Rancière's "Misadventures of Universality"

Rancière's talk from the Second Moscow Biennial is available at their site, here.

The central concern in the talk is "the way in which the universality of the human rights or people's autonomy appears to be absorbed by [...] a certain idea of the universality of the commodity." To illustrate what he means by this, Rancière brings up Godard's Masculin/Feminin (view the trailer below):

the film where we are introduced to the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. He does this to point toward a newer problem, that during the 60s the protests were supposedly in solidarity and identification with the children in Vietnam, today there is no identification possible because there is only the caricature of who is exploiting whom.

In the 70s Martha Rosler's collages were perhaps powerful critiques, but today this technique doesn't seem to have the same force. The mode is tired. These sorts of collages seem to be just one of millions of such images. Perhaps this is because the Vietnam war was so pervasive in the American dining room - the family could be on the front lines of the jungle warfare while eating tv dinners.

Today this proximity to warfare is a primary means of providing entertainment.

ABOVE: Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
RIGHT: Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (2004).
BELOW: Martha Rosler, The Grey Drape (2008).

Today, while it might be satisfying on some level to throw a brick through a Starbucks window it just doesn't seem to convey any form of urgency to political action. Indeed, on a personal level I can relate a story of exactly this. While there was some sense of political excitement in the Battle of Seattle as the anti-globalization movement began to really ramp-up and a brick in a Starbucks while wearing a vinegar-soaked bandanna seemed a viable political action; only a few years later the gesture became impotent one night in Athens, Georgia when my friend had her store window busted-in by UGA party boys. No bandanna, not purpose other than the thrill of simple vandalism. In short, no universal principle being advocated, except that joy of being rebellious.

The result of this commensurability (you can invoke the same bandanna worn in the Battle of Seattle by purchasing it at Urban Outfitters) as Rancière states it is, "[u]ltimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence."

He then proceeds in the talk to outline both sides of the political spectrum, primarily focusing on the shortcomings of the contemporary left. The right he simply passes over characterizing it as full of rage at the ambivalences in today's world.

With the left there is talk of the impotence of its melancholic prediction which is, "not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns into a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are." We should perhaps clarify this as, perhaps, an incomplete melancholia. As Judith Butler pointed out in her "Melancholy Gender", Freud saw an ego-accumulating aspect inherent to melancholia - an incorporative dimension in the ego's seeking the lost object. Perhaps this, too, is a universalism that Rancière would characterize as misadventure...

So on the one hand there is this "rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity," but also this rupture is the natural result of what Marx stated was capital's ability to dematerialize previous material relations by subsuming them to the demands of market exchange.

To be continued tonight at the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group...

Who Needs Time?

There is a great article written by John Cox over at Wired's Epicenter blog.

My wife's always teasing me because I've got this blog (plus another), I've got a myspace account (what a waste - almost as bad as monster.com), facebook, twitter, linkedin, academia.edu, and then a wordpress blog and fan page on Facebook for our reading group. What's the point of all this self-promotion? Right now, really very little actually. But, as this Epicenter article points-out, understanding how these platforms work and developing attention from the right people makes all the difference. These are ways of manipulating your relationship with the world virtually to effect changes in actuality.

What the article doesn't discuss, and maybe it isn't the place of that blog, is the kind of relationships that the people who voted for Brown. Who had the time to get to know him?

In some ways I wonder if this was an exciting opportunity for many people in Massachusetts but campaigning and public service isn't something that many want to do for sustained amounts of time? Maybe not - maybe the shame would be that so many people could become involved so rapidly and decisively and then not be allowed to continue to interface with the political process. That's been my overall experience with the Obama Administration's web portal.

Rather than a means to participate in democracy, the Internet continues to be hamstrung by those in a position to do so (RIAA, NSA, AT&T, et al.) I've been told that voting is mandatory in Australia and to make sure there is compliance, people can vote very easily with a proximity to polling place that would put the U.S. to shame. The U.S., miraculously, can develop technology that allows me to do all my banking virtually (there isn't even a bank branch in my state), I can bank nearly anywhere in the world. Yet some how we can't get a little voter card that would work like an ATM card? C'mon.

Responding to Thinking About Creativity

Thanks for reading, Matt.

If we're attached to the idea that everyone in a society should be able to voice their opinion, then it matters if they feel their voice is their own.

You ask, "if we want people to buy us...what's wrong with that; what does that really mean?" Now working with refugees I can assure you that millions of people are trafficked across the U.S. and the globe, as sex workers, as migrant workers. They are slaves by another name.

While you might be able to afford the idea that some people would want to be considered as simply a commodity to be purchased, no different from a sack of flour, I can assure you millions of people don't enjoy that luxury. Here I will quote the International Rescue Committee (where I am currently doing an internship):

Anywhere from 700,000 to 4 million persons worldwide are trafficked across or within national borders every year. Virtually every country is affected by trafficking, whether capitalized by traffickers as a source, transit or destination location. Generating roughly $7 billion to $10 billion annually, human trafficking is the fastest growing global criminal industry, with high profits, low risks, minimal capital investment, and a "commodity" that can be used over and over again.

If we're reduced to "just commodities sold in a market" then we are faced with conditions that would undermine the validity of democratic or republican representation.

And, let's face it, some sort of Libertarian utopia à la Ayn Rand would have to condone this burgeoning commodities market above described, and the existence of this market eats away at a notion of a commonwealth like an acid.

