The heroic peasants were a good start for the anarchic scholar. But, after national liberation struggles began claiming that the heart of the nation beat within the peasant, the scholar found an even more elusive class of people: hill peoples, those who buck authorities with a run to the hills. Through diligent scholarship, he was able to bring together an impressive array of theories and terms to describe how people transformed themselves into poor materials for state-making.

The anarchic scholar loved how hill peoples’ slash-and-burn culture was an elaborate trick to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted. After World War II, it all changed. Most States used technologies, both mechanical and human, to eliminated their “dark twins” in the hills. Space was spanned, he said. The peoples still in the hills were the last ones to escape, and they are on the verge on disappearing, he lamented.

Not far away, a similar discovery was made.

A young college student was tired of the usual posturing of campus activism. The daily barrage of manufactured urgency and its subsequent oppression Olympics asphyxiated most of us long ago. But he had a plan. And the brutal human cost of Reagan’s flagrant imperialism in Latin America demanded a response. So, after gaining a little know-how in engineering, with a focus on alternative energy, he headed south to make a real contribution to ‘people who could use help.’

But after he got there, the student felt out of place, as if that struggle was not his struggle. The projects he worked on were practical, no doubt. Computer donations from the States were not hurting the people of El Salvador, but they were not really helping that much either. When he looked for guidance, they were kind but blunt. War torn El Salvador did not need engineering solutions to political problems.

Look, just go to the mountains, the comrade later said to the student. The student shot back an incredulous glance. Look, you have mountains here. Just go to the mountains. That’s what we do, get some guns, go to the mountains, and wage a revolution. The student responded thoughtfully, suggesting that, yes, there were mountains in Seattle, but that does not make any sense. A few moments later, with an embarrassed grin, he admitted that it simply does not correspond to my reality at all.

The anarchic scholar and the student of revolution silently agree. For most of us, there is no sense in running to the hills. Before, the hills made sense; they were once a place without history, void of space and time. In this non-place, a u-topia, there existed a people without a history. And while it is said that the history of people is the history of class struggle, it would be at least as truthful to say that the history of peoples without history is the history of the struggle for escape. But with the great latticework of surveillance and control that now spans most of the developed world, the veil of spatial isolation has been pierced. So today, the hills cannot make class struggle or freedom a reality.

The answer may be so simple it is already obvious to you, the reader: escape does and will always exist, but escape depends on the context. The second clause is the less contentious of the two, especially given our postmodern culture that breeds a relativism that asks for deferral, pending more complexity (Jameson, “Postmodernism”: 65-6). So, I will begin there. But it is my ultimate aim to convince you of the first clause: even if you feel the authorities hot on your trail, escape is right around the corner. Therefore, when my examination ends with the demolition of the distinction between the valley and the hill or the town and the country, I shift to the new paths of escape that have opened up under the towering figure of the Metropolis. To escape today, one does not run to the hills but burrows deeper into the dark underside of the Metropolis.

My identity has become that of the speaker, the person who speaks from the television. Like Bakhtin, I would say that the refrain is not based on elements of form, material, or ordinary signification, but on the detachment of an existential “motif” (or leitmotiv) which installs itself like an “attractor” within a sensible and significational chaos. The different components conserve their heterogeneity, but are nevertheless captured by a refrain which couples them at the existential Territory of my self. …. (Guattari, Chaosmosis 17)

from Susan Ruddick… Desire

In this manner, Anti-Oedipus could be viewed as an exploration of the variety of regimes engaged in the social production of sad passions, a project in which Deleuze and Guattari seek to overturn the individualized understanding of affective conditions such as paranoia, schizophrenia or ‘false problems’, such as the fetish of the commodity (Deleuze, 1988: 208) and reinstall them on a plane of production, at the level of the socius. Revolution in social organization and in thought appears not in dismissing the false problem, but by establishing the conditions of its conscious actualization. The challenge is not to avoid the sad passions but to engage them actively, to uncover the role they can play in the production of thought, following Spinoza’s invocation to explore the meaning of all emotional intensities (E V, P18, S).

….

It is not the harmony of the senses that marks the possibility for thought, but their discord. Thought emerges in a cramped space, forced and under constraint, beginning with an overwhelming visceral refusal, which is at the same time an affirmation, its ‘dark precursor’. This idea of cramped space, amplified and extended in Thoburn’s treatment, is a ‘mode of engagement with the particular [that] has effects that break open individualized concerns even at the most individual level’ (2003: 25). It does not originate from an act of good will, but conatus under constraint, and the refusal of unendurable forces that bear down upon it, that construct it in unbearable ways. For Deleuze, it begins with the scream.

…

In Deleuze’s lectures, he described the particular scream as the set of conditions that forced each philosopher to ‘pose a problem’, becoming at the same time their life’s work and their signature. Thus:

the philosopher is not someone who sings, but someone who screams. Each time that you need to scream, I think that you are not far from a kind of call of philosophy. What would it mean for the concept to be a kind of scream or a kind of form of scream? That’s what it means to need a concept, to have something to scream! We must find the concept of that scream. One can scream thousands of things. . . . In my definition, the concept is the form of the scream. . . . [P]hilosophers who would say, ‘yes, yes’! . . . are philosophers of passion, of pathos, distinct from philosophers of logos. (Deleuze, 1980, emphasis added)

…D on paintings…

The scream is a social act, the rendering visible of forces. It poses the problem at the level of sensation rather than resolving it — triggering an unhinging of faculties, a shock wave that reverberates through the system from sensibility to imagination to memory to thought. The scream is a redoubled moment — an attempt of the body:

to escape itself by means of itself . . . not simply waiting for something from the structure, it is waiting for something inside of itself . . . in short a spasm, the body as plexus and its e¡ort or waiting for a spasm . . . the interior forces that climb through the flesh. . . .The entire body is plexus. (Deleuze, Bacon 2003: 15)

The scream makes the terrain of struggle visible. It cannot determine an outcome, but it marks something that can no longer be contained, a horizon and a threshold, or passing into something new:

The invisible forces, the powers of the future, are they not already upon us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the worst pain? . . . It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles . . . [I]t is as if combat had now become possible. (Deleuze, Bacon 2003: 52)

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Deleuze: ‘no- one knows ahead of time what affects one is capable of; it is a long affair of experimentation requiring a lasting prudence. . . you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a mind or body can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination’ (Deleuze, 1988: 125).

Transcript of a talk I gave January 21st, 2012, as part of an Occupy event entitled “Symposium of V for Vendetta”

The second in a series, which began with “Ghost Stories.” 

Lately, academics have been throwing around a new buzzword. Like all buzzwords, it is repeated to the point of meaninglessness. And academics, being the fragile creatures they are, feel it necessary to use the term to show that they are initiated members of some elite club, even if they’re not sure what the term really means. That word is political “imagination.” It is my intention to take that vague idea and give it a little meat. The way I plan to do so, is to talk about one form of imagination: our dreams.

Dreams exists as the left-overs of our waking life. They are mode up of those unprocessed bits of our day that are worked out when the mind is relaxed during rest.

During our waking hours, the primary job of the mind is to filter and select. Every second, we are bombarded with so much stimuli — sights, sound, smell, touch — that our mind is rushing to keep up. The result is a constant mental triage, of the brilliant world around us, we only take in a small sliver of details. The information that makes up our dreams is quite a different mix.

Consider for a moment what makes up your dreams. What is the texture of your dreams, what is the palette of sensations? Do you smell? How about see? Maybe you touch? Now, imagine the jump people immediately make. “What did that dream mean,” they usually ask. But do you dream in meanings? In easy to find words? Of course not. In fact, dreams are not about meaning, at least not primarily. Rather, they are about images and feelings that do not depend on a specific meaning-struture. To force meaning onto them is like asking to tree to explain to you its meaning in the world.

So what are dreams made of? Dreams are made of what _sticks_ to you. The things that you encounter but somehow stay with you. It could be the brilliant beauty of a flower, or the soft touch of your mother. Or even more profoundly, something that you could never fully process at the time.

Dreams can serve as the basis for politics for that reason: that they exceed the immediately classifiable. Because, everything that is immediately apprehended follows a clear three-step process: it’s understood, classified, and then filed away. The only revolutionary politics that truly lives up to its name is something excessive, it is something beyond the immediately classifiable. It sticks in people’s craw. It keeps them up at night. And it invades their dreams.

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There are, of course, many kinds of dreams. But nightmares stand out as a special type of dream; a dream so intense, so powerful, that it attacks the usual flow of dreams. Most people don’t remember their dreams, and if they do, recollection quickly fades. It has a useful function, most dreams sweep up the cutting room floor by taking out the trash of the day. They allow us to process the snippets of what remains while allowing us to let go.

Nightmares often do the opposite, however. Rather than providing a helpful way to let get and lose the remainder of our day, they impose themselves on reality. They strike at the heart of the night by forcing us awake, and burn a memory into our consciousness.

States & governments are acutely aware of the power of nightmares. Neo-conservatism, for instance, rests on a fundamental belief that fear motivates people more than any other emotion. We saw the drastic effects of this after 9/11, when the surging anti-globalization movement that had shut down the WTO and other massive global institutions, was fragmented by nationalist ideologies. The color-coded Terror Alert system and “See Something, Say Something” campaigns reduced most of the the US population to flag-waving ‘patriots’ willing to call domestic dissent “Anti-American.”

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V for Vendetta asks us to imagine a world of nightmares run amok. But before those of us gather here, in some sort of self-righteous chorus of, “we’d never fall for this shit,” I would like to provide us with a few thought experiments that I call “screams and dreams.”

And let me first disclose own perspective:

I think there is a massive difference between the two dominant forms of state authority today.

between (1) Bureaucratic Socialist States & (2) liberal capitalist democracies.

