Michael Hardt, Day 2 (1/2)

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.

Today's class we read through A Thousand Plateaus.

If Anti-Oedipus was written with an enthusiasm of May, '68 ATP shows a certain sense of defeat.

Why is there a date corresponding to each date? Maybe an antilinear (antiprogress) order.

Caution: AO had an unrestrained quality (lines of flight are revolutionary!); ATP is more of a "yes, but..." cautionary approach. See Claire Parent's interview with Deleuze L'Abecedaire (Charles J. Stivale, trans.), particularly the section "D as in Desire" where he discusses the sense of guilt that D&G carried for some time after 1968. (See also ATP, 165)

Rhizome

• these are defined by connection and heterogeneity
  

  (ATP, 21) [U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. ...It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. ...Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, or off-shoots.
  

  
  
• the rhizome is the multiplicity that is defined not by addition but subtraction: the arboreal is n+1 (this is overcoding), the rhizomatic is n-1 (it is destabilizing in connecting)
  

  (ATP, 21) The rhizome is reducible neither to the One or the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n+1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. ...It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n-1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis.
  

  
  

What are plateaux?
Any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by way of superficials that extends a rhizome.

(ATP, 22) What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus [vs. chapters, me] that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a "plateau" any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus.

Dualism
In AO and especially in ATP Deleuze &Guattari invoke dualisms to challenge all models. They bring up these contrasts in order to abandon them. This invoking of dualisms invites an examination not so much that a dialectic synthesis is achieved but so that in the intense oscillation between the two poles we come to realize how unstable these dualisms are (see Day 1 notes).

(ATP, 20) The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism.

Earlier in this section, after discussing tracings and maps (below), they announce that their strategy in using these dualisms:

(ATP, 13) Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? ...Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them? ...Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual divergence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map. This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical.

They oppose tracings (tree) and maps (rhizome):

• a tracing is a reproduction
  

  (ATP, 12) All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as well as psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain a balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start. ...It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree. (emphases added)
  

  whereas
  
• cartography is a performance of superficial multiplicity
  

  (ATP, 12) The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. ...What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs.... The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification....the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways....as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." (emphases added)
  

  
  
• Deleuze & Guattari state that the mode of apprehending the world that they call tracing is dangerous:
  

  (ATP, 13) [I]t is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. ...The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it. ...That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the unconcious, and the latter of language.
  

  
  

We should note that in the above statement they say that the rhizome does contain tendencies toward structuration, what the arboreal does is to exploit those facets of the rhizomatic toward its own needs for fixity. We might think of Shephard Fairey's "Obey" as a quintessential example of this tendency in the contemporary moment. The man was co-opted to sell Barack Obama (of course this has been the tendency within graffiti culture for a minute now).

(ATP, 14) Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.

They follow the above statement with, "That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsymmetrical, operation. Plug the tracings back onto the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome." I suspect we can understand what they mean by this plugging-back-in that is nonsymmetrical by understanding what they said earlier about the subtractive nature of the rhizome (ATP, 6) "[A]lways n-1 (the only way one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted) Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted...." In other words, we are of a mass (or crowd, or people, or public, or category), but we are individuated by our efforts to be unique within this throng, we are literally subtracting ourselves from the crowd when we express our uniqueness.

Wasp & Orchid
The wasp and the orchid are brought up briefly in Anti-Oedipus (AO. 5th pr., 285) when they are discussing Samuel Butler's "The Book of the Machines" and they expanded upon the wasp and the orchid in A Thousand Plateaus. Recently the letters between D&G were published and we learn that Guattari wrote to Deleuze about a certain kind of wasp that reproduces through orchids.

• The orchid gives-off a pheromone that leads wasps to leave their reproductive materials on the orchid and thus the flower is now able to impregnate other wasps - the wasps are of course also able to reproduce on behalf of the orchid because in the process of "mating" with what it thought was another wasp (but "was" an orchid) it has picked-up and now transmits the orchid's reproductive materials.
• The wasp and the orchid are in a process of becoming in this way and their relationship is a rhizomorphous, heterogeneous one - they don't cease to be wasps and orchids but they become both in their doing. This is an interesting moment of deformation, I wonder what Ranciere has to say about this?
  
• A fine example of what they are striving toward in discussing nonhuman sex (see Day 1)
  

  (ATP, 10) How could the movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.) But this is true only on the level of the strata....
  

  
  
• This begins some discussion in the class room about mimicry. During the discussion several people (Annemarie Oliver, Amir Mogharabi, and Tom Zummer) mention Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia by Roger Callois.
  
• It's decided that metaphor is perhaps the enemy of D&G and this talk about rhizomes is metonymy not metaphor. If we continue with the text we get:
  

  (ATP, 10) At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. ...There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying.
  

  
  

Pack vs. Mass

• Mass: equality of members, one-way transmission, large
• Pack: small, inequalities as remainders
  
• They reference Elias Canetti:
  

  (ATP, 33) Doubtless, there is no more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is component part of it, and to these which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign. Canettis notes that in a pack each member is alone even in the company of others (for example, wolves on the hunt); each takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band.
  

  
  
• They see Canetti's pack subject as a schizo position in opposition to the paranoid position of the mass subject; but they don't want to only introduce a simple dualism: "There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses in packs." (ATP, 34)

What is an machinic assemblage?
In the beginning of Anti-Oedipus D&G mention the bricoleur - someone that is perhaps most like McGuyver in working with all materials at-hand. They begin the discussion of the bricoleur by stating that, "The schizophrenic is the universal producer." This is someone that possesses, "an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved." Assemblage may be understood in similar terms to bricolage:

The rule of continually producing production, of grafting production onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary production: the production of production. (AO, 7)

In A Thousand Plateaus they ask (34) "What do you not have to do to produce a new sound?"

• Assemblage is something like a concatenation, a plane of consistency such that there are constant relations of becomings:
  

  Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-inhuman, each involves a molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or prepares the way for them. In Kafka, it is impossible to separate the erection of a great paranoid bureaucratic machine form the installation of little schizo machines of becoming-dog or becoming-beetle.
  

  
  

(Aside: sometimes I walk my dog and I yell out my favorite line from The Trial, "Like a dog!")

There are not two multiplicities or two machines; one and the same machinic assemblage produces and distributes the whole, in other words, the set of statements corresponding to the "complex." What does psychoanalysis have to say about all of this? Oedipus, nothing but Oedipus, because it hears nothing and listens to nobody. It flattens everything, masses and packs, molecular and molar machines, multiplicities of every variety. (ATP, 34-5)

(Foucault's "deployment of sexuality" from The History of Sexuality is brought up here)

What is love?
If we consider this question we begin to see the utility of the assemblage.

(ATP, 35) What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates...; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that something can be named...acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. (bold added)

This is not about dissolution into unity or opposites or wholes but the multiplicities in us.

This is my own contribution to these notes: We might want to liken this talk of apprehending the loved one in a crowd to William James' What Makes a Life Significant?

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anæsthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it— so importantly—is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and 'that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies.

Major & Minor
Back to speaking of Kafka - Can we propose criteria for political action in using major and minor languages?
Proust said, "Every great author writes in a foreign (minoritarian) language.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between several modes of language: major, minor, and becoming-minor (ATP, 106)

• major languages seek unity and uniformity
• minor languages seek reductions in constants, and a proliferation of concepts
• becoming-minor:
  

  Continuous variation constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the majoritarian Fact of Nobody. Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming.
  