While it's true we might reduce all of life to quantiles of energy exchange, this would ignore and abnegate the other 98% of life that is qualified by how these exchanges occur. To reduce living to a quantifiable exchange is to literally live without meaning.

Why eat anything other than high-fructose corn syrup if the purpose of eating is simply to facilitate the exchange of electrons? By the way, what's been among the most subsidized industries in the U.S. for going into 40 years now? Corn. Guess how the Federal Poverty level is determined - by how much it costs to acquire calories. Guess what the poorest people eat in the U.S. That's right, food slathered in high-fructose corn syrup, because it's cheap.

This is what Marx stated; in Capital, vol. 1:
"As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange-values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value. If we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor."

Why would a capitalist ever want to eradicate protections if it were possible to ensure that some portion of the population was always willing to be sold on the marketplace so as to escape the wretchedness of life unprotected by the commonwealth?

Exchange-Value in Marx's Capital, Vol. 1

Not feeling too well today and I'm not really able to think (which is an odd feeling). So, I'm posting something I started to write about in November. Just a quick note.

I'm watching and reading along with David Harvey's seminar on Karl Marx's Capital, vol. 1 and we've just come to page 127 (which is actually only at the beginning of the the book) where we are thinking through the exchange value of commodities. Harvey says something to the effect of the commodity is a bearer of value but value is not some kernel within the commodity that if we dissected the the commodity we would see why it has this value in exchange; in effect, we could keep exchanging and exchanging, and so on. This got me thinking about One Red Paperclip. Where a guy does, in fact, exchange a commodity over and over again until he gets himself a house (and a book deal).

A Look at the New York Times

Tonight we had an excellent meeting of the Poncey-Highlands Readgin Group where we discussed our readings of Breton's first "Manifesto of Surrealism" as well as the first chapter of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

We can see a moment from the Debord text played-out today in the New York Times' "Most Popular" section. In the article "Multicultural Critical Theory. At Business School?" we read that business students need

to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions. [...]Learning how to think critically — how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives — has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr. Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.”

Reading I can't help but think of Debord's line in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. " And then further in §26, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world." You might have an MBA, but you're still going to have your clock cleaned by those that exploit the rest of us.

Also, I'd like to address something in another article in today's NYT, this time in another article "Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected."

In this article we learn that Africans are being illegally trafficked into Italy so as to work in the orchards, picking fruit. This is a job seen as beneath the average Italian today, according to the article. Apparently an undisclosable number of immigrants have been picked up by the Italian Authorities and sent to detention centers. The situation for these immigrants, according to human rights workers in Italy is not dissimilar from slavery and these Italian Authorities have been using bull dozers to raze the encampments where these "semi-slaves" lived.

The article breezily then reports, "It was not entirely clear if all the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or if some were forced to leave."

I can answer that for you: they were forced.

Anytime the phrase "semi-slavery" is used to describe the lives of those at the bottom of an economic system and bulldozers are employed to raze these semi-slaves' "encampments" - that means the entire society there is blatantly using coercive maneuvers to get what they want. Those Africans have the two forms of freedom Marx outlined in Capital, vol. 1: they are free to use their bodies' abilities to labor and so enter, freely, contracts to sell their labor-capacity; but, they are also free of control of the conditions under which they will labor.

Just sayin'.

Society of the Spectacle: Toward the Postmodern

My long-time buddy, Ryland Johnson, was kind enough to respond to my recent posting on Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1 and what follows here is a reply to him.

Kudzu Kongzi is primarily a space for me to germinate my thinking. So I greatly benefit from your input on what is written as I am not an authority on any of it. Below is my reply to Ryland

Thanks for reading, Ryland.

There are some great things in your response, thanks. I'll only just briefly address only a few, not because I disagree with you, but only to kind of elaborate a little more on why I said some of these things here.

First, the blog's really just an off-the-cuff response to what I read today. The blog here serves in some capacity as a place holder for my thinking; but when folks, such as yourself, supplement this with your thinking I get greatly enriched. So thanks, again!

As for invocation of Dasein above: yes. I said it up there, only for the most superficial associative reason - because Dasein is an historic dasein and Debord seems to want to include some of Heidegger's thinking in §11. I agree with you, I think, that Debord, if he writes any more like this later in the book (I'm only reading Chapter 1 here), he's going to have a problem talking about Dasein in a proper way.

This should be said also, about Debord: in reading his works and what I've read about him as a person, I don't get the sense that he's a thorough scholar nor is he particularly interested in giving credit where credit is due.

As for Žižek: yes. I'm sure that there are many other people between 1967 and the rock star Žižek of the past decade, that have written about this advertisement stuff. The obvious place to start, since both Žižek and Debord are very open about their affinity for him is Lacan. I've not climbed the Mt. Doom of Lacan as yet.

At this point, with the minimal exposure to the other SI texts, and largely based on Lefebvre's account in that interview I've linked to here (from the journal October (79), Winter 1997) I'm not sure that the Situationists really had a good idea about the situations they wanted to achieve. In many ways the movement sounds like a collection of very creative, interesting, and angry people. The anger probably fueled their kinetic behavior, but it also probably contributed to the brevity of their moment.

One avenue I'd like to explore more thoroughly would be to better understand something that Ranciére was telling us this past summer: that there is a disconnect between Lyotard and (probably have to include Hal Foster, Bois, et al.) Baudrillard's account of the postmodern and the avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Ranciére seemed to be suggesting that the claims to postmodernity in Lyotard and Baudrillard are problematic in that they fail to account for the work that had been done in montage, surrealism, perhaps futurism, and so on.