– Bureaucratic Socialist States gone bad turn into single-party police states, dominated by a clear “right” and “wrong” way. Being on the “wrong” side could get you blacklisted, jailed, or even assassinated.

– Liberal Capitalist Democracies gone bad are taken over by the crushing indifference of postmodern capitalism. “Right” and “wrong” cease to exist, and terribly matrix of profit and power start running our lives. We were work more, love less, and slowly realize that nobody cares about truth, only influence.

So: here is my thought experiment,

(1) Let’s think to the “chasing” type dreams. If you need something more colorful, I always think of the surrealist scenes in the Coen Brother’s Big Lebowski. So, you’re being chased by something. Do you know what it is? Do you know why it’s chasing you?

–Really get a picture of it for a second.

–So here’s my question, “what is worse, knowing who’s chasing you, or being chased but not knowing by whom?”

— I would say that the first, knowing who’s chasing you, is characteristic of living in a police state. There are real examples of these places in the world, North Korea, Burma. But this isn’t exactly what it’s like here in the State.

–Rather, I would say that we live in the second. We’re being chased, but we never know by whom. In the age of cybernetic capitalism, our threats exist as a general environment that is hostile to us — with the risks of cancer everywhere, where every business is looking to make a profit off of you, especially the “buy local” retailers set up in yuppy parts of town — and there’s not a small group of “bad guys” we can point to.

As we watch the film, think of what world V for Vendetta present us. The first, the second? Some proportion of the two?

My second thought experiment:

(2) Recall an especially influential film, book, speech, or conversation from your life. Consider, what made it so transformative? Did it active your more reptilian emotions of fight & flight, security & survival, or was it more aspirational, loving, or beautiful?

Now think: how can we overcome the politics of fear? As I mentioned earlier, nightmares seem to be much more powerful than other dreams. But, if we are really to succeed, we need to unlock the power of higher emotions: comfort, love, cooperation –> a future we can believe in.

So, I want you all to imagine what it is going to take for you, as a person, to believe in those better emotions, and what it will take to make this shift nationally, globally, and beyond.

And for the film: whenever you see something unbelievable, whether contrived or fantastical, ask yourself one of two questions, either “what should they have done to make this match our current reality?” or “what could be done to make this believable, or even happen”?

Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud, S. “Femininity”
Lacan, J. “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”
Lacan, J. Seminar IV
Lyotard, J-F. Discourse/Figure

The ‘political’ legacy of anarchism is hard to measure; even more so if the standards applied to anarchism come from lateral projects like state socialism or communism.

Anarchism comes from utopian socialism and often unknowingly continues politically paralyzing assumptions that are unnecessary to anarchism more generally. The two most common are: 1) a naive Rousseauian faith in the ‘goodness’ of human nature, which presumes that projects based on cooperation generate superior outcomes to those based in competition; and 2) a reactionary conservatism based in romantic attachment to pre-industrial ways of life.

A clear example of the first are the Utopian Socialist experiments (Fourierism, Owenism) during early industrialism. The rhetoric of ‘cooperation’ was used to bring together families to start a town (in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana, for instance). To expand: poor people were told that one need not move West to line the pockets of a capitalist by working in a newly opened mill, but they should move west to start a cooperatively owned and managed town where everyone benefits! But as history shows, and how Marx ‘scientifically’ elaborates, that a capitalist market sets the ‘objective’ conditions of competition (and therefore a rate of exploitation that holds more-or-less true across the board) for all firms whether they are cooperatively owned and managed or not. Simply put – capitalist hegemony can only be avoided by becoming non-competitive. The insistence that ‘cooperation’ creates a built-in advantage against competition is a silly fiction (CVI, Part IV/Chp 13).

The second is often manifest in a polar opposite manner. Experiments birthed by adherents to the philosophy of Young Hegelians (Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner) often resisted capitalist as if it was trying to upset the pacific life of traditional communities. Stirnerites, for instance, founded utopian communities that practiced nudism and other socially-libertine lifestyles that would innoculate them from industrial integration (no shirt, no shoes, no service). Today, there’s a legacy of these communities in the ‘intentional communities’/eco-villages that span across the US and the world. A quick demographic survey of these communities would demonstrate their politically inefficacy within parts of the world formally subsumed by capitalism. Many of the residents are former business execs who ‘cashed out’ their retirement to live in the serenity of communes that are ‘closer to nature.’ These communes don’t provide much of a basis for anti-capitalist revolt.