  
  
• Again they reference Canetti, this time to discuss the order-word which they say has two tones:
  

  (ATP, 107) Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere. ...The verdict. But the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected: it is like a warning cry or a message to flee. It would be oversimplifying to say that flight is a reaction against the order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its other face in a complex assemblage, its other component.
  

  
  
• The task at-hand, then, is to transform the order-word to a line of flight, rendered positive and creative:
  

  (ATP, 110) For the question was not how to elude the order-word but how to elude the death sentence it envelops, how to develop its power of escape, how to prevent escape from veering into the imaginary or falling into a black hole, how to maintain or draw out the revolutionary potentiality of the order-word.
  

  
  
• Hardt makes reference to the Soledad Brothers play, paraphrasing, "Yeah, Ima fly, but Ima grab a gun"
• The issue isn't simply major or minor, but of nuance that suggests a social organization that is not of a constituted order, the constituent assembly as becoming:
  

  (ATP, 110) One should bring forth the order-word of the order-word. In the order-word, life must answer the answer of death, not by fleeing, but by making flight act and create. There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the other - to transform the compositions of order into components of passage.
  

  
  
• Becoming-woman: "There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming." (ATP, 106). So, all becoming is minoritarian. There's something difficult in the word order here because it's not that there is a woman to which we tend toward. Shouldn't it be woman-becoming or black-becoming?

What abstract machines are:

• They are not infrastructure, they are not transcendental order
• They have a piloting role, these construct a real-to-come, they are always prior to history.
• Abstract machines are much more than language:
  

  (ATP, 141) A true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency, which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and reterritorializations. The abstract machine itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction between within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form.
  

  They make the distinction between matter and substance, function and form:
  

  Substances are of expression "or" of content. But functions are no yet "semiotically" formed, and matters are not yet "physically" formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function - a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute. (ATP, 141)
  

  
  
• A diagram is an abstract machine that operates on matters; it allows us to see what we see, it doesn't represent the real but constructs a real for us to see.
  

  (ATP, 142) Defined diagrammatically in this way, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside of history but is instead always "prior to" history. Everything escapes, everything creates - never alone, but through an abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity, effects conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and contents. This Real-Abstract is totally different from fictitious abstraction of a supposedly pure machine of expression.
  

  
  
• We can think of the Turing machine, this is certainly to what they are referring, as Foucault's Panopticon - in this way a piloting: the panopticon produces the subjects to observe as well as the power of watching over them.

How to make yourself into a BwO
The body without organs is the field where intensities can grow; the masochist is all about being affected - they use pain to bring forth a body without organs:

(ATP, 155) [I]t is claimed that the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can only get it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to allay or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochist's suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire. ...In short, the masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire.

• Positive desire, referenced above, means that desire is not a lack of something:
  

  (AO, 27) Desire...becomes this abject fear of lacking something. But it should be noted that this is not a phrase uttered by the poor or the dispossessed. On the contrary, such people know that desire "needs" very few things - not those leftovers that chance to come their way, but the very things that are continually taken from them - and what is missing is not things a subject feels the lack of somewhere deep down in himself, but rather the objectivity of man, the objective being of man, for whom to desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of the real.
  

  Further:
  

  (ATP, 229) There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be.
  

  So, to understand the masochist as engaged in the the delay of pleasure is to miss the point; their activity is not about pleasure vs. pain, but about engaging in world creation. Pleasure gets in the way of experiencing positive desire for the masochist.
  

  (ATP, 165) The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. ...There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation or another.
  

  
  

That the BwO is desire and desire is positive does not mean that we necessarily have a positive outcome. The BwO can go bad.

(ATP, 163) How can we fabricate a BwO for ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How can we tell the three Bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this problem.

These lines of flight can be suicidal:

(ATP, 165) Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. ...That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO form its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification, and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consistency (keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for the suicidal and the demented).

Here I would like to point back to the Parnet interviews (above) and the section "D as in Desire" because we can see that D&G were quite serious in their lament after May of '68, "There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there also a possible use that would be in conformity with the plane of consistency?" (ATP, 165)

Faciality

• Levinas' notion of the face of the Other is expanded here, "The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels." (ATP, 167)
  

  (ATP, 167) Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in tows, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system.
  

  
  
• The colonialist constructs the dark Other and attributes to it racial quality and thin in negating this the colonialist forms its own identity.
  

  (ATP, 178) European racism as the white man's claim has never operated by exclusion, or by designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an "other." Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face.... From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal. ...Racism never detects particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naivete.
  

  
  
• What would be a non-dialectical racial theory? Faciality as the representation of the order of rule.
  

  (ATP, 180) Very specific assemblages of power impose signifiance and subjectification as their determinate form of expression... no signification without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects. ...A concerted effort is made to do away with the body and corporeal coordinates....Bodies are disciplined, coroporeality dismantled, becomings-animal hounded out.... A single substance of expression is produced. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject. You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed into the black hole.
  

  
  
• Faciality is the production of what is considered normal, what is allowed to be seen (perhaps this is not dissimilar to Ranciere's discussion of the aesthetic regime?):
  

  (ATP, 181) This machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social production of the face, because it performs the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus.
  

  
  
• The political implications of faciality, "Dismantling faciality is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger...." (ATP, 188). First we must recognize our place in hierarchy, but in dismantling this we must ensure we don't lose our Face (lest we end up in a gas chamber)
  

  (ATP, 188) The organization of the face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds... a whole set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of signifiance and subjectification. ...If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity.
  

  
  

How is love conceived in faciality?
There is the dismantling sense and there is the constituent sense. There are these two moments:

1. a kind of line of flight - I become capable of loving by abandoning love and self:
   

   (ATP, 189) Only in the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with the unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which lines composed are broken lines. Only on your face and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to return to a primitive head, but to invent combinations by which those traits connect with lanscapity traits that have themselves been freed from the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also been freed from their respective codes.
   

   
   
   
2. to compose these lines together like broken ones without overwhelming them:
   

   (ATP, 199) I no longer have any secrets, having lost my face, form, and matter. I am now no more than a line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the void. Absolute deterritorialization.
   

   
   

There is no guarantee that in dismantling my face this will ensure compossibility with you; we must, in the project of love, find the lines with which we make compositions:

(ATP, 205) It is also necessary to look at the various combinations: it is quite possible that one group or individual's line of flight may not work to benefit that of another group or individual; it may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw it even deeper into rigid segmentarity. It can happen in love that one person's creative line is the other's imprisonment. The composition of the lines, of one line with another, is a problem, even of two lines of the same type. There is no assurance that two lines of flight will prove compatible, compossible. There is no assurance that the body without organs will be easy to compose. There is no assurance that a love, or a political approach, will withstand it.

Micropolitics and Segmentarity
Their idea of the State:

• an orthodox Marxist sees it as the executive officer of the bourgeoisie
• Althusser deemphasizes the unitary State and emphasizes the institutions that function as State apparatuses
• with Foucault we should talk about State-ification, power operates at different points
• D&G understand the State as the resonances among centers of segmentation; not unlike Foucault:
  

  (ATP, 211) The central State is constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity but by a concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among centers. There are already just as many power centers in primitive societies; or, if one prefers, there are still as many in State societies. The latter, however, behave as apparatuses of resonance; they organize resonance, whereas the former inhibit it.
  