So, part of my motivation to read Bréton with Debord is to consider the latter's inheritance from the former and to ask whether Debord has offered something more innovative in light of that inheritance. And also, to some extent, I want to apply what I'm learning in that Harvey lecture course on Capital. This last item is really not remarkable since nearly everyone worth reading from France during the 20th century was a (Neo)Marxist, so there is no surprise to see whole chunks of Marx inserted in sections and just presupposed as true. Were I better read in Marx I might argue some of the finer points of how Capital gets used, but I'm not an authority at all.

A place that I really should develop is at the end there, in talking about the current economic crisis. It's really too simplistic to accept the often-invoked, and largely class-war inspired, trope that it's because too many people were flipping properties that global capitalism started stuttering. That's just not true. What's seems to me more true is that most people on Wall Street don't understand what Value is.

But, beyond this intuition that Debord might be able to help us understand the moment, I'm not sure I've got more than a tenuous gleam. I'd say 30% of me suspects Debord might, but 70% of me thinks that Debord was a bad student and a loudmouth. Here's to learning that I'm wrong.

(Economic) Notes on Society of the Spectacle

So let's finish-up the first chapter, ね？

We got to §21 the other day. But I'd like to assert some things that I did not in that previous posting: Chapter 1 of Society of the Spectacle is an economic text.

1. Debord here is announcing this new term he calls "the spectacle." This is important to keep in mind because the temptation is there to misconstrue the term. Thus we would read this text as Debord as making value judgements, something to the effect of him saying contemporary society is simply being spectacular and indulgent. What he seems to be doing in this first chapter is defining terms. Thus, when he states, in §21, "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion." he is not describing either religion as illusory in a pejorative sense nor that the process that has led to this contemporary social arrangement that he earlier defined as "the spectacle" (in §4, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Or also in §24, "the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of 'mass media' which are its most glaring superficial manifestation....")
   
2. Debord seems to be building from the presupposition that the reader has also read Marx's Capital, vol. 1 at a minimum. Over and over again we get definitions and phrases lifted from Capital.
   

I think it's important to mention this because Marx's book was an attempt to analyze and explain a new social reality whose, though it has been developing over centuries, functioning continues to be mysterious.

In §7 we are reminded of the fundamental alienation that accompanies the mass production which capitalism requires.

With §11 we sense that Debord is attempting to unite Marx with Heidegger's Dasein, "the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught."[itals original] Or perhaps thrown?

This is a text that attempts to describe the fundamental nature of all human interactions in the late capitalist period, as such this text must discuss economics. Whereas Marx sought to explain the dialectical nature of commodity generation and defines capitalism as the movement of commodities as capitalism, Debord's spectacle (qualified in §1 by the statement, "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.") is the, "autonomous movement of the non-living" (§2). What is the spectacle? "It is no more than the economy developing for itself." (§16) It is, "the main production of present-day society." (§15) Marx saw the commodification of the proletariat's labor and the commodification of money itself; Debord attempts something similar, "The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist."

Debord gives us a brief genealogy of how we came to be in the spectaclist economy, and he does this by sketching a shift in social ontology:

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. (§17)

What are the symptoms of this new arrangement of social relations? Not simply advertisements for the commodities of capitalism, but advertisements as something more than suggestions. Advertisements as rules:

I think that Žižek has spoken about this in several places, this injunction to, Enjoy!" Debord puts it this way in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible." This echoes a theme in §6 where the we are told that the spectacle is "the affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corrolary consumption." For an elaboration on this affirmation of the choice already made, consider George Ritzer's McDonaldization of Society. Here's a great site for all your McDonaldization needs.

§26 provides a summation and reiteration of the alienation principle from Marx, but Debord extends this alienation, as nothing can escape this process, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletariatization of the world."

For this proletariatization to be possible, the consummation of the process of rationalization must occur. Once every task had been made automated and efficiency achieved, the worker would be liberated from the workplace, free from toiling in exploitative environments. With no employees to exploit, the managers would be liberated as well. Lefebvre, in an excellent interview discussing the origins of the Situationists, states that his Critique of Everyday Life was inspired by a science-fiction story wherein all the humans have killed themselves because they have nothing to do after the robots took over their work, leaving dogs to exploit the robots. Debord finds this liberation from work suspect:

[T]his inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. [...] Thus the present "liberation from
labor," the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. §27

§s29-34 reiterate, once more, the alienation inherent in capitalist production. But where Marx saw it as perverse, this freeing of the serfs to enter contracts, but free from the ability to control the means of production; Debord repeatedly emphasizes that today nobody is free from the spectaclist economy:

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely. §26

Further still, "The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production." §32 The chapter ends with simple statement, "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." §34 

(remember this show on A&E? Oh, yeah there was that show on Discovery also) 

Is this how we arrived at the current economic crisis? One of the principle causes of the current meltdown of global capital is that the American real estate market tanked. This, then meant that all that value that Wall Street had created in the last few years immediately evaporated. How? Value, as Marx stated in Capital (1867), is manifested socially-necessary labor-time. You get enough of these suburbanites buying these properties and mistaking the menu for the meal, and, poof....

