death to “flat ontology”

Too much peddling in ‘flat ontology’ when it should really be process ontology.

(not to even mention the impossibly pernicious ‘paracite‘ of D&G that claims ‘ontology first’ when it’s really ‘politics first’ –> “For politics precedes being. Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines […]” ATP, 203).

To put the false Deluezism of ‘flat ontology’ to rest, I present to you a wonderfully strong philosophical reading of the rapport between the molar/molecular in ATP. Note, this does away with any lingering base/superstructure that may have tinged Anti-Oedipus. Rather, it’s the ‘telescopic’ doubling also called reflexive clearly articulated through Hjemselv, but found in other places like Luhmann, and expanded into the general D&G metaphysics, but missed by DeLanda…

is empire a haecceity?

if empire ain’t a thing, then is it a haecceity (a fog, a wind, a storm, a summer, an hour)? there’s all this talk about ‘the multitude’ being a haecceity. but let’s clarify our terms so we’re not caught up in ‘multitude is better than empire because it shares an ontologically privileged status’ or all that other mumbo-jumbo we’re been hearing. …

so here’s D&G in ATP: p 261-3

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it.33 A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject.

becoming-affective

Affect, like many other psychoanalytic concepts, was stratified by ego psychology. Just another box to check or a short line to scribble one- or two-word phrases — “Affect: __flat___”. Little did these clinicians know that they suffered from the same condition: “blunted affect.”

Massumi injects a little Bergson into cultural studies in an attempt to extend Foucault’s archaeological project — assume motion not arrest (or in Foucaultian shorthand: “assume discontinuity, explain continuity”).

affect: a definition (2)

AFFECT/AFFECTION: Neither word denotes a personal feeling (_sentimental_ in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected.

affect: a definition

‘affect’ describes both (i) the power of bodies to combine and (ii) the felt effects of power in the body. the content and expression of affecting and being affected. bodies combine in a very concrete sense, like nourishment or poison, to produce passional sensations of joy or sadness.

affect is caught like one catches a cold: through contagion. it can’t be quantified any more than freud was able to quantify libido. and when it’s qualified, felt as ’emotion’ for instance, its measurement still comes out dull like a nurse taking your temperature.

Embodiment

we don’t even know what a body is capable of. there is all of this talk of the soul and the mind, and we still don’t know what a body can do.

[for those of you reading this on RSS, I’ve embedded a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awtiZEiiAE8&feature=player_embedded]

a series of propositions:

Ungovernable Spaces

By now, Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones functions as a critical point of comparison for any theory of autonomous space.[1] More recent innovations include Tiqqun’s[2] Zones of Offensive Opacity (ZOOs).

picking the right midwife for the birth of the post-human

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism was, therefore similar in motivation to psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and certain forms of Marxism and existentialism; all these movements depicted ‘man’ as the being who is _other than mere_ life, whose desire for what is not immediate and present separates him from all positive being and compels him to enter some structure of deferral of present desire for the sake of an anticipated and collectively recognized human end.

diagram:environment::archive:discourse

If the ‘archive’ is the structure of what is sayable (discourse), then the ‘diagram’ is the structure of an environment.

Deleuze, Foucault, p31-2, 34: