A conversation between Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik continues from the previous post: SM: This comes back to what we were saying earlier: that the future itself becomes part of the present. This could be taken as an extension of the present without a future radically distinct from it. And it often is, with the leftist-critical claim of the loss of futurity under the capitalism of complex societies. That is the fundamental limitation of contemporary leftism that Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have identified, and which they look to countermand with their specific determination of what, in their contribution to this issue, they identify to be “a better future,” which provides an active horizon to direct the politics of the present. AA: I think we have a slight disagreement on the current state of neoliberalism, which you define as a state-business nexus directed to the concentration of capital and power, which requires and consolidates increasingly autocratic elites. I tend to think that we are already going past this stage. For me and others, neoliberalism is a move toward something one can call financial neofeudalism, in which key columns or foundations of the political economy of capitalism — like a safe nation-state, a governed population and a market regulating itself, or other basic economic assumptions like economic recovery or growth leading to more jobs or higher profits leading to greater competition instead of monopolies or oligopolies etc. — have started to disappear, and we are now in a fundamental financial and social crisis, with increasing depth of inequality. But instead of debating whether we are at a new financial feudalism or just another stage in capitalism, let’s instead focus here on the basic hypothesis we are jointly proposing: given the social, technological, and political transformations since the 1960s and 70s that we’ve already mentioned, and which are also embodied in contemporary art and in literature with the emergence and consolidation of the present tense novel in the period since, we live in a new, speculative time structure. There have been basically two responses to this transformation. On the one side, there is a right-wing or reactionary countermanding, looking toward the past as a kind of counter-balance against the negative aspects that everyone observes and feels: the frustrations, disadvantages and mistakes of neoliberal financial neofeudalism. The other standard response to the speculative time structure is the left or critical one, which is also the prevalent one in contemporary art. The focus here is not the past as a place of semantic security but instead on the present as a site or condition of resistance against the change to a speculative time. Yet, for all the contentions between left-critical and right-reactionary responses to the emergence of the neoliberal mobilization of the speculative time-complex, both are just playing in different ways into the hands of this new formation of neoliberal capitalism, or financial feudalism. It’s perhaps more obvious with the right-wing reactionary tendencies, which in no way disrupt but rather reinforce power structures that enabled the new social, economic, political formation. However, with left-critical reactions too, there is a kind of suffocation, to the extent that most people have the feeling of not being able to gain traction in the present, to change something, and to have something like a future worthy of its name. Contemporary art is both a symptom and surrogate of that futurelessness, with its constant celebration of experience: aesthetic experience, criticality, presentness and so on. SM: That is an instructive formulation of typical left and right reactions, and typical defensive moves around the emergence of the speculative time-complex and the loss of bearings that it institutes in relationship to both the past and the future. Though there are many ways of understanding or setting up a relationship to the speculative time-complex, what the right does is to simplify it, to reduce it as a complex, and to recenter it on the present as the dominant moment on the basis of tradition. The right has always done this in modernity: if modernity is a paradigm in which the new happens in the now, what has characterized the right is a defense against the emergence of the new as the basis for actions, social organizations, aesthetics, meaning and so on. The authority of past conditions is invoked as a stabilization mechanism for modernization. To be clear: the right is not necessarily against modernization but stabilizes its disruptive effects by calling on what are then necessarily conservative or reactive historical formations. And faced with the operationalized speculative time-complex of neoliberal capitalism, in a way the right can carry on doing what it has always done without necessarily recognizing that what it is reacting against is no longer the modern but a new condition. The Rightism of neoliberalism makes sense on this basis: even though I disagree with the adequacy of the phrase “financial neofeudalism” to describe what is happening in capitalism, it nonetheless serves to capture the increasing autocracy that goes along with the neoliberal restructuring. The political question then is how that autocratic, post-democratic kind of power is to be legitimized. Those on the right are very useful just here because what they endorse, essentially, is the authority of a recognised historical or elite formation that stabilizes semantics — and perhaps only semantics — in the newly established conditions. AA: And the left-critical abreaction? SM: In a way, leftism makes the problem of “the contemporary” more evident because the left in its progressive forms has been attached to modernism. The now in which the new takes place is the fetish of change for the progressive left, exemplified by its revolutionary ideals and clichés. The left’s abreaction to the speculative time-complex is to retrench the present as the venue or the site for thinking about and confronting the reconstitution of social and time organization, and semantic reorganization too. Instead of seeing the future as condition of the present, the present is instead taken to extend out indefinitely and cancel out the radically different future (the revolution, notably). But the speculative present as we are identifying it is, by contrast to this leftist melancholy, the entrenchment of the future and the past which folds into the present, in a way that certainly deprioritizes it and maybe even makes it drop out — as in the phrases demonstrating tense structures we discussed earlier. The past was the future, and the future will be the past. AA: There is no critical interruption from the present in this speculative present. SM: No, it’s constructed by the uncertainties of the future and the absence of the past. AA: That’s why the left-critical thinking of the event or the emptiness or openness of the present — of contemporaneity — is still vestigially modernist. And, as Laboria Cuboniks remark in their contribution from several different angles, it’s not adequate to the tasks and conditions of the twenty-first century. SM: What the left sees in the speculative complexification of time is an extension of the present rather than its thinning out by the forcing of the future or the disestablishment of the past. Historical, futural, anticipatory relationships are maintained with an emphatic insistence on the presentness of action, aesthetics or experience. This is insistence on “the contemporary.” It is still premised on the present as the primary tense. And what happens with the emphasis on contemporaneity is a determination of the present as indefinitely extended. The contemporary is a time form that saturates both the past and the future, a metastable condition. A leftism still attached to modernism won’t have traction on the speculative present, even if that leftism is more attentive to the time-complex than the right because it’s not trying to restore a past (though its revolutionary wing does seem largely interested in restoring a historical semantics, while its social-democratic wing now maintains an interest in failed market solutions). Even if it’s accepted that the left is more open to modernity than the right (which is questionable outside of the left’s self-reinforcing phantasm), it holds that the present extends into both the past and into the future, which supposedly destroys the future as a future. And, as Esposito remarks in her contribution, it doesn’t see that what it is actually involved with is the future now. That today is tomorrow, as you put it in another occasion. AA: It was “Tomorrow Today.”7 SM: Exactly. That title indexes how the speculative present is in a pre-post formation, or post-contemporary. The present now is not the time in which the decisions are made or the basis for the new, as it was in modernism. The new is happening instead in a transition between a past and a future that is not a unidirectional flux, but a speculative construction in or from the directions of past and present at once. AA: The whole idea of what in German is called Zeitgenossenschaft — the contemporary, more literally, “comrade of time” — is problematic because it far too often signifies the wish to change the present completely with an insistence on the present. The contemporaneity of Zeitgenossenschaft indicates the idea of having traction in the present by getting closer to it, and that is no longer adequate to the task. It is simply the wrong way to think. What is needed instead is neither Gegenwartsgenossenschaft — comradeship of the present, nor Vergangenheitsgenossenschaft — comradeship of the past, but rather a Zeitgenossenschaft from the future (die Zukunft), a kind of Zukunftsgenossenschaft. We need to become comrades with and of the future and approach the present from that direction. A conversation between Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik is taken from:
0 Comments
A conversation between Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik continues from the previous post: SM: One instructive manifestation of the operationalized speculative time-complex are derivatives. Of course, derivatives are now key to speculative finance, and they are “speculative” in that they use the unknown future price of an asset and the risks involved therein to draw profits against a present price. As Elena Esposito shows really clearly in her contribution, with derivatives the uncertainties of the future are used to construct prices in the present and this scrambles the standard time structure of past-present-future. The derivative is a clear example of how profits are not extracted on the basis of production or from fixed capital like equipment, plant and construction, all of which depend upon the history of investment, nor from variable capital like labor or wages. These belong to traditional industrial models of accumulation, in which a factory is built, workers are employed and paid, materials are used at a certain price, a product made or grown, then sold at a higher price than the costs, and profits made. All of which means that the profits are accrued from production that has happened in the past and subsequently exchanged on the market. The exchange of the product is the completion of a sequence that must have already happened. With the derivative model, on the other hand, a price in the future which is yet to happen is anticipated, and it is this future eventuality which is unknown that is operationalized to extract profits — on the basis, to reiterate, of a future that is unknown and unactualized. Derivatives are, in Natalia Zuluaga’s phrase, a specific kind of future-mining, an extraction from the future in the present. But this mining of the future in the present changes what the present is. The present isn’t the one that you started with. The very construction of a speculatively constituted present — the “pre-” — actively puts the present into a past that it also is, the “post-.” There’s one version of this configuration that you and others have described through pre-emptive policing, pre-emptive strikes, pre-emptive personality and so on, which are also anticipated through big data, and the use of algorithms through consumer information. But it also differs from the logic of preemption where, taking the example of a preemptive strike, you eliminate a possible enemy in order to prevent what might have happened — but which also may not. It’s rather that your act — price setting in the case of derivatives, but the construction is generalizable — is itself modified because you take this very proximate future into account as a condition of the act that should then be made. The future is acting now to transform the present even before the present has happened. As Esposito argues, it is not only the linear schematic of time that is scrambled, but also the very openness of the present to the future. But aren’t these conditions just what you and Anke Henning were also dealing with in your Speculative Poetics project, be it more in relation to formal literary and linguistic analysis? AA: Anke and I wanted to problematize certain initial assumptions, such as the very easy and oversimplified tension between speculative realism and poststructuralism. You and I also sought to rework that opposition with the essays collected in Genealogies of Speculation, which looks to vindicate a speculative dimension in the philosophy of the last decades. But, in particular, Anke and I explored how a prehistory of the current speculative philosophy took up the idea of speculative temporality. SM: One of the things you and Anke do in Present Tense, which is really important to emphasize here, is to introduce grammar structures within language as a kind of time-complex. Language for you seems to be a cognitive, plastic and manipulable medium of the time-complex. AA: Language has one unique and key feature in this regard: a tense system. The tense system is really important to our understanding and construction of time, even more fundamental than the experience of time because it structures that experience — though not in a relativist sense. Most continental philosophies of language or time actually don’t deal with what is specific to this system because they don’t really focus on the grammar. It’s a problem with phenomenology as well as with a lot of deconstructivist and post-structuralist philosophies. What is more instructive than those traditions has been analytic philosophy and non-Saussurean linguistics. For example, John McTaggart and Gustave Guillaume think a lot about sentences like “every past was a future” and “every future will be a past.” These basic structural paradoxes — or apparent structural paradoxes — can be tackled via an analysis of grammar. There are some important technical issues here that I had better not go into-- SM: Yes, maybe later. The core point seems to be that formulations like “every past was a future” and “every future will be a past”-- AA: And so on: every present as well-- SM: That’s what I was going to say: what’s very relevant about those two formulations for the identification of the speculative time-complex that we are here calling the post-contemporary is that they articulate a time structuring in which the present drops out. So determinations of time can be established that don’t require the present as their basis. The tense structure of language allows for that, formulating the non-necessity of the present as a structuring condition of the tense structure. AA: And what struck me as necessary for speculative realism or any kind of speculative philosophy was a better understanding of what I would call a speculative and materialist temporality. For Anke and me, this meant understanding time on the basis of the grammatical structures of language — language understood as something material — and to develop not a time-philosophy but rather a tense-philosophy. SM: At the same time, you make the criticism that speculative realism, as we mainly have it, doesn’t take ordinary or literary language seriously enough because it consigns it to correlationism — meaning, effectively, the dimension of human experience that never leaves itself. AA: Yes, but that’s their self-misunderstanding. SM: And why did you call it speculative poetics? AA: Because our work also implies a polemic against aesthetics and the general focus on aisthesis [perception] in modern philosophy; and, to return to your earlier point, also against the primacy of experience. SM: By “constructive,” do you mean that tense can be operationalized in order to structure time differently? The sentences formulating that the past was the future and eclipsing the present are not just descriptive. They also construct time relations within language, especially through narrative. Does the same operationalization of tense happen outside of human languages, for example through the derivative structures we mentioned? AA: The point is rather that “experience” of time and the construction of something like chronological time are only effects of grammar, not a representation of the direction of time or of what time really is. It’s the tenses in language that create an ontology of chronological time for us, and we live this time as the illusion of having a biography. SM: Isn’t this limitation of consecutive ordering what the speculative time-complex surpasses? What we have with the speculative time-complex is that the future, which includes the future we don’t know, gets included within the current reckoning and the present is coming disconnected from the past. The dismantling of the linear ordering and the primacy of the present equalizes past, present and future. AA: Absolutely. Some of today’s fiction and, more precisely, present-tense novels are far more dangerous than traditional narrative in really forcing time out of joint. As the result of 20th century vangardisms, present-tense novels subject readers to a speculative somatics of time. Maybe A.N. Whitehead would call this mode of sentience “feeling.” This time does indeed “feel” hallucinogenic, haunting, urging, hyperstitious, horrific, as David Roden shows in his contribution to this issue. In short, one feels time’s power coming from the future. In the most radical case this speculative feeling makes you change your life. Becoming on a par with the future you have speculated initiates a metanoia. But this goes very far…. The temporal phenomenon we were interested in is how all the aesthetic understanding of literature doesn’t understand that the present tense produces asynchrony. SM: Asynchrony? AA: That the present is not fully experienceable but is split in itself, and that tense structures can actively operationalize this splitting. It is laden with innumerable past-presents. It presents actual phenomena as post-X phenomena and it desynchronizes time. Armen Avanessian frequently teaches at art academies in Europe and the US. He is the founder of the bilingual research platform www.spekulative-poetik.de and editor-in-chief at Merve Verlag Berlin. Recent publications in English include Speculative Drawing (together with Andreas Töpfer, 2014), as co-editor #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014) and Genealogies of Speculation (2016). Avanessian’s Overwrite – Ethics of Knowledge, Poetics of Existance is forthcoming with SternbergPress. Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent publications include “The Ontology of Finance” in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2015), and, as co-editor, Realism Materialism Art (2015) and Genealogies of Speculation (2016). Malik’s book On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art is forthcoming from Urbanomic. Footnotes 4. See here 5. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, Genealogies of Speculation (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) 6. Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, Present Tense. A Poetic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) A conversation between Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik is taken from: A conversation between Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik Time is changing. Human agency and experience lose their primacy in the complexity and scale of social organization today. The leading actors are instead complex systems, infrastructures and networks in which the future replaces the present as the structuring condition of time. As the political Left and Right struggle to deal with this new situation, we are increasingly wholly pre-empted and post-everything. Armen Avanessian: The basic thesis of post-contemporary is that time is changing. We are not just living in a new time or accelerated time, but time itself — the direction of time — has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future. If people have the impression that time is out of joint, or that time doesn’t make sense anymore, or it isn’t as it used to be, then the reason is, I think, that they have — or we all have — problems getting used to living in such a speculative time or within a speculative temporality. Suhail Malik: Yes, and the main reason for the speculative reorganization of time is the complexity and scale of social organization today. If the leading conditions of complex societies are systems, infrastructures and networks rather than individual human agents, human experience loses its primacy as do the semantics and politics based on it. Correspondingly, if the present has been the primary category of human experience thanks to biological sentience, this basis for the understanding of time now loses its priority in favor of what we could call a time-complex.1 One theoretical ramification of the deprioritization of the present we can mention straightaway, but will need to return to later, is that it is no longer necessary to explain the movement of the past and the future on the basis of the present. We are instead in a situation where human experience is only a part of — or even subordinated to — more complex formations constructed historically and with a view to what can be obtained in the future. The past and the future are equally important in the organization of the system and this overshadows the present as the leading configuration of time. Complex societies — which means more-than-human societies at scales of sociotechnical organization that surpass phenomenological determination — are those in which the past, the present, and the future enter into an economy where maybe none of these modes is primary, or where the future replaces the present as the lead structuring aspect of time. This is not absolutely new, of course: for a long time political economy and social processes have been practically dealing with the subordination of the human to the social and technical organization of complex societies. Equally, under the heading of Speculative Realism, philosophy too has recently been trying to reset the notion of speculation as the task of finding more-than-human forms of knowledge by establishing the conditions within conceptual thought of knowledge of what is beyond human experience. That project is certainly attached to the conditions of the time-complex but is also distinct to it -- AA: – And to some concrete examples of the speculative time-complex that we know from everyday experience or from daily news. These are phenomena that usually start with the prefix “pre-,” like preemptive strikes, preemptive policing, the preemptive personality-- SM: Could you outline these phenomena? AA: What has been called preemptive personality or personalization is how you get a certain package or information about what you might want that you haven’t explicitly asked for from a commercial service.2 We know a version of this from Amazon: its algorithmic procedures give us recommendations for books associated with one’s actual choices but the preemptive personality is one step ahead: you get a product that you actually want. The company’s algorithms know your desires, they know your needs even before you become aware of them yourself. It doesn’t make sense to say in advance that “I’ll send it back” because it is likely that it will be something you will need. I don’t think that all this is necessarily bad, but we do have to learn how to deal with it in a productive or more pro-active manner. Another thing, often criticized, is the politics of preemptive strikes, which is also a new phenomenon of the 21st century. Brian Massumi and others have written about the kind of recursive truth they produce: you bomb somewhere and then afterwards you will find the enemy you expected.3 You produce a situation that was initially a speculation. The logic here is recursive and, to reiterate, the strike is not made in order to avoid something, a deterrence before the enemy strikes. It’s also very different to the twentieth century logic of the balance of threats or prevention. Rather, what happens in the present is based on a preemption of the future, and of course this is also linked to what has been called a tendency towards premediation in the media. Another everyday example of this new speculative temporality discussed a lot nowadays is preemptive policing. You have it in science fiction, notably with the “PreCrime” and precog detection of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (and the Spielberg film based on it). Versions of this are adopted more and more in policing today. This has to be distinguished from other current surveillance strategies; for example, CCTV is more of an older idea of watching what people are doing or documenting what they have done, to reinforce exclusion mechanisms. The question today, if one puts it in chronological terms, seems to be more along the lines: what kind of policing is needed to apprehend people even before they do something, with what they will do — as if the future-position promises more power, which creates a future-paranoia? This is less a surveillance directed to the exclusion of people than one that deals with people inside the social space, with the value they produce. How can they be observed and how to extract value from their activities? There is of course a hugely important biopolitical factor in this regulation of the population, especially with regards to medicine and insurance. SM: Along with “pre-,” what’s advanced by the time-complex is also a condition of the “post-,” the current ubiquity of which characterizes where we are at now, and which is maybe added to with the contention of the post-contemporary. Everything now seems to be “post-” something else, which indexes that our understanding of what is happening now has some relation to but is also disconnected to historically given conditions.… While the “pre-” indexes a kind of anticipatory deduction of the future that is acting in the present — so that future is already working within the now, again indicating how the present isn’t the primary category but is understood to be organized by the future — what the “post-” marks is how what’s happening now is in relationship to what has happened but is no longer. We are the future of something else. The “post-” is also a mark of the deprioritization of the present. If we are post-contemporary, or post-postmodern, post-internet, or post-whatever — if we are now post-everything — it is because historically-given semantics don’t quite work anymore. So, in a way, the present itself is a speculative relationship to a past that we have already exceeded. If the speculative is a name for the relationship to the future, the “post-” is a way in which we recognize the present itself to be speculative in relationship to the past. We are in a future which has surpassed the conditions and the terms of the past. Combined, the present is not just the realization of the speculative future (the “pre-”) but also a future of the past that we are already exceeding. As many contributors to this issue propose, we don’t quite have the bearings or the stability or the conventions that the past offers to us (the “post-”). AA: That’s the important thing, that the change of the present, the shaping of the present, is not necessarily determined by the past. The present can no longer primarily be deduced from the past nor is it an act of a pure decisionism, but it’s shaped by the future. For me, that’s the key problem and the key indication that the logic of the contemporary with its fixation on the present — you called it the human fixation on experience — that this presentism has difficulties or even completely fails in dealing with the logic of being constituted by the future. I think that’s partly the reason for all the critical reasoning and questioning of contemporaneity in recent years that happened parallel to the so-called speculative turn. Unfortunately, speculation is often discussed as just a logical or philosophical issue but not in its unique time aspect. But obviously we are also still looking for the right philosophical or speculative concepts for this post-contemporary (or past-contemporary) condition or time-complex. SM: Yes, as much as we are each indebted in different ways to speculative realism, and shared the move away from the poststructuralist or late-twentieth century models of philosophy that we both come from, nonetheless speculative realism has mostly argued for an intra-philosophical or conceptual notion of speculation, which is to think of the outside of thought and the experience of thought. The interest of the post-contemporary is to understand and operationalize the present from outside of itself. I don’t know at this point if that is also outside of thought. But, in any case, the time-complex can be thought, with “speculation” taken primarily as a time-historical speculation, like futurity, rather than an exteriority to experience or an exteriority of thought. This brings us much closer to current business and technical operations rather than the conceptual demands of speculative realism. Armen Avanessian frequently teaches at art academies in Europe and the US. He is the founder of the bilingual research platform www.spekulative-poetik.de and editor-in-chief at Merve Verlag Berlin. Recent publications in English include Speculative Drawing (together with Andreas Töpfer, 2014), as co-editor #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014) and Genealogies of Speculation (2016). Avanessian’s Overwrite – Ethics of Knowledge, Poetics of Existance is forthcoming with SternbergPress. Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent publications include “The Ontology of Finance” in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2015), and, as co-editor, Realism Materialism Art (2015) and Genealogies of Speculation (2016). Malik’s book On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art is forthcoming from Urbanomic. continue in the next post: A conversation between Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik is taken from: Footnotes 1. The time-complex is specific to the structures of integrated sociotechnical and psychic mnemic systems of individuation proposed by Bernard Stiegler. See for example Technics and Time Volume 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) and Symbolic Misery Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, trans. Barnaby Norman (Oxford: Polity, 2104). But the speculative time-complex is distinct to Stiegler’s thesis in that (i) it comprises a speculative constitution of time rather than memory and human temporalization, and (ii) the speculative time-complex is here affirmed against Stiegler’s appeal to rescuing an aestheticallyconstituted experience of individuation despite complexifying sociotechnical configurations. 3. Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption,” Theory & Event 10:2, 2007.
by Michel Foucault
An expression which was important in the eighteenth century captures this very well: Quesnay speaks of good government as 'economic government'. This latter notion becomes tautological, given that the art of government is just the art of exercising power in the form and according to the model of the economy. But the reason why Quesnay speaks of 'economic government' is that the word 'economy', for reasons that I will explain later, is in the process of acquiring a modern meaning, and it is at this moment becoming apparent that the very essence of government - that is, the art of exercising power in the form of economy - is to have as its main objective that which we are today accustomed to call 'the economy'.
loading...