Avoiding these two pitfalls doesn’t require expunging the utopian socialist roots from anarchism, however. Rather, an assessment of the elementary terms of the utopian socialist critique reveals the key opposition that most Marxists have yet to come to terms with: the social is a produced sphere of life from which the political can be opposed. Society itself is not a good — this is where Foucault’s history of the creation of ‘society’ proves absolutely essential — but a fragmented material of practices that has no necessary relationship to ‘the political.’ It is ‘from society’ that politics emerges: in, beside, above, or below ‘the social.’ Social-ism, therefore, is the acknowledgement of the social as a key category of theorization. Strangely enough, when Marxism becomes ‘scientific socialism’ or ‘the science of society’, it does so to subtract out a politics. As a strawman, some Marxists claim that Utopian Socialism subtracts out ‘the social’ from ‘the political’ to generate quiestism (moralism, lifestylism, washing ones hands, etc). Anarchism represents a third way.

On to the article:
There are a lot of quick swipes made at anarchism (indirectly equating it with liberalism, arguing that its non-political, reducing it to subjectivism, etc) — but the most ‘concrete’ points of the article may be the four propositions.

-Proposition One: Stagism. The author argues that capitalism is an improvement on “horribly oppressive” “pre-capitalist” societies.

-Propositions Two: Inter-nationalism. The author claims that revolt against any single nation-state will fail.

-Proposition Three: A Military of ‘Regulars’. The author states that irregular forces can never defeat a regular military.

-Proposition Four: The Working Class. The author asserts that only the working class has the potential to overthrow capitalism.

Let’s consider each one, quickly.

Stagism — The way stagism is posed in this article is extremely flippant and quite surprising to me. Modernization is posed as an absolute good that must be pursued at any cost. Yet a historical assessment of primitive accumulation, as done by Federici, Midnight Notes, or De Angelis, not to mention Latin/South American scholars, echo the violence and ‘bloody legislation’ outlined by Marx in Part 8 of CV1 (the ‘original sin’ of Primitive Accumulation). Post-colonial scholars working in political theory are definitive on this question, in my mind.

Inter-nationalism — No doubt the capitalist mode of production, even from its beginnings in merchant capitalism, has always had global aspirations. Wallerstein and others have highlighted the increasing divergence between national politics and the world market. But to claim that anarchist are focusing on the nation-state is patently absurd — it’s _Lenin_ who focused on the ‘chain of imperialism.’ Anarchists look to develop society/politics outside the _frame_ of nationalism, which is something that most inter-nationalists are still unable to do. And to the extent that people still reading Lenin, Gramsci, or Mao (let alone Castro, the Bolivarians) orient their politics toward the state or a collection of states – they are more ‘national’ than anarchists.

‘Regular’ Armies — This is definitely the ghost of Lenin back to haunt. What about ideology? What about ‘the age of terrorism’? While I hated Hardt and Negri’s “Multitude” book – the first section on War probably hasn’t been commented on because it’s appears at first to be a lit review, but is absolutely essential for understanding the terrain of struggle today. War is no longer about regular armies facing down in a clear field of battle.

The Working Class — In recent years, there has been more ink spilled on this than blood. Anarchism in its best form identifies immanent forms of revolt. Some Marxisms have similarly ‘open’ approaches — the dialectical acrobatics of the Frankfurt School or the strategic flexibility of Autonomia — but most remain focused on realizing aspects of a political project developed to address forms of production specific to the 1840s-1870s. 150 years later, and during the generalization of post-industrialization, it’s time to rethink.

More generally, I think that Day’s dispute is based on history. So let’s contrast the roles of history as they relate to the ‘revolutionary subject’. Anarchists don’t care much about history, nor do they find subjects looking to be self-criticially historical in the sense of extending a historical trajectory already set in place. Conversely, this article advocates for _nothing but_ the identification of historical elements that, through political action, can be made non-reversible.

The Spanish Civil War is a strange example. Day’s argument feels like finger pointing for the purpose of maintaining a fairly conservative Marxist line despite its historical failures. The Republicans (who were fighting Franco the Fascist and the Nationalists) were supported primarily by the USSR and was composed of many more communists/socialists than anarchists. To me, it speaks more of the failure of inter-national socialism than anarchism or communism. In fact, anarchists rarely aspire for taking over (let alone smashing) a single nation-state. Syndicalists occasionally dream of replacing the state with federalism, but they’re dinosaurs like Chomsky. To me, ‘anarchism’ represents the best chance for theorizing a global (not inter-national) political movement.

My current project is to politicize “the people without history”. In contrast to a mainline Marxist approach, which would be to transform them into Historical Peoples — I want to eviscerate history itself. Disembowel it. In one sense, it is a reductive move that equates history with the power of the state form. But more generally, it is a fragmentation of the organs of society to free them from the orthodoxy of historical determination. Revolution is an uncertain endeavor, and to limit our vision is a conservatism worse than moralism. The real strategic question should be: break down or break through.