  
  
• They are struggling with with the molecular nature of fascism and see a difference between fascism and totalitarianism. That fascism occurs in individuals, not only at institutional levels; there is the danger that lines of flight are not liberatory in themselves:
  

  (ATP, 229) This, precisely, is the fourth danger: the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition. Like Kleist's line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide, double suicide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death.
  

  
  

[End of Part One]

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]

Announcing: Class Notes from European Graduate School, 1st Year, 2nd Group, August, 2009

Over the next several days I will be posting the class notes from my coursework at the European Graduate School (Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien). I am completing coursework toward an MA in Communications at EGS. This summer I took classes with Michael Hardt, the Brothers Quay, Judith Butler, Larry Rickels, Jacques Rancière, and Mike Shapiro. I will be posting my notes from these classes and I will also be posting my notes from the evening lectures that were given by: Michael Hardt, Elia Suleiman, Bruce Barber, The Quay Brothers, Avital Ronell, Martin Hielscher, Chris Fynsk, Greg Ulmer, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Phillipe Beck (introduced by Judith Balso), Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Rancière, and Tom Zummer.

These were an intense three weeks and the experience far exceeded any expectations I had. I cannot recommend the opportunity enough!

Talkin' 'bout health care (THE DEUCE)

One of my talents, as Karen has told me, is thinking and responding on the fly. Thus, when I made a status update on myface today it unfurled a nice conversation between friends. Not unlike yesterday's posting, here's what I've written (so far) under my status update:

Paul Boshears status:
It seems ruthless, yes, that American society has no problem imagining giant robots destroying the world (we'd even entertain a sequel - why hello Transformers 2), but it's inconceivable to us that we'd make access to health care universal. (2 hours ago)

Q: Who's going to pay for it?

Paul:
Let's be adults here: the only people that are going to benefit from this talk of "who's going to pay?" aren't going to be us (those that would benefit the most) - as usual - it will be those with the most money (those that see no immediate gain). The problem is that those in a position to stall this development (of common decency), once again, cannot see beyond immediate benefits. Look at the rhetoric: it's clear single payer will happen, but those in power want to steer the conversation such that it makes sense to postpone another 60 years. That's immoral and it's a shame. Meanwhile, those vehemently opposed to providing universal health care because of "financial" principles are up in arms about not being able to spend more than this amount on things that simply explode and create a less-stable world. Literally would rather burn the money than invest it in us.

Q: But I already pay about 30% of my income in taxes, why should I have to pay for the nation's sick?

Paul:
Why don't people see that this attitude of "why should I pay taxes?" is precisely what leads to corruption? The end result is that those that can afford to pay taxes the least don't have access to the resources (accountants, lobbying firms, etc.) that would reduce their tax expenditures; while those that can afford to pay the most, perversely, also can afford to pay the armies of accountants, lobbyists, lawyers, etc. to ensure that they actually pay less in taxes than the rest of us. That's immoral and it's shameful.

Q: I'm not saying I'm against health care reform, I just think the hold up is around who will pay for it [I'm also going to expand this to suggest that what is implied here is that it's normal to have these kinds of stalls, although my commenter did not say this]

Paul:
That's what I'm saying, though: it's a shame that those that can hold this up will do so and present the hold up as though the matter were mind-bendingly difficult; meanwhile, it's no leap of the imagination that Bruce Willis could save us from a meteor impact. Or that we could spend trillions of dollars on destroying other people's countries.

Q: But if giant robots can run off imaginary resources, why can't our government?

Paul:
since we are that imaginary resource, why shouldn't we be well-maintained? What's the point of supporting a government (that taxes us anyways) if our government won't support us? Isn't that the essence of commonwealth?

Q: I am not convinced that our government will do even a reasonably okay job at health care should this succeed. They can barely manage to get my driver's license correct; why would I trust them with my life?

Paul:
You already do trust them with your life: look at the roads you drive on; the food you eat, the materials in your home.

What is it about universal health care that is going to turn all our doctors into medicine men from the neolithic age? Will their thermometers stop working and the antibiotics rise against us?

Q: The point of supporting the government is that you don't get thrown in prison. Our economy is being devoured at both ends, and making healthcare "free" instead of fixing it.... well if the system crashes badly enough they might rebuild it right, so there is hope. I don't know exactly who you mean by "we", but I'm not so sure the american people as a whole count as energon, at least not as a matter of right.

Paul:
all we mean by rights these days, it seems, is the ability to own something. the first thing we should be able to then own is our bodies, how else will we perform in an economy without this?

Q: What I mean is that I think the government is already far too large and I don't think they need to get bigger. I do not want or need them to invade every single aspect of life.

The house is burning, what do you do; try to put it out and salvage the rubble or pour gasoline on the flames and hope something rises from the ashes?

Paul:
The house isn't on fire and why would anyone think to put gas on it? This is precisely the "Bruce Willis and Will Smith can save us if only we had the right nuke" kind of thinking that I'm trying to illuminate here.

Q: I'm just saying, people will never realise what they should do until they see the consequences of what they shouldn't.

Paul:
well, I think that there have been numerous examples of people in all areas and all times that have had foresight; in fact, the lack of foresight is the implicit argument in this whole conversation.

the trouble with foresight is that it requires courage on the part of those that have it. The irony of hindsight is that it seems so clear to all the cowards why they shouldn't have spoken-up.

Q: Unfortunately no one's agreeing and really, we're all one big pile of tiny factions, instead of a large group of people thinking together for the common good. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of universal healthcare, I hope we get it; but it's going to take something big to shake the American people and say, "Hey! Think about it!"

Paul:
Something big or just conversations like these?

And I'm really resistant to the idea that we are a collection of factions. We have a long tradition in the English-speaking world of talking about being of a group. Like John Donne in the 17th century wrote: No man is an island... every man's death lesson's me for I am a part of humanity... ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

Talkin' 'bout health care

What follows is a discussion on a friend's facebook page about universal health care. It's just what I wrote so it may seem a little disjointed:

As one of those that had no health care (going to school full time, paying for it outta pocket, and working full-time waiting tables, which of course doesn't offer health insurance) and then broke his elbow (meaning he couldn't work any more); I can assure you, those millions of us CANNOT afford the $30,000+ to pay for healthcare. I owe more in ... Read Moremedical bills than I've made in the last two years. Thankfully I went to Japan, where they do have universal healthcare, and I received great treatment at a fraction of the cost in the States (wisdom teeth pulled out and weekly treatments for a month all for less than $800). Now I'm back in the U.S. and I am shocked at the rhetoric against universal healthcare. How can we not afford to invest in those that make this country great, the people of this country?

Just saying: the #1 reason people over 40 years of age file bankruptcy is medical bills. A quick google search of bankruptcy and medical debt gets these:

1) American Journal of Medicine:
"Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these
medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income."
2)Medical Debt Huge Bankruptcy Culprit:
3) Medical Bills Leading Cause of Bankruptcy, Harvard Study Finds

The U.S. spends more money on its military than EVERY OTHER COUNTRY COMBINED. Why can we afford to spend money blowing stuff up but can't spend money helping our own citizens live?

The real quality of health, ask any doctor, is measured in prevention. The most common thing doctors recommend for maintaining health is exercise and regular check-ups. On this account the U.S. health care system is hopelessly flawed.

What we have instead is a heroic model where we have the most expensive people and equipment to intervene when the... Read More intervention itself optimizes health the least.