Reading Society of the Spectacle

I'm preparing for next Monday, when the Poncey-Highland(s) Reading Group is meeting to discuss Andre Breton's (First) "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924) as well as Chapter 1 from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967).

In my reading I am coming across some ideas that I want to put out to the internetz as well as keep me in the practice of daily writing:

In Debord's watershed treatise we read, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles."(§1) Okay, so keep in mind that modern conditions of production must prevail in order for spectacles to exist. First and foremost we read this and have to recognize that Marx and Weber have offered authoritative analyses of the capitalist mode of production, which is the dominant mode of production over the past 400-500 years. The worker in the factory is doubly alienated: first, because the worker is no longer a craftsman (building an entire cabinet, say) but one worker on an assembly line and so makes only one section of a product - the worker is alienated from the very thing that is made all day at the factory; second, in order for the factory to operate it must attract workers from far away to come work there and so there is a rise in urban living (where, contrary to Cheers, nobody knows your name) rather than the previous mode of living in small towns where everyone knows everybody else. As Marx points out in Capital, vol.1, (Ben Fowkes translation, Penguin Classics, 280) the worker is doubly free as well: 1) he freely owns his body and so can enter labor contracts, and 2) he is free of control of the means of producing. He is free to slave-away at that factory.

Debord goes on to say, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (§4) He further clarifies in the next section that the spectacle is a Weltanschauung, a comprehensive world view(ing). Leo Apostel has said that a world view should have seven elements (thanks, wikipedia!):

1. ontology - a descriptive model of the world
2. an explanation of the world
3. a futurology - answering the question, "where are we going?"
4. Values, answers to ethical quetions
5. A theory of action, answering the question, "How do we attain our goals?"
6. An epistemology - what is true/false
7. An etiology - the building blocks that then answer the question, "What are our origins?"

Then, in section 7, he reiterates that the spectacle that he is defining in this text is not a decoration or a phantasm, it, "is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption....The spectacle is also the permanent presence...since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside modern production." That is, since the mode of production today requires a long supply chain involving supplies and people from all over the globe interacting in a ballet that they are not even aware of on a daily basis (I don't have any clue who is the exploited worker in the Hanes factory in Cambodia that made my hooded sweatshirt, or who drove the truck that delivered it to the Target store down the street, nor do I know the person that acted as the cashier when I bought it, let alone who is responsible for making sure that the debited amount comes from my bank account and not someone else's).

This leads him to say that "Separation is itself part of the unity of the world..." (§7) Which is not too controversial a hypothesis today to say about the State since we've got Althusser discussing it at the same time as Debord in his "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", but shortly after Philip Abrams, in his essay "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State" states it so:

It is first and foremost an exercise in legitimation - and what is being legitimated is, we may assume, something which if seen directly and as itself would be illegitimate, an unacceptable domination. Why else all the legitimation-work? The state, in sum, is a bid to elicit support for or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable by presenting them as something other than themselves, namely, legitimate, disinterested domination. (1988) Journal of Historical Sociology. (1)1. 76.

It would seem fair to paraphrase Debord here such, "the spectacle is an ideological activity in the same sense that the State is." But of course Debord is talking about something bigger than just the State and politics, he's trying to put his hands around the whole magilla. "Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides." (§8) This is exactly how reality tv works, isn't it? The people on the show are fully aware that they are being recorded, we are fully aware that they are aware.

We've come to see these last 10-20 years as an age of irony, but perhaps the real irony has escaped us, as Debord states, "This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society." Thus, no matter how skeezy we might think the people on these shows are, we are complicit in maintaining and facilitating these conditions that produce these shows. "The spectacle presents itself as something... indisputable and inaccessible. [...] The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply..." (§12) And then further still, "all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it." (§17)

This spectacular production that society has become is, again, all encompassing, including the overcoding of the religious. "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base." While this may not serve as proof of his theorizing, we certainly can't help but nod when reading the science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Prediction, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Now imagine having an iPhone 40 years ago ans ask yourself if it wouldn't seem to be, effectively, magic.

Now here's what really got me writing today:

"To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep." (§21) This section has two items that got me excited: first is the phrasing of social necessity (because this is a key phrase in Marx's Capital, vol.1) and, second because this seems to be a critique of Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism":

[D]reams give every evidence of being continuous and show signs of organization. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself. [...] When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers[....] Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? (4)

Is Debord pointing-out that what Breton failed to appreciate in his revolutionary writing was a proper economic understanding? I've fixated on this social necessity phrasing because Marx claims that Value is the coming together of use-value and exchange-value in the form of socially-necessary labor time. It is in this way that commodities are at all possible. Without this socially-decided necessity commodities are only products, and without commodities there is no capitalism.

Slavoj Žižek Evening Lecture

As part of our curriculum at the European Graduate School we must attend evening lectures from the faculty. This evening Slavoj Žižek spoke to us.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing. This is certainly the case here with Žižek as once he starts talking, he will carry on for sometime. My notes, then are going to be problematic. To overcome my limitations I will embed the lecture here as well:

"Trauma and Israel"

Sometimes the world changes and not for positive reasons, for example √-1 which was discarded but now it is understood as i. Perhaps capitalism will be so treated. Capitalism is always in crisis, surviving only by borrowing from the future. Maybe what distinguishes Man from Animal is the rise of a new impossibility.

That which separates us from noumena are ethics, etc. There is no reality outside what appears. Noumenal real is overpowering and shocking. In the moments before certain death we can see reality not human reality.