The word 'economy', which in the sixteenth century signified a form of government, comes in the eighteenth century to designate a level of reality, a field of intervention, through a series of complex processes that I regard as absolutely fundamental to our history.
The second point which I should like to discuss in Guillaume de La Perriere 's book consists of the following statement: 'government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end'.
I would like to link this sentence with another series of observations. Government is the right disposition of things. I would like to pause over this word 'things', because if we consider what characterizes the ensemble of objects of the prince 's power in Machiavelli, we will see that for Machiavelli the object and, in a sense, the target of power are two things, on the one hand the territory, and on the other its inhabitants. In this respect, Machiavelli simply adapted to his particular aims a juridical principle which from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century defined sovereignty in public law: sovereignty is not exercised on things, but above all on a territory and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it. In this sense we can say, that the territory is the fundamental element both in Machiavellian principality and in juridical soveregnity as defined by the theoreticians and philosoehers of right. Obviously enough, these territories can be fertile or not, - the population dense or sparse, the inhabitants rich or poor, active or lazy, but all these elements are mere variables by comparison with territory itself, which is the very foundation of principality and sovereignty. On the contrary, in La Perriere's text, you wiil notice-that-the, definition of government in no way refers to territory. (One governs things) But what does this mean? I do not think this is a matter of opposing things to men, but rather of showing that what government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in fact men, 'but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those others which are wealth, resources, means of subsistance, the territory with its specifk qualities, climate, irritgration, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to that other kind of things, cust0ms, habits, ways of acting and thinking, etc. lastly man in their-relation to that other kind of things. accidents and misfortnus such as famine. epidemics. death, etc. The fact that government concerns things understood in this way, this imbrication of men and things, is I believe readily confirmed by the metaphor which is inevitably invoked in these treatises on government, namely that of the ship. What does it mean to govern a ship? It means clearly to take charge of the sailors, but also of the boat and its cargo; to take care of a ship means also to reckon with winds, rocks and storms; and it consists in that activity of establishing a relation between the sailors who are to be taken care of and the ship which is to be taken care of, and the cargo which is to be brought safely to port, and all those eventualities like winds, rocks, storms and so on; this is what characterizes the government of a ship. The same goes for the running of a household. Governing a household, a family, does not essentially mean safeguarding the family property; what concerns it is the individuals that compose the family, their wealth and prosperity. It means to reckon with all the possible events that may intervene, such as births and deaths, and with all the things that can be done, such as possible alliances with other families; it is this general form of management that is characteristic of government; by comparison, the question of landed property for the family, and the question of the acquisition of sovereignty over a territory for a prince, are only relatively secondary matters. What counts essentially is this complex of men and things; property and, territory are merely one of its variables.
This theme of the government of things as we find it in La Perriere can also be met with in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Frederick the Great has some notable pages on it in his Anti-Machiavel. He says, for instance, let us compare Holland with Russia: Russia may have the largest territory of any European state, but it is mostly made up of swamps, forests and deserts, and is inhabited by miserable groups of people totally destitute of activity and industry; if one takes Holland, on the other hand, with its tiny territory, again mostly marshland, we find that it nevertheless possesses such a population, such wealth, such commercial activity and such a fleet as to make it an important European state, something that Russia is only just beginning to become.
To govern, then, means to govern things. Let us consider once more the sentence I quoted earlier, where La Perriere says: 'government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end'. Government, that is to say, has a finality of its own, and in this respect again I believe it can be clearly distinguished from sovereignty. I do not of course mean that sovereignty is presented in philosophical and juridical texts as a pure and simple right; no jurist or, a fortiori, theologian ever said that the legitimate sovereign is purely and simply entitled to exercise his power regardless of its ends. The sovereign must always, if he is to be a good sovereign, have as his aim, 'the common welfare and the salvation of all'. Take for instance a late seventeenth-century author. Pufendorf says: 'Sovereign authority is conferred upon them [the rulers] only in order to allow them to use it to attain or conserve what is of public utility'. The ruler may not have consideration for anything advantageous for himself, unless it also be so for the state. What does this common good or general salvation consist of, which the jurists talk about as being the end of sovereignty? If we look closely at the real content that jurists and theologians give to it, we can see that 'the common good' refers to a state of affairs where all the subjects without exception obey the laws, accomplish the tasks expected of them, practise the trade to which they are assigned, and respect the established order so far as this order conforms to the laws imposed by God on nature and men: in other wordst, the common good' means essential obedience to the law, either that of their earthly sovereign ot that God, the absolute sovereign. In every case, what characterizes the end of sovereignty, ihis common and general good, is in sum nothing other than submission to sovereignty. This means that the end of sovereignty is circular: the end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty. The good is obedience to the law, hence the good for sovereignty is that people should obey it. This is an esential circularity which, whatever its theoretical structure, moral justification or practical effects, comes very close to what Machiavelli said when he stated that the primary aim of the prince was to retain llis principality. We always come back to this self-referring circularity of sovereignty or principality.
Now, with the new definition given by La Perriere, with his attempt at a definition of government, I believe we can see emerging a new kind of finality. Government is defined as a right manner of disposing things so as to lead not to the form of the common good, as the jurists' texts would have said, but to an end which is 'convenient' for each of the things that are to be governed. This implies a plurality of specific aims: for instance, government will have to ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, that the population is enabled to multiply, etc. There is a whole series of specific finalities, then, which become the objective of government as such. In order to achieve these various finalities, things must be disposed - and this term, dispose, is important because with sovereignty the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim - that is to say, obedience to the laws - was the law itself; law and sovereignty were absolutely inseparable. On the contrary, with government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics - to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved.
I believe we are at an imporatant turning point here: whereas the end of sovereignty is internal to itself and possesses its own intrinsic instruments in the shape of its laws, the finarlity of government resides in the things it menages and it pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the processes which-it directs; and the instruments of goverment, instead of being laws, now come to be a range or multiform tactics. Within perspective of government, law is not what is important: this is a frequent theme throughout the seventeenth century, and it is made explicit in the eighteenth century texts of the Physiocrats which explain that it is not through law that the aims of government are to be reached.
Finally, a fourth remark, still concerning this text from La Perri ere: he says that a good ruler must have patience, wisdom and diligence. What does he mean by patience? To explain it, he gives the example of the king of bees, the bumble-bee, who, he says, rules the bee-hive without needing a sting; through this example God has sought to show us in a mystical manner that the good governor does not have to have a sting, that is to say, a weapon of killing, a sword - in order to exerclse - liis power; he must have patience rather than wrath, and it is not the right to kill, to employ force, that forms the essence of the figure of the governor. And what positive content accompanies this absence of sting? Wisdom and diligence. Wisdom, understood no longer in the traditional sense as knowledge of divine and human laws, of justice and equality, but rather as the knowledge of things, of the objectives that can and should be attained, and the disposition of things required to reach them; it is this knowledge that is to constitute the wisdom of the sovereign. As for his diligence, this is the principle that a governor should only govern in such a way that he thinks and acts as though he were in the service of those who are governed. And here, once again, La Perriere cites the example of the head of the family who rises first in the morning and goes to bed last, who concerns himself with everything in the household because he considers himself as being in its service. We can see at once how far this characterization of government differs from the idea of the prince as found in or attributed to Machiavelli. To be sure, this notion of governing, for all its novelty, is still very crude here.
This schematic presentation of the notion and theory of the art of government did not remain a purely abstract question in the sixteenth century, and it was not of concern only to political theoreticians. I think we can identify its connections with political reality. The theory of the art of government was linked, from the sixteenth century, to the whole development of the administrative apparatus of the territorial monarchies, the emergence of governmental apparatuses; it was also connected to a set of analyses and forms of knowledge which began to develop in the late sixteenth century and grew in importance during the seventeenth, and which were essentially to do with knowledge of the state, in all its different elements, dimensions and factors of power, questions which were termed precisely 'statistics', meaning the science of the state; finally, as a third vector of connections, I do not think one can fail to relate this search for an art of government to mercantilism and the Cameralists' science of police.
To put it very schematically, in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, the art of government finds its first form of crystallization, organized around the theme of reason of state, understood not in the negative and pejorative sense we give to it today (as that which infringes on the principles of law, equity and humanity in the sole interests of the state), but in a full and positive sense: the state is governed according to rational principles which are intrinsic to it and which cannot be derived solely from natural or divine laws or the principles of wisdom and prudence; the state, like nature, has its own proper form of rationality, albeit of a different sort. Conversely, the art of government, instead of seeking to found itself in transcendental rules, a cosmological model or a philosophico-moral ideal, must find the principles of its rationality in that which constitutes the specific reality of the state. In my subsequent lectures I will be examining the elements of this first form of state rationality. But we can say here that, right until the early eighteenth century, this form of 'reason of state' acted as a sort of obstacle to the development of the art of goverment.
This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are the strictly historical ones, the series of great crises of the seventeenth century: first the Thirty Years War with its ruin and devastation; then in the mid-century the peasant and urban rebellions; and finally the financial crisis, the crisis of revenues which affected all Western monarchies at the end of the century. The art of government could only spread and develop in subtlety in an age of expansion, free from the great military, political and economic tensions which afflicted the seventeenth century from beginning to end. Massive and elementary historical causes thus blocked the propagation of the art of government. I think also that the doctrine formulated during the sixteenth century was impeded in the seventeenth by a series of other factors which I might term, to use expressions which I do not much care for, mental and institutional structures. The preeminence of the problem of the exercise of sovereignty, both as a theoretical question and as a principle of political organization, was the fundamental factor here so long as sovereignty remained the central question. So long as the institutions of sovereignty were the basic political institutions and the exercise conceived as an-exercise of sovereignty, the art of government could not be developed in a specific and autonomous manner. I think we have a good example of this in mercantilism. Mercantilism might be described as the first sanctioned efforts to apply this art of government at the level of political practices and knowledge of the state; in this sense one can in fact say that mercantilism represents a first threshold of rationality in this art of government which La Perriere's text had defined in terms more moral than real. Mercantilism is the first rationalization of the exercise of power as a practice of government; for the first time with mercantilism we see the development of a savoir of state that can be used as a tactic of government. All this may be true, but mercantilism was blocked and arrested, I believe, precisely by the fact that it took as its essential objective the might of the sovereign; it sought a way not so much to increase the wealth of the country as to allow the ruler to accumulate wealth, build up his treasury and create the army with which he could carry out his policies. And the instruments mercantilism used were laws, decrees, regulations: that is to say, the traditional weapons of sovereignty. The objective was sovereign's might, the instruments those of sovereignty: mercantilism sought to reinsert the possibilities opened up by a consciously conceived art of government within a mental and institutional structure, that of sovereignty, which by its very nature stifled them.
Thus, throughout the seventeenth century up to the liquidation of the themes of mercantilism at the beginning of the eighteenth, the art of government remained in a certain sense immobilized. It was trapped within the inordinately vast, abstract, rigid framework of the problem and institution of sovereignty. This art of government tried, so to speak, to reconcile itself with the theory of sovereignty by attempting to derive the ruling principles of an art of government from a renewed version of the theory of sovereignty - and this is where those seventeenth-century jurists come into the picture who formalize or ritualize the theory of the contract. Contract theory enables the founding contract, the mutual pledge of ruler and subjects, to function as a sort of theoretical matrix for deriving the generaL principle of an art of goverment. But although contract theory: with its reflection on the relations up between ruler and subjects, played a very important role in theories of public law, in practice, as is evidenced by the case of Hobbes (even though what Hobbes was aiming to discover was the ruling principles of an art of government), it remained at the stage of the formulation of general principles of public law.
On the one hand, there was this framework of sovereignty which was too large, too abstract and too rigid; and on the other, the theory of government suffered from its reliance on a model which was too thin, too weak and too insubstantial, that of the family: an economy of enrichment still based on a model of the family was unlikely to be able to respond adequately to the importance of territorial possessions and royal finance.
How then was the art of government able to outflank these obstacles? Here again a number of general processes played their part: the demographic expansion of the eighteenth century, connected with an increasing abundance of money, which in turn was linked to the expansion of agricultural production through a series of circular processes with which the historians are familiar. If this is the general picture, then we can say more precisely that the art of government found fresh outlets through'the emergence of the problem of population; or let us say rather that there occurred a subtle process, which we must seek to reconstruct in its particulars, through which the science of government, the recentring of the theme of economy on a different plane from that of the family, and the problem of population are all interconnected.
It was through the development of the science of government that the notion of economy came to be recent red on to that different plane of reality which we characterize today as the 'economic ', and it was also through this science that it became possible to identify problems specific to the population; but conversely we can say as well that it was thanks to the perception of the specific problems of the population, and thanks to the isolation of that area of reality that we call the economy, that the problem of government finally came to be thought, reflected and calculated outside of the juridical framework of sovereignty. And that 'statistics' which, in mercantilist tradition, only ever worked within and for the benefit of a monarchical administration that functioned according to the form of sovereignty, now becomes the major technical factor, or one of the major technical factors, of this new technology.
In what way did the problem of population make possible the derestriction of the art of government? The perspective of population, the reality accorded to specific phenomena of population, render possible the final elimination of the model of the family and the recentring of the notion of economy. Whereas statistics had previously worked within the administrative frame and thus in terms of the functioning of sovereignty, it now gradually reveals that population has its own regularities, its own rate of deaths and diseases, its cycles of scarcity, etc.; statistics shows also that the domain of population involves a range of intrinsic, aggregate effects, phenomena that are irreducible to those of the family, such as epidemics, endemic levels of mortality, ascending spirals of labour and wealth; lastly it shows that, through its shifts, customs, activities, etc., population has specific economic effects: statistics, by making it possible to quantify these specific phenomena of population, also shows that this specificity is irreducible to the dimension of the family. The latter now disappears as the model of government, except for a certain number of residual themes of a religious or moral nature. What, on the other hand, now emerges into prominence is the family considered as an element internal to population, and as a fundamental instrument in its government.
In other words, prior to the emergency of population, it was impossible to conceive the art of government except on the model of the familly terms of economy concieved, as the management of a famIly; from the moment when, on the contrary, population apears absoluteiy irreducible to the family, the latter become population, as an element internal to population: no longer, that is to say, a model, but a segment. Nevertheless it remains a privileged segment, because whenever information is required concerning the population, (sexual behaviour, demography, consumption, etc.), it has to be obtained through the family. But the family becomes an instrument rather than a model: the privileged instrument for the government of the population and not the chimerical model of good goverment. This shift from the level of the model to that of an instrument is, I believe, absolutdly .fundamental, and it is from the middle of the eighteenth century that the family appears in this dimension of instrumentality relative to the population, with the institution of campaigns to reduce mortalIty and to promote marriages, vaccinations, etc. Thus, what makes it possible f9f the theme of population to unblock the field of the art of government is this elimination of the family as model.
In the second place, population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government. In contrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government uses to attain these ends are themselves all in some sense immanent to the population; it is the population itself on which government will act either directly through large-scale campaigns, or indirectly through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth rates, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities, etc. The population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, but it is also the object in the hands of the government, aware, vis-a-vis the government, of what it wants, but ignorant of what is being done to it. Interest at the level of the conciousness of each individual who goes to'make up the population,and interest considered as the interest of tne population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be or the individuals, who compose it, this is the new target and the fundamental instrument of the government of population: the birth of a new art, or at any rate of a range of absolutely new tactics and techniques.
Lastly, population is the point around which is organized what in sixteenth-century texts came to be called the patience of the sovereign, in the sense that the population is the object that government must take into account in all its observations and savoir, in order to be able to govern effectively in a rational and conscious manner. The constitution of a savoir of government is absolutely inseparable from that of a knowledge of all the processes related to population in Its larger sense: that is to say, what we now call the economy. I said in my last lecture that the constitution of political economy depended upon the emergence from among all the various elements of wealth of a new subject: population. The new science caned poiitlcal economy arises out of the perception of new networks of continuous and multiple relations between population, territory and wealth; and this is accompanied by the formation of a type of intervention characteristic of government, namely intervention in the field of economy and population. In other words, the transition which takes place in the eighteenth century from an art of government to a political science, from a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to one ruled by techniques of government, turns on the theme of population and hence also on the birth of political economy.
This is not to say that sovereignty ceases to play a role from the moment when the art of government begins to become a political science; I would say that, on the contrary, the problem of sovereignty was never posed with greater force than at this time, because it no longer involved, as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an attempt to derive an art of government from a theory of sovereignty, but instead, given that such an art now existed and was spreading, involved an attempt to see what juridical and institutional form, what foundation in the law, could be given to the sovereignty that characterizes a state. It suffices to read in chronological succession two different texts by Rousseau. In his Encyclopaedia article on 'Political economy', we can see the way in which Rousseau sets up the problem of the art of government by pointing out (and the text is very characteristic from this point of view) that the word 'oeconomy' essentially signifies the management of family properrty by the father, but that this model can no longer be accepted, even if it had been valid in the past; today we know, says Rousseau, that political economy is not the economy of the family, and even without making explicit reference to the Physiocrats, to statistics or to the general problem of the poplliation, he sees quite clearly this turning point consisting in the fact that the economy of 'political economy' has a totally' new sense which cannot be reduced to the old model of the, family, He undertakes in this article' the task of giving a new definition of the art of government. Later he writes The Social Contract, where he poses the problem of how it is possible, using concepts like nature, contract and general will, to provide a general principle of goverment which allows, room both for a juridical principle of sovereigiIty and for the elements through which an art of government can be defined and characterized. Consequently, sovereignty is far from being eliminated by the emergence of a new art of government, even by one which has passed the threshold of political science; on the contrary, the problem of sovereignty is made more acute than ever.
As for discipline, this is not eliminated either; clearly its modes of organization, all the institutions within which it had developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - schools, manufactories, armies, etc. - all this can only be understood on the basis of the development of the great adminis.trative monarchies, but nevertheless, discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it became important to manage a population; the managing of a population not only concerns the collective mass of phenomena, the level of its aggregate effects, it also implies the management of population in its depths and its details. The notion of a government of population renders all the more acute the problem of the foundation of sovereignty (consider Rousseau) and all the more acute equally the necessity for the development of discipline (consider all the history of the disciplines, which I have attempted to analyze elsewhere).
Accordingly, we need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a _disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security. In any case, I wanted to demonstrate the deep historical link between the movement that overturns the constants of sovereignty in consequence of the problem of choices of government, the movement that brings about the emergence of population as a datum, as a field of intervention and as an objective of governmental techniques, and the process which isolates the economy as a specific sector of reality, and political economy as the science and the technique of intervention of the government in that field of reality. Three movements: government, population, p0litical economy, which constitute from the eighteenth century onwards a solid seres, one which even today has assuredly not been dissolved.
In conclusion I would like to say that on second thoughts the more exact title I would like to have given to the course of lectures which I have begun this year is not the one I originally chose, 'Security, territory and population': what I would like to undertake is something which I would term a history of 'governmentality'. By this word I mean three things:
1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.
3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes 'governmentalized'.
We all know the fascination which the love, or horror, of the state exercises today; we know how much attention is paid to the genesis of the state, its history, its advance, its power and abuses, etc. The excessive
value attributed to the problem of the state is expressed, basically, in two ways: the one form, immediate, affective and tragic, is the lyricism of the monstre froid we see confronting us; but there is a second way of overvaluing the problem of the state, one which is paradoxical because apparently reductionist: it is the form of analysis that consists in reducing the state to a certain number of functions, such as the development of productive forces and the reproduction of relations of production, and yet this reductionist vision of the relative importance of the state's role nevertheless invariably renders it absolutely essential as a target needing to be attacked and a privileged position needing to be occupied. But the state, no more probably today than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance; rnaybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraqion, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think. Maybe what is really important for our modernity - that is, for our present, - is not so much the etatision of society, as the govermentalization of the state.
We live in the era of a 'governmentality' first discovered in the eighteenth century. This governmentalization of the state is a singularly paradoxical phenomenon, since if in fact the problems of governmentality and the techniques of government have become the only political issue, the only real space for political struggle and contestation, this is because the governmentalization of the state is at the same time what has permitted the state to survive, and it is possible to suppose that if the state is what it is today, this is so precisely thanks to this governmentality, which is at once internal and external to the state, since it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits of the basis of the general tactics of governmentality.
And maybe we could even, albeit in a very global, rough and inexact fashion, reconstruct in this manner the great forms and economies of power in the West. First of all, the state of justice, born in the feudal type of territorial regime which corresponds to a society of laws - either customs or written laws - involving a whole reciprocal play of obligation and litigation; second, the administrative state, born in the territoriality of national boundaries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and corresponding to a society of regulation and discipline; and finally a governmental state, essentially defined no longer in terms of its territoriality, of its surface area, but in terms of the mass of its population with its volume and density, and indeed also with the territory over which it is distributed, although this figures here only as one among its component elements. This state of government which bears essentially on population and both refers itself to and makes use of the instrumentation of economic savoir could be seen as corresponding to a type of society controlled by apparatuses of security.
In the following lectures I will try to show how governmentality was born out of, on the one hand, the archaic model of Christian pastoral, and, on the other, a diplomatic-military technique, perfected on a European scale with the Treaty of Wesphalia; and that it could assume the dimensions it has only thanks to a series of specific instruments, whose formation is exactly contemporaneous with that of the art of government and which are known, in the old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense of the term, as police. The pastoral. the new diplomatic-military techniques and, lastly, police: these are the three-elerments that I believe made possible the production of this fundamental phenomenon in Western history, the governmentalization of the state.
excerpt from the book: THE FOUCAULT EFFECT, STUDIES IN GOVERNMENTALITY/ LECTURES BY MICHEL FOUCAULT
loading...
by Michel Foucault
In a previous lecture on 'apparatuses of security', I tried to explain the emergence of a set of problems specific to the issue of population, and on closer inspection it turned out that we would also need to take into account the problematic of government. In short, one needed to analyze the series: security, population, government. I would now like to try to begin making an inventory of this question of government.
loading...