Universal health care isn't about making sure everyone gets their own kidney dialysis machine, it's about making sure people don't need dialysis machines by encouraging people to do simple, cheap things, like visit a doctor one a year.

Going for regular check-ups isn't going to happen if parents have to choose between feeding their children for the next two months or sending themselves for an annual screening. In Okinawa we were required by law and by our employers to get an annual check-up. Karen was required to go more frequently because she has female parts. Had I been older I too would have had to go more frequently. Lesson: to change health culture you have to make access universal and create incentives for compliance.

As to eating bad foods:
You're going to think I've gone off the map but this is directly related to changing cultures.
Did you know that the Federal poverty rate is determined by a family's ability to ingest calories? It's true. What do you do, then? You get the most calorie-rich food you can find. What would that be? Yup, high fructrose corn syrup... Read More. It's ubiquitous, and thanks to three decades of gov't corn subsidies (by politicians touting the families first motto) it's not likely to go anywhere.
What's the result of 30 years of corn subsidies? A significant increase in "food" (if the development of Cheetos counts) production, yes, but a reduction in the nutrient distribution in the caloric intake of American families.
It's the most efficient thing in the world to feed families with bad-for-you food, and since we're defining poor as being able to get access to this food, no surprise that we have a positive feedback loop, like a snake eating its tail.

UPDATE: Replying to Reader Responses (Pt. 2)

UPDATED 28 July, 2009

As I mentioned in the last two posts, I had to write a book review for my coursework at the European Graduate School. I am very grateful to Vincent van Gerven Oei who also read my review and joined in the discussion. Below I present my response to him:

ヴィンセント先輩

You very much flatter me in reading these words, thank you. And thank you also for encouraging further discussion, I will do my best.

Yes, translation presents a host of concerns; but I suspect that translation is fundamentally the task that is at-hand if we are to discuss community, politics, or selfhood. There is a wonderful poem by Wendell Berry that nicely emphasizes why I think that translation is the fundamental task at work in ethical engagement. The poem, "The Country of Marriage," has this singularly wonder-full line: "you are the path that leads always into the dark." I can think of no better way to discuss a loving, long-term, committed relationship. There is this myth (or perhaps fervent/fever dream) that what works in one language will work in any language. This is the lesson of that Bill Murray movie, Lost in Translation, isn't it? That, no matter how long we live or share our love with someone, what isn't irrecoverably lost in translation between us all? Surely, love is the path that leads always into the dark.

When I introduce the Chinese and Japanese examples what I am introducing (and thank you for pointing out where this isn't clear) a case where it is not only possible to discuss the world in a non-metaphysically-dependent manner, but there are many successful examples of how this is possible. I certainly don't want the reader to surrender to a "call to the exotic;" and, of course, Heidegger warns against this in his discussion of "Ister."

You are right and do my argument a great service by pointing out that it is possible to ask a direct question in Japanese. But we cannot understate how irregular it would be to announce 何だ! (nanda!) Of course, nanda is not Subject-Object-Verb (UPDATE: Japanese is, as Vincent points-out perhaps THE S-O-V language) because always already present in the utterance is an assumption of both a subject and an object. "Nanda!" is a performative utterance, not an ontological position to start from. Not only are the subject and object assumed but the expression is of disbelief at what is assumed to be an implicit moral order. One cannot say "Nanda!" and not simultaneously be reacting in a moral manner. The same is true in Chinese wherein one asks, "how do you cook it?" when referring to something that is unfamiliar. What we see in both languages is the residue of an a-metaphysical worldview: to be a person is to fundamentally be a moral entity. And we see this expressed in all host of manners, whether it's pedagogy, the arrangement of rocks in a garden, one's penmanship, or Shinto practice. We are accustomed to clearly partitioning grammatical rules from moral rules, but these two are not capable of being conceptualized as separate in the Classical views of East Asia. Simply stated: "to be" is "to be a moral entity." Without this assumed interrelatedness, "Nanda!" is only as intelligible as discussing an American football bat.

I think that I may have not expressed clearly what I said in my discussion about the development of "thing" and "happy." If you review my statement the operative phrase is that the Western particulate view was not a privileged worldview until after the Medieval and Modern eras. I should have better articulated that although we may foreground a particular worldview or orientation this does not by any means negate the fact that there is another orientation in the background.

In the Western world(s), while we see implicit calls for interrelatedness in words like "thing" and "happy" prior to the medieval and modern eras, what we know to be true in living in these languages today is that "thing" refers to a particular object and happiness is no longer a process of manifesting a project but is the result of drinking Coca-Cola (just kidding). This shift to objectifying, and here I think I understand Heidegger's overall trajectory, was within a shifting conceptualization of man's place in the world. We may privilege a worldview where all relationships are externalized (symbolized best by the love contract - also called marriage), but we all are familiar with the pain of dissolving a relationship such as a marriage.

The contract is a technology that was developed in response to the social order of the medieval period. The contract was supposed to state a priori what the nature of our relationship would be and thus secure the integrity of the two parties. The thinking has been that if we are both able to enter into this relationship as separate individuals, when we dissolve the contract we can both walk away as the individuals we were before the contract was enacted. But, as we can probably all attest to, to dissolve a marriage is not to simply sever something "out there" but to lose a part of myself. We are both lessened by the experience.

Again, this is not an unfamiliar experience and is not an insight from our contemporary moment because this is precisely what John Donne referred to in his Meditation XVII (1623):

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

But today, at least in the U.S., we don't hear too many calls for this sort of interrelatedness and it is certainly not what is present when the U.S. (and probably the rest of the European Community) talk to East Asian nations about human rights. Human rights, as developed in the Western traditions are primarily ways of delimiting space and establishing property rights over these spaces. For these rights to even exist there must be something upon which these rights could hang, an identity. For these rights to exist for eternity the identity must be fixed as well. Of course here we begin to see that fixed identity is not only problematic, but would irrecoverably reduce any notion of interbeing as described in the Donne poem.

Replying to Reader Responses (Pt. 1)

So as I mentioned in the last post, I had to submit a book review for my classwork at the European Graduate School. I am very grateful to Mikael Liss, who was kind enough to not only read my review but also initiate a discussion. Below is my response to him.

Hi Mikael,

Thanks for reading my review, that's very kind of you, especially to then also say nice things about the review. I was reading something the other day by David Wood where he pointed out a funny similarity: according to some anthropologist, there is/was a tribe where young men weren't given a name until they had killed an enemy and then they took that person's name. Wood felt that this practice is not too unfamiliar at times when reading reviews of others' books. Ha!

I've not seen this movie, but the idea of a spirit of machines is compelling.

I should really hasten to stress that I think See's book provides a very useful Heidegger. I think that he wrote about Heidegger in a fairly accessible manner (which we both concede is no small feat), and I think he did a fine job also of maintaining his line of thought throughout the middle sections. When I reread his book I suspected that he had developed some of these ideas earlier, walked away to get more familiar with Deleuze, Derrida, etc. and then came back to Heidegger armed with their insights. I like See's treatment of Heidegger and I will be referencing him in an upcoming talk in October and so I very much need to thank him for his hard work.

I feel bad for having pointed-out the number of typoes, 'cause I know I'm not free of these either. I agree with you, someone should be reviewing these things (and so are we now both going to have our names in the hat for editors at Atropos Press, I'd like that gig).