Jews are both upper and lower class; too smart, too sexual; these are the classical stereotypes of the antisemitic tropes. In early Modernity the pressure was to force Jews to convert to Christianity, but in the late 19th century conversion is useless. For the Nazis the guilt of Jewry is in their very being. This began to be the case at the moment when Capitalism was developed and so the stereotypes of miserliness, etc. became qualities others sought. Thus deprived of what they were, Jews became the Absolute Jew and so condemned for some other more fundamental guilt.

Antisemitism in Europe began as Europe came out of the Dark Ages, when currency began to circulate as Capital.

Zionist antisemitism, the inheritors of Spinoza, those who still hold to the public use of Reason. Is the logic of antisemitism not that of global circulation and fluidification? It's hard to understand the critique that Western European democracy at its root is antisemitic when the greatest contributors to the development of democracy were radical, nomadic European Jews. It seems that Israel the State has become antisemitic.

Symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface; the fetish is not this. The fetish has a constructive quality that allows us to cope by clinging on when reality is too traumatic. Fetishes can operate in two ways: we are unaware of it, or we are aware of it.

• But let's further distinguish between dismissive cynical fetishism as opposed to populist fetishism. 
• False universality - where we advocate equality but privilege a secret group. 
• Fetish mystification - where anti-capitalist struggle of the working class is transferred over to the struggle against Jews.

Jews are the fetish for fascism; the last thing that is seen before outright class struggle. It's very rare to get Nazis to become Communists, that is, it's hard to rationalize someone out of their fetish.

Mao's statement that everything is in chaos so everything is okay means something more than what is being said here.

The provocative conclusion

We are caught in an antagonism: the Liberal West vs. Radical Fundamentalism. What we need is a more radical Left. The true opposition, though.

Kierkegaardian repetition, Deleuze says there is no difference between repetition and the new.

[Does this mean the future of the world is Confucianism? He said we should repeat Lenin.]

"Perhaps the Left will resurrect good manners."

Michael Hardt, Day 2 Evening Lecture UPDATE 1.10.2009

UPDATED to include video of Hardt's lecture:

Integral to the EGS curriculum are the evening lectures, which are mandatory for the students to attend.

Michael Hardt presented the first lecture of the August session, "The Common in Communism."

Hardt and Negri wrote Empire, then Multitude, and The Common will be their newest book.

The economic crisis of 2008 has similarities to talking about ecologic change: a time for revisiting Capitalism is under way or is inevitable.

Clarifying: neither public not private properties but the Common in communism. This talk is a critique of property.

To abandon the terms of freedom, democracy, etc. would upset people and ignore the work of those that have dedicated themselves to these projects over the last centuries.

How, and what, people produce and how production is organized has changed.

Marx's Relation to Private Property

• there is a distinction made between mobile property and immobile property
• this distinction marks the bourgeoisie of the mid-19th century
• there is at this time a movement from rent (collector) to profit (capitalist investor)
• Marx foresaw that all aspects of society will have to adapt to the qualities of industrial production

Industry today has to intellectualize and so there is now this movement to "immaterial" production and today's struggle is between exclusive and shared property

The notion of scarcity is no longer germane to talking about immaterial property (copyright, say)

Today we might argue that scientific production (like internet production) really requires open access to production of the past

• The more the Common is corralled, the more production is inhibited

The battle between private property against the Common is the mark of globalization:

• On the one hand there is the rise of privatizing extractive industries, a neoliberal mode of relating to Nature
• On the other hand we have the artificial Common. To privatize this is problematic but it nonetheless continues.

Piracy of biological knowledge is not correct because real pirates take something more noble: real property

• Today there is a shift back to rent rather than profit: this is what copyright does
• Finance is relative rent not absolute rent

Christian Marazzi: the so-called Real Economy is just as fictional as the finance economy is.

What would it mean to say an object is ours not only when it is in our hands?

• the positive content of communism is the positive expression of new thinking, new hearing, etc.

Production not only creates objects for the subjects but also produces subjects for the objects:

• Anthropogenetic production (Marazzi) - producing man; Hardt would call this biopolitical produciton
• Capital vol. 1: All of capitalist production are for the production of forms of social life

Foucault "Remarks on Marx"

• cautions against humanism in "man produces man" he sees it as the destruction of who we are and the creation of something other

Capital, in other words, is producing its own grave diggers

• The task at hand is to organize these conditions

Openness as a problematic when trying to organize
(Note to self: couldn't we think of 無爲 (wu wei)? As it says in the Dao, "the sage does nothing and in doing nothing, nothing is left undone.")

Michael Hardt, Day 1

Hardt taught a class entitled "POLITICAL ACTIVISM: MULTIPLICITY & EMPIRE" where we read through three texts: Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus (both written by Deleuze & Guattari), and Empire (written by Hardt and Antonio Negri).

A great way to supplement my notes is to use the notes he has posted on his site at Duke University.

These three books pose three questions:

1. Liberation, not emancipation. The transformation of the subject itself, it's not you but someone else, that is freed.
2. This makes revolution troubling: it makes me not fit in the world - not fit into the world that's made by the revolution as well.
3. Who is the Enemy? Post-'68, what it politics?

Along these lines of thinking, violence is a concern because it's a common mode. We may not touch on this because he's not really able to say much.