Throughout the Middle Ages and classical antiquity, we find a multitude of treatises presented as 'advice to the prince ', concerning his proper conduct, the exercise of power, the means of securing the acceptance and respect of his subjects, the love of God and obedience to him, the application of divine law to the cities of men, etc. But a more striking fact is that, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, there develops and flourishes a notable series of political treatises that are no longer exactly 'advice to the prince ', and not yet treatises of political science, but are instead presented as works on the 'art of government'. Goverment as a general problem seems to me to exploded in the sixteenth century, posed by discutions of quite diverse questions. One has, for example, the question of the government of oneself, that ritualization of the problem of personal conduct which is characteristic of the sixteenth century Stoic revival. There is the problem of the goverment of souls and lives, the entire theme of Catholic and Protestant pastoral - doctrine. There is government of children and great problematic of pedagogy which emerges and develops - during the sixteenth century. And, perhaps only as the last of these questions to be taken up, there is the government of the state by the prince. How to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor - all these problems, in their multiplicity and intensity, seem to me to be characteristic of the sixteenth century, which lies, to put it schematically, at the crossroads of two processes: the one which, shattering the structures of feudalism, leads to the establishment of the great territorial, administrative and colonial states; and that totally different movement which, with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, raises the issue of how one must be spiritually ruled and led on this earth in order to achieve eternal salvation.
There is a double movement, then, of state centralization on the one hand and of dispersion and religious dissidence on the other: it is, I believe, at the intersection of these two tendencies that the problem comes to pose itself with this peculiar intensity, of how to be ruled, how strictly, by whom, to what end, by what methods, etc. There is a problematic of government in general.
We must first of all remember that Machiavelli's The Prince was not immediately made an object of execration, but on the contrary was honoured by its immediate contemporaries and immediate successors, and also later at the end of the eighteenth century (or perhaps rather at the very beginning of the nineteenth century), at the very moment when all of this literature on the art of government was about to come to an end. The Prince re-emerges at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, where it is translated, prefaced and commented upon by writers such as Rehberg, Leo, Ranke and Kellerman, and also in Italy. It makes its appearance in a context which is worth analyzing, one which is partly Napoleonic, but also partly created by the Revolution and the problems of revolution in the United States, of how and under what conditions a ruler's sovereig'lty over the state can be maintained; but this is also the context in which there emerges, with Clausewitz, the problem (whose political importance was evident at the Congress of Vienna in 1815) of the relationship between politics and strategy, and the problem of relations of force and the calculation of these relations as a principle of intelligibility and rationalization in international relations; and lastly, in addition, it connects with the problem of Italian and German territorial unity, since Machiavelli had been one of those who tried to define the conditions under which Italian territorial unity could be restored.
This is the context in which Machiavelli re-emerges. But it is clear that, between the initial honour accorded him in the sixteenth century and his rediscovery at the start of the nineteenth, there was a whole 'affair' around his work, one which was complex and took various forms: some explicit praise of Machiavelli (Naude, Machon), numerous frontal attacks (from Catholic sources: Ambrozio Politi, Disputationes de Libris a Christiano detestandis; and from Protestant sources: Innocent Gentillet, Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner contre Nicolas Machiavel, 1576), and also a number of implicit critiques (G. de La Perriere, Miroir politique, 1567; Th. Elyott, The Governor, 1580; P. Paruta, Della Perfezione della Vita politica, 1579).
This whole debate should not be viewed solely in terms of its relation to Machiavelli's text and what were felt to be its scandalous or radically unacceptable aspects. It needs to be seen in terms of something which it was trying to define in its specificity, namely an art of government. Some authors rejected the idea of a new art of government centred on the state and reason of state, which they stigmatized with the name of Machiavellianism; others rejected Machiavelli by showing that there existed an art of government which was both rational and legitimate, and of which Machiavelli's The Prince was only an imperfect approximation or caricature; finally, there were others who, in order to prove the legitimacy of a particular art of government, were willing to justify some at least of Machiavelli's writings (this was what Naude did to the Discourses on Livy; Machon went so far as to attempt to show that nothing was more Machiavellian than the way in which, according to the Bible, God himself and his prophets had guided the Jewish people).
All these authors shared a common concern to distance themselves from a certain conception of the art of government which, once shorn of its theological foundations and religious justifications, took the sole interest of the prince as its object and principle of rationality. Let us leave aside the question of whether the interpretation of Machiavelli in these debates was accurate or not. The essential thing is that they attempted to articulate a kind of rationality which was intrinsic to the art of government, without subordinating it to the problematic of the prince and of his relationship to the principality of which he is lord and master.
The art of government is therefore defined in a manner differentiating it from a certain capacity of the prince, which some think they can find expounded in Machiavelli's writings, which others are unable to find; while others again will criticize this art of government as a new form of Machiavellianism.
This politics of The Prince, fictitious or otherwise, from which people sought to distance themselves, was characterized by one principle: for Machiavelli, it was alleged, the prince stood in a relation of singularity and externality, and thus of transcendence, to his principality. The prince acquires his principality by inheritance or conquest, but in any case, he does not form part of it, he remains external to it. The link that binds him to his principality may have been established through violence, through family heritage or by treaty, with the complicity or the alliance of other princes; this makes no difference, the link, in any event, remains a purely synthetic one and there is no fundamental, essential, natural and juridical connection between the prince and his principality. As a corollary of this, given that this link is external, it will be fragile and continually under threat - from outside by the prince's enemies who seek to -conqueror re-capture his principality, and from within by subjects who have a priori reason to accept his rule. Finally, this principle and its corollary lead to a conclusion, deduced as an imperative: that the objective of the exercise of power is to reinforce, strengthen and protect the principality, but with this last understood to mean not the objective ensemble of its subjects and the territory, but rather the prince 's relation with what he owns, with the territory he has inherited or acquired, and with his - subjects. This fragile link is what the art of governing or of being a prince - espoused by Machiavelli has as its object. As. a consequence of this the mode of analysis of Machiavelli's text will be twofold: to identify dangers (where they come from, what they consist in, their severity: which are the greater, which the slighter), and, secondly, to develop the art of manipulating relations of force that will allow the prince to ensure the protection of his principality, understood as the link that binds him to his territory and his subjects.
Schematically, one can say that Machiavelli's The Prince, as profiled in all these implicitly or explicitly anti-Machiavellian treatises, is essentially a treatise about the prince 's ability to keep his principality. And it is this savoir-faire that the anti-Machiavellian literaiure wants to replace by something else and new, namely the art of government. Having the ability to retain one 's principality is not at all the same thing as possessing the art of governing. But what does this latter ability comprise? To get a view of this problem, which is still at a raw and early stage, let us consider one of the earliest texts of this great anti-Machiavellian literature: Guillaume de La Perriere's Miroir Politique.
This text, disappointingly thin in comparison with Machiavelli, prefigures a number of important ideas. First of all, what does La Perriere mean by 'to govern' and 'governor': what definition does he give of these terms? On page 24 of his text he writes: 'governor can signify monarch, emperor, king, prince, lord, magistrate, prelate, judge and the like'. Like La Perriere, others who write on the art of government constantly recall that one speaks also of 'governing' a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, a family.
These points of simple vocabulary actually have important political implications: Machiavelli's Prince, at least as these authors interpret him, is by definition unique in his principality and occupies a position of externality and transcendence. We have seen, however, that practices of government are, on the one hand, multifarious and concern many kinds of people: the head of a family, the superior of a convent, the teacher or tutor of a child or pupil; so that there are several forms of government among which the prince's relation to his state is only one particular mode; while, on the other hand, all these other kinds of government are internal to the state or society. It is within the state that the father will rule the family, the superior the convent, etc. Thus we find at once a plurality of forms of government and their immanence to the state: the multiplicity and immanence of these activities distinguishes them radically from the transcendent singularity of Machiavelli's prince.
To be sure, among all these forms of government which interweave within the state and society, there remains one special and precise form: there is the question of defining the particular form of governing which can be applied to the state as a whole. Thus, seeking to produce a typology of forms of the art of government, La Mothe Le Vayer, in a text from the following century (consisting of educational writings intended for the French Dauphin), says that there are three fundamental types of government, each of which relates to a particular science or discipline: the art of self-government, connected with morality; the art of properly governing a family, which belongs to economy; and finally the science of ruling the state, which concerns politics. In comparison with morality and economy, politics evidently has its own specific nature, which La Mothe Le Vayer states clearly. What matters, notwithstanding this typology, is that the art of government is always characterized by the essential continuity of one type with the other, and of a second type with a third.
This means that, whereas the doctrine of the prince and the juridical theory of sovereignty are constantly attempting to draw the line betweell the power of the prince and any other form of power, because its task is to explain and justify this essential discontinuity, between them, in the art of goverment the task is to establish a continuity, in both an upwards and a downwards direction.
Upwards continuity means that a person who wishes to govern the state well must first learn how to govern himself, his goods and his patrimony, after which he will be successful in governing the state. This ascending line characterizes the pedagogies of the prince, which are an important issue at this time, as the example of La Mothe Le Vayer shows: he wrote for the Dauphin first a treatise of morality, then a book of economics and lastly a political treatise. It is the pedagogical formation of the prince, then, that will assure this upwards continuity. On the other hand, we also have a downwards continuity in the sense that, when a state is well run, the head of the family will know how to look after his family, his goods and his patrimony, which means that individuals will, in turn, behave as they should. This downwards line, which transmits to individual behaviour and the running of the family the same principles as the good government of the state, is just at this time beginning to be called police. The prince's pedagogical formation ensures the upwards continuity of the forms of government, and police the downwards one. The central term of this continuity is the government of the family, termed economy.
The art of government, as becomes apparent in this literature, is essentially concerned with answering the question of how to introduce economy - that is to say, the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children, and servants) and of making the family fortunes prosper - how to introduce this meticulous attention or the
father towards his family into the management of the state.
This, I believe, is the essential issue' in the establishment of the art of government: the introduction of the economy into political practice. And if this is the case in the sixteenth century, it remains so in the eighteenth. In Rousseau's Encyclopedia article on 'Political economy,' the problem is still posed in the same terms. What he says here, roughly, that the word economy can only properly be used to signify the wise government of the family for the common welfare of all, and this is its actual use; the problem, writes Rousseau, is how to introduce it, mutatis mutandis, and with all the discontinuities that we will observe below, into the general running of the state. To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods.
excerpt from the book: THE FOUCAULT EFFECT, STUDIES IN GOVERNMENTALITY/ LECTURES BY MICHEL FOUCAULT
loading...
by Katharine Streip METAPHORS AND COMIC PRACTICEHow are avant-gardes identified and what practices account for that identification? What are the criteria that enable us to identify contemporary avant-garde artists and what do those criteria say about both the cultural establishments that recognize movements or artists as avant-garde and avant-garde practitioners themselves? William S. Burroughs offers an exemplary test case for these questions. In spite of its significance, his work still has not received academic canonization and continues to rest on the margins of American literary culture because of its fragmentary structure, the apparent contradictions of its cultural critiques and its outrageous humor. It is difficult to reconcile Burroughs’s humor with the aesthetic goals of canonical postmodernism or with any straightforward political critique. A crucial impediment to Burroughs’s reception is his humor. And as Burroughs remarks, ‘Much of my work is intended to be funny’ (1984:266). How does humor function as an avant-garde strategy? Humor as a strategic avant-garde tactic that both transgresses and aims at eliminating the separation of art from life has been under-theorized. This is not surprising, as comedy (and theorizing about comedy) continues, for the most part, to occupy a position within critical discourse which ironically parallels the position of ‘female’ in gender constructs: it is a genre and a practice viewed as superficial, minor, lightweight, trivial and disreputable. As Susan Purdie observes in Comedy: Mastery of Discourse, ‘the criticism of comedy is a site on which the assumptions a critic makes about what is valuable and possible in our general experience become especially apparent’ (1993:120). Laughter has traditionally been viewed with suspicion in Western cultures; even a subject such as sex, a great inspiration for joke work, can pose a challenge to laughter. For example, Burroughs writes in a letter to Allen Ginsberg ‘(Note that sex and laughter are considered incompatible. You are supposed to take sex seriously. Imagine a Reichian’s reaction to my laughing sex kick! But it is the nature of laughter to recognize no bounds)’ (LTG 80). Humor within Burroughs’s work can be read as a social practice and as a formal and a performative strategy, a way to probe and to explore boundaries. Here, current work on theories of globalization can be useful in expressing the relation between Burroughs’s humor and the fictional landscape of his work. Just as modernization frameworks characterized social science programs in the period after World War II (Tsing 2000:454), today, globalization theories encourage us to imagine a new world in the making. I am particularly interested in the metaphors that inform the discourses of globalization, how they function to add to the charisma of the notion of an era of globalization, and how these metaphors in turn can illuminate Burroughs’s comic practice. For example, the effect of Burroughs’s humor within his work can be compared to the shifts in landscapes constituted by global cultural flows. These flows, identified by Arjun Appadurai as ethnoscapes (the moving landscape of people), mediascapes (the distribution of electronic capabilities to disseminate information), technoscapes (the global configuration of technology), financescapes (the movements of global capital) and ideoscapes (a chain of ideas composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview) (1996:50–53), qualify the nature, depth and even the very existence of a global culture that is post-nationalist, postcolonial, postmodern and cosmopolitan. Burroughs’s humor as well shapes and qualifies the landscapes that he imagines in his fictions. Just as Appadurai’s global flows ‘give rise to a profusion of fluid, irregularly shaped, variously textured and constantly changing landscapes’ (Hay and Marsh 2000:2), Burroughs’s humor unsettles any stable reading of his fictional landscapes. Global interconnectedness suggests a world full of movement and mixture, contact and linkages, and cultural interaction and exchange (Inda and Rosaldo 2002b:2). As Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo argue, this interconnectedness ‘implies a speeding up of the flows of capital, people, goods, images and ideas across the world […] suggest[ing] an intensification of the links, modes of interaction, and flows that interconnect the world’ and producing ‘a stretching of social, cultural, political, and economic practices across frontiers’ (9). In consequence, ‘while everyone might continue to live local lives, their phenomenal worlds have to some extent become global as distant events come to have an impact on local spaces, and local developments come to have global repercussions’ (9). A question that frames many discussions of globalization is that of whether globalization necessarily leads to a cultural homogenization of the world, ‘the installation worldwide of western versions of basic social-cultural reality: the West’s epistemological and ontological theories, its values, ethical systems, approaches to rationality, technical-scientific worldview, political culture, and so on’ (Tomlinson 1997:144). Tomlinson points out that cultural materials do not transfer in a unilinear manner, with what is called a hypodermic model of media effects (Morley and Robins 1995:126), but require the recognition of a context of complex reception. An appreciation of Burroughs’s exploration of boundaries through humor demands a similar recognition of the complexity of the context of reception. Although humor and globalization may seem metaphorically distant, as Appadurai insists, ‘[t]he imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order’ (1996:49). Anna Tsing makes an important point: Globalization draws our enthusiasm because it helps us imagine interconnection, travel and sudden transformation. [F]low is valorized but not the carving of the channel; national and regional units are mapped as the baseline of change without attention to their shifting and contested ability to define the landscape […] We describe the landscape imagined within these claims rather than the culture and politics of scale making. (2000:456) Burroughs’s work with humor insistently reminds us of the culture, politics and values that shape our responses. It represents both a seduction into laughter and a call for a critical stance toward the assumptions and fantasies represented by his comic practice. VAMPIRIC EMOTIONAL POSSESSIONBurroughs’s use of the imagination and the effects of humor can be seen in the presence of routines, or comic monologues, throughout his work. Many of Burroughs’s routines originate in letters he wrote to Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s after the end of their love affair. Ginsberg describes these routines as ‘conscious projections of Burroughs’ love fantasies—further explanations and parodies and models of our ideal love schlupp together. I was somewhat resistant, so much of his fantasy consists of a parody of his invasion of my body and brain’ (LTG 6). Timothy S. Murphy also identifies these routines as a ‘means of seduction […] Through these routines, Burroughs hoped to win the errant Ginsberg back’ (1997:144). However, as Ginsberg points out, to ‘schlupp’ means ‘to devour a soul parasitically’. If the routines in Burroughs’s fiction establish a relationship with his readers similar to the relationship with Ginsberg as a recipient of his letters, we must ask, is Burroughs’s humor intended to seduce his readers? Is it aggressively meant to devour interlocutors, as his consciousness effectively takes over ours and sets off a laughter mechanism? Or does Burroughs mean to warn us of the potential for a kind of vampiric emotional possession through our reception of his entertaining and disturbing routines? Jamie Russell certainly views Burroughs’s routines as threatening because of their tendency to collapse boundaries: ‘Both fantastic and realistic, the routine is monstrous. Its schizophrenic oscillation between opposed registers (real/fictional, comic/terrifying, masculine/ feminine) threatens to overwhelm the teller, turning him into a mere ventriloquist’s dummy […] In this respect, the routine feminizes the receiver, throwing him into a camp hysteria that is likely to tear him apart, bringing about his psychic disintegration’ (2001:22). In the relationship set up by Burroughs’s routines, the comic, who should be the ventriloquist here, becomes transformed into a ventriloquist’s dummy (evoking the disturbing transfer of subjectivity between Burroughs’s Carny man and the talking asshole), while the receiver, possessed by laughter, also risks the loss of a stable self. Russell tentatively recuperates this potential psychic disintegration by ascribing the prestige of a survivor who has confronted the danger of self-loss and reveled in bawdiness to the appreciative audience of Burroughs’s routines, but the undermining potential for psychic dissolution remains. In recognition of this psychic threat, Burroughs clearly does not offer a utopian presentation of humor. A haunting passage from Naked Lunch—the Sailor ‘laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to serve some obscure function of orientation like a bat’s squeak’ (NL 47)—suggests that for Burroughs, laughter is an involuntary, automatic reaction that we would not necessarily recognize as human in volition, but which can serve as a tool for orientation. As the passage continues, ‘The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped laughing and hung there motionless listening down into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency of junk’ (NL 47). Laughter is addictive and compulsive, and can be compared to involuntary physical responses such as sneezing, hiccupping and coughing, as we see in an incident in The Wild Boys: ‘The boys pulled their eyes up at the corners yacking in false Chinese. The effect was irresistibly comic. Then the boys laughed. They laughed and laughed laughing inside us all the officers were laughing doubled over holding their guts in. The boys sneezed and coughed. They posted themselves in front of the CIA man and began to hiccup’ (WB 132). The boys’ laughter collapses the boundaries between officers and wild boys as their laughter erupts from within the officers. The boys’ irresistible pranks prevent the officers from reasserting their autonomy, as they are literally possessed by seizures of laughter, hiccups, coughs and sneezes. The body takes over, the contagion spreads, the boys grab guns and in seconds hundreds of soldiers lie dead. Laughter involves and expresses contradictory registers of emotion. D. H. Monro, Gregory Bateson and other reception-oriented humor theorists claim that a single, discrete emotion does not cause laughter, but rather an abrupt movement from one ‘emotional sphere’ to another (Monro 1951:249) or the interval of affective ‘oscillation’ created by this movement (Bateson 1953:6). This oscillation brings about the ‘sharp cold bray of laughter’ that an ass-like Le Comte repeatedly ‘emits’ in The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (128,137) and Port of Saints (38, 52, as well as the French Consul, 37). Because laughter is multi-referential, with shifting agendas, it can engage our awareness of the elements involved in its circulation through Burroughs’s work in its exploration of boundaries and social limits. This oscillation of emotions informs definitions of the term ‘prank’, a comic practice specifically associated with Burroughs (if you search Google with the words ‘William Burroughs prank’ four out of the first five responses will describe the death of his wife Joan Vollmer, ‘killed in a drunken prank’. According to Burroughs, this ‘prank’ was both a case of possession [Morgan 1988:198] with tragic consequences, and the enabling source of his becoming a writer—‘I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out’ [Q xxii]). Is a prank a malicious act, a trick, a practical joke? Are there criteria for good and for bad pranks? V. Vale and Andrea Juno argue that the best pranks invoke the imagination, poetic imagery, the unexpected and a deep level of irony or social criticism […] Great pranks create synaesthetic experiences which are unmistakably exciting, original and reverberating, as well as creative, metaphoric, poetic and artistic. If these criteria be deemed sufficient, then pranks can be considered as constituting an art form and genre in themselves. Bad pranks, on the other hand, are characterized not only by unoriginality but by conventionalized cruelty, these pointless humiliations do nothing to raise consciousness or alter existing power relationships. They are deeds which only further the status-quo; they only perpetuate the acceptance of and submission to arbitrary authority, or abet existing hierarchical inequities. Basically these include all pranks recognizable as ‘clichés’—those which contribute no new poetic imagery. (1987:4–5) According to Vale and Juno, good pranks are both creative and critical and play an important role in the history of art, in world myths and in written literature. Bad pranks, on the other hand, are conservative and conventional. A good prank crosses borders: ‘[G]enuinely poetic/imaginative pranks resist facile categorization, and transcend inflexible (and often questionable) demarcations between legality and illegality, good and bad taste, and right and wrong social conduct’ (1987:5). Rabelais’s Panurge, the master prankster, provides a model here, in his challenge to boundaries in the world of the Renaissance, a period where laughter also responded to a new awareness of the global. And as Tsing reminds us, ‘[t]he idea that global interconnections are old has only recently been revitalized, muffled as it was for much of the twentieth century by the draw of nationally contained legacies, in history, and functionally contained social worlds, in anthropology; it seems unfortunate to lose this insight so quickly’ (2000:459). Comic practices can both articulate and respond to the shifting borders of globalization. THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCALAs an example of Burroughs’s appreciation of the circulation between the global and the local, we might look at a famous routine which speculates on the consequences that arise when body parts assume their own lives: states of consciousness, individual agency and autonomy, stable philosophical and theological values are put up for grabs. In a discussion of the global traffic in human organs, Nancy Scheper-Hughes points out, for example, that ‘[t]ransplant surgery has reconceptualized social relations between self and other, between individual and society, and among the “three bodies”—the existential lived body-self, the social, representational body, and the body political’ (2000:272). While these concerns may seem recent, the literature of talking body parts, expressing anxiety and humor over autonomous organs, can be traced back to the Old French fabliaux, anonymous narratives dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, short humorous tales written in octosyllabic couplets that present bawdy anecdotes, practical jokes and tricks of revenge, including such stories as ‘Le Débat du con et du cul’ (‘The Dispute between the Cunt and the Anus’) (Bloch 1986:105). Burroughs’s ‘talking asshole’ routine continues this legacy by probing the demarcations of the legal, of taste and of social conduct through humor. A first version of this sequence occurs in a letter to Ginsberg dated 7 February 1954. Burroughs prefaces the routine with a description of how he procrastinates before he settles down ‘to write something saleable’—emphasizing how the routine itself is a commodity that explores commodification: So finally I say: ‘Now you must work’ and smoke some tea and sit down and out it comes all in one piece like a glob of spit: The incredibly obscene, thinly disguised references and situations that slip by in Grade B movies, the double entendres, perversion, sadism of popular songs, poltergeist knockings and mutterings of America’s putrifying [sic] unconscious, boils that swell until they burst with a fart noise as if the body had put out an auxilary [sic] ass hole with a stupid, belligerent Bronx cheer. (LTG 17–18) Burroughs clearly draws a connection between America’s putrefying unconscious, as expressed in the popular culture of movies and songs, and the routine of the chattering asshole that culminates in a brain assumed to be dead because there is no more feeling in the eyes ‘than a crab’s eye on the end of a stalk’. After the routine, Burroughs continues with a discussion of border crossings: So what I started to talk about was the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there’s always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, as giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out globs of that Un D. T. [undifferentiated tissue—a crucial part of the talking asshole routine] to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate, cancerous life form, reproducing a hideous random image. (LTG 19) Burroughs then significantly equates himself, or his humor, with the asshole who takes over: This is my saleable product. Do you dig what happens? It’s almost like automatic writing produced by a hostile, independent entity who is saying in effect ‘I will write what I please.’ At the same time when I try to pressure myself into organizing production, to impose some form on material, or even to follow a line (like continuation of novel) the effort catapults me into a sort of madness. (LTG 20–1) When Burroughs writes humor for consumption, according to this description, it is the asshole who speaks. Not surprisingly, critical analysis tends to eliminate the humor and respond to the horror of the ‘hostile, independent entity’ within the routine. However, both humor and horror are emphasized in the talking asshole routine as it appears in Naked Lunch. In the frame for the routine, Schafer, who is not listening to Doctor Benway talk, realizes the human body is ‘scandalously inefficient’ and wonders ‘why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate’ (NL 119). Benway responds ‘Why not one all-purpose blob?’ and starts the routine. In Benway’s description of the Carny act, the talking asshole is synaesthetic, like a good prank—you can smell the sound. It also moves the audience physically—to hear the ass talk fills the audience with the urge to excrete. The Carny owner of the asshole initially speaks for the ass, as a ventriloquist. His act is ‘Real funny, too, at first’, and then the asshole gains verbal independence and turns out to be an innovative comic—‘After a while the ass started talking on its own […] his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time’ (NL 120). The asshole, or now commodified act, begins to consume as well; the subject or Carny man thinks this is cute at first and builds another act around the eating asshole, but the asshole is not willing to exist only as an objectified commodity, part of an act, and collapses the boundary between art and life (think of Peter Bürger, who defines the avant-garde as a series of tendencies aimed at overcoming the separation of art from everyday life, as attempts to dismantle the institution of art and the aesthetic as an acknowledged cultural sphere [Bürger 1984]; and recollect the commercial success of Joseph Pujol, ‘Le Pétomane’ [Lydenberg 1987:25–6 and Zeldin 1977:703–4]) by talking on the street, asking for equal rights, getting drunk, wanting love and kisses like any other mouth. Completely out of control, it talks day and night; the Carny man beats it and screams at it and sticks candles up it but the final words we hear from the asshole (and at this point, even before the eruption of the undifferentiated tissue, we must wonder who exactly is the real asshole here) are ‘[i]t’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit’ (NL 120). The asshole has not only learned the lesson of economy and profit, but his understanding of efficiency is superior to that of his teacher. Soon the Carny man’s mouth seals over with undifferentiated tissue, and only the eyes remain—the eyes no longer signify consciousness, and might even assume the function of an asshole for the asshole, mediating between within and without (the only change in the routine in Naked Lunch from the original letter to Ginsberg lies in the description of how the brain is trapped in the skull, rather than in a shell, when it can’t give orders any more, emphasizing a mammal’s prison). Critics of Burroughs tend to read this routine as distinctly uncomic, presenting a destabilizing revolution of ‘lower’ over ‘higher’ terms. Tony Tanner, for example, sees the anecdote as a ‘parable of matter in a state of hideous revolt’, where lower forms of life devour higher forms (1971:117). For Tanner, the rebellion of body parts is hideous rather than funny. Alvin Seltzer, using terms offered by both the initial letter and Naked Lunch in both their subsequent discussions of bureaus as parasites, reads the routine as ‘a political statement of the evils of a democratic system. The talking asshole becomes an allegorical equivalent of bureaucracies that feed off their host’ (1974:346). Neil Oxenhandler interprets the tale psychoanalytically as ‘the struggle between the oral impulse and the anal impulse’, with a false victory for the anal impulse as the oral irrevocably returns (1975:144). Robin Lydenberg emphasizes language and the body and asserts: ‘In this bizarre tale, Burroughs dramatizes the problematic relationship of body and mind, and the role of language in that relationship; the arbitrary violence of language as a system of naming and representation; and the possibility of an ontology and an aesthetics based on negativity and absence’ (1987:19). At least Lydenberg does point out that the story is funny as well as frightening (23) and notes that ‘critical references to the story do not appear in the context of discussions of Burroughs’ humor’ (26). Wayne Pounds identifies the routine as a parody of the discourse of scientistic, behaviorist human engineering, a dystopic parody of Benway’s (actually Schafer’s) engineering utopia (1987:219). Jamie Russell argues that the routine ‘is a very obvious morality tale that warns against the mimicry of the feminine that is the basis of the effeminate paradigm and camp’ and shows how ‘the hideously comic image’ (48) makes it easy to overlook the importance of what Lydenberg calls the ‘novelty ventriloquist act’ (cited by Russell 2001:48). That this routine can inspire so many powerful readings is remarkable, but read with attention to its humor, it can also provide insights into the dynamics of Burroughs’s comic practice. Although eyes often symbolize the intellect in the Western tradition, both eyes and asshole are also parts of the body. Cultural maps of the body assign very different values to assholes and eyes—collapse these differences and the resulting oscillation of emotions produces laughter. There are many links between the asshole and the eye in Burroughs’s work as he plays with corporeal hierarchies. Starting with an indiscriminate appearance of organs in Naked Lunch (‘In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth … but no organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout anywhere … rectums open, defecate and close …’ [NL 10]), the connection becomes more explicit in the recording Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (1993), which describes its eponymous heroine thusly: ‘She had an auxiliary asshole in the middle of her forehead, like a painful bronze eye’ (SAA). The announcements ‘[a]nother installment in the adventures of Clem Snide the Private Ass Hole’ (NL 108), ‘I am a private asshole’ (CRN 35) and ‘I change my address, he gets a private ass hole to find me’ (WL 123) also identify the asshole with the eye and with detection. In Burroughs’s work, neither asshole nor eye is privileged—both represent the physical, both mediate between inner and outer. In The Western Lands, when mummification is posed as a potential vehicle for immortality, we are reminded that any preservation of the body must include the asshole and all its functions: The young question the mummy concept: ‘To keep the same asshole forever? Is this a clarion call to youth?’ ‘It stinks like petrified shit.’ ‘Have you something better to offer?’ says a serious young Scribe […] ‘To reach the Western Lands is to achieve freedom from fear. Do you free yourself from fear by cowering in your physical body for eternity? Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore, or sell it if you can find a fool … it’s full of holes … it’s full of holes.’ (WL 161–2) Both eyes and asshole represent holes, physical vulnerability, concavities that facilitate physical survival. DIALECTIC BETWEEN THE SERIOUS AND THE FRIVOLOUSBurroughs’s ambivalence over the body’s fragility can be found throughout his later work: ‘I see myself streaking across the sky like a star to leave the earth forever. What holds me back? It is the bargain by which I am here at all. The bargain is this body that holds me here’ (WB 102). In the past, immortality was achieved through preservation of the body (mummies)—now the body can be seen as part of a greater, more insidious bargain: Audrey felt the floor shift under his feet and he was standing at the epicenter of a vast web. In that moment, he knew its purpose, knew the reason for suffering, fear, sex, and death. It was all intended to keep human slaves imprisoned in physical bodies while a monstrous matador waved his cloth in the sky, sword ready for the kill. (CRN 309) Escape from the body, a privileging of the mental or spiritual over the crude physical accidents and mortal contingencies of the flesh, should presumably bring liberation. Here we return to the role of laughter in achieving, marking or qualifying this potential freedom, when Burroughs’s narrator observes: The Duad is a river of excrement, one of the deadliest obstacles on the road to the Western Lands. To transcend life you must transcend the conditions of life, the shit and farts and piss and sweat and snot of life. A frozen disgust is as fatal as prurient fixation, two sides of the same counterfeit coin. It is necessary to achieve a gentle and precise detachment, then the Duad opens like an intricate puzzle. (WL 155) How to escape the false values of disgust and fixation, how to arrive at detachment? And what does it mean when the Duad opens, when a river of excrement reveals itself to be a complex puzzle? Laughter offers a way of exploring the boundaries that limit us to the emotional polarities of disgust or fixation. Our reception of the metaphors that circulate within Burroughs’s humor—‘Jody can do a fake Chinese spiel that’ll just kill you—like a hysterical ventriloquist’s dummy. In fact, he precipitated an anti-foreign riot in Shanghai that claimed 3,000 casualties’ (NL 101)—determine whether we are in some way possessed by the joke, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, like a comic or an asshole, or whether we can discover detachment through the humor. One can see an evolution in Burroughs’s relation to possession, frequently expressed through humor, from Naked Lunch (‘“Possession” they call it.… Sometimes an entity jumps in the body […] and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the neighbor child in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to goof now and again.… Wrong! I am never here.… Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves.… Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation’ [NL 200]) to the questions that inform the late trilogy: ‘It is essential for immortalists to remember, do not take anything too seriously. And remember also that frivolity is even more fatal … so, what now?’ (WL 163). This dialectic between the serious and the frivolous culminates in a final glimpse of an old man who realizes that what he struggles against necessarily constitutes what he must struggle for: I want to reach the Western Lands—right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It’s a frozen sewer. It’s known as the Duad, remember? All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western lands. Let it flow! My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. A tree like black lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy. How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’? You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair. (WL 257–8) In what seems like a joke, the longed-for Western Lands are squarely on the other side of a brook that bubbles like the asshole of human history. And instead of trying to frantically cross to that other side, or becoming paralyzed with disgust, here the narrator accepts that flow. I sometimes wonder if one of Burroughs’s final pranks on his audience is this insistence that the barren trees of winter, the suffering and despair that lead people in and out of their addictions, the control mechanisms that provide an unearthly solace and a taste of immortality, are for better or for worse, a necessary part of the landscape. Like a good prank, Burroughs’s humor reminds us not to dismiss the body. If we commodify the asshole, it will in turn commodify us. Laughter for Burroughs is both an involuntary automatic reaction that we would not necessarily identify as human, and a potential tool for orientation. A good prank is creative, critical and raises consciousness. A good prank can inspire creativity, flexibility and resilience through laughter. A bad prank leads to frozen immobility where we are trapped, rather than liberated, by the oscillation of laughter. Although Burroughs frequently depicts laughter as hostile, even deadly (‘His loud, metallic laugh rings out across the dump, and the crowd laughs with him under the searching guns’ [NL 166]; ‘The onlookers snort and bray with laughter sharp as flint knives in sunlight’ [WL 71]), its absence in his work also signals mortal corruption. (‘He organized a vast Thought Police. Anybody with an absent-minded expression was immediately arrested and executed. Anyone who expressed any ideas that deviated in any way from decent church-going morality suffered the same fate. The American Moral Disease passed into its terminal stage. Laughing was strictly forbidden. Everyone wore identical expressions of frustrated hate looking for a target’ [POS 22–3].) Because ‘it is the nature of laughter to recognize no bounds’ (LTG 80), laughter marks a place where boundaries can be both acknowledged and crossed, where conventional feelings are questioned and challenged: The door to another dimension may open when the gap between what one is expected to feel and what one actually does feel rips a hole in the fabric. Years ago I was driving along Price Road and I thought how awful it would be to run over a dog or, my God, a child, and have to face the family and portray the correct emotions. When suddenly a figure wrapped in a cloak of darkness appeared with a dead child under one arm and slapped it down on a porch: ‘This yours, lady?’ I began to laugh. The figure had emerged from a lightless region where everything we have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply. There is no light to see them by. It is from this dark door that the antihero emerges.… (PDR 300) The outlaw, the anti-hero, and the avant-garde can be said to share a sense of humor. Carl Hill, in his investigation of wit, observes how Witz has come to be identified with the side of human reason. The split between accepted knowledge and the faculty that does the knowing, along with the increasing identification of Witz with the latter, marks Witz as the avant-garde of the intellect. It is in the paradoxical position of being both the builder and the destroyer of knowledge, tradition, and culture. (Hill 1993:4–5) A study of humor as an avant-garde strategy of provocation and engagement can provide a ‘stranger’, more compelling framework for theorizing than such familiar categories as aesthetics versus politics or containment (the release and ultimate structural support of comic relief) versus transgression (or subversion). As John Limon points out, ‘if comedy performs a useful task for theory it is all in the reduction to nonsense of the distinction between containment and subversion models of art’ (Limon 2000:38). Burroughs’s practice of humor points to a globalization model that endorses interconnection and valorizes both flows and the carving of their channels, that maps the relations between the local and the global and explores the scales of values used to construct those relations. Burroughs’s joke work, exploring the relation between local organs and global constructs, illuminates how globalization must be seen not just as a new era facilitating commercialism and scholarship, but also as something that has always been with us. As Tsing argues, ‘we can investigate globalist projects and dreams without assuming that they remake the world just as they want. The task of understanding planet-wide interconnections requires locating and specifying globalist projects and dreams, with their contradictory as well as charismatic logics and their messy as well as effective encounters and translations’ (2000:456). Any articulation of flows must remain conscious of riverbanks—those structures that shape and are being shaped through globalization. Burroughs’s humor urges us to recognize contradiction and mess, to appreciate the complexity of contexts of reception that lead, for example, to such profound (and profoundly different) responses to a ‘talking asshole routine’. Humor in Burroughs’s work offers a tool for orientation, to help us navigate even the flow made possible by the riverbank of the Duad. The current crisis is the same as the one that threatened human nature at the time of the establishment of Christianity. Benjamin Constant The Apogee of Civilization Is a CrisisEach time a vast movement of civilization has developed, in Egypt or in the Greco-Roman world, in China or in the Occident, the values that brought men together at the dawn of each upheaval, the taboo or sacred acts, places, names, and laws, have slowly lost, more or less on the whole, a part of their efficacious force and their ability to inspire awe. The simple fact of the movement itself was decomposition and, in this sense, civilization can be seen as synonymous with sickness or crisis. The two meanings, passive and active, of the word critical questioned and questioning-adequately and clearly account for the identification that must be made between a developing civilization and crisis. On the passive side, there is the crisis of the conventions-the royal or divine sovereignty - that constitute the foundations of the human aggregate; on the active side, there is the individual critical attitude toward these conventions: the individual thus develops in a corrosive way, at the expense of society, and the facilitated individual life sometimes takes on a dramatic meaning. The figure of the living community little by little loses its tragic appearance-both puerile and terrible-which reached each being in his most secretly lacerated wound; it loses the power of provoking the total religious emotion that grows to the point of ecstatic drunkenness, when existence is avidly opened before it. But because the material organization that has developed demands the conservation of social cohesion, this cohesion is maintained by all the means at the disposal of its principal beneficiaries; when communal passion is not great enough to constitute human strengths, it becomes necessary to use constraint and to develop the alliances, contracts, and falsifications that are called politics. When human beings become autonomous they discover around themselves a false and empty world. The awareness of being a dupe before administrative impudence (and also before terrifying displays of individual satisfaction and stupidity) succeeds the strong and painful feeling of communal unity. The vast results of long centuries of struggle, of prodigious military or material conquest, have always led conquering peoples - whether in the West, or among the Egyptians or the Romans -to a failed and disappointing world, flattened by interminable crises. Through an extreme malaise and through a confusion in which everything appears vain and nearly disastrous, there grows the obsession with. The Recovery of the Lost WorldDecomposition can affect, at the same time, economic activity, the institutions of authority, and the principles that establish moral and religious attitudes. Disintegrated societies, obscurely attempting to regain their cohesion, can still be devastated by a multiplicity of useless endeavors: brutal force and intellectual pedantry, both equally blind, find the road wide open before them. The excessive and shattered joy of great disasters can therefore relieve existence, like a hiccup. But behind the facade constituted by affirmations of strength, reason, and cynicism, there is a yawning void, and whatever continues gives way more and more to the feeling that something is missing. Nostalgia for a lost world can be clothed in numerous forms, and generally it is the feat of cowards, who only know how to moan for what they claim to love, who avoid or know how not to find the possibility of FIGHTING. Behind the facade, there is first of all only nervous depression, violent but incoherent noise, aesthetic reverie and chatter. When a man among others, in this world in which a simple representation of the act has become an object of nausea, tries to enter into combat for the "recovery of the lost world," he creates a void around himself, he meets only the infinite evasion of all those who have taken upon themselves the task of knowledge and of thought-for it is almost impossible to imagine a man thinks without having the constant worry of elminating from the course of his reflections everything that could condense and threaten to explode. Because he could not confuse emasculation with knowledge, and because his thought was open to a lucid explosion that could not stop before exhausting his resources - becoming the hero of everything human that is not enslaved-Nietzsche collapsed in humuliating solitude. The destiny of human life, since it is linked to what is most significant for all men, has perhaps never known a moment that justifies a greater uneasiness than the one in which Nietzsche, alone and in a fit of madness, embraced a horse in the streets of Turin. The Fascist SolutionBut the close connection between the will to regain lost life and enervating mental depression is not only the occasion for tragic failures: it constitutes an incentive to grasp at the vulgar and facile solutions whose success at first seems assured, to the exclusion of all others. Since it is a question of regaining what existed in the past, and whose elements are dying or dead, it is simplest to revive, in favorable circumstances, what already exists. It is easier to restore than to create, and since the necessity of a renewed social cohesion can, at certain moments, be felt in the most pressing way, the first movement of recomposition takes place in the form of a return to the past. The crudest and most directly usable fundamental values are capable, in bitter and hateful crises, of taking on a dramatic meaning that seems to restore real color to communal existence, whereas on the whole it is a matter of an operation in which the affective values set in motion are in large part used for ends other than themselves. The RECOMPOSITION OF SACRED VALUES starts when the boots of human existence are repaired, and it can obediantly march straight ahead once again under the whip of hard necessity. The reestablished Pharaohs and Caesars, the heads of the revolutionary parties that today have bewitched half the inhabitants of Europe, have answered the desire to base life again on an irrational urge. But the amount of constraint necessary for the maintenance of too rapidly imposed edifices indicates their profoundly disappointing character. To the extent that there persists a nostalgia for a community through which each being would find something more tragically taut than anything to be found in himself-to this extent the concern for the recovery of the lost world, which played a role in the genesis of fascism, has as its outcome nothing other than military discipline and a limited calm, produced by a brutality that destroys with rage everything it lacks the power to captivate. But what is adequate to a possibly dominant faction is nothing more than sundering and deception when one considers the entire living community of beings. The community does not demand a fate similar to that of the different parts it brings together, but it demands as an end that which violently unifies and asserts itself without alienating life, without leading it to the repetition of emasculated acts and of external moral formulae. Brief bursts of fascism, set off by fear, cannot deceive such a true, wild, and avid demand. From the Caesarian Heavens to the Dionysian Earth: The Religious SolutionIf one now imagines the obsession that dominated Nietzsche's life, it seems clear that this common obsession with the lost world, which grows greater in profound depression, can necessarily be followed in opposite directions. The confusion between two responses to the same void, the apparent similarity of fascism and Nietzsche, then becomes easily understandable: any resemblance is reduced to identical traits appearing in two opposites. Among the various oppositions that maintain the existence of men under the harsh law of Heraclitus, none is truer or more ineluctable than the one that opposes the Earth to the heavens, to the "need to punish" the dark demands of tragedy; on one side are constituted the aversion to sin and the light of day, glory and military repression, the imprescriptible rigidity of the past; on the other, the grandeur of auspicious nights, of avid passion, of the obscure and free dream power is given to movement and, in that way: its numerous. appearances may be, it is torn from the past and projected into the apocalyptic forms of the future. On one side a constitution of communal forces riveted to a narrow tradition-parental or racial-constitutes a monarchical authority and establishes itself as a stagnation and as an insurmountable barrier to life; on the other, a bond of fraternity, which may be foreign to the bond of blood, is established between men, who among themselves decide upon the necessary consecrations: and the goal of their meeting is not a clearly defined action, but life itself - LIFE, IN OTHER WORDS, TRAGEDY. It is true that, when it comes to man, there are no examples of a real form representing, to the exclusion of the other, one of the possible directions of life: these directions are nevertheless easy to determine and describe. On the whole, they set the Chthonian and Uranian world of mythic Greece (and, in the phases of recomposition of each great civilization, in clearer and clearer way, the properly religious movements-Osirian, Christian, or Buddhist) in opposition to the development of the character of the military sovereign. The thing that has prevented people from immediately seeing how Nietzsche's representation of values opposes the eternal resumption of military monarchy-a resumption that takes place with an empty regularity, without ever providing anything new-has