Y'know, I will level with you: my purchase of Heidegger comes almost entirely from a comparative philosophy perspective. That means I am primarily (and I assume many would say, to a fault) influenced in my reading of Heidegger by what those who came after him had to say. I would defend this, however, by pointing out that the most interesting philosophical movement of the 20th century was the Kyoto School in Japan. I think Heidegger is a wonderful thinker to discuss in a comparative manner because he was so profoundly concerned with getting at the arche of the Western metaphysical tradition. (I recognize that, perhaps, Derrida would pop-in here and say, "ah, but there is no such 'Western' world." To him I would humbly submit that there is most certainly a different worldview between what has come to be known as East and West.) But I have also been very fortunate to share multiple, lengthy conversations with excellent Nietzsche and Heidegger scholars such as Graham Parkes and David Krell.

I 110% agree with you (and I suspect that Heidegger does as well) that the grammar of Indoeuropean languages already have within them the problem of objectifying the world. I got a crash course in this last year when I was working in Japan - where it is grammatically impossible to ask a direct question. I think that it would be putting the cart before the horse, however, to say that people already have the view that the world is a standing reserve and so developed a language that describes it as such. The languages that have developed in the Western world already assume that there are divisions between things; and a handy way to imagine another orientation would be Chinese where perception of the world can be understood as a focusing of attention to a field of events. But I think that the Western particulate view was not a privileged worldview (at least in Europe and slowly dissipating to its colonies) until the Medieval to Modern eras and I would use two very common words to illustrate this shift: thing, and happy.

"Thing" is a judicial institution in North-Germanic societies and it's rooted in English as meaning "an assembly." Very briefly: it's compelling to think that matters of justice could not be decided unless the community was present to judge, this seems to suggest a privileging of interrelatedness (or as Kasulis might say, intimacy). Later on this idea would become developed into a question of whether what is Just cannot be performed at all times by individuals and this could in turn be a guiding principle. Happy, happiness, happenstance - all share the root hap which means luck or chance occurrence. I am not really sure, though, that hap is unpredictable. There definitely seems to be a strong indication of mutual causality between the individual and the environment in which she finds herself. In other words, we don't simply stumble into this fortune, not only.

I defend this reading by looking for guidance from the word "happen." What does it mean for us to make something happen? It means to align our environs with fortune (perhaps understood as natural tendencies allowed to authoritatively manifest) and delight in this alignment. It is only in creating (worlding as Heidegger might say) in a manner that maximizes the flourishing of our coming together (our happenings) with those we encounter that our sense of fate (understood here as purpose or raison d'etre) will be sated.

So to your question, is it possible to choose an ethical comportment first, I feel emphatically yes. This is how I prejudice my reading of Ranciere as well. To foreground interrelatedness is an aesthetic act, and it is a political act in so far as it seeks to reinvigorate the community dynamic (were we to foreground this it would then become a policing action as we establish that it is the way things should be).

Community without Integrity: A Review

(***NOTE: this is the first paper I had to write for classes at the European Graduate School; so for those of you that are already reading these papers on the bulletin board, sorry, this is a repeat***)

A Community without Integrity: Reviewing Tony See's Community without Identity.
Paul Boshears

Tony See is to be commended for his accomplishment in publishing his dissertation that boldly suggests “none other than a rethinking of the political itself.” See sets about demonstrating that community is the common thread linking Heidegger's multiphasic body of work. This dissertation contains a useful summary of Heidegger's works arranged around discussions of politics, technology, and metaphysics. This is a useful organizing of Heidegger's work because this helps us to understand a lineage of thought transmitted through Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy. That said, one wonders at the author's suggestion that those, “well acquainted with Heidegger's thinking in general,” should feel free to skip the vast majority of his dissertation and judge only his final chapter where he presents the form of Heidegger's political theory. According to See, Heidegger rejected American capitalism and Russian communism because both were technologies which reduced the individual to resources for the State. This dehumanization is possible because of the Modern presupposition (and logically imposing as a result) of a metaphysical order that views the immanent reality before us as a standing reserve to be managed rather than encountered. Thus Heidegger's deep engagement with metaphysics is always toward demonstrating that this metaphysical project has succeeded in delimiting the world in which we live and has hamstrung our ability to authentically experience the world.

See states that the central problem of the book is alleviating the violence that is inherent in visions of community based upon identity. How will we avoid this violence? By the, “erasure of identity from the very heart of community itself, so that the unique singularity of the members of the community are not subject to violence;”[1] and in so doing we will be freed from the violence of homogeneity. The violence of homogeneity is based upon a willing suspension of disbelief: while building a representation of the world (in this moment a picture), we become fascinated (whose relationship to fascism would be welcome in this discussion) by the created image and, “mistake the menu for the meal.” That this process is in place is all that necessarily needs to exist for the violence of the modern era to begin, “The reduction of the world into a picture, thus, provides the necessary precondition of our being violent to the world.”[2] While sympathetic to the project of this book, the strengths of the presentation of Heidegger's philosophy are lost in an ineffective manner of expression vis-a-vis See's inconsistent thinking on how one might form a sense of identity that is not dependent upon transcendental claims in the first place.

See uses, correctly, Heidegger's interpretation of Holderlin's Ister in order to demonstrate the heart of Heidegger's political philosophy. From this discussion we learn that Heidegger sees the human condition as fundamentally one of being homeless. In this pursuit of finding one's place in the world clearly we can see Heidegger as a political thinker. But the argument loses its intelligibility when See seems to suggest that once we set out to find our home we will encounter something foreign (a concept that is metaphysically backed-up by being not-me), “that is [sic](3) what is proper or natural for a people can only be appropriated when it is founded on an encounter with what is foreign and other to that people”[4] and then states, “it becomes clear that what is called for is none other than an encounter with the Greeks here....[t]his suggests that what is proper to a people can be appropriated only by way of a journey outward to encounter the foreign.”[5] Again, being sympathetic to See's project, I believe that he has made an appropriate gesture: Heidegger reconfigures Holderlin's notion of homecoming as a “nearness to Being” and so Germans must eschew familiar patterns of reducing the world to classifications and objects to be understood within frameworks. See does say this; but it does not follow from this statement that Heidegger's was a politics that, “does not reduce the difference of the other into an identity, but which suggests of an ethical recognition of the difference and singularity of the other.”[6] Thus we understand the importance of Levinas in the 20th century (as Derrida points out at his eulogy for Levinas[7]) as not only the man that brought Heidegger to France[8] but also the man that first suggested, after the tour de force of Enlightenment reasoning that was the first two world wars: these wars are inevitable and unavoidable if the first question we ask upon meeting something with which we are unfamiliar is an ontological question, “what is it?” rather than first asking an ethical question, “how will I promote harmonious relations with what I encounter?”

