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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Bergson’s Critique of Crude Materialism

All questions concerning the mode of the survival of the past will dismiss from the outset any psychological theory trying to locate recollections within the cerebral matter of the brain.To say, with Bergson, that the brain is a mere “central telephonic switchboard” transmitting movements is also “to say [that] it is in vain to attribute to the cerebral substance the property of engendering representations” (ibid.). In fact the final conclusions of Matter and Memory run as follows:“Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, must be put in terms of time rather than of space” (ibid., 74/71, emphasis in original). As Frédéric Worms insightfully points out, we are here witnessing a crucial reversal of the relationship between the body and memory.Whereas from a practical point of view, the body is occupying the foreground in the theory of perception, it gets relegated to the background in the theory of memory. Similarly, while memory remains secondary from a practical point of view, it returns as primary with the reintroduction of time, which is to say, of becoming.Worms writes,“At bottom, the stakes are the following: the body, whose existence had been posed as an absolute in the first chapter, now depends on memory for its conservation in time!”26 This is the key to the Virtual informing the Bergsonian unconscious.

Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual, 31

 

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Matter That Matters: Materialist Feminism & Sexual Difference

Reading Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art for the first time finally made materialism click for me. I had been feeling a growing dissatisfaction with social constructivism; and while I had been reading plenty of materialists who insisted on “matter that mattered,”  I never knew how to explain it, or at least without recourse to a crude reductionist paradigm. With Grosz, however, we see how differences (and in her case: sexual difference) create a beautiful tension from which art and culture spring forth. At last, a beautiful demonstration on why matter matters. Enjoy.

I want to start with some mythical sense of “the beginning.” “In the beginning” is chaos, the whirling, unpredictable movement of forces, vibratory oscillations that constitute the universe. Chaos here may be understood not as absolute disorder but rather as a plethora of orders, forms, wills—forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other, both matter and its conditions for being otherwise, both the actual and the virtual in-distinguishably. Somewhere in this chaotic universe, in a relatively rare occurrence, through chance, molecular randomness generates [6] organic proteins, cells, proto-life. Such life can only exist and perpetuate itself to the extent that it can extract from the whirling and experientially overwhelming chaos that is nature, materiality, and their immanent forces those elements, substances, or processes it requires, can somehow bracket out or cast into shadow the profusion of forces that engulf and surround it so that it may incorporate what it needs. Henri Bergson, one of Deleuze’s major philosophical influences, understands this as a skeletalization of objects: we perceive only that which interests us, is of use to us, that to which our senses have, through evolution, been attuned (Bergson 1988). That is, life, even the simplest organic cell, carries its past with its present as no material object does. This incipient memory endows life with creativity, the capacity to elaborate an innovative and unpredictable response to stimuli, to react or, rather, simply to act, to enfold matter into itself, to transform matter and life in unpredictable ways.

Such elementary life can only evolve, become more, develop and elaborate itself to the extent that there is something fundamentally unstable about both its milieu and its organic constitution. The evolution of life can be seen not only in the increasing specialization and bifurcation or differentiation of life forms from each other, the elaboration and development of profoundly variable morphologies and bodily forms, but, above all, in their becoming-artistic, in their self-transformations, which exceed the bare requirements of existence. Sexual selection, the consequence of sexual difference or morphological bifurcation—one of the earliest upheavals in the evolution of life on earth and undoubtedly the most momentous invention that life has brought forth, the very machinery for guaranteeing the endless generation of morphological and genetic variation, the very mechanism of biological difference itself—is also, by this fact, the opening up of life to the indeterminacy of taste, pleasure, and sensation.6 Life comes to elaborate itself through making [7] its bodily forms and its archaic territories, pleasing (or annoying), performative, which is to say, intensified through their integration into form and their impact on bodies.

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Escape: A Talk

This following talk was presented last week at the 2012 North American Anarchist Studies Network conference. The Q/A period was perhaps more interesting than my talk. If you look around, you’ll find the videos.

Today, I will do three things:
1) Sketch a model of the State
2) Outline our terrain of struggle
and 3) Fill your arsenal with a few political weapons

This paper is a gloss of my current writing project, which is entitled Escape. Like many, I love stories of leaving it all behind, whether those are tales of fed-up employees quitting their jobs, restless romantics hitting the road, or the enraged laying waste to the civilization around them. Yet my thinking about escape originated from an academic interest that began after reading a curious comment early on in the popular book on “running to the hills,” James C Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed.”

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Politics Is Dangerous: Against Innocence

The recent LIES: a journal of materialist feminism is an excellent collection of critical essays, reflections, communiques and other writings. Despite its obvious roots in ‘zine culture, it rises above such classification; perhaps the best contrast is that the collection presents things to disagree with. Many of these writers have certainly spent time in the world of the personal essay, which puts most writers in a position too vulnerable to propose anything worth disagreeing with your friends about – ‘recognize my experience or fuck you,’ – yet these authors reinvigorate the true meaning of the phrase: the personal is the political. This isn’t a dumb boys club that starts the night with a good argument that is only to be forgotten later after a few slaps on the back at the bar. This is the lived realization that friendship is political, which is now understood as the politics of struggle built on intimacy but hidden by the seemingly-innocuous cover of “friendship as a way of life.” Yet friendship here is neither an underground network of subversive cells nor a support group turned family, it is the way we make it through our miserable lives by being political. They’re not looking for reform, rights, recognition – they’re laughing at Andy Warhol selling pictures of his mangled chest, they’re eagerly sharing diary entries about cheating the boss and getting back at bad boyfriends (aren’t they about the same?), and they’re trying not to gloat about having their finger on the pulse of the struggle way before everyone else.

