lenin’s shadow: organization

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.

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

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.

televisual subjection

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)

The Scream

from Susan Ruddick… Desire, not joy, becomes the central focus of Deleuze’s work, arguably a concept of desire which draws upon Spinoza’s concept of conatus, this being an innate tendency towards self-preservation which involves a determination to act on affections however they are experienced or conceived, through body or mind, through superstition or reason (E II, P9, S; E III, def.), but in which, ‘self-preservation’ can become mobilized in all manner of distinct experiences of self, in addictions, perversions and transformations. The project, for Deleuze and Guattari, is to historicize desire and locate it in a social field, as desiring-production, which situates Spinoza’s combinatorial processes — the social nature of becoming active — in relation to a kind of infinite expression of man’s co-production with ‘the profound life of all forms or all types of beings’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000 AO: 4). This leads Deleuze away from an exploration of sites that express the move from passive to active joy, into more complex determinations of a range of emotional registers. Deleuze, in an inflection rather than an overturning of Spinoza’s framework, extends this argument to affect itself, arguing that baseness, stupidity, the sad passions, are not some individual failing — a matter for repentance as the Stoics might have it, ‘which complicate or inconvenience the dogmatic image of thought without overturning it’ (1994 D+R: 151). They are, rather, institutionalized: ‘one is neither superior to nor external to that from which one benefits: a tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed in it’ (1994 D+R : 151). The tyrant rules through the sad passions, as ‘a complex that joins desire’s boundlessness to the mind’s confusion, cupidity and superstition’ (Deleuze,  SPP 1988: 25).

Nightmares

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.

Rejoinder to a Toothless Critique

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.

Deleuze & The Meaning of Life: Fichte!?

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?

how to give lacan the boot

[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.

Leading By Example, or, the power of a good example

Brian Massumi suggests in the introduction to his 2002 book “Parables For The Virtual” that the most Bergsonian form of argumentation follows from an “exemplary method,” by which he means supporting an argument through an example. There are three major arguments, which, while not stated explicitly, forms the subterranean structure by which Massumi makes his case for the example: singularity, detail, and connectability.

Lazzarato’s Virtual Communism

Lazzarato is able to distinguish his approach from traditional historical materialism with a few key reversals. The first is an elaboration on an argument he shares with Read: production is ‘greater’ than reproduction, which is just a translation of D&G’s claim that the virtual is richer than the actual. But rather than remaining within the capitalist mode of production, which treats it as a de facto totality, Lazzarato uses Tarde to make a move that detaches his analysis from capitalist production almost completely:

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.