Capitalism: Open System, Collection of Processes

Take capitalism. It consists of moving elements such as the relative freedom of capital, contractual labor, the commodity form, and market/anti-market forces. But this complex (or “axiomatic” as Gilles Deleuze would call it) is both incomplete by itself and connected to other force-fields upon which it depends or which may intrude upon it. These include climate patterns, weather systems, animal-human disease jumps, the availability or [pg 37] depletion of clean water, fertile soil, oil, and other “resources,” educational systems, scientific activity, adventurous investors, medical practices, religious evolution, collective spiritual priorities, consumer trends, asteroid showers, and many other processes.

Outline of “Apparatus of Capture” Plateau – Deleuze and Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus: “Capture”

Outline by “Anarchist Without Content”

PDF here.

Draft copy. Do not cite without permission. Please email comments or suggestions.

empire ain’t a thing

“An international ecumenical org does not process from an imperial center that imposes itself upon and homogenizes an exterior milieu; neither is it reducible to relations between St8s, for example (the League of nations, the United Nations).  On the contrary, it constitutes an intermediate milieu between the different coexistent orders. Therefore it is not exclusively commercial or economic, but is also religious, artistic, etc.  From this standpoint we shall call an international organization anything that has the capacity to move through diverse social formations simultaneously: States, towns, deserts, war machines, primitive societies. “ (435, my emph)

prolegomena to any future engineering

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, Production of Absolute Surplus Value

The Geometry of Revolution

The openings created by the Maya Prophecies for 2012 mark a political and cultural challenge to the onto-theological metaphysics deeply embedded within European thought that have long blackmailed revolutionary possibilities.  In this talk I will briefly interrogate how to crack the thin veneer of vulgar revolution to open a path that makes ‘steps’ toward true revolution possible.  Methodologically, I posit a diagrammatic thought that looks to machines that extract and re-articulate forms of resistance, as shown by a series of visual examples.

The Phenomenology of the Resonance-Reverberation Doublet

Political Acoustics?

Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space:

to go so far and so deep, [we] must go beyond the sentimental resonances with which we receive (more or less richly – whether this richness be within ourselves or within the poem) a work of art. This is where the phenomenological doublet of resonance and repercussions must be sensitized. The resonances are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world. While the repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence.

clarifying affect

The traditional framework of robot motion planning is based on manipulating a robot through a workspace while avoiding collisions with the obstacles in this space. Our application of motion planning, on the other hand, is aimed at determining potential paths that a robot (or ligand) may naturally take based on the energy distribution of its workspace. Hence, instead of inducing the motion of the robot through actuators, we examine the possible motions of the robot induced by the energy landscape of its immediate environment.53

Latombe’s distinction between the two approaches to motion planning is an important one in that it foregrounds Deleuze’s distinction between effective and affective space. Effective space is rational space functioning according to a discernible logic, as in the first method for motion planning. Effective space is negotiated by a binary logical process, such as colliding/not colliding with obstacles. In effective space, actions are directed from the inside-out: the subject is able to adapt by exerting itself within the space. As a result, interactions within effective space are extensive, concerned with conditions of quantity than quality.