But for me, the real gem of the journal is Jackie Wang’s “Against Innocence: race, gender, and the politics of safety.”

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The Modern State (edited)

The machine emitted strange buzzing, whirring, and clicking sounds. The noises unsettled casual observers, but to the technician, it made beautiful music. She had listened to its movements so many times that she did not have to look at the monitor to pick out the slow set of clicks that marked the beginning of each cycle. Tck… Tck… Tck… Tck…

 The machines had been a triumph over the archaic technology that came before it. It took the dreams of stargazers and a few steady hands to crank out the first prototypes. Even the wildly imperfect geometry of the early models still hypnotized onlookers.

She was charged with maintaining a machine from a newer line. The introduction of this version of the machines had ushered in a new era. In her land, authorities were crushed under the feet of rebelling peasants. As nobles bickered with the monarchy, a new class claiming to “represent the people” had seized power. But instead of quelling the waters, wars became more bloody. And there are still dissident factions trying to destroy the machines through sabotage or even cruder methods.

It is her task to keep the machine running. The rules are clear. Polarize the field. Alternate poles. Keep everything in orbit. She had been trained in basic geometric correction, which usually entailed resetting the aperture but sometimes required redacting elements. While no one told her how to control for the creeping tide of noise, she had come up with some makeshift bypasses. But if a long-term solution was eluding her, her fellow technicians were probably in just as much trouble…

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Prelude (edited)

Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is among the simplest.

Half a century ago, an anarchist scholar decided to write a heroic story of peasants.[1] When bodies were piling up in Vietnam, he thought that people actually cared about peasants for once. Even then, his task had not been easy, given that peasants serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are performed. But in the archives he uncovered books and records to wield against those who had discounted his lowly peasants.

The heroic peasants were a good start for the 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 why certain peoples are poor materials for state-making.

The scholar loved the hill people’s slash-and-burn culture the most. Dismissed by others as hillbilly backwardness, he knew that their whole way of life was an elaborate trick that they used to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted: it had all changed after World War II. Most States used technologies, both mechanical and human, to eliminate their “dark twins” hiding in the mountains. Space was spanned and the hill sanctuaries were found, 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.

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Modern State, complete

The machine emitted strange buzzing, whirring, and clicking sounds. The noises unsettled casual observers, but to the technician, it made beautiful music. She had listened to its movements so many times that she did not have to look at the monitor to pick out the slow set of clicks that marked the beginning of each cycle. Tck… Tck… Tck… Tck…

The machines had been a triumph over the archaic technology that came before it. It took the dreams of stargazers and a few steady hands to crank out the first prototypes. Even the wildly imperfect geometry of the early models still hypnotized onlookers.

She was charged with maintaining a machine from a newer line. The introduction of this version of the machines had ushered in a new era. In her land, authorities were crushed under the feet of rebelling peasants. As nobles bickered with the monarchy, a new class claiming to “represent the people” had seized power. But instead of quelling the waters, wars became more bloody. And there are still dissident factions trying to destroy the machines through sabotage or even cruder methods.

It is her task to keep the machine running. The rules are clear. Polarize the field. Alternate poles. Keep everything in orbit. She had been trained in basic geometric correction, which usually entailed resetting the aperture but required redacting elements. While no one told her how to control for the creeping tide of noise, she had come up with some makeshift bypasses. But if a longterm solution was eluding her, her fellow technicians were probably in just as much trouble…

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The Modern State: Spatialization and Systematization

Spatialization is the third operation of the Modern State. Spatialization is the result of the Modern State breaking through the Absolute State’s totalizing despotism. Once separated from the circular logic of omnipresent authority, the Modern State is forced into a sober realization: sovereign power is only one force among many other possible forces. Given the pluralization of force, the Modern State responds by calculating power as a matter of physics. To produce this political physics, force is first materialized by slowing down the forces within its control. Land is appraised, people counted, commodities tracked, and conduct evaluated. From this ecology of forces, the Modern State slowly introduces linear time and a discretization of space to mark out discrete blocks of space-time that serve as the architecture for its power. Like a giant relief sculpture, the Modern States is a material form carved out of a single block to reveal what lies beneath. The Modern State begins from a territorial mass, framed from the earth, from which the sculpture will be formed. To stabilize its form and find the shape imagined to already exist inside, the Modern State first eliminates excessive forces through subtraction. (Land is partitioned, deviants locked up, black markets shut down.) Next, to bring the matter to life, it sets certain forces within that territory back in motion through manipulation. (The fields are seeded, goods made, and currency exchanged.) Next, to enhance, supplement, and cover up imperfections, it introduces institutions that intervene within forces through addition. (Emptied monasteries are made into factories, indigents put to work, and the army professionalized.) And lastly, to transact between the still porous inside and the world outside it, it enables exchange through substitution. (Regions annexed, skilled workers imported, and foodstuffs sold.)

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A Prelude to Escape

Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is also the simplest.

Half a century ago, an anarchic scholar struck out to write a heroic story of peasants. It was when bodies were piling up in Vietnam, indicating to him that people actually cared about peasants for once. Even then, his task had not been easy, given that peasants serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are performed. But in the archives he uncovered books and records to wield against those who had discounted his lowly peasants.

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.

What anarchic scholar loved most about the hill peoples’ was their slash-and-burn culture. Most dismiss it as hillbilly backwardness, yet he knew their whole way of life was an elaborate trick to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted. It all changed after World War II. 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 to fight Reagan’s imperialist interventions in Latin America. 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 his reality at all.

Where the anarchic scholar and the student of revolution agree, we may have silently come to the same conclusion long ago: there is no sense in running to the hills. Before, the hills may have 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.

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