Deleuze’s search for a metaphysical grounding for his theory on the meaning of life as “becoming-?”, understood as becoming-different or queer vitalism, as Claire Colebrook explains in her article in New Formations no 68, ends with an unlikely philosopher: Fichte. The payoff is a form of Aufheben that, while still in the German Idealist tradition, looks different than that proposed by Hegel. Here is Keith Ansell-Pearson’s explanation:

In a short piece entitled ‘Immanence: A Life…’, written in 1993, Deleuze argue that the transcendental field needs to be mapped out as a ‘life’ the involves neither subject nor object but rather ‘an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers back to a being but ceaselessly posits itself in a life’ (4). This, says, Deleuze, is the immanence of the late Fichte (the text Deleuze [sic] of Fichte’s referred to is Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre 1806, appearing in French as Initiation a la vie beinheruese [(Eng trans of Fr: 'Initiation Into the Life Well-Lived'), English trans of German The Way Towards the Blessed Life; or, the Doctrine of Religion]. It is the impersonal but singular life of the individuating haecceity [taken from Duns Scotus] (the ‘beatitude’ in the title of Fichte’s work). This is a germinal life since it is not positing life in a ‘simple moment’ confronting a ‘universal death’ but rather a life that is ‘everywhere’, contained ‘in all the moments’ that a ‘living subject passes through’, a life of virtualities, events, and singularities (5).

It is odd, however, that Deleuze should locate in the later Fichte a renaissance of ‘Spinozism’ given Fichte’s own declared hostility towards Spinoza and his influence (see Fichte 1994: 98-99, where he argues that Spinoza could not have believed in his own philosophy, but could only have ‘thought’ it). Nevertheless, in this series of popular lectures Fichte does present Being in terms akin to Spinoza’s immanent substance as that ‘which is absolutely through itself, by itself, and from itself…a self-comprehensive, self-sufficient, and absolutely unchangeable Unity (Einerleiheit)’ (1962: 53; 1848: 48-9). This is Being that ‘ex-ists’ outside of Time and outside of Becoming. The spiritual life of blessedness is the life filled with consciousness, love, and self-enjoyment. It is through the laws of reflection which govern its operations that consciousness creates a system of separate and independent individuals and so confronts itself with numerous paradoxes concerning the reality of time and change. It should be noted that Fichte’s text is bound up in the moves it makes with classical metaphysics, notably the distinction between a ‘true world’ (life/blessedness) and an ‘apparent world’ (death/unblessedness). This is a distinction that Fichte presents as one between the merely sensuous world and the higher suprasensuous world that is available to, and attainable only by, Thought. It is lecture VIII that is the most philosophically serious and which is [sic] would be the decisive one for staging and encounter between Fichte and Deleuze (ibid.: 122ff.; 144 ff.). See also Fichte 1987: 91ff., where beatitude is related to the achievement of supersensible death ‘in life and through life…’, which speaks of the praxis of a relational self as its peculiar ‘sublime vocation’. The self-expressive life of the spiritual is one in which the universe can no longer be thought in terms of the circle ‘returning to itself, that endlessly repeating game, that monster which devours itself so as to give birth to itself again as it already way’; rather, there is ‘constant progress to greater perfection in a straight line which goes on to infinity’. This is because ‘All death is nature is birth…in dying does the augmentation of life visibility appear…It is not death which kills, but rather a more living life which, hidden behind the old life, begins and develops’ (ibid.: 122). My death can only be a festive passing. it is not, therefore, for Fichte a question of living ‘according to nature’ simply because this is not even what nature does. The only ‘law of life’ is, in Nietzsche’s almost Fichtean language, ‘self-overcoming’. On the world as a ‘monster of energy’, ‘without beginning or end’ but as ceaseless transformation, a world of repetition and difference (the ‘joy of the circle’ as the only goal), compare Nietzsche 1968: 1067 (in German, Nietzsche 1987, volume 11, pp 610).

On beatitude see also Deleuze’s ‘big’ book on Spinoza (Deleuze 1968: 282ff.; 1990: 208ff.). Clement Rosset argued that beatitude constitutes the central and constant theme of Nietzsche’s thought – ‘I would willingly say the only theme’ (Rosset 1993: 26). Nietzsche’s expression of a beat-philosophy informs the entire endeavour of ‘gay science’ (Nietzsche 1974: sections 276-7), with its commitment, in the enternal engagement with/to life (especially its gloom and doom), to the ‘art of cheerfulness’ (Heiterkeit). It would be instructive to determine the difference between types and expressions of beatitude, whether Spinozist, Fischtean, Nietzschean, or Stoic. Clearly Nietzsche’s challenge resides in the attempt to think theodicy without God, a challenge most evident in his reading of Leibniz (see Nietzsche 1968: sections 411, 419, 1019) (this is a move which, according to Rosset, makes Nietzsche more Leibnizian – more cheerful – than Leibniz).

–”Living the Eternal Return as the Event: Nietzsche with Deleuze,” Keith Ansell Pearson, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 14, Eternal Recurrence (Autumn 1997), pp. 64-97 Published by: Penn State University Press Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717678

The question of a Nietzsche-Fichte ‘self-overcoming’ is raised differently in Colebrook’s recent book Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, in terms of a sort of Hegelian ‘higher deterritorialization.’ For us, as political theorists, is to find the way to translate this argument, locked deep within the history of philosophy, into a weapon. Thoughts from the more philosophically inclined?