Four categories in Deleuze's books:

1. Monographs in the history of philosophy (Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault).
   
2. Books on aesthetics (Proust, Masoch, Beckett, Francis Bacon)
   
3. Dialogues and interviews (collected here and here)
   
4. Collaborations with Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and What Is Philosophy?)

Guattari's motto might have been: "The unconscious is social!" Subjectivity is a social production; not the family, but the society and group is key to understanding the individual.

Anti-Oedipus (AO)
NOTE: I am using the 5th printing, 1990. I've noticed there are some different paginations out there.

• Explores the relationship between social repression (Marx) and psychic repression (Freud). This is also in many ways exemplary of the ideology of May '68.
• The unconscious is productive, as a machine. "Everything" is machines.
• Human nature is not unlike Nature as a whole (similar to Spinoza).
• Immanence rather than transcendence is emphasized
• Univocity: said in one way; all the world is one, no dualist distinction between God and world. (see Difference and Repetition)
• Machines are a-subjective and artificial (there's no difference between man, machine, and Nature - all are machinic) see AO, 2. "There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one with the other and couples machines together. Producing-machines, desiring machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species of life: the self and non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever."
  

  AO, 4: [W]e make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.
  

  
  
• Schizophrenia: a mode of recognizing the world, doesn't separate the production and the producer. (AO, 5) "Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of production and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as 'the essential reality of man and nature.'"
• Desire: The productive synthesis, and...and...and...: it's about connecting.
  

  (AO, 5) [O]ne machine is always coupled with another....there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it....Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks flows.
  

  Important to note that desire is not an expression of a lack of some object of desire; rather, desire is an act of creation, it is positive.
  
• Body without Organs: organs are productive and segmented. BwO is an allusion to Artaud who coined the phrase in his radioplay To Have Done with the Judgement of God. Artaud felt all the constant productions of his eyes and ears and mouth were a form of persecution.
  

  (AO, 9) An apparent conflict arises between desiring-machines and the body without organs. Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the body without organs. ... In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. ... We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as "primary repression" means precisely that: it is not a "countercathexis," but rather this repulsion of desiring-machines by the body without organs.
  

  BwO doesn't produce, it registers on its surface the instances of production. Capital also is anti-productive. Capital doesn't produce anything; rather, it describes how trade will occur and how it is organized. It doesn't actually produce value. Capital is a miraculating machine: only labor produces, capital records the value of labor. Thus there is a disjunction between recording and production.
  
• Oedipus: The familialism of Oedipus always records the family triad which D&G think is a bad way to read desire.
  

  (AO, 23) The ego, however, is like daddy-mommy-me: the schizo has long since ceased to believe in it. He is somewhere else, beyond or behind or below these problems, rather than immersed in them. ... There are those who will maintain that the schizo is incapable of uttering the word I, and that we must restore his ability to pronounce this hallowed word. All of which the schizo sums up by saying: they're fucking me over again. Even Freud never went beyond this narrow and limited conception of the ego. And what prevented him from doing so was his own tripartite formula - the Oedipal, neurotic one: mommy-daddy-me. ...[W]e must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off fromreality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers - "an undesirable resemblance."
  

  They resist the theatricality of the concept:
  

  (AO, 24) The question as to how to deal analytically with the relationship between drives (pulsions) and symptoms, between symbol and what is symbolized has arisen again and again. Is this relationship to be considered causal? Or is it a relationship of comprehension? A mode of expression? The question, however, has been posed too theoretically. The fact is, from the moment that we are placed within the framework of Oedipus - form the moment we are measured in terms of Oedipus - the cards are stacked against us, and the only real relationship, that of production, has been done away with. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the production of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself - in myth, tragedy, dreams - was substituted for the productive unconscious.
  

  Representation was substituted for the production of the unconscious.
  

  (AO, 54-5) But who says that dream, tragedy, and myth are adequate to the formations of the unconscious, even if the work of transformation is taken into account? ... Production is reduced to mere fantasy production, production of expression. The unconscious ceases to be what it is - a factory, a workshop - to become a theater, a scene and its staging. And not even an avant-garde theater, such as existed in Freud's day (Wedekind), but the classical theater, the classical order of representation. The psychoanalyst becomes a director for a private theater, rather than the engineer or mechanic who sets up units of production, and grapples with collective agents of production and antiproduction. Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution; we don't know when it started going bad. ... Oedipus is the idealist turning point. ...The fundamental notions of the economy of desire - work and investment - keep their importance, but are subordinated to the forms of an expressive unconscious and no longer to the formations of the productive unconscious.
  

  
  
• Subject: subjects come after production, it is a conjunctive synthesis ("oh, that's me"). D&G are following Althusser on this point (Althusser saw that the subject is created through interpellation). The subject is formed by zones of intensity on the BwO, and we can understand this by how Judge Schreber describes his share of the pleasure (AO, 16).
  
  

  (AO, 16) It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state.
  

  
  

In general, D&G are arguing for production rather than representation and expression.

Usage vs. Meaning
Materialism vs. Idealism
Immanence vs. Transcendentalism

The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, but of use.

(AO, 109) The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not "What does it mean?" but rather "How does it work?" How do these machines, these desiring-machines, work - yours and mine? With what sort of breakdowns as a part of their functioning? How do they pass form one body to another? How are they attached to the body without organs? What occurs when their mode of operation confronts the social machines? ... What are the connections, what are the disjunctions, the conjunctions, what use is made of these syntheses? It represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works. Desire makes its entry with the general collapse of the question "What does it mean?"

