No writing today…

on account of an article rejection. Anyone have a venue for a paper on comparative materialisms v/v Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “the virtual” and communism?

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The Fold, explained

Graham asked about the fold. Here is a simple non-explanation that perhaps helps more than an immanent description of the term.

The fold follows from Deleuze’s general development of a materialist metaphysics that holds the potential to differ as the original and ongoing movement of the cosmos. One term Deleuzians are perhaps more familiar with is actualization, which occurs when a single potential (singularity) is selected from the virtual and made concrete. To give an example, Darwinian natural selection is this type of selection, as it picks a genetic mutation but neither exhausts that particular potential nor prevents other potentials from being selected in the future. As Steven Jay Gould says, rewind and replay the evolutionary history of a species 100 times and you will get 100 different results.

In summary, Deleuze tends to make concepts: 1) open-ended and inexhaustive, e.g. always have the potential to differ and grow despite a certain consistency of operation (Holland calls this the “underdetermination of concepts”); 2) non-exclusive and unlimited, e.g. every application is creative, generative, and an ongoing process and therefore always allows alternate routes to be taken, as in every actualization enables counter-actualizations (cf. Deleuze’s preference of potential to the possible); 3) exist in exteriority to one another and are therefore infinite, e.g. a general rule of Deleuze’s metaphysics is that the relation between two terms itself is a third term, so there is nothing “necessary” or “intrinsic,” only determinants within differing sizes of infinitely.

The fold is Deleuze’s form of connection.

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Forget the Greeks

As many of you may know, there has been a trend in Foucault Studies to ponder over his late work on the Ancients. Some liberal Foucault scholars looked to him as a guru that offered an ethical system for a new form of life washed of the worries of power. While us radicals scoff at the so-called ‘ethical’ reading of Foucault, it is perhaps Deleuze who best dismisses such a reading.

Gilles Deleuze writes in his book Foucault, that:

If power is constitutive of truth, how can we conceive of a ‘power of truth’ which would no longer be the truth of power, a truth that would release transversal lines of resistance and not integral lines of power? How can we ‘cross the line’? And, if we must attain a life that is the power of the outside, what tells us that this outside is not a terrifying void and that this life, which seems to put up a resistance, is not just the simple distribution within the void of ‘slow, partial and progressive’ deaths?

….

What remains, then, except an anonymous life that shows up only when it clashes with power, argues with it, exchanges ‘brief and stridence words’, and then fades back into the night, what Foucault called ‘the life of infamous men’, whom he asked us to admire by virtue of ‘their misfortune, rage or uncertain madness’? … This culminated in The Use of Pleasure’s searing phrase: ‘to get free of oneself’. (94-95)

….

The redistribution or reorganization [found in the Greeks] takes place all on its own, or at least over a long period. For the relation to oneself will not remain the withdrawn and reserved zone of the free man, a zone independent of any ‘institutions and social system’. The relation to oneself will be understood int rems of power-relations and relations of knowledge. It will be reintegrated into these systems from which it was originally derived. The individual is coded or recorded within a ‘moral’ knowledge, and above all he becomes the stake in a power struggle and is diagrammatized.

The fold therefore seems unfolded, and the subjectivation of the free man is transformed into subjection: on the one hand it involved being ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence’, with all the processes of individuation and modulation which power installs, acts on the daily life and the interiority of those it calls its subjects; on the other it makes the subject ‘tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’, through all the the techniques of moral and human science that go to make up a knowledge of the subject.n24 Simultaneously, sexuality becomes organized around certain focal points of power, gives rise to a ‘scientia sexualis’, and is integrated into an agency of ‘power-knowledge’, namely Sex (here [in The Uses of Pleasure,] Foucault returns to the analysis given in The History of Sexuality).

Must we conclude from this that the new dimension hollowed out by the Greeks disappears, an falls back on the two axes of knowledge and power? In that case we could go back to the Greeks and find a relation to oneself based on free individuality. but this is obviously not the case. There will always be a relation to oneself which resists codes and power; the relation to oneself is even one of the origins of these points of resistance which we have already discussed. For example, it would be wrong to reduce Christian moralities to their attempts at codification, and the pastoral power which they invoke, without also taking into account the ‘spiritual and ascetic movements’ or subjectivation that continued to develop before the Reformation (there are collective subjectivations).n25 It is not even enough to say that the latter resists the former; for there is a perpetuation communcatio between them, whether in terms of struggle or of composition. What must be stated, then, is that subjection, the relation to oneself, continues to create itself, but by transforming itself and changing its nature to the point where the Greek mode is a distant memory. Recuperated by power-relations and relations of knowledge, the relation to oneself is continually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise. (102-104)

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Empire & The Grid

Yesterday, Matt asked a wonderful question about my theory of subjection in Empire and its relevance to Massumi’s use of “the grid” in the introduction to Parables For the Virtual.

