References to Time in Lefebvre’s Production of Space

***– nietzsche: 22
— abstract space: 49
— passivity of time: 50
— rediscover time through space: 91
— time thru space: 95
— expulsion of time thru modernity: 96
— reducing time to variable: 108
— genesis: space v time: 130
— bergsonian/neitzschean coconstitution bs: 181
***– spatial control of time: 218-219
— ritual time “orienting” or “punctuating” space: 267-268
— industrialization of time: 277-278
— critique of hegelianism, which sees state as master of space: 279-285
— dialectics = time: 292
— reduction of time to space: 296-300
— Marx’s reduction of time in political economy: 322-326
— echoes of Marx’s reduction: 331, 333
***– capital’s visualization of time through commodities: 337-340
— appropriation as time: 356
— time as resistance: 393
— finitude: 409
— temporality of knowledge: 414
— time’s “trial by space”: 416-418

Armchair Radical

Your dialectics might break bricks, and you might have even found a novel form of protest. But are you an armchair radical?

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 Do not cite without permission.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.

Communism: A Family Drama in Epic Theater by Walter Benjamin

On the occasion of the world premiere of Brecht’s play Die Mutter [The Mother].

Brecht has said of Communism that it is “the middle term.” “Communism is not radical. It is capitalism that is radical.” How radical it is can be seen in its attitude toward the family – as in every other matter. It insists upon the family at any price, even where intensification of family life can only aggravate the suffering already caused by conditions utterly unworthy of human being. Communism is not radical. Therefore, it has no intention of simply abolishing family relations. It merely tests them to determine their capacity for change. It asks itself: Can the family be dismantled so that its components may be socially refunctioned? These components are not so much the family members themselves as their relationships with one another. Of these, it is clear that none is more important than the relationship between mother and child.

“Forget the Dialectic”

Heres a _rough_ version of the paper I gave at the Marxist Literary Group – Institute on Culture and Society 2010 in Antigonish at St. Francis Xavier University:

Forget The Dialectic

Too many

Movement philosophers,

not enough

moving philosophy.

The curse of

Movements

without

movement.

Politicos

make a motion,

fake e-motion.

We need more

Loco-motion.

Ideas

dancing

furiously

in the heat

of resistance.

–Ron Sakolsky, Swift Winds

********

The Fragmented Body of Prometheus

“In the face of those who denigrate decadence, the supposed optimism of the theory of productive forces is immediately ripped to piece by the play of two contrary powers: the grand tragedy of water and fire, of production and destruction, and the low comedy of earth and air, of fabrication and imitation.  One may talk as much as one likes about Marx’s “Promethean” theory, but the body of Prometheus is fragmented from the outset.  The materialism of history and the dialectics of revolution run the risk of never encountering each other in it.” Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 69

MLG Conference Paper Proposal: Movement Without the Dialectic: Abolishing the Present State of Things

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).

Mille Plateaux: deleuze and dialectics (and guattari too…)

Page 5: …the most “dialectical” way possible, what we have before us is the m…*

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…