What are they taking from Kant: there are a number of syntheses of the unconscious and what are the legitimate and illegitimate uses of these?

Desire is revolutionary. Is it a first down payment what we mean by revolution?

(AO, 60) Oedipal desires are the bait, the disfigured image by means of which repression catches desire in the trap. ...[I]t is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the establishment of society.... The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence - desire, not leftist holidays! - and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.

Parts 1 & 2 of Anti-Oedipus are more Freudian; Part 3 is where Marx comes in.
Alliance and affiliation: alliance through families and being a family in the early stages of humanity; this is the operation of the coding of the world. This is how territory was created.

(AO, 146-7) Filiation is administrative and hierarchical, but alliance is political and economic, and expresses power insofar as it is not fused with the hierarchy and cannot be deduced from it, and the economy insofar as it is not identical with administration. Filiation and alliance are like two forms of primitive capital: fixed capital or filiative stock, and circulating capital or mobile blocks of debts. ...While production is recorded in the network of filiative disjunctions on the socius, the connections of labor still must detach themselves from the productive processes and pass into the element of recording that appropriates them for itself as quasi cause. But it can accomplish this only by reclaiming the connective regime for its own, in the form of an affinal tie or a pairing of persons that is compatible with the disjunctions of filiation. It is in this way that economy goes by way of alliance. ...At no time, therefore, does alliance derive from filiation, but both form an essentially open cycle where the socius acts on production, but also where production reacts on the socius.

These axes (filiation and alliance) code the social flows.

• The illegitimate use of this coding would be to think of the family as a whole rather than a collection of partial units; thus 3+1 [the +1 is overcoding of the family triad (affinity) with the State (alliance)].

• What they would say was a legitimate use of this coding would be 4+n, meaning the family and...and...and...(the conjunctive synthesis).

• The despot machine overwrites onto the earlier primitive machine; the State takes all that alliance coding and overcodes towards the despot.

Coding and Overcoding:
The illegitimate use of this is the double bind, an exclusive or restrictive use of "or..."

(AO, 79) Double bind is the term used by Gregory Bateson to describe the simultaneous transmission of two kinds of messages, one of which contradicts the other, as for example the father who says to his son: go ahead, criticize me, but strongly hints that all effective criticism - at least a certain type of criticism - will be very unwelcome. ...It seems to us that the double bind, the double impasse, is instead a common situation, oedipalizing par excellence. ...[T]he "double bind" is none other than the whole of Oedipus. It is in this sense that Oedipus should be presented as a series, or an oscillation between two poles: the neurotic identification, and the internalization that is said to be normative. On either side is Oedipus, the double impasse. And if a schizo is produced here as an entity, this occurs for the simple reason that there is no other means of escaping this double path, where normality is no less blocked than neurosis, and where the solution offers no more of a way out than does the problem. Hence the schizo's withdrawal to the body without organs.

They celebrate an inclusive and nonrestrictive use of "or..." The illegitimate use of "or..." would be seen in sexuality: one can be only male or female, hetero or homosexual. Isn't it possible to have an openness such that we can encompass both?

survol (overflight)

The conjunctive, third synthesis:
Capital machine is a decoding machine, it works with two disjointed codes: capital and labor. The free worker is decoded from territory, they've been freed from the soil (or having access to the soil) thus violently deterritorialized and so herded into the city. They are free, but with nothing, not even a particular kind of labor.

(AO, 225) At the heart of Capital, Marx points out the encounter of two "principal" elements: on one side, the deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labor capacity; and on the other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying it. ... What is more, each of these elements brings into play several processes of decoding and deterritorialization having very different origins. For the free worker: the deterritorialization of the soil through privitization; the decoding of the instruments of production through appropriation; the loss of the means of consumption through the dissolution of the family and the corporation; and finally, the decoding of the worker in favor of the work itself or of the machine. And for capital: the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; the decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital; the decoding of the States through financial capital and public debts; the decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial capital; and so on.

Money is completely decoded wealth, my money is no different from yours; it is pure flow. Your $20 is the same $20 I have. Capital decodes all values and puts them into a plane of immanence. It melted solid relationships of the despotic era and returned it to flow. It is in this sense that capital is just like schizophrenia.

So what's the legitimate use of this synthesis?

Capital imposes an axiomatic on coded and decoded flows. Axiomatics provide a framework and at each step in that framework one can add another axiom. They aren't transcendental, they're mechanisms that do create hierarchies; capital adds an indefinite number of axioms.

The value of those who do the work is only partially shared with the laborer.

The answer isn't necessarily to withdraw from the worldmarket, but to accelerate what capital does.

(AO, 239-40) So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? ...To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.

The 3 syntheses revisited
These are normative statements being made by D&G, they're saying use these syntheses in these ways:

• 3+1 refers to the family (family = 3, mommy-daddy-me). The 3 is extrapolated, however and overcoded with "The Family" which is a category (thus the +1 is used in their formula).
• 4+n refers to the the above four moving forward and coded over and over again (&...&...&...)
• The legitimate use of the disjunctive can be seen in their discussion of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell as racial migration. To identify with the names of history but to have them wirtten as zones of intensity on the BwO:
  
  

  (AO, 21) There is no Nietzsche-the-self, professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather there is the Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: "every name in history is I...."
  

