when the aleatory de-territorialization of a line of flight is transformed into a line of pure destruction (us against them). lines of flight then become lines of conquest, or what we will call “lines of fight”.
p231:They always contain the “stupid and repugnant” cry, Long live death!, even at the economic level, where the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction.
<also p55>
Even if capitalism has been dialectical, it is becoming less so as exhibited by the collapse of civil society, the emergence of immaterial labor, and the growing indistinguishability between surplus labor and other labor.
If communism is the real movement that abolishes the present state of things, as argued by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology; and if Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction only generates false movement through negativity and mediation, as claimed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, then this paper seeks to re-pose dialectical problems in non-dialectical ways by developing an alternative conceptual terrain that actualizes real movement.
Looking to step completely outside the shadow of Hegel, the paper proposes concrete alternatives to often-criticized features of dialectical thought, namely its conceptions of time, negativity, mediation, totality and its hylomorphism by drawing on a crowd of non-dialectical philosophers employed by Deleuze and Guattari. The paper leans heavily on Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Bernhard Riemann, and Gilbert Simondon to suggest a model of immanent causality against the backdrop of Althusser.
What is at stake are not only problematics that maintain the footing of Marxism as a critique of political economy but also the potential to produce movement in an age where the modern dialectic “has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality” (Hardt and Negri, Empire, 189).
Page 32: …o escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the p…*
Page 89: …herent to dialectics. First, although it may be possible to conceiv…*
Page 90: …n ongoing dialectical miracle of the transformation of matter into…*
Page 101: …op- erly dialectical zone of variation. According to Malmberg, it i…*
Page 103: …a minor, dialectical, or ghetto language cannot be studied unless…*
Page 359: …course to dialectics. The State seems to rise up in a single stroke…*
Page 431: …and even dialectical schemas, lag behind the richness and complexit…*
Page 483: …he end of dialectics and the beginning of a typology and topology o…*
Page 517: …m and the Dialectic” (ibid). 7. Ibid. 8. See Deleuze’s discussion…*
Page 523: …n, Sur la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). Parain develops a th…*
Page 532: …iple as a dialectical unity, one that reduces the multiple by gathe…*
Page 532: …away with dialectical movement. 17. [TRANS: Artaud, “The Body Is th…*
Page 547: …elard, La dialectique de la duree (Paris: Bovin, 1936), pp. 128-129.…*
Page 549: …rd, in La dialectique de la duree, draws on Dupreel. 32. [TRANS: Th…
Continue reading “Mille Plateaux: deleuze and dialectics (and guattari too…)”
1a. capitalism is a difference engine
1b. alternatively, the state constructs sameness
2. the relation of bodies under the logic of capitalism are exterior, the relations of bodies under the logic of the state are interior
3a. capitalist commodification is an abstract relation built between bodies
3b. abstraction doesn’t reduce a body to its image
4a. the state constructs relations through mutilation
4b. the state doesn’t mutilate bodies to fit a single image but sets them orbit, or whittles notches in them to fit together like cogs in a machine [needs rewording/word economy]
5a. an ensemble of relations of exteriority is a socius
5b. an ensemble of relations of interiority is a totality
6. empire is the mix of the logics of capitalism and the state
foucault, student of althusser, is known by many independently of his teacher’s influence. traces of althusser’s method can be found in foucault’s work – even the most ‘radical’ moves that one might not initially attribute to an althusserian influence.
one of the most (non)obvious examples is foucault’s almost obsessive research on the production of truth through the manufacturing of speaking subjects. like althusser’s subjectivity without a subject, foucault similarly posits subjectivity as a process of bodies caught up in their own subjection.
althusser’s system of “over-determination” builds in a humility that doesn’t rely on a single determinate cause – borrowing from the strategies of freud’s dream interpretation used to carefully break the frustration of mis-recognition. in contrast to the all-too-common notion that foucault was rabidly anti-psychoanalytic (quickly broken by even a small foray into his biography would find that he received psychology training), i would argue that foucault’s own concept of immanent causality borrows heavily from althusser, and thus also sharing a heritage in freudian dream interpretation.
Funny how the french left-communists were all read by the primis and now that primi’s on the way out, everyone’s reading the left-commies on their own. There was a stupid critique of this neofrancaise crowd at HM by some Party flare-clad SD type – the words came out of his mouth like spittle, crescendoing into the paranoid nightmares of infantilism mixed with a gatling-gun rattling off of notorious anarchist franchise projects (what is the average length of a infoshop? like six months! and primitivists….).
This speaker’s lack of eloquence undercut the clear elephant in the room — what is the connection between left-communism and primitivism?
Continue reading “French Left-Communists == licentiously primitivists?”
McCormick —
COP: friend/enemy
I’ve been thumbing through the recent translation of “Introduction to Civil War” but haven’t given it a systematic read. As I’ve discussed, I’m reticent to accept Schmitt’s notion of politics which seems to be a rejoinder to the ongoing depoliticization produced by the abstract machine ‘Empire’. I haven’t done a close read yet, so I’m not sure if the text explicitly advocates a re-politicization (or by what means) or if it’s merely ‘obvious’ in the sense that Jason’s paper noted the ‘ontological obviousness of communism.’
Lecercle:
In any Marxist text, L expects (Four Theses): p37(3)
1) an analysis of capitalism via Capital but with whatever adaptations needed
2) a political programme
3) conception of history: how the future is contained in past&present
4) conception of time (temporality) centered around conjecture capable of guiding political action (lenin’s contribution)
Six key dichotomies p37+(3)
1) collectivism/methodological individualism
Anarchist Without Content 