been Nietzsche's effort to point out the deepest differences less between Dionysianism and Bismarckian National Socialism (a movement which, for good reason, he saw as negligible) than between Dionysianism and Christianity. And the possibility of error is even greater in. that the critique of Christian falsehoods led Nietzsche to rail against any renunciation of power, leading in that way to a confusion between the sphere of military solidification and ossification and that of tragic liberty. And even greater in that there can be no question of renouncing a hard-won human virility: the scorn for Caesarian acts, deprived of all human meaning, will no longer lead to the acceptance of boundaries that these acts claim to impose on life; a religious movement that develops in the present world no more has to resemble Christianity or Buddhism than Christianity and Buddhism resembled polytheism. It is because of this necessary dissimilarity that Nietzsche set aside, for good reason, the word religion, which alone lends itself to a confusion almost as unfortunate as the confusion between Nietzschean Dionysianism and fascism-and a word that can only be used, in the present world, in defiance. Nietzsche DionysosTHE CRITICAL PHASE OF A CIVILIZATION'S DECOMPOSITION IS REGULARLY FOLLOWED BY A RECOMPOSITION, WHICH DEVELOPS IN TWO DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS: THE RECONSTITUTION OF RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS OF CIVIL AND MILITARY SOVEREIGNTY, TYING EXISTENCE TO THE PAST, IS FOLLOWED OR ACCOMPANIED BY THE BIRTH OF FREE AND LIBERATING SACRED FIGURES AND MYTHS, RENEWING LIFE AND MAKING IT "THAT WHICH FROLICS IN THE FUTURE," "THAT WHICH ONLY BELONGS TO A FUTURE." The Nietzschean audacity demanding for the figures it creates a power that bows before nothing-that tends to break down old sovereignty's edifice of moral prohibition-must not be confused with what it fights. The marvelous Nietzschean KINDERLAND is nothing less than the place where the challenging of every man's VATERLAND takes on a meaning that is no longer impotent negation. It is only after Zarathustra that we can "ask our children's forgiveness for our having been the children of our fathers." The very first sentences of Nietzsche's message come from "realms of dream and intoxication." The entire message is expressed by one name: DIONYSOS. When Nietzsche made DIONYSOS (in other words, the destructive exuberance of life) the symbol of the will to power, he expressed in that way a resolution to deny to a faddish and debilitating romanticism the force that must be held sacred. Nietzsche demanded that the possessors of today's shattering values become dominant-and not that they be dominated by a heaven laden with the need to punish. The god of the Earth, DIONYSOS, was the son of Semele, the Earth, and Zeus, god of the Heavens. The myth has it that Semele, pregnant with Dionysos, wanted Zeus to appear to her clothed in the attributes of his power; she was reduced to flames and ashes by the heavenly thunder and lightning she had so imprudently provoked. Thus the god was born of a lightning-torn womb. In the image of the one he wanted to be to the point of madness, Nietzsche is born of the Earth torn open by the fire of the Heavens, he is born blasted by lightning and in that way he is imbued with this fire of domination that becomes the FIRE OF THE EARTH. WHEN THE SACRED-NIETZSCHEAN-FIGURE OF TRAGIC DlONYSOS RELEASES LIFE FROM SERVITUDE, IN OTHER WORDS, FROM THE PUNISHMENT OF THE PAST, HE RELEASES IT AS WELL FROM RELIGIOUS HUMILITY, FROM THE CONFUSIONS AND TORPOR OF ROMANTICISM. HE DEMANDS THAT A BRIllIANT WILL RETURN THE EARTH TO THE DIVINE ACCURACY OF THE DREAM. The Performance of NumantiaThe opposition of Heaven and Earth has ceased to have a meaningful, communal, and immediately intelligible value. When it appears, it comes up against the desires of the intellect, which no longer knows what such an antiquity is supposed to mean, and which refuses to admit as well that mythological entities can have, at the present time, in a world saturated with science, any meaning at all. But if one considers an everyday reality, only favorable circumstances are needed for men, who are obviously a long way from madness, to enter lucidly into the world of the infernal spirits-and not only men, but the vulgar political passions that animate them. When Marquino, coming forward in his cowl, calls forth the most somber things of the world, the figures he invokes with terrible names ...waters of the black lagoon... cease to be empty and powerless representations. For, in Numantia's agony, within the walls and under the naked rock of the Sierra, it is the Earth that is there: the Earth that opens to return the cadaver to the world of the living, the Earth that opens to the living, thrown by delirium into death. And even though this Earth breathes Fury and Rage, even though it appears in the screams of children slaughtered by their fathers, of wives slaughtered by their husbands, even though the bread it brings the starving man is soaked in blood, the feeling its presence inspires is not horror. Because those who belong to it (and thus who belong to frenzy) bring back to life, before our eyes, all of lost humanity, the world of truth and immediate passion for which nostalgia has always been felt. And it is impossible to break apart a profoundly constituted and bound figure. Just as the Romans, commanded by the implacable authority of a leader, are associated with the glory of the sun, in the same way the Numantines, WITHOUT A LEADER, WITHOUT A HEAD, are located in the region of the Night and of the Earth, in the region haunted by the phantoms of the Tragedy-Mother. And insofar as agony and death have entered the city, this city becomes the image of everything in the world that can demand a total love; insofar as this city dies, all the nostalgia for the lost world can now be expressed by the single name, NUMANTIA. Numantia! Liberty!The tragedy of Numantia is great because in it one is confronted not only with the death of a certain number of men, but with the entry of death into the entire city: it is not individuals who are dying, but an entire people. That must be disconcerting, and in principle it must make Numantia inaccessible, because the game destiny plays with men can only appear to most of them clothed in the brilliant colors of individual existence. Moreover, what is currently in the air-if one is speaking of collective existence-is the poorest thing one can imagine, and no representation can be more disconcerting than one that presents death as the fundamental object of the communal activity of men, death and not food or the production of the means of production. No doubt such a representation is based on the totality of religious practices of all ages, but there has been a predominant tendency to see the reality of religion as a surface reality. In the existence of a community, that which is typically religious, in the sure grip of death, has become the thing most foreign to man. No one thinks any longer that the reality of a communal life-which is to say, human existence-depends on the sharing of nocturnal terrors and on the kind of ecstatic spasms that spread death. Thus the truth of Numantia is even more difficult to grasp than that of an individual tragedy. It is religious truth-in other words, that which in principle rejects the inertia of men living today. The idea of a fatherland - which appears as a constituent of dramatic action has only an external meaning, if one compares it to this religious truth. Whatever their appearance, the symbols that govern the emotions are not among those that serve to represent or maintain the military existence of a people. Military existence even excludes any dramatization of this kind. It is based on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to make the living march in a straighter line. The most tragic performance it knows is the parade and, due to the fact that it excludes all possible depression, it is incapable of basing communal life on the tragedy of dread. In this sense the fatherland, condemned to accept as its own a brutal military poverty, is far from equal to the communal unity of men. In certain cases it can become a force of attraction destroying the other possibilities, but since it is essentially constituted by armed force, it can give to those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the great human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility. On the contrary, it must force its half-seduced lovers to enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of barracks, military prisons, and military administrations. In the crisis currently depressing existence, the fatherland even represents the greatest obstacle to this unity of life that-it must be forcefully said-can only be based on a communal awareness of profound existence, the emotional and riven play of life with death. Numantia, which is only the atrocious expression of this play, cannot have any more meaning for the fatherland than it has for the individual who suffers alone. But Numantia, in fact, took on for those present at the spectacle a meaning that had to do neither with individual drama nor with national feeling, but with political passion. This was made possible by the war in Spain. That is an obvious paradox, and it is possible that such a confusion is as lacking in importance as the confusion of the inhabitants of Saragossa, who presented the tragedy during a siege. Numantia, today, has been performed not only in Paris, but in Spain, in burned-out churches, without any other decor than the traces of the fire, and without any other actors than red militiamen. The fundamental themes of a remote existence, the cruel and unalterable mythological themes developed in the tragedy-are they not, however, as foreign to the political spirit as they are to the military spirit? If it were necessary to hold to current appearances, the answer would have to be in the affirmative. Not only does a politician, of whatever party, find repugnant the consideration of profound realities, but he has accepted, once and for all, the game of alterations and compromises that makes possible precarious power alliances, and that makes impossible the formation of a true heartfelt community. In addition, among the various convulsive conflicts in history, the one currently sundering the totality of civilized countries-the conflict between antifascism and fascism-appears the most corrupt. The comedy which-under the pretense of democracy-opposes German Caesarism with Soviet Caesarism, shows what frauds are acceptable to a mob limited by misery, at the mercy of those who basely flatter it. Nevertheless a reality exists which, behind this facade, is in contact with the most powerful secrets of existence; anyone who wants to enter this reality need only take in the opposite way what is generally accepted. If the image of Numantia expresses the grandeur of a people struggling against oppression by the powerful, it reveals at the same time that the struggle currently engaged in most often lacks any grandeur: the antifascist movement, if it is compared to Numantia, appears to be an empty mob, a vast decomposition of men linked only by what they refuse. There is only illusion and comfort in admiring Numantia because one sees in it an expression of the current struggle. But tragedy confronts the world of politics with an evident truth: the battle joined will only take on a meaning and will only be effective to the extent that fascist wretchedness comes face to face with something other than troubled negation-namely, the heartfelt community of which Numantia is the image. The principle of this reversal can be expressed in simple terms. CAESARIAN UNITY, ESTABLISHED BY A LEADER-A HEAD-IS OPPOSED BY THE HEADLESS COMMUNITY, BOUND TOGETHER BY THE OBSESSIVE IMAGE OF A TRAGEDY. Life demands that men gather together, and men are only gathered together by a leader or by a tragedy. To look for a HEADLESS human community is to look for tragedy: putting the leader to death is itself tragedy, it remains a requirement of tragedy. A truth that will change the appearance of human things starts here: THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT THAT GIVES AN OBSESSIVE VALUE TO COMMUNAL LIFE IS DEATH. The Dionysian MysteriesThis "Dionysian" truth cannot be an object of propaganda. And since, by its own movement, it calls forth power, it gives meaning to the idea of an organization revolving around profound mysteries. "Mystery" here has nothing in common with a vague esotericism: it is a question of lacerating truths that absorb those to whom they belong, truths that the mob does not seek, and away from which it even tends to move. The disintegration-movement of this mob can only be countered by a crafty deliberation, by what revolves once again around figures of death. It is only on this open route, where everything is disorienting to the point of drunkenness, that Sade's paradoxical assertions cease to be, for whoever accepts them, a mockery and an implacable judgment. For men who do not want to follow a consistent and difficult path, what could the following quote mean? An already old and corrupt nation, courageously shaking off the yoke of its monarchical government in order to adopt a republican one, can only maintain itself through many crimes, for it is already in crime ... Or this one... From these first principles, there follows ... the necessity of softening laws, and above all of annihilating for all time the atrocity of the death penalty, because the law, which in itself is cold, cannot be accessible to the passions that legitimate in man the cruel activity of murder. Still, those are the least clearly inhuman of Sade's assertions. How could his bloody doctrine have a meaning for anyone who, finding it right, does not live it in trembling? For "killing for pleasure" would only be a literary provocation, and the most inadmissible expression of hypocrisy, if consciousness were not driven by it to a point of extreme lucidity. The awareness of the fact that the pleasure of killing is the truth, charged with horror, for one who does not kill, can remain neither obscure nor tranquil, and it forces life into an unlikely, frozen world, where it tears itself apart. What else could be the meaning of the fact that, for a number of years, some of the most gifted men did their utmost to shatter their own intellects, hoping in this way to make the intellect itself explode? Dada is generally seen as an unimportant failure, whereas, for others, it becomes liberating laughter, a revelation that transfigures human being. And as for Nietzsche's glances into the abyss, isn't it time to call to account those for whom they have only been the object of an eclectic curiosity? Many realities are subject to the law of all or nothing. This is the case with Nietzsche. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola would be nothing if they were not meditated in the greatest silence (and meditated, they are a prison without an exit). What Nietzsche shattered can only be opened to those carried forward by the need to shatter; the others do to Nietzsche what they do to everything else: nothing has meaning for them, and everything they touch decomposes. It is a law of present-day life that an ordinary man must be incapable of thinking about anything at all, and be tied down in every way by completely servile occupations, which drain him of reality. But the existence of this man will end up crumbling into dust, and one day he will no longer be astonished when a living being does not see him as the ultimate limit of things. excerpt from the book Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, (1927-1939), Georges Bataille
by McKenzie Wark
A hack touches the virtual; and transforms the actual. “To qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style and technical virtuosity.”The terms hacking and hacker emerge in this sense in electrical engineering and computing. As these have been leading areas of creative production in a vectoral world, it is fitting that these names come to represent a broader activity. The hacking of new vectors of information have indeed been the turning point in the emergence of a broader awareness of the creative production of abstraction.
loading...
Since it’s very emergence in computing circles, the hacker “ethic” has come up against the forces of commodified education and communication. As Himanen writes, hackers, who “want to realise their passions,” present “a general social challenge,” but the realisation of the value of this challenge “will take time, like all great cultural changes.”And more than time, for it is more than a cultural change. It will take struggle, for what the hacker calls into being in the world is a new world and a new being. Freeing the concept of the hacker from its particulars, understanding it abstractly , is the first step in this struggle.
The apologists for the vectoral interest want to limit the semantic productivity of the term “hacker” to a mere criminality , precisely because they fear its more abstract and multiple potential—its class potential. Everywhere one hears rumours of the hacker as the new form of juvenile delinquent, or nihilist vandal, or servant of organised crime. Or, the hacker is presented as a mere harmless subculture, an obsessive garage pursuit with its restrictive styles of appearance and codes of conduct. Everywhere the desire to open the virtuality of information, to share data as a gift, to appropriate the vector for expression becomes the object of a moral panic, an excuse for surveillance, and the restriction of technical knowledge to the “proper authorities.” This is not the first time that the productive classes have faced this ideological blackmail. The hacker now appears in the official organs of the ruling order along side its earlier archetypes, the organised worker, the rebellious farmer. The hacker is in excellent company.
The virtual is the true domain of the hacker. It is from the virtual that the hacker produce sever-new expressions of the actual. To the hacker, what is represented as being real is always partial, limited, perhaps even false. To the hacker there is always a surplus of possibility expressed in what is actual, the surplus of the virtual. This is the inexhaustible domain of what is real but not actual, what is not but which may become. The domain where, as Massumi says, “what can not be experienced can not but be felt.” To hack is to release the virtual into the actual, to express the difference of the real.
Any domain of nature may yield the virtual. By abstracting from nature, hacking produce the possibility of another nature, a second nature, a third nature, natures to infinity, doubling and redoubling. Hacking discovers the nature of nature, its productive—and destructive—powers. It is in the nature of hacking to discover freely, to invent freely , to create and produce freely. But it is not in the nature of hacking itself to exploit the abstractions thus produced. This applies as much in physics as in sexuality, in biology as in politics, in computing as in art or philosophy. The nature of any and every domain may be hacked.
When the hack is represented in the abstraction of property rights, then information as property creates the hacker class as class. This intellectual property is a distinctive kind of property to land or capital, in that only a qualitatively new creation may lay claim to it. And yet, when captured by the representation of property, the hack becomes the equivalent of any other property, a commodified value. The vectoral class measures its net worth in the same currency as capitalists and pastorialists, making patents and copyrights equivalent to factories or fields.
Through the application of ever-new forms of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of production, the possibility of making something of and with the world— and of living off the surplus produced by the application of abstraction to nature—to any nature. Abstraction, once it starts to be applied, may seem strange, “unnatural,” and may bring radical changes in its wake. If it persists, it soon becomes taken for granted. It becomes second nature. Through the production of new forms of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of the future. Of course not every new abstraction yields a productive application to the world. In practice, few innovations ever do so. Yet it can rarely be known in advance which abstractions will mesh with nature in a productive way .
It is in the interests of hackers to be free to hack for hacking’s sake. The free and unlimited hacking of the new produces not just “the” future, but an infinite possible array of futures, the future itself as virtuality. Every hack is an expression of the inexhaustible multiplicity of the future, of virtuality . Yet every hack, if it is to be realised as a form of property and as signed a value, must take the form not of an expression of multiplicity, but of a representation of something repeatable and reproducible. Property traps only one aspect of the hack, its representation and objectification as property . It cannot capture the infinite and unlimited virtuality from which the hack draws its potential.
Under the sanction of law , the hack becomes a finite property , and the hacker class emerges, as all classes emerge, out of a relation to a property form. As with land or capital as property forms, intellectual property enforces a relation of scarcity. It assigns a right to a property to an owner at the expense of non-owners, to a class of possessors at the expense of the dispossessed. “The philosophy of intellectual property reifies economic rationalism as a natural human trait.”
By its very nature, the act of hacking overcomes the limits property imposes on it. New hacks supersede old hacks, and devalue them as property. The hack takes information that has been devalued into redundancy by repetition as communication, and produces new information out of it again. This gives the hacker class an interest in the free availability of information rather than in an exclusive right. The immaterial aspect of the nature of information means that the possession by one of information need not deprive another of it. The fields of research are of a different order of abstraction to agricultural fields. While exclusivity of property may be necessary with land, it makes no sense whatsoever in science, art, philosophy, cinema or music.
loading...
To the extent that the hack embodies itself in the form of property ,it does so in a quite peculiar way ,giving the hacker class as a class interests quite different from other classes, be they exploiting or exploited classes. The interest of the hacker class lies first and foremost in a free circulation of information, this being the necessary condition for the renewed expression of the hack. But the hacker class as class also has a tactical interest in the representation of the hack as property, as something from which a source of income may be derived that gives the hacker some independence from the ruling classes. The hacker class opens the virtual into the historical when it hacks away to make the latter desire a mere particular of the former.
The very nature of the hack gives the hacker a crisis of identity . The hacker searches for a representation of what it is to be a hacker in the identities of other classes. Some see themselves as vectoralists, trading on the scarcity of their property . Some see themselves as workers, but as privileged ones in a hierarchy of wage earners. The hacker class produces itself as itself, but not for itself. It does not (yet) possess a consciousness of its consciousness. It is not aware of its own virtuality . Because of its inability—to date—to become a class for itself, fractions of the hacker class continually split off and come to identify their interests with those of other classes. Hackers run the risk, in particular, of being identified in the eyes of the working and farming classes with vectoralist interests, which seek to privatise information necessary for the productive and cultural lives of all classes.
To hack is to abstract. To abstract is to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation.It is also to produce the names and numbers, the locations and trajectories of those things. It is also to produce kinds of relations, and relations of relations, into which things may enter. Differentiation of functioning components arranged on a plane with as hared goal is the hacker achievement, whether in the technical, cultural, political, sexual or scientific realm. Having achieved creative and productive abstraction in so many other realms, the hacker class has yet to produce itself as its own abstraction. What is yet to be created, as an abstract, collective, affirmative project is, as Ross says, “a hacker’s knowledge, capable of penetrating existing systems of rationality that might otherwise seem infallible; a hacker’s knowledge, capable of reskilling, and therefore rewriting, the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies; a hacker knowledge, capable also of generating new popular romances around the alternative uses of human ingenuity.”
The struggle of the hacker class is a struggle against itself as much as against other classes. It is in the nature of the hack that it must overcome the hack it identifies as its precursor. A hack only has value in the eyes of the hacker as a qualitative development of a previous hack. Yet the hacker class brings this spirit also into its relation to itself. Each hacker sees the other as a rival, or a collaborator against another rival, not—yet—as a fellow member of the same class with a shared interest. This shared interest is so hard to grasp precisely because it is a shared interest in qualitative differentiation. The hacker class does not need unity in identity but seeks multiplicity in difference.
The hacker class produces distinctions as well as relations, and must struggle against distinctions of its own making in order to reconceive of itself as itself. Having produced itself as the very process of distinction, it has to distinguish between its competitive interest in the hack, and its collective interest in discovering a relation among hackers that expresses an open and ongoing future for its interests. Its competitive interest can be captured in the property form, but its collective interest cannot. The collective interest of the hacker class calls for a new form of class struggle.
This struggle must enlist the components of other classes that assist in the realisation of the hacker class for itself. Hackers have so often provided other classes with the means by which to realise themselves, as the “organic intellectuals” connected to particular class interests and formations. But having guided—and misguided—the working class as its intellectual “vanguard,” it is time for hackers to recognise that their interests are separate from those of the working class, but potentially in alliance. It is from the leading edge of the working class that hackers may yet learn to conceive of themselves as a class. If hackers teach workers how to hack, it is workers who teach hackers how to be a class, a class for itself and in it self. The hacker class becomes a class for it self not by adopting the identity of the working class but by differentiating itself from it.
The vectoral puts the over developed world directly in touch with the underdeveloped world, breaching the envelopes of states and communities, even those of the subject itself. The poorest farmers find themselves struggling against not only the local pastoralist class, but against a vectoralist class hell bent on monopolising the information contained in seed stocks, or the curative properties of medicinal plants long known to traditional peoples. Farmers, workers and hackers confront in its different aspects the same struggle to free information from property, and from the vectoral class. The most challenging hack for our timeis to express this common experience of the world.
While not everyone is a hacker, everyone hacks. Touching the virtual is a common experience. If hacking breaches envelopes, then the great global hack is the movement of the dispossessed of the under developed world, under and over every border, following every vector toward the promise of the overdeveloped world. The vectors of communication scatter as confetti representations of commodified life around the world, drawing subjects to its objects, turning on vectors of migration on unprecedented scale. But what remains yet to be hacked is a new opening of expression for this movement, a new desire besides the calling of the representation of the object for its subjects, who will arrive, sooner or later, at boredom and disappointment. The vectoral world is being hacked to bits from the inside and the outside, calling for the combining of all efforts at abstracting desire from property and releasing the properties of abstracted desire.
McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto
loading...
by Jean Baudrillard What is there beyond the end? Beyond the end extends virtual reality, the horizon of a programmed reality in which all our functions—memory, emotions, sexuality, intelligence— become progressively useless. Beyond the end, in the era of the trans-political, the transsexual, the trans-aesthetic, all our desiring machines become little spectacle machines, then quite simply bachelor machines, before trailing off into the countdown of the species. The countdown is the code of the automatic disappearance of the world, and all our little charitable machines, by way of which we anticipate that disappearance—the Telethons, Sidathons, and all kinds of Thanathons—are merely the promotional sales events for the misery of this fin de siècle. But—and this is even more paradoxical—what are we to do when nothing really comes to an end anymore, that is to say, when nothing ever really takes place, since everything is already calculated, audited, and realized in advance (the simulacrum preceding the real, information preceding the event, etc.)? Our problem is no longer: What are we to make of real events, of real violence? Rather, it is: What are we to make of events that do not take place? Not: What are we to do after the orgy? But: What are we to do when the orgy no longer takes place—the orgy of history, the orgy of revolution and liberation, the orgy of modernity? Little by little, as the hands of the clock move around (though, sadly, digitalclocks no longer even have hands), we tell ourselves that, taking everything into account—taking everything into a “countdown”—modernity has never happened. There has never really been any modernity, never any real progress, never any assured liberation. The linear tension of modernity and progress has been broken, the thread of history has become tangled: the last great “historic” event—the fall of the Berlin Wall—signified something closer to an enormous repentance on the part of history. Instead of seeking fresh perspectives, history appears rather to be splintering into scattered fragments, and phases of events and conflicts we had thought long gone are being reactivated. All that we believed over and done, left behind by the inexorable march of universal progress, is not dead at all; it seems to be returning to strike at the heart of our ultra-sophisticated, ultra-vulnerable systems. It’s a bit like the last scene of Jurassic Park, in which the modern (artificially cloned) dinosaurs burst into the museum and wreak havoc on their fossilized ancestors preserved there, before being destroyed in their turn. Today we are caught as a species in a similar impasse, trapped between our fossils and our clones. So, the countdown extends in both directions: not only does it put an end to time in the future but it also exhausts itself in the obsessional revival of the events of the past. A reversed recapitulation, which is the opposite of a living memory—it is fanatical memorization, a fascination with commemorations, rehabilitations, cultural museification, the listing of sites of memory, the extolling of heritage. In fact this obsession with reliving and reviving everything, this obsessional neurosis, this forcing of memory is equivalent to a vanishing of memory—a vanishing of actual history, a vanishing of the event in the information space. This amounts to making the past itself into a clone, an artificial double, and freezing it in a sham exactitude that will never actually do it justice. But it is because we have nothing else, now, but objects in which not to believe, nothing but fossilized hopes, that we are forced to go down this road: to elevate everything to the status of a museum piece, an item of heritage. Here again, time reverses: instead of things first passing through history before becoming part of the heritage, they now pass directly into the heritage. Instead of first existing, works of art now go straight into the museum. Instead of being born and dying, beings are “born” as virtual fossils. Collective neurosis. As a result, the ozone layer that was protecting memory becomes frayed; the hole through which memories and time are leaking out into space expands, prefiguring the great migration of the void to the periphery. Closing down, closing down! It’s the end-of-the-century sale. Everything must go! Modernity is over (without ever having happened),the orgy is over, the party is over—the sales are starting. It’s the great end-of-the-century sale. But the sales don’t come after the festive seasons any longer; nowadays the sales start first, they last the whole year long, even the festivals themselves are on sale everywhere....The stocks have to be used up, time-capital has to be used up, life-capital has to be used up. Everywhere, we have the countdown; what we are living through in this symbolic end of the old millennium is a sort of fatal prescription, whether it be that of the planet’s resources or of AIDS, which has become the collective symptom of the prescribed term of death. It is all these things that hang over us in the shadow of the Year 2000, together with the delicious, yet terrifying enjoyment of the lag time left to us. But, ultimately, perhaps the Year 2000 will not have taken place? Perhaps, on the occasion of the Year 2000, we are to be granted a general amnesty? The concept of countdown evokes once again Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God.” A community of Tibetan monks has been engaged from time immemorial in listing and copying out the names of God, of which there are nine billion. At the end of this, the world will end. So runst he prophecy. But the monks are tired and, in order to hasten the work, they call in the experts at IBM, who come along with their computers and finish the job in a month. It is as if the operation of the virtual dimension were to bring the history of the world to an end in an instant. Unfortunately, this also means the disappearance of the world in real time, for the prophecy of the end of the world associated with this countdown of the names of God is fulfilled. As they go back down into the valley, the technicians, who did not actually believe the prophecy, see the stars vanishing from the firmament, one by one. This parable depicts our modern situation well: we have called in the IBM technicians and they have launched the code of the world’s automatic disappearance. As a result of the intervention of all the digital, computing, and virtual reality technologies, we are already beyond reality; things have already passed beyond their own ends. They cannot, therefore, come to an end any longer, and they sink into the interminable (interminable history, interminable politics, interminable crisis). And, in effect, we persevere, on the pretext of an increasingly sophisticated technology, in the endless deconstruction of a world and of a history unable to transcend and complete it self. Everything is free to go on infinitely. We no longer have the means to end processes. They unfold without us now, beyond reality, so to speak, in an endless speculation, an exponential acceleration. But, as a result, they do so in an indifference that is also exponential. What is endless is also desire-less, tension-less, passionless; it is bereft of events. An anorectic history, no longer fueled by real incidents and exhausting itself in the countdown. Exactly the opposite of the end of history, then: the impossibility of finishing with history. If history can no longer reach its end, then it is, properly speaking, no longer a history. We have lost history and have also, as a result, lost the end of history. We are laboring under the illusion of the end, under the posthumous illusion of the end. And this is serious, for the end signifies that something has really taken place. Whereas we, at the height of reality—and with information at its peak—no longer know whether anything has taken place or not. Perhaps the end of history, if we can actually conceive such a thing, is merely ironic? Perhaps it is merely an effect of the ruse of history, which consists in its having concealed the end from us, in its having ended without our noticing it. So that it is merely the end of history that is being fueled, whereas we believe we are continuing to make it. We are still awaiting its end, whereas that end has, in fact, already taken place. History’s ruse was to make us believe in its end, when it has, in fact, already started back in the opposite direction. Whether we speak of the end of history, the end of the political or the end of the social, what we are clearly dealing with is the end of the scene of the political, the end of the scene of the social, the end of the scene of history. In other words, in all these spheres, we are speaking of the advent of a specific era of obscenity. Obscenity may be characterized as the endless, unbridled proliferation of the social, of the political, of information, of the economic, of the aesthetic, not to mention the sexual. Obesity is another of the figures of obscenity. As proliferation, as the saturation of a limitless space, obesity may stand as a general metaphor for our systems of information, communication, production, and memory. Obesity and obscenity form the contrapuntal figure for all our systems, which have been seized by something of an Ubuesque distension. All our structures end up swelling like red giants that absorb everything in their expansion. Thus the social sphere, as it expands, absorbs the political sphere entirely. But the political sphere is itself obese and obscene—and yet at the same time it is becoming increasingly transparent. The more it distends, the more it virtually ceases to exist. When everything is political, that is the end of politics as destiny; it is the beginning of politics as culture and the immediate poverty of that cultural politics. It is the same with the economic or the sexual spheres. As it dilates, each structure infiltrates and subsumes the others, before being absorbed in its turn. Such are the extreme phenomena: those that occur beyond the end (extreme = ex terminis). They indicate that we have passed from growth (croissance) to outgrowth (ex-croissance), from movement and change to stasis, ek-stasis, and metastasis. They countersign the end, marking it by excess, hypertrophy, proliferation, and chain reaction; they reach critical mass, overstep the critical deadline, through potentiality and exponentiality. Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social. Ecstasy of the body: obesity. Fatter than fat. Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true. Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present. Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real. Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex. Ecstasy of violence: terror. More violent than violence.... All this describes, by a kind of potentiation, araising to the second power, a pushing to the limit, a state of unconditional realization, of total positivity (every negative sign raised to the second power produces a positive), from which all utopia, all death, and all negativity have been expunged. A state of ex-termination, cleansing of the negative, as corollary to all the other actual forms of purification and discrimination. Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication; form gives way to information and performance. Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event. This kind of acceleration by inertia, this exponentiality of extreme phenomena, produces a new kind of event: now we encounter strange, altered, random, and chaotic events that Historical Reason no longer recognizes as its own. Even if, by analogy with past events, we think we recognize them, they no longer have the same meaning. The same incidents (wars, ethnic conflicts, nationalisms, the unification of Europe) do not have the same meaning when they arise as part of a history in progress as they do in the context of a history in decline. Now, we find ourselves in a vanishing history, and that is why they appear as ghost events to us. But is a ghost history, a spectral history, still a history? Not only have we lost utopia as an ideal end, but historical time itself is also lost, in its continuity and its unfolding. Something like a short-circuit has occurred, a switch shift of the temporal dimension—effects preceding causes, ends preceding origins—and these have led to the paradox of achieved utopia. Now, achieved utopia puts paid to the utopian dimension. It creates an impossible situation, in the sense that it exhausts the possibilities. From this point on, the goal is no longer life transformed, which was the maximal utopia, but rather life-as-survival, which is a kind of minimal utopia. So today, with the loss of utopias and ideologies, we lack objects of belief. But even worse, perhaps, we lack objects in which not to believe. For it is vital—maybe even more vital— to have things in which not to believe. Ironic objects, so to speak, dis-invested practices, ideas to believe or disbelieve as you like. Ideologies performed this ambiguous function pretty well. All this is now jeopardized, vanishing progressively into extreme reality and extreme operationality. Other things are emerging: retrospective utopias, the revival of all earlier or archaic forms of what is, in a sense, a retrospective or necrospective history. For the disappearance of avant-gardes, those emblems of modernity, has not brought the disappearance of the rearguard as well. Just the opposite is true. In this process of general retroversion (was history perhaps infected with a retrovirus?), the rearguard finds itself in point position. Quite familiar by now is the parodic, palinodic event, the event Marx analyzed when he depicted Napoleon III as a grotesque copy of Napoleon I. In this second event—a cheap avatar of the original—we have a form of dilution, of historical entropy: history self-repeating becomes farce. The fake history presents itself as if it were advancing and continuing, when it is actually collapsing. The current period offers numerous examples of this debased, extenuated form of the primary events of modernity. Ghostevents, clone-events, faux-events, phantom-events—such as phantom limbs, those missing legs or arms that hurt even when they are no longer there. Spectrality, of communism in particular. Events that are more or less ephemeral because they no longer have any resolution except in the media (where they have the “resolution” images do, where they are “resolved” in high definition)—they have no political resolution. We have a history that no longer consists of action, of acts, but instead culminates in a virtual acting-out; it retains a spectral air of déja-vu. Sarajevo is a fine example of this unreal history, in which all the participants were just standing by, unable to act. It is no longer an event, but rather the symbol of a specific impotence of history. Everywhere, virtuality— the media hyperspace and the hyperspace of discourses— develops in a way diametrically opposed to what one might call, if it still existed, the real movement of history. excerpt from the book: The Vital Illusion, Jean Baudrillard by Francesca Ferrando Humans Have Always Been Posthuman: A Spiritual Genealogy Of PosthumanismBe free from all dualities Baghavad-Gita, Text 45 This article argues that spirituality, in its all-encompassing signification, corresponds to the core meaning of the posthuman post-dualistic perspective.In this sense, humans have always been posthuman. The posthuman extends over the boundaries of the academic, technological and scientific domains, and can be genealogically traced in different types of spiritual knowledges and understandings, dating back to the beginning of recorded civilization. and still, the significance of spirituality as a genealogical source of the posthuman has not been fully acknowledged in the contemporary field of Posthuman Studies. The need for such a recognition becomes clear when entering the field of pragmatics: what does it mean to be posthuman in our existence? How can we enact post-dualistic non-hierarchical posthuman approaches in the ethics of our daily practices of living? The notion of spirituality helps us answer these questions, as it dramatically broadens our understanding of the posthuman, allowing us to investigate not only technical technologies robotics, cybernetics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, among others, but also, technologies of existence. This article wishes to recognize the important contribution of different spiritual tradition in the development of a posthuman stand point. In order to do so, it first provides an introduction to the topic of posthumanism and spirituality. Secondly, it highlights ancient spiritual traditions which are in tune with the posthuman approach; lastly, it elaborates on the development of the spiritual politics of the posthuman, by emphasizing the relevance of posthumanism as a contemporary philosophy of life. Posthumanism and SpiritualitySpirituality refers to the human tendency to conceive existence more extensively than the individual perception. Existence, in a spiritual sense, contemplates a non-separation between the inner and outer worlds. It is a connectedness between the self and the others: within the spiritual realm, there is no division based on caste, color, creed, gender, age, nationality, religion or species. The etymology of the term speaks for itself. "Spirituality" comes from the Latin word The term "spirit" refers, more in general, to the animating, or "vital principle" (Ibidem) common both to human as well as to non-human entities, and it relates to key concepts found in other world traditions, such as "pneuma" in Ancient Greek, the yogic definition of "prana", and the notion of "qi" in traditional Chinese medicine. The interconnection of existence is one of the markers of the posthuman post-anthropocentric approach. posthumanism deconstructs any fixity, dualism or polarity for a nomadic trans-subjective, inter-dependent perception of the human. Rosi Braidotti in "The Posthuman (2013) proposes a re-evaluation of the idea of subjectivity, as a transversal domain which includes the human, the non-human and the earth as a whole. This "post-individualistic notion of the subject, which is marked by a monistic, relational structure" (87) to use Braidotti's words, is related to her notion of Zoe, that is, life conceived as a non-human generative and vitalist force common to all species Braidotti (2006). Although the spiritual realm is all-encompassing, the effects of the human and humanistic paradigms are actively enacting in the ways spirituality has been historically addressed. Many spiritual traditions still hold sexist, ethnocentric and anthropocentric biases. One example can be found in rituals based on animal sacrifice, which are sustained on the anthropocentric assumption that human animals are entitled to take the life of non-human animals for divine purposes. Throughout the Torah, for instance, God consistently requires animal sacrifice (Genesis 4:3-5; 8:20-21; 15:9) Exodus 20:24; 29:10-42; Leviticus 1:5; 23:12; Numbers 18:17-19; Deuteronomy 12:15; 12:27). Another example of discriminatory traditions can be found in the sexist practice of forming male lineages of spiritual masters, marginalizing women and their spiritual knowledge. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, does not allow women to be ordained (Macy 2008) and still, women have been strong supporters of the Catholic religion, finding ways to express their mystical experiences within the limits imposed. Think, for instance, of the rich tradition of Medieval and Renaissance women mystics: from Hildegard of Bingen (1098 -1179) to Caterina of Siena(1347-1380) and Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), from Joan of Arc (1412 - 1431) to Teresa of Avila (1512 - 1582). More in general, "despite being excluded from leadership positions, in almost every culture and religious tradition, women are more likely than men to pray, to worship, and to claim that their faith is important to them" (Trzebiatowska/Bruce 2012). Such contradictions inhabit the historical outcomes of the spiritual domain. How do we deal with them in mapping a spiritual genealogy of the posthuman? First of all, we shall note that spiritual traditions should not be assimilated to the history of the religions enacting them: religion and spirituality are not synonyms and they shall not be assimilated. There again, an etymological research can be of help. The word "religion" is derived from the Latin "religio" as "an obligation "as of an oath, "bond between man" (in the sense of humans -Note ours) "and the gods", "reverence for the gods" 'The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, n.p.).The origins of the Latin term are uncertain. According to Cicero, "religio" comes from " re-ligare" (re-read), that is, to be knowledgeable and careful with the cult of the Gods (Cicero, De Natura Deorum II", 28). Following the legacy of Lucretius, Lactantius and Agustin (Hoyt 1012), modern philologists derive "religion" from "religare" in the meaning of "placing an obligation on"( Max Muller 1892:33-36). In both cases, religions are characterized by an "oath", an "obligation", related to the knowledge of a set of principles of divine nature 'dogmas', which specifically define each religion in respect to other religions. They are empirically sustained by hierarchical structures based on acquired levels of information, which are needed in order to preserve those same teachings throughout historical changes. The focal relevance of their legacies is clearly shown by their names, which are often inextricably connected to their prophets, taking their names from them, such as Zoroastrianism 'from Zoroaster' (Manichaeism 'from Mani, Christianity 'from Christ'. The divergence between Orthodox and Gnostic Christianity in the Early Christian movement (second century C.E.) regarding the relation between the authority of clergy and the access to the Divine through the individual experience, is enlightening of what can be seen as the main difference between spirituality and religion. While orthodoxy highlighted the Church as the necessary intermediate with the divine, gnostics posed emphasis on gnosis, that is, self-knowledge as knowledge of God (Pagels 1979). Mary, in the "Gospel of Mary", clearly states: "Be on your guard so that no one deceives you by saying, Look over here; or; Look over there;. For the Child of Humanity exists within you. Follow it. Those who search for it will find it". (Meyer 2008, 742) "The Child of Humanity" is Christ, as a symbol of human perfection: the key is searching for it spiritually, within the self, instead of following other people's rules. While religions, in the hierarchical outfit and centralized control, do not necessarily comply with a posthuman approach, the spiritual trends and doctrines present in each religion may. The notion of spirituality is in perfect harmony with philosophical Posthumanism. Here, I wish to clarify that the posthuman scenario is composite, formed by different movements which can hardly be assimilated (Ferrando 2013). For instance, although both Posthumanism and Transhumanism radically open to alterity and extension of perceptions, they do not share the same perspectives nor origins (Ranisch/Sorgner 2014). The connection between Transhumanism, religions and spirituality has been widely investigated, both from a historical perspective, (Mercer /Trothen 2015); Tirosh-Samuelson 2012; Tirosh-Samuelson 2014; Cyborg Buddha Project), and also, from a theoretical one. Transfigurism is one example of a religion based on the syncretization of Mormonism and Transhumanism; it is being developed by the Mormon Transhumanist Association, according to which: Mormonism and Transhumanism advocate remarkably similar views of human nature and potential: material beings organized according to law, rapidly advancing knowledge and power, imminent fundamental changes to anatomy and environment, and eventual transcendence of present limitations. (transfigurism.org) The Turing Church Unlimited, Transhumanist Religions 2.0 represents a transhumanist approach to spirituality. Is stated in the website: We are not interested in developing a new, rigid doctrine. We are interested in developinga loose framework of ideas, concepts, hopes, feelings and sensibilities at the intersection of science and religion, compatible with many existing and new frameworks. This is why we call the Turing Church a meta-religion. (turingchurch.com) On the contrary, the relation between spirituality and Posthumanism (here intended as critical, cultural and philosophical) is a field of investigation which has not been significantly engaged upon yet, with some exceptions. For instance, an attempt to rethink Posthumanism through the Indian tradition of Tantra can be found in "Avatar Bodies": A Tantra for Posthumanism" (2004) by Ann Weinstone. Overall, apart from sparse cases, no exhaustive study has been done on the contribution of spirituality to the constitution of the post-anthropocentric, post-dualistic approach of the posthuman. This article wishes to set a path in this direction. In tune with the comprehensive terms of philosophical, cultural and critical Posthumanism, this article adopts a methodology which is inclusive, rather than exclusive (Ferrando 2012), highlighting relations and points in common, instead of emphasizing why each specific spiritual tradition may not be fully representative of the posthuman. Let's now explore why the realm of spirituality shall be recognized as one of the genealogies of Posthumanism. Ancient Sources of the PosthumanPosthumanism does not recognize humans as being exceptional, nor does it see them in their separateness from the rest of beings, but in connection to them. In such an interconnected paradigm, the well-being of humans is as crucial as the one of non-human animals, machines, and the environment. One of the main characteristics of philosophical Posthumanism is its emphasis on a post-dualistic understanding of existence. Such an ontological approach finds revealing parallels in ancient Asian traditions. Advaita, one of the main Vedanta schools of Indian philosophy, literary means "non-two", "non-dual" (Rambachan 2006; Timalsina 20090. According to this tradition, the inner essence of an individual (Atman) corresponds to the transcendent existence (Brahman), and no frontal dualism between immanence and transcendence can be established: Through the epistemological lens, what is cognized is essentially non-dual awareness only. Through the soteriological perspective, essentially there is no difference between Brahman and the individual self. (Timalsina 2009:3) Advaita complies with another fascinating distention of dualistic perceptions: the one between being awake or being asleep (Sharma 2004) According to Advaita, there are three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and deep sleep: "In all three states, Advaita contends, ātman as awareness is common and constant" (Rambachan 2006:40). The Advaita doctrine of "awareness only" establishes the monism of Brahman. One of the main differences with Posthumanism is the monistic ways Advaita develops such an understanding" "The rejection of duality can be interpreted in terms of the ontological perspective that there is ultimately non-essential plurality in what exists" (Ibidem3). By some schools of Advaita, plurality is seen as an "illusion" (Ibidem9). On the contrary, Posthumanism recognizes diversity as one of the main technologies of evolution, and sees pluralism as the necessary complement to monism: in this sense, Posthumanism is both a monistic pluralism as well as a pluralistic monism. The plurality, according to the posthuman, is the ontological manifestation of the one: it physically represents what can be symbolically seen as the pure potential of being. Specularly, the one is the ontological manifestation of the plural: in the post-dual techno-genesis, as well as in the herstory of conception, there is no pure beginning, everything comes from something else. The passage from not being to being is marked by a collective effort. In the case of humans, for instance, their birth is based on the carnal union of two beings, if we consider natural conception) on the effort of a specialized team of humans and machines, if we consider artificial insemination. The physics and cosmologist hypothesis of the multiverse is another striking example. It not only stretches any universe-centric perspective of existence, stating that this universe is one among many (Tegmark 2010; Randall 2005; Bars et al. 2010), but also, it offers a quantum understanding of the posthuman ontology. Pluralistic monism, or monistic pluralism, can be accessed through physics: many dimensions may exist, each depending on different vibrations of quantum loops of energy called strings. The strings may create different dimensions depending on their vibrations: the one is many, the many are one. The multiverse deals with how the material materializes, revealing itself inductive for a posthuman ontology in tune with the posthumanist overcoming of any strict dualisms. The hypothesis of the multiverse resonates with a shamanic understanding of energy and description of parallel worlds (Harvey 2002). Moreover, as McKenna suggests: The survival through long centuries in Europe of witchcraft and rites involving psychoactive plants attests that the gnosis of entering parallel dimensions by altering brain chemistry was never entirely lost.