This Is Not a Program: Or, The Politics of Autonomy

If we understand politics not as the ontological ground upon which forces swirl but those forces themselves, then This Is Not A Program and Sonogram of Potentiality are perhaps the  most political texts of Tiqqun. And for that reason, This Is Not A Program is not a work of philosophy but strategy. Just as Debord balked at being labelled a philosopher and instead called himself a strategist, This Is Not A Program employs philosophical dispositifs [devices, tools] but never philosophy itself; rather, it is part historical warning and part field manual for the present.

For those of you who never get around to reading the whole book, you should still read “living-and-struggling” in whole, but otherwise, here are the four most important take-home points:

The Social State / The Welfare State and The Socialist State

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

the new human condition

Today we increasingly think like computers, while communication technologies and their model of interaction are becoming more and more central to laboring activities.

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 Do not cite without permission.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.

Resonance: A New Image of Communication

As the phrase goes, “the communication between two terms generates an independent third.”

Resonance isn’t found by plumbing the interiority of two singularities, or even their overlap. (A U B)

Rather, resonance is an external force in-between singularities that incites forms of content and expression.

Dominic Smith’s response article to Badiou’s Clamour of Being is an amazing descriptive piece that lays the groundwork for theorizing this form of inter-action:

A New Communism (Of Singularization) Pt II

Communism has nothing to do with the collectivist barbarism that has come into existence. Communism is the most intense experience of subjectivity, the maximization of the processes of singularization – individuation which represent the capability potential of our collective stock. No universality of man can be extracted from the naked abstraction of social value.

Communism no longer has anything to do with any of this [blind, reductionist collectivism]. It is a matter rather of manifesting the singular as multiplicity, mobility, spatio-temporal variability and creativity.

Politics today is nothing more than the expression of the domination of dead structures over the entire range of living production

The historical communist parties, prisoners of antiquated paradigms of production, did not even succeed in imagining the revolutionary force of the social mode of production which was in the process of emerging. Incapable of separating themselves from centralist organizational models deriving from a paradigmatic split between the avant-garde and the masses, they found themselves disoriented and frightened in the face of the unexpected self-organization of a social movement.

A Social Without Solidarity

Yes, communism is possible. It is true, more now than ever, that it haunts the old world. 1968 revealed the fragility of the social contracts installed successively to contain the revolutionary movements of the beginning of the century, those which followed the big crisis of 1929 and the movements which accompanied and followed the second great imperialist war. However one views the events of 1968, it is undeniable that they revealed the failure of this social compromise to eliminate or supersede the antagonistic contradictions of the capitalist systems. […skip two paragraphs…]

…work and life are no longer separate; society is collapsed into the logic and processes of capitalist development.

A New Communism (Of Singularization)

From this perspective, communism is the establishment of a communal life style in which individuality is recognized and truly liberated, not merely opposed to the collective. That’s the most important lesson: that the construction of healthy communities begins and ends with unique personalities, that the collective potential is realized only when the singular is free. This insight is fundamental to the liberation of work.

Lenin: Coming Between Guattari and Negri

We now come to a central aspect of the question of the organisation for liberation, of the form of militant social practice of liberation. This entire discussion revolves around the name, Lenin.

It is clear – more or less explicitly – that when Guattari warns against  ‘authoritarian disciplines, formal hierarchies, orders of priorities decreed from above, and compulsory ideological references…’ (p. 124) he is warning against what we might call the Leninist temptation.