[it really starts to get good at the 6 minute mark...]

Transversality was to replace transferrence. Why the replacement? Transference works by provoking change through coerced dialogue between analyst-patient. The patient, one-on-one, stuck in a room with nothing but the psychiatric gaze and the ambience of the room, has few options outside the give-and-take channeled through “the talking cure.” Compelled speech generates content that the analyst uses to place the patient on a psychoanalytic grid that charts out various structural positions. Is the patient a hysteric? Then the analyst must evacuate the position of the Big Other. The bottom line: the analyst is to induce the patient into clarifying their Subject position so a diagnosis and adequate counter-reaction be applied. The trouble is that this only works for neurotics – meaning slips for psychotics, preventing the analyst who holds meaning to get any traction.

“So long as people remain stuck on themselves, they only see themselves.” Maybe it’s society that’s sick, not you. (And who doesn’t have nightmares about the sterility of hospitals and clinics?) Why not crack the window and open the door to change to let in a little fresh air? End the vertical hierarchy of the analyst-patient dyad. Particularize institutional transfer by making everything a group, a club, or a tribe, and give it a name to establish a process that trumps it. That process? The transversality of the group. The faster and stronger the connections are made to the outside world, the greater the motion, and the higher the coefficient of transversality. You’d be surprised at how quickly you ‘get over yourself’ when the focus shifts outward.

The second two arguments follow from the first, in which Massumi proposes that examples activate a level of detail not available to other methods, more specifically, because examples are not required to fit the generalizing repeatability of usual model-building. Examples, for Massumi, are not used to abstract out principles, as in positivities that fit all cases of a particular type, but instead, contain details that would otherwise be limited out. Those details serve as the basis of the method, which Massumi suggests should be explored in order to unlock further detail. According to Massumi, the details found by the exemplary method would be singular, interactive, and divergent. The precision of those claims is illusive, however, because Massumi’s elliptical writing works to undermine syllogistic reason, often challenging the reader to understand a complex argument without either example or propositional content. Fortunately, the first author that he cites, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, provides a coherent case for the example. Massumi quotes from Agamben’s most famous book, “The Coming Community,” which he also helped translate. CC is written in Agamben’s poetic post-deconstructive style, and is split up into mini-chapters often no longer than a few paragraphs. The chapter Massumi quotes from is entitled “Example.” Example begins with the classical philosophical problem of the one and the many, as rewritten through the general and the particular. Agamben’s precise but sometimes-tedious prose outlines how language forges an antimony between a particular and a general class. Specifically, one curious effect of language is that it transforms singularities (this tree, that tree) into members of a class. The basics of this formulation follows from a rather orthodox observation made popular by structural linguistics, often described in terms of the Saussurian bar that separates the sign from the signifier, but for Agamben’s post-Kantian transcendentalism, the being of language is still different from thing in itself, which still grants singularities a separate linguistic status that he calls not “being-” (being-human, being-Communist) but “being-called-” (being-called-Communist). The example holds a unique status for Agamben, however, because it is able to span the otherwise unbridgeable chasm between general and particular. Agamben outlines how the example holds true for all cases without losing its singularity. Even though the example is treated as a real particular case, it is understood to stand for nothing in particular. The challenge for explaining the importance and character of singularities is that the argument is disseminated throughout “The Coming Community,” without being located in a single identifiable spot. Agamben outlines the argument for the example in a later text, “Homo Sacer,” which follows a more familiar path. In “Homo Sacer,” Agamben provides a careful exposition of the example in contrast to the exception. Each of the two is described according to a pair of terms, the example being an inclusive exclusion, and the exception being an exclusive inclusion. To explain the example, Agamben looks to the linguistic example, as in doing example problems in a foreign language class. Specifically, Agamben cites a linguistic performative, like a Priest’s declaration like “I now pronounce you…,” which  is a speech act that could not act without speech (necessary), and in speech alone, commits an act (sufficient). But, if the Priest were to demonstrate the speech act, like during a wedding rehearsal, what is the status of the speech? According to Agamben, it ‘stands aside’ the normal case, but is also a part of the normal case. The example is therefore excluded from the normal case, but not because it does not belong, but “because it exhibits its own belonging” (HS 20). The example is therefore what Agamben calls a paradigm, that which is “shown beside” a class to establish its own being, or: “neither universal nor particular, neither general nor individual,[but] a singularity which, showing itself as such, produces a new ontological context” (WIAP np). Agamben then goes on to contrast the example with the exception. The exception is that which functions inside a normal case while simultaneously not belonging to it. Therefore, the example and the exception demonstrate the zone of indistinguishability of each set: the example is belongs but is outside the class, and the exception is inside the class but does not belong.