(1993:224) The multiverse can be seen as an inner and an outer plane of existence, it can be explored cosmologically and existentially. In a similar way, according to the Mahayana schools of Buddhism, there is no ultimate difference between the samsara 'the repeating cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth (and the nirvana 'the perfect peace of mind, acquired by one who is liberated). The enlightenment, within this context, consists precisely in the realization of this ultimate non-dualism: (...) coming to understand that objects and the Self are just a flow of experiences with no enduring elements set in opposition to each other (no duality), we attain enlightenment (Williams 2009:92) Currently, nondualism is attracting an increasing interest from scholars working on bridging modern knowledge and ancient wisdom. In Western science, for instance, the term is used to refer to an inter connectedness which, in tune with the posthuman approach, rejects Cartesian dualism. Such an approach stands on the path opened by Fritjof Capra with his groundbreaking work "The Tao of Physics" (1975), which highlighted "the parallels between the worldview of physicists and mystics", and demonstrated "the profound harmony" between ideas an concepts as expressed in modern physics and Eastern mysticism. The contemporary attempt to rethink science, technology and spirituality in a natural-cultural continuum honors the ontology of the cyborg, to use Donna Haraway's terminology, and highlights Posthumanism as one of the most suited philosophical platform of discussion in the contemporary academic debate. The posthuman does not convey in any techno-utopianism, nor engage in luddism: the machine is not the other, since the human itself is seen as a process developing within a material net, a hybrid, a constant technogenesis. Within the field of Posthuman Studies, the non-separateness between the human and the techno realm shall be investigated not only as an anthropological (Gehlen 1957), paleontological (Leroi-Gourhan 1943; 1964), phenomenological (Simondon 1958) and ontological issue Heidegger 1953; Stiegler 1994), but also, as a spiritual one. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, in "The Buddha in the Robot" (1974), states: From the Buddha's viewpoint, there is no master-slave relationship between human beings and machines. Man achieves dignity not by subjugating his mechanical inventions, but by recognizing in machines and robots the same Buddha-nature that pervades his own inner self. When he does that, he acquires the ability to design good machines and to operate them for good and proper purposes. In this way, harmony between humans and machines is achieved. Although delivered in a sexist language (note the universalized use of the masculine "man" instead of the gender-neutral "humankind"), Mori's message is revelatory: for him, machines and robots are made of "the same Buddha-nature". His view resonates with Quantum Physics and New Materialism, a specific philosophical approach developed within the posthuman scenario. From a physics perspective, anything which has mass and volume is considered matter: humans, for instance, are made out of matter, as well as robots. The way matter appears on the large scale might be misleading if taken as its ultimate state. Matter, on a subatomic level, is not static or fixed but is constantly vibrating. The matter is relational and irreducible to a single determined entity: any reductionist approach has scientifically failed. And still, the impact of such a historical redundancy of reductionist and dualistic approaches in human thoughts and actions should not be underestimated. Posthumanism recognizes its own standpoints as post-dualistic, rather than non-dualistic, in the sense that, within hegemonic systems of thought, the episteme has been repeatedly dualistic - think of the classic sets: body-mind, female-male, black-white, east-west, master-slave, colonizer-colonized, human-machine, human-animals, just to mention a few. In tune with Derrida's deconstructive approach (1967), Posthumanism is aware of the fact that such dualistic presumptions cannot be easily dismissed. Posthumanism does not necessary rely on the death of God (Nietzsche 1883-5) nor on the death of Man (Foucault 1966) since the assumptions of a "death" are already based on the recognition of the symbolic dualism dead-alive, which has been challenged by the posthuman post-dualistic reflection. Furthermore, if God or Man (note the masculine form) are dead, who killed them? This is a relevant question, for the simple fact that, if someone is talking about their deaths, it means that someone has survived: who is the survivor? Dualism keeps coming back, born out of its own ashes. Such a dualistic mindset creates an unbalance which needs to be acknowledged and deconstructed, in order to understand where and how it is silently enacting. For instance, sexism, based on the essentialist dualism female - male, is still uncritically engaged within non-dualistic schools of thoughts. For instance, Vajrayana Buddhism is a Tibetan tradition which has developed a highly refined deconstruction of the dual, including death, which, according to the "BardoThodol' or "Tibetan Book of Dead (14th Century), is not considered an unredeemable end, but an an intermediate state, or "Bardo". And still, in this practice: 'otherness; is commonly represented as either demon or woman, or as both. (...) women's "otherness" is considered a real threat to the potential spirituality of the male. The monastic tradition emphasized the polluting aspect of women, and encouraged celibacy and physical distance from women.' (Campbell 2002:50) Biases cannot be simply erased but, once detected, they have to be deconstructed, in order to be transformed through present awareness and visions of the futures. Awareness is the path towards enlightenment. Recognizing the contribution of women to the manifestation of the human species is necessary in order to recollect post-individualistic realizations of the selves. By being excluded from the linearity of monumental history, actualized in an ongoing list of male protagonists, women have historically sustained non-hierarchical approaches such as sister circles, oral sharing of collective knowledge and cooperatives. In "Quintessence... Realizing the Archaic Future", Mary Daly states: For millennia women have been creating Memories of the Future. By performing actions and generating works that can affect/effect the Future, Wild Women have been creating Memories that will be Realized in the minds and actions of those who will come after us. We have been storing treasures of our own creation in the Treasure House of the Future. Posthuman ontology, as a monistic pluralism or a pluralistic monism, is free from the relativist-absolutist paradigm: no single point of view can be regarded as the complete one. According to the posthuman relational ontology proposed by Karen Barad(2007), there are not fixed and established points of departure: the subject and the object are interchangeable cognitive positions reciprocally constituting one another. In her words: "relata do not precede do not precede relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions"(334). Epistemologically speaking, Posthumanism is a perspectivism, according to which every perspective is valuable and should be acknowledged and respected. It is important to note that the term "perspectivism" etymologically bears a phenomenological, embodied legacy, coming from Latin, in the formula: "per" (prefix meaning "through") plus the verb "specere" ("look at") (Collins Latin Dictionary, n.p.); and still, the gaze should not be reduced to the physical sight. The embodied specificity of perspectivism allows for an agential turn: the embodiment of the perspective is not be confined to the biological/inorganic/autopoietic(Maturana/Varela 1972) realms, but it is extended to social bodies and systems (Luhmann 2002). Moreover, these embodiments cannot be considered independently from their environments, which are crucial to the developed perspectives. Posthumanism shares a striking point in common with the ancient spiritual tradition of Jainism and the doctrine of anēkāntavāda (non absolutism) that is, the principles of pluralism and multiplicity of viewpoints Sethia 2004). The reality is perceived differently from diverse points of view, and no single point of view can be regarded as the complete one: This ability to see the other person as no longer the "other" but as identical to our own self, underlies the capacity for empathy and sympathy with the other that operationalizes ahimsā. (Koller 2004: 86 -87) "Ahimsa" is a Sanskrit word which literally means "not to harm" and is considered one of the main principles of Jainism (Ibidem). For instance, in their outstanding attentiveness to respect all forms of life, some Jains, in their vegan diet, do not eat root vegetables, because the tuber's ability to sprout is considered characteristic of a living being. Such a choice displays a sensitivity fully aware of speciesism and deeply engaged with the significations of a non-anthropocentric standpoint. Jainism shall also be granted a major role in the development of posthuman ethics of daily living. "situated in the recognition of the embodied multiplicity of possible perspectives, in tune with ancient wisdom and contemporary science and technology, fashionable and well-received by academia, posthumanism has now set the right conditions for its own development into a philosophy of life that can have an impact on society. It is time to engage with the pragmatics of the posthuman: what does it entail to be posthuman in our daily practices of living? Spiritual Politics of the PosthumanPosthumanism is a post-dualism: macro-politics are the mirrors of micro-politics. The politics of the posthuman are, in other words, spiritual politics. Spirituality has to do with the minutest things we do: from the food we eat to our thoughts, dreams, and actions. Existence is a process, constantly manifesting, enacting, evolving. Each being is part of such enactment, and thus, has agency in the existential evolution of spacetime. "I am who I am" God answers Moses in "Exodus"(3;14) existence is in the present. The present is the act of manifestation, the physics performance out of pure potentials. Existence manifests itself through memory, repetition, and vision. Posthumanism, as well as Transhumanism foresees the potentials of partaking in the process of evolution with full awareness. Since its very beginning, Transhumanism has particularly focussed on humans being actively engaged in the next step of human evolution. The closest reference to Transhumanism as the current philosophical attitude can be found in the writings of the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (1887 - 1975). This is how "Transhumanism", a chapter of his book "New Bottles for New Wine" (1957): As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe - in a few of us human beings. Huxley's Transhumanism is anthropocentric, based on human exceptionalism. Such an ontological primacy will be mostly left intact in the current developments of Transhumanism, for which human enhancement is the primary goal (Bostrom 2003). Another antecedent of the transhuman is the term "trans-humanizing", found in the paper "The essence of the Democratic Idea: A Biological Approach(1949) included in the posthumous collection "The Future of Mankind" (1959) by philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). De Chardin is an interesting thinker both for Transhumanism as well as for Posthumanism. Although his teleological view is not in tune with the decentralized approach of the posthuman, De Chardin's emphasis on the interconnection of evolution cannot be underestimated. As he states: Our habit is to divide up our human world into compartments of different sorts of 'realities' natural and artificial, physical and moral, organic and juridical, for instance. / In a space-time, legitimately and perforce extended to include the movements of the mind within us, the frontiers between these pairs of opposites tend to vanish. (1965: 222) Existence is connected, entangled, relational. The age of the Anthropocene (Crutzen- Stoermer2000) requires the development of daily post-anthropocentric ethics of living based on an integral investment of the notion of the posthuman. Eco-feminism underlines the fact that a holistic approach has never been dismissed within women's practice (Shiva 1988). And still, holism and individualism should not be seen in controversy (Zahle 2014); instead, according to a pluralistic monistic approach, they can be viewed as embodied perspectives, symbolic mirrors which, harmonically placed in front of each other, create infinite reflections, opening the doors to the multiverse. In this sense, the Tantra tradition is of key interest. According to this ancient style of meditation, "the practitioner;s body became identified with the entire universe, such as all the processes and transformations occurring to his body in this world are now occurring to the world inside his body". (White 2012: 14) New Age movements underlie the fact that significant social changes require deep shifts in consciousness: evolution is to be preferred to revolution. In this respect, the global impact of yoga on contemporary society is significant. "Yoga" is a Sanskrit word, meaning: the act of joining", "union" (Sanskrit-English Dictionary, n.p.). In the "Bhagavad Gita" Krishna, the Divine, tells Arjuna: "He whose self is harmonized by yoga sees the Self abiding in all beings and all beings in the Self, everywhere he sees the same"(6.30). And also, "He, O Arjuna, who sees with equality everything, in the image of his own self, whether in pleasure or in pain - he is considered a perfect yogi" (6.32). The growing popularity of Yoga worldwide (Singleton / Byrne 2008) can be seen as a collective desire of transformation, based on the experience of existential and social empowerment offered by the practice (Nevrin 2008). In the non-dual tradition of Yoga, as well as in the post-dualistic tradition of the posthuman, self-transformation corresponds to the transformation of the entire plane of being. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), in his integral yoga approach, focussed at directing the evolution of human life into a "life divine" (1939-1940), on the belief that a spiritual realization would transform human nature: A change in consciousness is the major fact of the next evolutionary transformation, and the consciousness itself, by its own mutation, will impose and effect any necessary mutation of the body.(1963:10) This emphasis on a spiritual evolution, related to a biotechnological one, should be more extensively addressed within the field of Posthuman Studies. Spirituality can be invested as a technology of the self, to say it in Foucauldian terms. It is an open-source technology of existence, offered to anyone, anywhere. The resisting side of spirituality should not be underestimated: spirituality destabilizes the hegemonic order through a connected existential attitude, which can be silently expressed during the most challenging circumstances. A history of beliefs, visions, prayers, and rituals have accompanied the historical outcomes of the most oppressed categories of human beings and can be recollected during the most challenging times: by captives during slavery (Erskine 2014) or by women during high patriarchal times. This is of great interest for the posthuman, which challenges a hierarchical notion of the human. Posthumanism is aware of the fact that the notion of the human has been historically constructed by the same embodied subjectivities who have self-imposed themselves as the hegemonic voices in normalizing what the notion of the human should imply. To be granted full recognition of human dignity in the Western exclusivist process of humanizing, the subject had to be: male, White, Western, heterosexual, physically able, propertied, among other terms. Spiritual practice can be viewed, from a posthuman perspective, as a technique which offers hybridization in a context where essentialism has been employed to configure fixed categories and hierarchies. Furthermore, spirituality may actively destabilize such a state of things through a connected existential attitude. In the post-dualistic frame of the posthuman, micro-politics are macro-politics. By our acts, our thoughts, our visions, we are co-constituting existence. In the interconnected rhizome of existence, what we eat, the products we use, the people we relate to constitute who and what we are. The politics of the posthuman are enacted in each moment of being, manifested in full awareness. Posthuman politics are, in other words, spiritual politics. ConclusionsThis article wishes to unveil the relevance, significance, and meaning of spirituality in the genealogy of cultural, critical and philosophical posthumanism. In its genealogical endeavor, this article expands the lens of the posthuman outside of Western academia, to Eastern traditions of thought such as Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoga and Tantrism, although in no terms does it seek to offer a comprehensive scenario of all the parallels which can be drawn between specific spiritual traditions and the posthuman standpoint. Furthermore, this article clearly highlights that no specific tradition can be regarded as fully representative of the posthuman. For instance, non-dualistic systems are still formed within anthropocentric paradigms: most Hindu and Buddhist teachings view the human as the highest reincarnation before achieving enlightenment, in a hierarchical system which does not comply with the post-centralized non-hierarchical perspectivist approach of the posthuman. This is why, although posthumanism is deeply indebted to the spiritual realm, its offerings are uni&ue, original and very much needed. In tune with ancient wisdom, contemporary science, ecology and technology, posthumanism is evolving from an academic theory into a philosophy of life that has an impact on society. In the age of the Anthropocene, posthumanism is re&uired to develop daily post-anthropocentric ethics of living based on an integral investment of its own post-dualistic process-ontological premises. Spirituality is a precious resource for this important task, as a practice which is enacted in each moment of being: the ultimate post-dualism of the posthuman resides in full awareness. Envisioning desirable posthuman modes of existence is a path of self-discovery, once the self-has been recognized as the others within. In a spiritual sense, humans have always been posthuman. Francesca Ferrando New York University, Liberal Studies Program, Faculty Member
by Steven Craig Hickman
For the founders of the State come like lightning; the despotic machine is synchronic while the capitalist machine’s time is diachronic.
– Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
Continuing from the above Deleuze and Guattari will see in this transition from the Roman, Feudal, and Mercantile regimes a series defined by its static enclosure and linearity, while in the emergence of capitalism is this sense of movement, evolution, history: progress. Should we say that the engine of capitalism has always been the principle of progress? Against all previous forms of economy they will tell us that capitalism “institutes a kind of creativity of history, a strange menagerie: the schizoid time of the new creative break” (p. 223).1
Deleuze and Guattari will offer a general theory of society based as a general theory of flows. They qualify this regarding the theory of flows as the relationship of social production to desiring-production, the variation of this relationship in each case, and the limits of relationship in the capitalist system. (p. 262) They’ll argue that the three social machines of production are: the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized societies. Explicating this they’ll tell us:
The first is the underlying territorial machine, which consists of coding the flows on the full body of the earth. The second is the transcendental imperial machine, which consists in overcoding the flows on the full body of the despot or his apparatus, the Urstaat: it effects the first great movement of deterretorialization, but does this by adding its eminent unity to the territorial communes that it conserves by bringing them together, overcoding them and appropriating their surplus labor. The third is the modern immanent machine [Capitalism], which consists in decoding flows on the full body of capital-money: it has realized the immanence, it has rendered concrete the abstract as such and has naturalized the artificial, replacing the territorial codes and the despotic overcoding with an axiomatic of decoded flows, and a regulation of these flows; it effects the second great movement of deterritorialization, but this time because it doesn’t allow any part of the codes and overcodes to subsist.(p. 261)
Yet, they’ll add the new system adds new codes and overcodes replacing the others using regulatory practices that place both an outer limit and internal limit upon the processes of capital.
Lyotard and Baudrillard will attack them for their inability to go far enough to expose either the libidinal forces operative within the circulatory system of capital, or the inner core of death which beats like a heart in the dark lairs of capital’s jouissance. Yet, neither of these take into account the actual statements by Deleuze and Guattari who were already recognizing a latency – “Death is felt rising from within and desire itself becomes the death instinct, latency, but it also passes over into these flows that carry the seeds of new life” (p. 223). What is “latency” in the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari use the term? Latency addresses the spatial-temporal dynamics of quiescence and suspends chronological continuities. As an agential materialization of physical and technological processes (i.e. “virus”), as well as of cultural productions (i.e. music, memory), it operates with time intervals and intervenes eventfully. In the section in which they describe the notion of Urstaat: “the presence of the latent model that can no longer be equaled, but that one cannot help but imitate” becomes the death-in-desire. As they will ask: “For what do private property, wealth, commodities, and classes signify?” The breakdown of codes. It’s this sense of the latent power of desire become death instinct that breaks down the codes of the despotic State releasing new decoded flows of desire that becomes the desiring-production of capital.
That is why capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decoded flows [structural], but by the generalized decoding of flows [as processes], the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows. It is the singular nature of this conjunction that ensured the universality of capitalism. (p. 234) [emphasis mine]
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari expand the concept of the three syntheses into political terms: association, disjunction and conjunction. Association is the connection, not just of data (as in Kant’s philosophy), but also of bodies or terms into some manifold or experienced thing, an ‘assemblage’. Disjunction, the second synthesis, is the subsequent possibility of relations between or among such assembled points of relative stability, while conjunction or the third synthesis is the referral of these terms to the ground or plane across which they range.2 In this sense of conjunction as the synthesis of capital with the “plane” across which these decoded flows range we approach what Deleuze and Guattari will term the disconnect of conjunction from its ties to enjoyment or to the excess consumption of a class: the reduction of all decoded flows to “production for production’s sake” that links labor and consumer to the new deterritorialized “full” body from which they emanate (pp. 224-225).
Deleuze and Guattari will tie cynicism and piety together as the as the extortion of capital from labor, and the emanation of labor through piety (p. 225). At the heart of this is not production itself, but rather anti-production: the “State, its police, and its army form a gigantic enterprise of antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production” (p. 235). Yet, it will be to money and the market itself that they will crown as the true policing force:
Marx often alluded to the Golden Age of the capitalist, when the latter didn’t hide his own cynicism: in the beginning, at least, he could not be unaware of what he was doing, extorting surplus value. But how this cynicism has grown – to the point where he is able to declare: no, nobody is being robbed! For everything is then based on the disparity between two kinds of flows, as in the fathomless abyss where profit and surplus value are engendered: the flow of the merchant capital’s economic force and the flow that is the derisively named “purchasing power” – a flow made truly impotent that represents the absolute impotence of the wage earner as well as the relative dependence of the industrial capitalist. This is money and the market, capitalism’s true police. (pp. 229-230)
The banker’s control the investment of desire: the wage earner’s desire, the capitalist’s desire, everything moves to the rhythm of one and the same desire, founded on the differential relation of flows having no assignable exterior limit, and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever widening and more comprehensive scale. (p. 239) And, as they will affirm, it is at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved. (p. 239)
“So what is the solution?” they will ask. “Which is the revolutionary path?” They turn from psychoanalysis saying it “constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value” (p. 239). So no help there. It is complicit with the very system it works to reinstate through its services as immunologists of the psyche: curing the disabled products (i.e., the broken psyche’s of the alienated consumer) of the capitalist system and returning them to the feeding machine (i.e., capitalism as alien entity absorbing energy). No. Psychoanalysis is no revolutionary path, but rather a repressive force for capitalism that patches up the broken proletariat and sends it back to be farmed of its surplus once again. Then D&G enter that famous section that so many know well:
To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? 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. (pp. 239-240)
Many critiques of the above statement seem to always stop just there, never going into the next chapter where they will take this thought-experiment and apply a rigorous dissection of its actual theoretic in praxis. (One might also ask how many ever follow up the above notion of “accelerate the process” by tracing it down to Nietzsche’s actual notes in his late Notebooks?) Always amazes me how philosophers and other thinkers seem to just read what they want without actually reading anything at all. Amazing. For it is in under the next section, Capitalist Representation, that Deleuze and Guattari will both extend and explicate what they intend in the above statement “accelerate the process”. They’ll point out the difference between the older forms of despotic inscription based on linguistic (semiotic) forms as compared to the new capitalist use of visual and non-representable (diagrammatic: a-semiotic) forms that move away from the power of the voice to order and shape, and therefore repress the limits of desire in the capitalist system. They’ll point out that capital itself produces its own internal constraints and limits, thereby suppressing and policing desires that would exceed those limits, etc.
They’ll ask: “Then what becomes of a “truly” schizophrenic language and the “truly” decoded and unbound flows that manage to break through the wall of the absolute limit?” (p. 246) Capital confines these break-flows to the caged environment and enclosure of the psychiatric ward, disallowing and policing such surplus flows. As they’ll attest: “the notion of break-flow has seemed to us to define both capitalism and schizophrenia. But not in the same way…” (p. 247). The exterior limit of capitalism is the decoded flows of schizophrenia, but it exorcises and regulates these flows through inscription and policing by the State and other systems. It also has internal limits which are the limits of capitalist production itself, its ability to produce and absorb its productivity, etc. As it expands it adds new axioms to include a new limit. As they’ll tell it capitalism “defines a field of immanence and never ceases to fully occupy this field” (p. 250). This cyclic movement of the internal limits in production and antiproduction keeps the process continuous and expanding at the rate of absorption, etc.
Instead of the old despotic and primitive inscriptions of body markings (tattoos) as part of the communal alignments of filiation and alliance, etc. now the individual is “privatized” no longer needing inscriptions: “your capital is your labor capacity, the rest is unimportant.” (p. 251). In the capitalist system the privatized labor no longer implies the coding to the body of the earth, but rather the application of the code is done by the individual upon the body of the socious – a reversal or substitution. The individual is a part-object in a vast machine that includes technical machines adjacent to her: both form the labor inscriptions of capital formation. In Industrial democracies the bureaucracy is the regulatory mechanism of repression that codes and recodes the private and technical machines within capital. (One may refer to those such as Gilbert Simondon Being and Technology and Bernard Stiegler Technics and Time trilogy, etc.) In fact most of this section of the book is taken up with a diagnosis and dissection of how capitalism in the West and in Russia both form and shape these internal mechanisms of repression based on desire-as-death. (Think of Freud’s notions of repression as defense systems against the death-drive) As they’ll explain the “social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the other.” (p. 260) Between conspiracy and paranoia the authoritarian State encloses the commons in a shizflow world of sociopathic citizens who feed off each other’s vulnerabilities, competing for the treasures of a false infinity of goods. A world where psychopathology is the order of the day, insanity in institutionalized capitalism, murder and mayhem the escape valves, and mass incarceration the global system of final extraction and exclusion. A self-referencing system caught between Big Data and the dominion of surveillance capitalism where even the winners are losers in an end game without outlet, the only benefit being the cruel pleasures of a jouissance that immerses the top .01% in a mental straight-jacket of self-imposed paranoia and fear – a terror capitalism in which everyone is at war and democracy is just another name for death.