This book would benefit tremendously by taking Heidegger to the next logical step and suggesting that it is possible to arrange a worldview that is not dependent upon transcendental claims, that an immanent worldview is possible. Although listed in the secondary literature of the bibliography there seems to be no encounter in See's book with Graham Parkes' Heidegger and Asian Thought, wherein one might be introduced to the very rich Japanese reception of Heidegger (the Japanese having made no less than five translations of Sein und Zeit before there was an English translation of his magnum opus). If, as See suggests, we can only begin to form community by understanding the limits of our cultural inheritance, then this East Asian encounter must surely be a richly rewarding endeavor. Again, sympathetic to See's project, I believe I get a sense of what he refers to at the conclusion of the book: that a community without identity might be palpated by considering the singularity of children. But children are marked by, fundamentally, an inability to understand themselves over time. Perhaps theirs is a world not of immanence but of immaturity. Identity (which is of course a problematic word and See does well to not limit what is meant by the term), if it does anything, must provide a sense of meaning over a duration of time. As Nietzsche put it (and we can suspect Heidegger took this to heart), man would rather will nothing than not will at all. Those that employ suicide bombers know this to be true as well: a person can readily affirm death and act upon that affirmation, but that same person cannot tolerate a life where their suffering is for nothing[9]. I suspect that Deleuze and Guattari also recognize this when they state that what the dispossessed desire are not hand-me-downs but the ability to produce in the real[10]. The lesson of the suicide bomber is that identity production is the sine qua non of humanity.

Rather than a community without identity, the argument here presented would be strengthened by sustaining an argument for community without integrity. Integrity understood as the quality of being solid and stolid; one that has integrity cannot be compromised by outside influence. If we think through the logic of this statement, integrity means to be wholly insulated and impermeable, precisely the opposite of what Heidegger throughout his ontic explorations demonstrated: that the worlding of the world is a process of attunement, of becoming more and more authentic in our living by becoming more and more enveloped in this time and this place in which we find ourselves thrown[11]. Allowing-Being-to-be as a safeguard against totalitarianism is possible if we redefine the relationship between the knower and reality, using what Kasulis calls, the assimilation theory of truth[12]. While we foreground a correspondence model of truth, where language reflects a structure of truth (but is not necessarily truth itself) such that I propose something in language that correlates to what is true; in the assimilation theory of truth reality and the knower are not discrete but are interrelated and so knowledge is the overlap between the two. The depth of my knowledge and truth is only limited by my allowing access between myself and that which I seek to understand. While this talk about knowledge and the knower interrelating seems foreign, we do have an everyday expression that intimates this way of accessing truth: something that we find difficult to comprehend we say is hard to digest. As See points out in his presentation of Heidegger's works, theory cannot be separated from practice and this also suggests that a call for an assimilative theory of truth.

In this reconfiguration of knowledge production there is the understanding that the knower is fundamentally implicated in the object of knowledge because the base understanding of the world is one of interdependence rather than independence. That is, all relationships are foundationally intimate relationships (and expressions of degrees of internalization), rather than the what has been the push in Western philosophy over the past 600 years to establish the hegemony of externalized relationships whose best symbol is the technology of the contract. The result has been communities by lashing together (and this becomes more interesting if we include that the term fascism comes from the Latin symbol of many rods lashed to the axe) ontology and theology through the primacy of metaphysical questioning.
See should be commended for his courage in pursuing this particular dissertation topic, not the politics of Heidegger (a question twenty years too late), but to discuss Heidegger at all at this point in the development of the Heideggerian literature exposes one to many critics as there have been so many dissertations on Heidegger in so many languages. See has produced a very helpful book that quickly provides the reader with a very French orientation of Heidegger's philosophy – to play with Kojeve's comments on Hegel, here we have Heidegger-as-anthropologist, whether he wishes to be one or not. I thank See for presenting Heidegger as such. Almost as though an afterthought, See tacks-on a Conclusion giving an all-too-brief presentation of how community has come to be discussed by Derrida, Nancy, and Deleuze. Because See's book has such a strong French reading (in many ways a discussion of why Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and Deleuze have formulated their political philosophies) to include something about Heidegger's friendships to Jaspers and Arendt could only benefit his interpretation of Heidegger as a philosopher who prefers engagement instead of evasion. See is correct to demonstrate why Heidegger's involvement with the National Socialist movement must be read in the context of his insights into metaphysics and technology; but, surely there is much that can be learned from the Heidegger-Jaspers-Arendt triad as it was performed. Would this not be an excellent moment of theoria in praxis?

[1] page 16.
[2] page 42.
[3] This typo is one of many glaring errors in word choice, subject-verb agreement, missing citations, and failures to correctly spell names. The effect of encountering so many errors (more than one would anticipate in a first edition) is a significant feeling of disappointment as it suggests no consideration for the reader's experience. Of course, there is a very real concern that the author, in presenting himself in this manner, has said much more than was intended.
[4] page 163.
[5] page 164-5.
[6] page 167.
[7] Derrida, Jacques. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas, trans. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.10.
[8] Tom Rockmore's “Aspects of Heidegger in France.” also discusses the lineage of Heidegger-Kojeve/Levinas-Derrida and points-out that the French philosophical tradition has long been concerned with understanding the human being. Available at: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Sp92/aspec.pdf http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Sp92/aspec.pdf
[9] Wood, David. (2005). The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press. 16.
[10] Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 27.
[11] I would suggest that as one becomes more authentically oneself in worlding one's world one is becoming more authoritative in one's practice of being in the world.
[12] Kasulis, Thomas P. (2002). Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press.

Community without Identity: The Ontology and Politics of Heidegger
Tony See
2009 Atropos Press, New York & Dresden.
$21.95

The Entertainment Engine

Wired has a neat, too-short, interview with Guillermo del Toro (of Pan's - DUDE! that guy smashed that other guy's face in with a wine bottle!-Labrynth).

In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform "story engine." The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction.

I'm excited at the idea that some really significant change is just on the horizon (and to think that you and I will be get to be responsible for it!) - but then I recognize something a little too familiar: 30 years ago Foucault described something similar.

Foucault pointed out, among other things, that the 20th century has been a period paradigm shift from what he termed disciplinary society to a society of control. From the 17th to the end of the 19th centuries there was a movement in Western Europe to subsume all aspects of the human experience to the principles of rationality. Reason and rationale helped to overcome pernicious problems of sovereignty inherited from the Medieval period and also provided insight and tools as to how to avoid constant death from diseases and famines. The world could be better explained through objective, that is publicly-verifiable, knowledge and the nature of reality could be "discovered" by identifying, through induction and deduction, the principles that maintain order in the universe.

At the center of this rational ordering of the universe is the individual capable of using reason (this is Descarte's cogito; and this is an interesting take on it). The story of the Modern era has been the elucidating of what is reasonable in society - of course there is the obvious problem of what seems quite reasonable form this individual's perspective is entirely unreasonable to the individuals at this vantage point. So the knowledge that should be so publicly verifiable (and so natural and obvious) is actually very strictly policed by the powerful and their institutions. Obviously the rational thing to do when people break the law is imprison them, that is the efficient (efficiency is a primary concern of rationality) way to reduce crime, reducing crime means society is able to funciton smoothly (because the rational society is the stable society that has no turbulence in the form of oder being put out of whack). How do we rationally (efficiently and effectively) build prisons? Build a panopticon, a position in the structure where everyone can be watched, like a tower in the middle (kinda like God watches over Man, how perfect). The prison, the university, etc. these became the technologies that defined disciplinary society.


What those in charge began to realize was that you didn't have to have anyone even in the tower for the prisoners to behave: just the knowledge that they were being watched kept many of them in line. Thus what became the most rational (efficient and effective) thing to do would be to promote in the individuals themselves the belief that they must manage themselves. Think about it: if you are trying to get the world nice and orderly, there really can't be any pockets of non-orderliness. If you're hiring all these guards to patrol the borders of what is acceptable to do (police) or to think (professors) that means you've got at least the number of hired guards not reproducing the orderliness you want (because they're busy making sure the prisoners are doing what they're told). If we got everyone, including the guards, to order themselves around (of course according to the laws of the powerful, working for and toward the desires of the powerful), then we are getting the maximal productivity (the natural result of rationality) from the system. A society that no longer required discipline to run would be, according to Foucault, a society of control.