Massumi is able to wrest the example from Agamben’s post-deconstructive transcendental linguistics by twisting it ever so slightly into a case for Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. Rather than placing language at the heart of the model, as Agamben does in the linguistic Common of the coming community, Massumi uses the example as a way to explore the real. Like Agamben, Massumi argues that the power of the example does not come from its generalizability. But, rather than deriving power from being a paradigm, which Agamben argues for as a linguistic supplement in the post-Derridean sense, Massumi shows that the power of the example comes from its reference to the real. The first move Massumi makes toward this explanation, is when he transforms Agamben’s definition of the example as “inclusive exclusion” into Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of a Kantian synthesis: “disjunctive inclusion”, which he defines as “a belonging to itself that is simultaneously an extendibility to everything else with which it might be connected (one for all, and all in itself)”, or in shorthand, “exemplification is the logical category corresponding to self-relation” (PV 18). Rather than establishing language as the basis for epistemology, as Agamben does, which would imply that the logical operation of inclusive exclusion to establish the formal conditions for thinking all possible existence, Massumi looks empirically to the chaos of the real for the real conditions of existence for things, not just for-us, as an our apprehension through reason, but the real for conditions for things for-themselves. [i'm not a philosopher, so i'm really bad at stating this clearly] Establishing formal conditions serves a limited type of change, change that is predictable and hold true for all cases within a given type. This change is not bad; in fact, it is crucial for many engineering problems like insuring the safety of a product or vehicle. But real conditions for change address potentials that are unique to each given thing, its singularity, many of them too complex to ever be shoehorned into formal logic.

The empirical method of the example functions through disjunctive inclusion because it explores the real details of things, whether virtual ideas or the actualization of one of its differentials, to test the transformations potential in a system. Most potentials of a system are unactualizable in an immediately available context, but provide the best fodder for sci-fi thought experiments or other ‘fiction,’ until the ground is ripened, sometimes to our detriment. Given the plethora of dystopias created under the guise of late capitalism, there is a certain reassurance that comes with an unactualizable example, for actualization never happens the exact same way twice. But the function of power is to extend repeatability by limiting, restricting, or simulating difference, and insures that life as we know it may progress in the image of the present for a while longer; human exploitation, brutal violence, global climate change, and all.

Agamben, The Coming Community

–. Homo Sacer

–. “What Is a Paradigm?” @ EGS, online

Massumi, Parables for the Virtual

invention, as the creation of the possible and its process of actualisation in the souls (of consumers as well as workers), is the real production, whilst what Marx and the economists call production is, in reality, a reproduction (or a manufacture of a product or a management of a service even if in this case the things are a bit more complicated). (CLCL: 192)

In place of the totality of the mode of production, Lazzarato posit an original dynamic multiplicity. It is from that multiplicity that everything is constructed. Lazzarato then fully integrates a Foucaultian analysis within this metaphysics of the multiple.

Foucault provides Lazzarato a genealogical history of Euro-American power. Within this history, post-sovereign power is produced through the diffuse dispositifs of the social, which are first constructed during the enclosure movement as relatively autonomous sites of power constituted as closed blocks of space-time (the prison, the barracks, the hospital, etc). Each one of these enclosures utilizes techniques of confinement to produce useful effects that are provided by a multiplicity when it is captured and disciplines within the limits of space and time (Life/Living 173). At first each site of the enclosure works somewhat independently as different dispositifs of power, though they share a similar logic: the prison. As power intensifies, heterogeneous dispositifs form problematics between elements that seem to be antagonism: namely, the centripetal logic of individual rights (‘my rights end where your rights begin’) and the centrifugal logic of economic exchange (‘natural propensity to combine, expand, and profit’). Liberalism emerges as the response to this tension because it “does not aim tot take over, in a reconciled totality, the different conceptions of law, freedom, right and the process of the juridical and social dispositifs imply” (BB np).

Two subsequent intensifications of power follow: biopower and societies of control. Beginning in the 18C, biopower layers on top of the disciplinary institutions to create a combined anatomo-politics of the body and a bio-politics of the population. Biopower marks the points where power management multiplicities as such; as systems that, when combined and in open spaces, exhibit their own emergent patterns as the result of interaction. Second, as institutions begin to derive power from multiplicities and not institutions themselves, society qualitatively shifted into what Deleuze calls “societies of control.” Within these societies, power relations are “virtual, unstable, non-localisable, non-stratified potentialities” and are controlled through integration and differentiation (L/L 174).

To integrate “means to connect singularities, to homogenise them and make them converge qua singularities towards a common goal… tracing a general line of force which passes through forces and fixes them into forms” piece by piece according to small difference, like integral calculus (L/L 174). And differentiation, is the creation and reproduction of dualism without a reference term in order to “capture, codify, and control virtualities” (174). This is not the bi-univocal dualism of male/female, but a dispositif, the ‘thousand tiny sexes’ and ‘tiny possible becomings’ that make up a population. The effect of this control is not the restriction of difference, but their de-potentialization through a repetition of the same; in particular, the intended effect is to confine the outside. This is the primary strategy of neo-liberalism: predictable permissiveness to produce an intended result. Undesirable outcomes are mapped and neutralized in order to codify repetition and drain the power of repetition (L/L 176).

