“It is Raining”: A Philosophy of the Digital Stream (new intro)

“It is raining,” philosopher Louis Althusser writes. These words: a declaration; a marked change in the world outside; an announcement about the rain felling outside Althusser’s room at the Sainte-Anne clinic in late 1982. Only then, two years after his scandalous psychotic fit, did he begin writing again.[1] Peering through the window to outside, Althusser ended his dry spell with a book “before all else,” “about ordinary rain.”[2] Such ordinary rain is not the common sense notion of rain that pertains to water falling from the sky. Althusser’s rain is far more commonplace: it is the underground current of materialism that runs through the history of philosophy (“The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” 167). This watershed year also marked the emergence of another type of rain, which is seen through an altogether different window. 1982 was the year Time magazine named “the computer” its personal of the year. Three decades later, we now watch the streams that rush across our digital screens.

Propaganda by the Deed’s Dangerous Undercurrent

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

Empire’s Extension

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

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).

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?

Capitalism: The Age of Sad Passions?

Is the era where ‘power produces more than it represses’ the Age of Sad Passions?

And, in an era that ‘produces more than it represses,’ why haven’t the large decentralized networks that expand at an exponential rate forced older more centralized systems of power into exile?

affect = power

In a recent movie that glorifies the criminal struggles of car culture, the protagonists have to “pull one last job to gain their freedom.” But this thrilling depiction of libertine struggle has not created a radical culture of popular resistance; it is the latest Hollywood blockbuster and has grossed over $169.7 million.

affect: a definition

‘affect’ describes both (i) the power of bodies to combine and (ii) the felt effects of power in the body. the content and expression of affecting and being affected. bodies combine in a very concrete sense, like nourishment or poison, to produce passional sensations of joy or sadness.

affect is caught like one catches a cold: through contagion. it can’t be quantified any more than freud was able to quantify libido. and when it’s qualified, felt as ’emotion’ for instance, its measurement still comes out dull like a nurse taking your temperature.

Embodiment

we don’t even know what a body is capable of. there is all of this talk of the soul and the mind, and we still don’t know what a body can do.

[for those of you reading this on RSS, I’ve embedded a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awtiZEiiAE8&feature=player_embedded]

a series of propositions:

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.