Of course, promoting a system where everyone can follow their own rules in an orderly manner is the promise of democracy. The democratic process, thus, is a process that seeks to place everyone into the society of control. As we leave the Modern era and enter post-modernity we see that globalized communication and productivity (globalization) requires this kind of control. It's inefficient and perhaps too insipid to believe that only the people in Hollywood would be the people that could best at creating entertainment, what a positively guild-like idea. Let's get everyone producing their own entertainment and really maximize output.

So now everything is entertainment: news (CNN's iReport, Indymedia, Daily Show), cooking (really, food pr0n from the Foodnetwork, etc.), cleaning your house, hurting yourself, spelling wrong, doing anything at all wrong...Hell: let's make a video game where people create simulated people, personas, identities.

I return to the Wired interview to just regesiter the complaint that far too often we are told that it is so revolutionary to Enjoy! (like the Coke logo says) the fact that we are at this dawn of the society of control (in Wired's case it's called Web 2.o): a time when we can be the viral video. But what is the payload of this viral behavior, what does the meme deliver into the host? Clearly, the need to manage ourselves, to produce, to consume as we are directed - I mean how else can I understand Gatorade's new low-calorie sports drink? del Toro's talk about the PS3 being the Model T is not inaccurate, it's just not as interesting an idea as, say Peter Greenaway's conception of cinema without text.

Prologue to "Tank Man"

What follows is a very close reading of the Prologue to Frontline's show "The Tank Man." I'd like to be clear that I am in no way an apologist for the violence that occurred, but I cannot also stand by and allow this kind of violence. What we are experiencing, at least in the U.S. is, I argue a pernicious form of violence that rests on the assertion that some people are allowed to remember, but only can remember what they are told. The simple truth is this: the American public does not understand China's history and there is a very real incentive to capitalize on this ignorance. Not only among the power elite because they cannot achieve their hegemony without their handmaiden: the newscycle. Of course the irony is that here we have a media that decries the erasing of history while simultaneously creating a new history that will reinforce the naturalness of what the power elite want the multitude to think about China.

"Prologue"
3:23
"Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The largest public space in the world, created on an inhuman scale." (this emphasis is in the original) The monumental public buildings that line the edges and the vast, tree-less edges between speak of the insignificance of the individual before the might of the State."
In this passage, the beginning of the show, the prologue which will orient us so that we can understand what they are trying to persuade us to believe, we are set up with a familiar problem. Familiar to Westerners, at least. Their is an ominousness to the tone in this sequence, in the suggestion that the individual is insignificant in relation to their government - but isn't this what ALL monuments are supposed to do? Is this not the purpose of erecting Gothic cathedrals, to inspire in humanity the sense of the vast mystery of God? That the Chinese have dedicated a vast public space, the largest in the world, should reveal to us that the Chinese are far less concerned with lofty abstractions about the mystery of some transcendental realm and are much more concerned with the mystery of the immanence of being in this world. This public space should be inspiring, the individual should know that there are more than just individuals in the world, but an immense, teeming, ocean of human beings - one should be given pause at this thought. What is the purpose of the individual, in this schema, except to elucidate, articulate, and promote the peaceful coexistence of billions of human beings (the very name of the Chinese government can be translated along these lines, in fact).

3:51
"[T]hey have hundreds of [cameras] trained on Tiananmen Square, their cameras, cameras in the hands of others are considered dangerous."
This should be no surprise to anyone in the Western world, look at Britain. They have thousands of cameras set up through out the country and designed to track cars and individuals. But this is also true in North Carolina. And it appears that all Americans are being spied upon now.

6:32
"It's absolutely extraordinary. You could look at him as unusually brave; but he probably wasn't. He probably just an ordinary person who was so disgusted at what he had seen for the last few days."
The emphasis in Western media on the individual is necessary because it reinforces what the West believes to be sacrosanct: the individual, the one that is defined as radically particular, and fundamentally different from all others and only able to be related to others through externalized relationships. The ideal form of relationships for this entity is the contract.

7:18
"Standing in front of a column of tanks. No one around him - he was all on his own with a shopping bag in his hand. He climbed on top of the tank, banged on the lid, and said, 'Get out of my city you're not wanted here.' We don't know exactly what he said, but it's clear that's what he wanted to say."
Is it so clear? Is this not a classic example of projection? Maybe he said something like, "go on kill me, you shot my girlfriend last night and I drank all the rent money away, again. I'll be homeless and without prospects, just kill me." What if he was schizophrenic and thought he was catching a bus? Why is the journalist (I assume he was there, but I am not told he was) given this priviledged information? Yes, it is compelling to believe that the guy got off work (see 11:15), bought his groceries and on the walk home confronted the People's Liberation Army. It's compelling because that's what I want my action heros to do, it's what I would expect from Bruce Willis or Will Smith. It's my ideal type. But it's not Chinese.

7:53
"During this time I'm thinking, 'This guy is gonna be killed at any moment now. And, if he is, I can't just miss this. This is something he is giving his life for.' It's my responsibility to record it as accurately as possible."
Spoken with the great solemnity that we should all be familiar with because this is the same attitude of the apostles at the crucifixion. Of course, we will also all recognize that there are very different accounts of what happened on that cross - there is no accurate depiction in the sense that there is 100% agreeance about what occurred there. This is another great Western preoccupation: the revelation through objectivity, through public epistemological methods. It is a great hiding and revealing game that we play because our worldview. But why is it necessary to watch these moments? Why do we HAVE to watch as the man is executed? Why must we witness, what compels us to watch the gore? Is there not something sadistic and cruel to this voyeurism? Is there not a sense that the man is calling into existence the murder of this man with his bags in front of the tanks?

We are told, then about this magical photograph. The one that publically announces, like that mythic star in the East of the Nativity, that their is a special man in the world that redeems all our sins (our need to create a social order where individuals are subsumed other individuals). Where does he hide this wonderful photo? In the shitter. I wish that I could talk with Zizek about this one! Literally, the object of our political fascination, the stuff of pure excess, is put into the toilet, that place where all real human excess is deposited and where we place all that we cannot bear to view because to have it return from the toilet is a nightmare, just as to confront our unconscious desire to see a man crushed to death under a tank is too nightmarish to admit. Fortunately we have the medium of celluloid to give us the fantasy of these ghoulish desires - and it's stored where? That great symbol of the unconscious: the toilet!

Cyber Insurgency Lulz - Who Is Anonymous?

Thanks to Wired's Danger Room for sharing the link to Counterterrorism Blog where we read, "The Lulz vs. North Korea." From the article:

Would this be seen as western provocation by North Korea? Who knows, but it does raise the question of how uncontrolled or accidental cyber-warfare could have unintended consequences, a new factor in an old dynamic. Unlike nuclear technology the ability to conduct cyber-warfare is not the sole preserve of states. Individuals, or loosely affiliated groups of individuals operating on a trans-national basis can replicate some if not all of a nations capability.

This is probably not the place to discuss 4chan and /b/ but I do recommend looking them up, you'll be surprised (I'll bet).