  The Oedipal is biunivocal, but that is a problematic use of the conjunctive synthesis; rather, it should be polyvocal
  

  (AO, 100-1) The Oedipal operation consists in establishing a constellation of biunivocal relations between the agents of social production, reproduction, and antiproduction on the one hand, and the agents of the so-called natural production of the family on the other. ...There we have a faulty use of the conjunctive synthesis, leading to the statement, "So it was your father, so it was your mother..." It is not at all surprising that only afterward is it discovered that all of this was the fathe rand the mother, since this is assumed to be the case from the beginning, but is subsequently forgotten-repressed, though still subject to a later rediscovery in relation to more recent developments. Whence the magical formula that characterizes biunivocalization - the flattening of the polyvocal real in favor of a symbolic relationship between two articulations: so that is what this meant. Everything is made to begin with Oedipus, by means of explanation, with all the more certainty as one has reduced everything to Oedipus by means of application.
  

  The legitimate use would be to say, "Yes, it is the mother, and the iron, and Mao Zedong..." it's nomadic and polyvocal.
  
• Is the conjoined synthesis right? The illegitimate use is when identity is fixed, but the legitimate use is nomadic.

Nonhuman Sex (Part 4)
Sexuality is the result of desiring-machines, it is equally invested in social and biological spheres, it is not determined or dependent on gender, there are not two sexes (male and female) but n-sexes.

Proust and sexuality: a proliferation of sexualities,

(AO, 318) In Search of Lost Time as a great enterprise of schizoanalysis: all the planes are traversed until their molecular line of escape is reached, their schizophrenic breakthrough;

It's important to note here D&G's strategy is exactly this traversing of planes until the molecular line of escape is reached - not simply thinking something through to its logical end but of hyperbolically acting in the spirit of the propositions until, of adding intensity into the proposed action or ideas until they become unstable. This is also what they mean in the above section about Capital.

thus in the kiss where Albertine's face jumps from one plane of consistency to another, in order to finally come undone in a nebula of molecules. The reader always risks stopping at a given plane and saying yes, that is where Proust is explaining himself. But the narrator-spider never ceases undoing webs and planes, resuming the journey, watching for the signs or the indices that operate like machines and that will cause him to go on further. ...[O]h, the narrator does not homestead in the familial and neurotic lands of Oedipus... he does not remain there, he crosses these lands, he desecrates them, he penetrates them.... The perverse lands of homosexuality, where the exclusive disjunctions of women with women, men with men, are established, likewise break apart....

see Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet

(AO, 319) The Search of Lost Time "in progress," functioning as a desiring-machine capable of collecting and dealing with all the indices. He goes toward these new regions where the connections are always partial and nonpersonal, the conjunctions nomadic and polyvocal, the disjunctions included, where homosexuality and heterosexuality cannot be distinguished any longer: the world of transverse communications, where the finally conquered nonhuman sex mingles with the flowers, a new earth where desire functions according to its molecular elements and flows.

The nonhuman sex which mingles with flowers above will be expanded upon in A Thousand Plateaus when discussing orchids and wasps. As Foucault said, it's not that sex is primary and sexuality follows from it.

Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension; it becomes immobile, in a room and on a body without organs - an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is creating.

Extension above refers to the machinic assemblage that juts out; what they are seeming to suggest is that this process of auto-creation that can be illustrated by the schizophrenic is not necessarily one that must happen beyond the boundaries of our own skin.

Why is this nonhuman sexuality? Rather than a notion of sexuality derived from a molar (large) aggregate (where: this category=woman, that category=man); at the molecular level (small) we see that there are sexualities that seek to operate in these molar gaps.

Molar/Molecular
The molar is a statistical aggregation on a large scale.
The molecular are linked, however fleetingly, in their lines of flight.

• The molar is not homogeneous but can be seen as a totality (the French people)
• The molecular is seen as a multiplicity of singularities (this person within the crowd)

How is politics possible without the molar (Party)? The molar statement might be, "We unanimously decide that..." this statement excises any dissent, because WE, Unanimously decide. (See Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power)

• Power does not have a locus, it has a capillary effect (Foucault), in this way we can understand the molecular.

Part 4: Introduction to Schizoanalysis
The first positive task of schizoanalysis is to ask, not what it means but, how does it work?

(AO, 322) What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes? The schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is soley functional.

What do we get from capital being axiomatic?

• a mechanism of deterritorialization that works on decoded flows
• although it is operating on the plane of immanence, it nonetheless creates and recreates hierarchies.
• Deleuze & Guattari's anticapitalism involves not just overthrowing capitalism but also taking what works in capital and moving forward: push forward deterritorialization

D& G quote Marx's Capital (154):

Value...suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value...(emphases added).

Money is a general equivalent, without value but also it is hierarchy:

(AO, 227) It is solely under these conditions that capital becomes the full body, the new socius or the quasi cause that appropriates all the productive forces. We are no longer in the domain of the quantum or quantitas, but in that of the differential relation as a conjunction that defines the immanent social field particular to capitalism, and confers on the abstraction as such its effectively concrete value, its tendency to concretization. The abstraction has not ceased to be what it is, but it no longer appears in the simple quantity as a variable relation between independent terms; it has taken upon itself the independence, the quality of the terms and the quantity of the relations. The abstract itself posits the more complex relation within which it will develop "like" something concrete. (emphasis added)

Rather than heading toward a point in the future they are locating a vector.

[END OF CLASS]