Let me first preface this by saying that I believe Empire has already overcome the problem of the grid. It’s now just a problem for cultural studies and other disciplines that linger on old models of social analysis. In contrast to Empire, subjection in The Social State is absolutely indicative of a grid-type model of power, as are parts of the Modern State. ***Therefore: struggles against hierarchy and binary exclusion may benefit Empire rather than confront it.***

At the beginning Parables, Massumi claims that most cultural studies uses a social model premised on structural positions (“feminine,” “black,” etc). This is an application of an argument he inherits from Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari develop an elaborate critique of certain Fruedo-Lacanian psychoanalytic models that use a grid. They spare Lacan himself (Guattari was once the heir-apparent to Lacan’s ecole freudienne and remained under analysis even after the publication of AO), but are not so kind to his more dogmatic followers, such as Serge Leclaire.

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The Savage Fruit of Alienation

New book review over at The Anvil Review:

Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield Ford, Verso (2011). Architecture, for all its aspirations, is usually far too dated. Even for the untrained eye, it is easy to spot when most buildings were designed. And yet, after the luster of newness fades, architecture still casts its long shadow on the future. It is on each side of this phenomenology of time and structure that the Situationists and their inheritors lie. The Situationists, enraptured by rapid mid-century urbanization, tore up cobblestones to find the beach beneath the streets. But after all that work, the beach was not paradise but a desert …read more

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New Download: Hjemslev and D&G’s Linguistics

A chart on Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Hjemselv’s linguistics from ATP / AO is now available in the downloads section. Enjoy!

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Militancy, Power, Antagonism: Two Meditations on the Space of Politics

Below is a piece I put together w/ MLA of Prodigies & Monsters for presentation at the Potentials of Performance symposium in October 26 – 27th in London by a group of Greeks who have occupied a closed-down theater owned by the Greek state since last November. Please enjoy.

Occupy speaks not only to the occupation of space, but to the politics of place. This piece offers two meditations on the space of power. The first offers a virtual topography that thinks the role of the intellectual within the university. The second is a working out of that theory that questions Occupy’s spatialization of autonomy. Together, the mediations propose a return to militancy, facilitated by topologies of power that circulate struggle in and through a political antagonism that refuses the totalizing and authoritarian tendencies of command.

Keywords: militancy/antagonism, the academy, cartography/spatialization of power, program/anti-command

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Updates

Sorry for such intermittent posting, folks.

1. The so-called “Job Market” has taken up virtually all of my academic energy in the last three weeks. As I have now produced enough material to streamline this process, I am slowly getting back to work. Also, if you have any hot tips, send them my way!
2. Two journal articles have been revised and out for review. The super-secret review process makes sharing difficult. Once they get greenlighted, expect me to share portions of them on here.
3. I have plans to visit The Bay Area in November (for friends, Claire, and Ardent), Chicago in upcoming months (to see friends), and NOLA in January (for NAASN), plus anywhere that invites me for a job talk. If you are in these areas and want to meet up for coffee, or whatever, let me know.
4. Locally, a new collective I helped start is holding a November film series, and work around the infoshop is heating up. : D

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Ghost Stories & Nightmares Published

Please check out this wonderful new publication, Three Word Chant, by the folks at Giles Corey Press.

If you like what you see, please consider donating some startup funds to get the print version of their summer catalogue off the ground.

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State Chart (chapter 3)

	Pole 1	Pole 2
Mythic Figure	Magician-King	Jurist-Priest
Operation	Conquest	Contract
(method)	(bond)	(pact)
Medieval Technique	Discipline	Confession
(substance / operation)	(body / force)	(self / reflection)
Modern Organ	Police	Publicity
(means / effect)	(order / splendor & happiness)	(reason / right & will)
Science	Policy	Public
(scientific task / connaissance)	(prevention / statistics)	(legitimacy / consensus)
Discipline	Political Economy	Public Opinion
(method)	(axiomatics)	(deliberation)
Mid-Century Political Form	State Socialism	Liberal Capitalism
	Biopower	The Spectacle

 

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