But I can do you one better and give you a quote from Hardt and Negri's Empire that I think well-anticipates this situation (by nearly 10 years):

In effect, one might say that the sovereignty of Empire itself is realized at the margins, where borders are flexible and identities are hybrid and fluid. It would be difficult to say which is more important to Empire, the center or the margins. In fact, center and margin seem continually to be shifting positions, fleeing any determinate locations. We could even say that the process itself is virtual and that its power resides in the power of the virtual....(39)

Their Empire is not simply imperialism 2.0 - that's what the Cold War was. Our situation is marked now by informational wars: whether one chooses to drink Pepsi or Coke is just as valuable to the world order today as a recently Post-Colonial country's decision to become a democracy or espouse communism. So, if, suddenly "the marketplace" becomes concerned that Pepsi can no longer maintain productivity, things will start happening: the news cycle will grab onto this, the pundocracy will weigh in, the activist investors will be profiled... This is an informational war in the same way that the current financial crisis is an informational war. Today the powers that be are hammering-out how to maintain fluidity within the world economy, they are not meeting to discuss how to prop-up the U.S.'s over-production of farm equipment ("Use USAID! give it to Kenya so that they resist the kalishnikovs the Soviets are sending"); so it's not like the situation at the eve of WWII (I mean the Berlin Conference of 1885). The situation is no longer Westphalian sovereignty vs.

Rather Hardt and Negri are claiming something else:

Our claim... is that we are dealing here with a special sovereignty that should considered liminal or marginal... a sovereignty that locates its only point of reference in the definitive absoluteness of the power it can exercise. Empire thus appears in the form of a very high tech machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organized to dominate and when necessary intervene in the breakdowns of the system. (39)

These breakdowns of the system look less like wars liberating people (that phrase used to justify the last invasion of Iraq) and more about the state of emergency. "Order and peace - the eminent values that Empire proposes - can never be achieved but are nonetheless continually reproposed," as Hardt & Negri state (60). Thus it is more likely that any military action in North Korea will likely be justified by promoting the terrible state of affairs in North Korea. Thus, the only way to fight wars will be by marketing them appropriately.

Why do I begin with 4chan griefers and go to these philosophical discussions? Because I think that "Anonymous" is a great, practical, example of what Hardt & Negri call the multitude:

This is another fundamental characteristic of the existence of the multitude today within Empire and against Empire. New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjuncture of events, in the universal nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegenation of individuals and populations, and in the technological metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine. (61)

If we try to understand who Anonymous is, as an ontological group that has formed based on its identity, we will be forever frustrated. If you read the transcript form the build-up to the Lulz you will see that the group are not interested in democracy, they're not complaining about nuclear proliferation. In fact, one "member" (I use scare quotes 'cause membership is open and you can't be Anonymous) even states, "I [doing this] isn't out of moralfaggotry," that is, doing this because one is partisan to an outcome. This is also predicted by Hardt & Negri when they wrote:

These new figures and subjectivities are produced because, although the struggles are indeed antisystemic, they are not posed merely against the imperial system - they are not simply negative forces. They also express, nourish, and develop positively their own constituent projects....The deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction. (61)

Postmodernism FTW!

Oooooo! Super-Computer Church!

I got a link to this on the ARTNEWS listserv and what follows are some thoughts I have about the matter as well as most of the email I sent in reply to the list (I hope they don't mind that I write so much on there sometimes). Thanks Eggtoof and Al Matthews!

Here is the original link that I followed. Little did I suspect what waited for me. I then began watching the video (here).

This has to be one of the best hoaxes I've seen. They spent a lot of time putting all this together, and I think it looks great. I thought that it must be one of those YesMen or RTmark projects, but, sigh, it won't.

I do find it really humorous this idea that the reality of the mind, which maps the reality "out there" has finally been solved (and it was done in 1974!), and they didn't bother to entertain any notion of an epistemology where the knower and the known are mutually transformed by one another.

I think that's what's really crucial for AI: how do we develop code that gives networked machines the same kind of understanding that Olympic diving judges have? What I mean is this, the only way for the judges to know how to judge the olympian is to have learned how to dive and perform the moves that the divers perform every four years. While this is clearly a private knowledge (because it is embodied within the individual), this expert knowledge is actually quite public because (as we see with the Olympics) judges tend to judge fairly consistently, even when they don't consult one another.

If you go to the site initsimage.org you find that this is a nonprofit dedicated to life-extension by downloading your consciousness (which they say is who you really are) into a matrix of computers.

Here's the best part:
"Although the attainment of immortality may be a generation or two away, its plausibility may be made loud and clear in the present. In the meantime, the road to such a goal is ripe with philosophical and even spiritual repercussions. That's why we have claimed the status of a church. Although we have no burning bushes to our credit, we do offer a fairly divine revelation that pure rationality can lead to eternal life, along with the recognition of a cosmic mind based upon the same neural network paradigm that will inevitably free us from the agony of death."

Never mind that the music that this machine makes is simply loops form Apple's GarageBand which comes free with the purchase of a new Mac. I mean, maybe they used some equation to select the loops, but I kinda doubt that.

Oh well. I'm not saying that life-extension is a bad thing, necessarily. I read Neuropolitique when I was a younger man. I am saying, however, that it should be a crime to use the phrase "the zen of ____" in a sales pitch for transcendentalism (in the video explaining the music-making ability of their machine they say the machine understands the zen of music making).

I guess it's just, perhaps in the words of another early hero of mine, Robert Anton Wilson, "uncool" to create a religion out of rationality (although I will make an allowance for those that would create a religion with the purpose of illuminating those that convert) Isn't that the problem in the first place? in the late 19th century Weber was already warning us about the iron cage of irrationality and the fundamental irrationality of rationality.

20 Years of Dischord

(the title refers to a compilation from a favorite D.C.-based record label)

I posted something heavy on the ol' facespace status bar today and I s'pose I should try to clarify a little more what I am saying. Here's what my status read today:

I suspect that all this talk about Tiananmen has little to do with China and really points out that in the new era "revolution" is less about changing material circumstances and more about affirming domination; particularly in the U.S. - where the myths of revolutions and wars of liberation are Disney rides. 成者天之道地。成者, 人之道地。"Creativity is the way of all reality, creating is the proper way of being human."

from 中庸20 (the zhongyong, verse 20; Ames and Hall translation); what I mean is that if we want to change things in this world (like political oppression) then it is incumbent upon us to be that change. At the root of this change is a fundamental receptivity to being changed by what we learn of the world, rather than approaching the world with a strategy for engaging it. Rather than holding the world to an abstract ideal and then changing the world to fit this idea.

I bring this up because I suspect for many Americans (if they think anything about Tiananmen at all) they will look at this incident as simply proof of the blatant disregard for human rights in China, nevermind that most Americans don't really understand what "human rights" means. And it is this lack of understanding that creates the wiggle-room necessary for folks to then begin entertaining notions about liberating the people of China so that they might be free. Probably there are too many economic necessities at work right now for that to happen, but who's to say that this won't happen in the future, especially if the fires of racism and hatred are allowed to simply burn in the open like this.

Henry Rosemont, Jr. and Roger Ames have both dedicated their careers to elucidating the meanings of Confucius as well as promoting a harmonious flourishing between the U.S. and China. I refer you to them:

Rosemont on the "threat" of China
Rosemont's "U.S.-dominated Human Rights Discourse as an Impediment to Reconciliation"
Ames on the benefits of the U.S. and China engaging in this discussion

And there are a number of scholarly works that you can google, hopefully some you'll be able to read for free.