By displacing the focus from the ‘communism of capital’ to the multiplicity, Lazzarato produces a complete different map of the virtual. For Lazzarato, the social is a much more diverse space than the image of that space generated by the denigrated apparatus of capture that is forever trying to close of avenues of difference. The enclosed spaces of discipline have been turned inside out and networked.  Wholeness, completion, and coherence have been transformed. A web of elements has been layered on top of disciplinary enclosures to de-code and de-territorialize them so they can be stitched together by virtue of their connectivity and transitivity to create the movability of the event, the displacement of change, relationality outside its terms, “communication” without content, and communicability. Connectivity is made through porosity, a leaking.  It has been described as bio-political tissue, but it is really a giant membrane, a filter of exteriorities continually entering and traversing it. It twists the strange formulation that ‘there is no outside’, which sounds too much like the frightening howl of Thatcher’s ‘There Is No Alternative”, into the much more useful ‘there is no inside.’[i]  One no longer has to enter a disciplinary enclosure to be filled with a projective interiority, but rather extend through time and space.

“Another world is possible”, the saying that spilled out on the street of Seattle in 1999, the new image of revolt is. Lazzarato insists on the historical and ontology dimension of this philosophy rather than the imaginative. “To exist is to the differ.” It is the given-ness of phrase being spoken that affirms the existence of an alternative different world as echoed by the anarchists in Bernadette Corporation’s Get Rid of Yourself:

They say, “another world is possible.” But I am another world. Am I possible? I am here, living, stealing, doing cocaine, subtracting myself from the bad movie of urban love stories, inventing weapons, elaborating the complex constellation of my relations, building the Party. They say “another world is possible.” But we do not want another world, another order, another justice: another logical nightmare. We do not want any global governance be it fair, be it ecological, be it certified by Porto Allegre. We want THIS world. We want this world as chaos. We want the chaos of our lives, the chaos of our perceptions, the chaos of our desires and repulsions. The chaos that happens when management collapses. Capitalism defeated traditional societies because it was more exciting than they were, but now there is something more exciting than Capitalism, itself: its destruction.

And as Deleuze and Guattari insist in WiP, utopia is a no-where and a now-here, both at the same time; to “posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed” (WiP: 99-100). Lazzarato is therefore a special thinker, able to retain the utopian dimension of both the virtual and the actual, of science and philosophy. And the vehicle for revolution is the politics of the minoritarian multiplicity.

And a key component of all this, I think, is the radical impact of the market in shifting the nature of state authority. In outsourcing certain aspects of state functioning, the state weakens itself, whether it intends it or not, because there are people acting in the name of the state—whether it’s through private security, contract military operators, commercial providers of intelligence, or the corporate operation of prisons— these forms of “governmentality” are ever more evidently beyond direct state control. And the new kinds of partnerships—whether in taking censuses or computing crime statistics, fighting wars or keeping order on the streets—people know that this is a new kind of authority that relativizes the sovereignty of the state. The power of modern state government was never absolutely sovereign, of course, but the appearance of such sovereignty was enacted plausibly enough to sustain the appearance of such sovereignty until the late twentieth century.

Another key dimension of this shift is the fact that states no longer control a lot of the economic activity taking place within their “sovereign” space because of the transnational nature of capital. So, for instance, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when the British government moved to bailout a threatened flagship industry—Jaguar Land Rover—they were actually propping up a company owned by the Tata group, a corporation based in India. So who exactly is calling the shots, who exactly is saving whom? What is a national economy and who controls it? Who controls the means of violence? In many parts of the world, when an enforcement agent in uniform stops you on the streets, you do not know whether they act in the name of the state, private enterprise, or even organized crime. Under those conditions, what constitutes an authority? Where does sovereignty reside?

The same kind of undermining occurs when state governments seem radically incapable and/or unwilling to control economic collapse and the plummeting value of money. This always makes me think about what happened in Weimar Germany after World War I, when suddenly the German currency lost all value. When the signifiers (whether official uniforms or currency) lose face value, that prompts collective distrust in the very nature of reality and what underpins it. I think this sets in motion efforts to recover a sense of lost tradition, certain sorts of sovereign force (whether by way of fascism or theology), certain fundamental truths that all assert that “the buck stops here—this is the original text, this is the unambiguous source of power.” And revelation serves well here: an authority that comes from somewhere else that is undeniable. I think that is the issue that lies behind the re-enchantment of our times, the hunger for the sublime. One can see this clearly in the reading of recent apocalyptic events, even the way that 9/11 provided a “Ground Zero,” time-stopping event that served in the construction of the new kind of international security order.

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/RitesResponsibilities-I-Comaroff-TIF.pdf