They’ll admit that democracy, fascism, and communism are all three haunted by the Asiatic despotic of the Urstaat, which constitutes in its shadow existence history’s only break, since even the modern social axiomatic can function only by resuscitating it as one of the poles of socialism. (p. 261)
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin, 2001)
2. (2010-09-01). The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition (p. 80). Edinburgh University Press. Kindle Edition.
The article is taken from here: socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/deleuze-guattari-in-the-time-of-capital/
Chris Dercon
CD: An idea that comes up again and again in your books is that of the TV screen, the TV screen looking out on the world like a portable window. Enlarging on this idea, one could say the world is merely retransmitted by screens and satellites. What do you mean by this idea of the portable window?
PV: I used this term in reference to architecture, because the problem in architecture is first and foremost one of doors and windows. It is not the wall which encloses, since a structure that cannot be entered is not a structure for man.
There are three windows. There is the French window (door) which serves to effect an architecture, a place where man lives, be this a city or an apartment. There is the window which renders itself autonomous, the window as a place of light or looking – here we have an extraordinary invention related to a religious problem, the problem of the cult of light, through the claustra, solar calendars, etc. The third window is the television screen … So when I speak of a window, I mean this third window. I am speaking also of another constructed space, that of telecommunications and the new technologies. Another point concerns cutting out: you only have an image if there is cutting, for nothing is ever seen in its entirety. Everything is always perceived through a frame, and it’s certain this frame existed from the moment the first eye opened upon the visible field. This process continued with the framing of paintings, the frame of the photograph, and the frame created by the television camera eye. I believe when you talk of a third window, you are talking about a new frame, a sidereal frame, since with communications satellites and live re-broadcasts, the problem of the window becomes a macrocosmic phenomenon. But, this all stems from the very first window, the porthole drilled in the megalithic tomb. In these tombs there was a tiny hole to let the sun shine in. All this goes back to the beginning of time. That’s why I call it the continuation of as tory, the after math of that first sighting.
CD: The view through this third window might represent a catastrophe of perception, because as seen through it, reality becomes blurred. We are living in this loss of the real, because we only perceive reality through images. How should we react to this third window, how should we question it?
PV: As a first step we spoke of space; I think here we should speak of time. The contemporary image is a time-image, even a speed-image. The first pictures were space images, and that’s what I refer to when I speak of an aesthetics of disappearing. I think we may come back to that in order to answer your question, but it really won’t be an answer. Until the invention of photography, there was only anaesthetics of appearance. Images only persist because of the persistence of their medium: stone in the neolithic era or in ancient times, carved wood, painted canvas. … Those are an aesthetics of immersion, of the appearance of an image which becomes permanent. The image is sketched, then painted and coated, and it lasts because its medium persists. With the coming of photography, followed by cinematography and video, we entered the realm of an aesthetics of disappearance: the persistence is now only retinal. Despite the film used in photography and cinema, there is no longer any real ‘support’. The sustaining medium is retinal persistency because there is a persistency of the image in my eye that is this image in motion. Let’s never forget that. So I believe an aesthetics of disappearing is another world, another link to the real. It is a link to the real as fleeting, as uncertain. The real in an aesthetics of appearance consists of being the solid, durable, hard real – hard in both senses of the word, i.e. hard and aggressive. So I believe that reality was a reality of solidity, of real presence, as they say. With cinematography, with photography first of all and now with infography, reality is shown as fugacious, but I think that we, too are fleeting.
CD: You have mentioned fugacity. Another very important concept in the almost real functioning of the magnetoscope is that of establishing a program of absence. What is the relationship between the idea of fugacity and the idea of a program of absence?
PV: I think the old image, the old reality, was a reality that can be presented as a space-time reality. Man lived in a time system of his actual presence: when he wasn’t there, he wasn’t there. Today we are entering a space which is speed-space. Contrary to popular belief, the space we live in is a speed-space. This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming. We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have, I think, a discovery: the olden space-time was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was short-lived was considered an evil – something perjorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it was negative. Today we are entering an era of intensive time: that is to say that new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times we were conscious, with telescopes, of the infinitely large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small. Today, high-speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of carbon-14, which enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the ‘program of absence’ that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that billionth of a second.
No human being can be present in the intensive time that belongs to machines. Man is present in the average time situated in the long duration of historical phenomena and the short duration of his reflexes, of the ‘twinkling of an eye’. We can say the same for the cinematographer. Beyond 60 images per second you can no longer perceive anything. Here again, you see, the problem of space is central. The new space is speed-space; it is no longer a time-space, a space where time is manipulated. What we are manipulating is no longer man’s time, but machine’s time, which I call speed-space, or the dromosphere, meaning the sphere of speed. Inconclusion, from my point of view, speed is not a means, but a milieu – another milieu, and one that tends to escape us. When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from here to there fast, it’s the means of seeing the Antipodes live when there’s a game, or of watching the Olympics in Los Angeles. But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, and a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information science and ‘robotized’ systems.
CD: You have spoken of the relationship between dromospheric space – of speed-space – and an aesthetics of disappearance, in connection with the machinery of war.
PV: Yes.
CD: For you, one of the most important factors in this new time-space concept – let’s call it speed-space – is the strategic or stratifying development of war.
PV: Yes, in so far as war has always been the laboratory of the future. Because of the necessity to survive, and to face the possibility of sudden death, be it in ancient or new societies, war has always been the laboratory of techniques, of mores. I really believe this, and we must not forget it. War has also been the laboratory of speed. When Sun Tzu, the old Chinese strategist of several centuries ago, said that ‘promptitude is the essence of war’, he said it at the time of the cavalry. Now it is obvious that this saying is still true: witness the debate over euromissiles in Europe just a year ago. So, war is in fact the laboratory of modernity, of all modernities. And it is in this sense that it has been a subject of permanent study for me. It is also because I myself have experienced it. I lived through a war in my childhood, and it affected me deeply. Thus, war is not merely an a moral phenomenon, it is an experimental phenomenon in as much as it reverses productivity relations. War produces accidents. It produces an unheard-of accident, which is upsetting the traditional idea of war. Substance is necessary and accident is contingent and relative! That is the traditional story of the return to the accident. In war time the opposite is true. Here accident is necessary and substance relative and contingent. What are war machines? They are machines in reverse – they produce accidents, disappearances, deaths, breakdowns. I think war in this sense conveys something which at present we are experiencing in peace time; the accident has now become something ordinary.
CD: You have spoken elsewhere of the relationship of cinema to modern techniques of war. As you know, it is said of Viverstein’s films, and of all the products of Nazi cinema, that they were made especially for propaganda purposes. Is it not interesting to view these productions according to Jean-Marie Pienne’s theory that technology is built upon the idea that there is no such a thing as death? So here’s an immediate connection between technology and the idea of heredity. Let’s not for the moment consider this idea of propaganda and this idea of the strategy of the image from the viewpoint of atavism. Let’s say that there is a paradox: technology and atavism, an atavistic technology.
loading...
PV: I’m having trouble grasping your idea of atavism. I understand the word but I can’t grasp what you mean by it. This being said, I think we can talk of propaganda. During the Second World War, the German army with the American army – the French army was less advanced on this score – was to develop the ‘Peca’ companies, the cinema companies created to follow the divisions. Films were regularly brought into head quarters to provide a direct vision of the front. This was because television, though it already existed, wasn’t ready to do this yet. The camera operators of the land army and airforce served as on-the-spot reporters where the war was actually taking place. But it is certain that the Second World War was essentially a radio-telephone war for the whole population. Nonetheless, we see Nazi regime dignitaries conducting research into colour as opposed to Technicolor. At the beginning of the war, Agfa-colour pictures were earthy and yello wish in hue, where as Technicolor reds and blues were already bright. You have the Germans of the era saying, ‘Ah, those colours are distinctly better than ours, and we’re going to have to get ours to look much more lifelike.’ I think this is important, especially for propaganda.
CD: Is there a difference between the idea of developing the cinema and the statues of Arno Breker? Technology is based on the idea that there is no such thing as death. It’s the same thing as Arno Breker’s statues. At that point, technology becomes atavistic. There is a paradox in cinema production.
PV: Well, here I’ll begin with an anecdote about General Macarthur. When he was leaving his post in Korea, because he had planned to use nuclear arms but was refused and demoted, he said in his last official words, ‘Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.’ I think this expression is very cinematographic and very ‘disappearance-aesthetic’. It is true the new technologies allow the dead man to live again, allow the duration of what has disappeared. There is a sort of universal conservatory, when you watch an actor on TV. You can see Mussolini, Hitler, Jean Gabin, Claude François, live again. It is in fact a form of conservation. I’ve always been amazed to see to what extent cinema is a sort of temporal porthole, as if there were a porthole in time. To be able to write ‘War and Cinema’, I was looking at the archives of the Army Cinematographic Services at Fort d’Ivry, and I had asked to see films of the 1914– 18 war. I was chiefly interested in the fact I’d be seeing soldiers of that war in their youth, in their vitality, in their illusion – and they couldn’t see me. As if it were a time-porthole which reverses the arrow (the direction) of time. So I said to myself that now, perhaps, in looking through this lens, we’ll see people who do not yet exist. I have to ask myself that question.
Yes, I think cinema is a sort of porthole into the past, and this porthole is through the camera lens. Recording myself today is, I believe, to make myself particular to a time which will not be my own. Through this viewfinder, this porthole, people yet unborn will see me, but I have no way of seeing them. The arrow of time is reversed. And indeed we have here an event of the cinema, an event of this speed-space. We are no longer in time-space. It is, in fact, an illustration of what I was talking about earlier. We are in a speed-space: it is the recording capacities of a machine which will allow people of the future to see me. I had the privilege of seeing myself twenty years after, in my friend Eric Rohmer’s film Le Marbre et le Cellulo. I had been interviewed in 1965 and I saw a projection of this film in 1985. It had an awful effect on me, because to see this man who had existed twenty years before, to see him again today, was in away frightful. It wasn’t a problem of the beauty of youth, it was a problem of identity – it wasn’t me. Not at all. That man quoted the word time-space continuum even, and that was the only word which allowed me to connect myself to him, for everything else – the clothes, the tie, the hairstyle – everything was wrong. If I had known twenty years ago, I would certainly have said something else!
CD: There is also another reversal, that of day and of night. Is there a link to be made between the day–night relationship and the night bombings of the Second World War and the idea of night as a black hole, in ‘Star Wars’ [The Strategic Defense Initiative]?
PV: There is much to be said here. It is certain that technological war allowed us to continue to make war at night, in other words, we’re performing theatre. Then, after that, in 1914, 1925, those same projectors were used to pick out the planes coming to bomb in order to shoot them down. So here we have a whole light-war; tracer-bullets will be used to make night-time shooting possible, and flares to light up the troops’ night chargers (flare revolvers and rifles). And I myself saw those special effects in the Second World War. During the bombings of the city of Nantes I saw those projectors, those tracer-bullets, those rocketparachutes tossed out of bombers to light up the bombing zone. It was a fabulous show of unheard of and even tragic beauty. It was Rome burning. So it’s certain the use of new technologies extended war to the totality of time, not only as in the past wars in summer time, but also war in wintertime. In antiquity war was waged starting in March, and then stopped in September–October. The new technologies have allowed us to wage war year round. But up until 1914 no one made war at night, they stopped at nightfall. Now, with the new technologies, not only do they make war all the time, in all seasons, but non-stop, day and night. We have a totalizing phenomenon that is also a phenomenon we experience daily with live broadcasts from the four corners of the earth, which allow us to watch a festival or a ballgame. There is therefore a cancellation of the daytime. In the same way that there is a cancellation of timespace, there is a cancellation of daytime as a way of dividing up time. Daytime is no longer the astronomical day, it is the day of techniques. With astronomical daytime, chickens went to sleep when Man did. Today, chickens continue to go to sleep when the sun goes down, but men no longer do. When the sun goes down, electric light and television go on. It’s another time, another day beyond the solar day. I think that’s new.
CD: Now that war takes place beyond the horizon, can we still speak of war or of a war?
PV: Indeed, now they are talking of a trans-horizonal weapon – the term is a technical one. But I believe that war has never been linked to the horizon. It always was, even when geographical, a war of time. Its territory was always temporal. When Sun Tzu said, ‘Promptitude is the essence of war’, he meant war is not simply a problem of hills,valleys and mountain passes which have to be defended, it’s a problem of time; hence, the invention of the cavalry. Cavalry was its strike force, the strike force of that time. Afterwards, it was the artillery which replaced this strike force. Every war is a war of time, and I think there have been profound changes, changes which brought about the invention of new weapons and which today are reaching a limit. ‘Star Wars’ is also a war of time, but it is no longer the time of decision. If you take the history of decision in war, war was first delegated to commanders, great captains of the Middle Ages, then afterwards, with the invention of headquarters, the decision was concentrated in individuals – the ministers of war, chiefs of staff, who concealed the decision. There was a phenomenon of concentration–the dispersal, the diaspora, of decision disappeared. Then, with the Second World War, there was the creation of the general headquarters, a headquarters of armies and groups of armies, whose great strategist was Eisenhower. Here again you had a phenonemon of retention of power over a chief of general headquarters who made the decisions concerning a half a continent or half a hemisphere. With nuclear weapons, this retention of the time of war, of the time of decision, became even more concentrated in one lone individual, the head of state. Presidentialism in France is connected with nuclear power, the strike force. Presidentialism in the US is similar, even if its origin is not exactly the same. Nuclear weapons demanded there be just one decision-maker. This, moreover, is one of the major handicaps to the creation of Europe: if we want a nuclear Europe, there will be no Europe, because we’ll never manage to agree on a President.
In fact, this moment is in the process of disappearing too. The supreme decision-makers, François Mitterand, Reagan, Gorbachev himself, are in the process of disappearing. Why? Because now with ‘Star Wars’, trans horizon and transcontinental weapons, the decisiontime to fire will drop to a few milliseconds. With laser weapons that work at the speed of light, 300,000 kilometres per second, there’s no question of saying, ‘Mr President, it seems that some rockets have taken off on the other side of the Atlantic’. No, they would already be there before you could say so. So now the formidable idea is taking hold in the US and the USSR, around the ‘Star Wars’ debate, of the automatic responder, meaning the idea of a war-declaration machine. Why? Because man’s time is no longer the time of the speed of light. Man cannot intervene: he may have been elected and hold supreme political and military powers, but he does not have the power to act at the speed of light. Today a drama is being played out. But no one is talking about it, despite the demonstrations I participate in, despite Clifford Johnson’s court case, which has been launched in the US.
A computer expert at Stanford says, ‘the new concept of firing on alert is a mad concept, for it delegates the declaration of war to a machine’. Now, constitutionally, the commander has no power to delegate. Reagan does not have the power to delegate the decision to declare nuclear war to a machine. For what reasons? Quite simply because a computer breakdown cannot be identified as the free act of an individual head of state. I think that between the commander of the Middle Ages and Reagan or Gorbachev today, and finally the automatic responder, it’s clear that promptitude is the essence of war. That essence of war eliminates man from the system. First the big battalions are replaced by materials, then big materials are replaced by very small, sophisticated materials (satellites or MX missiles), and finally man, the supreme decider, is eliminated in favour of a responder which will, of course, be coupled to another responder.
CD: Will the idea of speed-space instead of time-space influence the means of representation in the cinema and the artist’s image?
PV: I think it’s already had an influence. We witnessed the shift from extensive to intensive time with cinema. We experienced it first with cinema of 16 images per second, then 24 images per second, then tracks, then reels; we had films which lasted a few minutes – I’m thinking of Meliese’s films – then we had films lasting half an hour, then films one and one half to two hours, which is the average length at 25 frames per second. With the new machines today we are in fact playing with the subliminal. We are in the process of reducing the length of films to half or three quarters of an hour, but projected at 60 frames per second. We are going from the extensive films of Abel Gance and Eisenstein, whose films lasted up to ten hours, to the intensive film – the video clip or halfhour film. I think that there’s a movement here; more goes into speedspace, 60-image per second films than went into time-space, 24 frames persecondfilms, but we are at the limits of the subliminal. We know that beyond 60 images per second there will be no more viewers, since nothing more will be perceived. Here, again, intensiveness is confirmed–the shift from extensiveness to intensiveness. It’s certain that artists, be they film-makers or video-makers, use this. They play in this dromospheric space, in speed-space. I think special effects are one of the most interesting areas in cinema. I remember coming back when Alien was released. It was made and shown before Star Wars. I remember viewers, young people, coming in and saying ‘fasten your seat belts’. What they were coming to see wasn’t a story. It was a movement. They wanted to be carried away in the special effects. They were disappointed. Though Alien is a good film, it’s not one where you fasten your seat belts. It’s another film which tells a story about monsters, whereas Star Wars was a film where you fastened your seat belt. Now it seems to me cinema is fastening the viewer’s seat belts, via video clips, special effects and through infography and synthesized images. We saw this in Tron, and other films. There is a cinema beyond the 24 frames per second one, a speed-cinema, which is no longer a time-cinema, a tale. I don’t think that’s bad. What is bad is that we lack a Meliesse. Meliesse was the inventor of telescopic effects, of montages of different temporalities. Today, it is unfortunately too commercial, and I regret the lack of a Meliesse of electronic effects.
loading...
CD: You say that we lack a Meliesse, but the story has become less and less important. Therefore, we also lack a Roland Barthes, since without one, we can’t go on telling tales. What are the consequences of this?
PV: That’s the moral position I’ve always wanted to avoid. It’s true that speed is a drunkenness, a drug – there’s no doubt. It has the same effects. You vomit, you get a headache, just as when you get drunk or take other drugs. That’s the negative aspect I’ve developed in my books. But I don’t think that anything’s ever totally negative. The world is not so simple. At one and the same time, it is dreadful, in that it causes us to lose the relationship to the subject. But it also teaches us about our fragility, our fugacity. That is perhaps the moral lesson of that which has no moral.
CD: Then special effects become a homeopathic means, a vaccine. Is that why special effects have been so exaggerated, and that an artificiality beyond artificiality has been created?
PV: For the moment, it’s indeed the commercial system and therefore a system of facility. As for me, my preoccupation is that, behind speed-space, another relationship to the real is hiding. It’s just as humanistic, just as moral or ethical as the other. Only no one has yet been behind that mirror. For the moment they’re playing the way they played with the first cinema, the first films. It wasn’t cinema, it was effects, effects you’d see at a country fair. They showed films at fairs. I think this is just a stage.
CD: What remains to us is the idea of editing, of arrangement. The idea of original creation no longer exists, no longer counts. In that case, when we are editor–arrangers, do we have to create or exaggerate the artificiality, as we would the story?
PV: The model is the speed composition. Now there is a very old model of speed composition and that’s music. Music has confused speeds in harmonics in an extraordinary fashion for a very long time, to use only Western references. Speed-compositions were very well developed, through Bach, Handel, Mozart etc. in the universe of sound. Intervals of time were extraordinarily well developed and utilized. In the optical system, it hasn’t happened yet. Abel Gance hoped for it. He hoped to make the music of images, but I think the means of his time did not permit this. Transparencies and superimpositions were not sophisticated enough. Today I believe we are about to enter a time of compositions in optical speed and special effects. These are the rather spectacular aspects of this music of the eye. For the moment we just have vulgar things, but there’s a possibility here, which will or won’t be realized. We see the video clips being used for ads, and the films being made with fantastic special effects, but, alas, for the moment, we are not moving towards the realization of that potential. But it could happen, and I believe there will be a [Guillaume de Nacho] or a J.S. Bach able to do the same thing with pictures and light. The new techniques allow it.
CD: Another consequence: in video and cinema, we’re seeing more and more violence and hard-core pornography. I’m thinking of the English expression ‘video nasty’. Isn’t there a desire for images which still have this notion of reality?
PV: Yes, absolutely. Pornography is an example of retrogradation. The body only appears through obscenity. Now there exists this retrograde vision of the body. Personally, I think the word ‘obscenity’ corresponds to its etymology, which we often forget is ‘ill omen’. It is curious to see that Sun Tzu – who I quote a lot, as I believe his is the only philosophy of war – says ‘weapons are tools of ill omen’. I’d like to say that through unrestrained pornography, there is a return to the body, which is a lost body. This obscene body is not a body to come, it’s a lost body. It’s the equivalen to facadaver, the putting to death of the body. I admit it bothers me profoundly. What shocks me in pornography is that in it, boredom is weeping. There are the tears of boredom, not those of pleasure.
CD: Listening to you, you seem to be attached to the idea of the ‘Immaterialists’, of Lyotard – the possibility of developing a new idea of the material, of material representation. Do you think that the use of the term the ‘immaterialists’ is correct?
PV: I’ve used that term for a long time, saying that war went from the material of war to the immaterial of war. That seems completely coherent to me. I feel we have indeed tended to forget everything that’s invisible. Now, with the aesthetics of disappearance, we are obliged to care about all things invisible. In the past, the invisible was present through religion and mythologies. When we read in the third epistle of St Peter the sentence, ‘One day is … as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’, we have a vision of relativity that was the vision of the whole of antiquity. Even if here it is expressed through Christianity, this vision of relativity was present in ancient history – the invisible peopled the world. The invisible world was an important element of reality. With the onset of materialism, of the Age of Enlightenment, of the political history of the nineteenth century, the invisible was, I would say, censored. It signified the old customs; it was an archaic vision. The visible and the material were priviliged to the detriment of the invisible, as the deeds of society are not all visible.
CD: This notion was also to change the idea of the essence of being.
PV: Certainly. Besides, it isn’t by chance that we are seeing a powerful return of religious ideologies. Personally, I’m religious, Iam a Christian. You are obliged, as I’ve often said to non-believing friends, to reintroduce only the question of God, not the answer, which is a personal problem. If not, don’t speak of the immaterial. You cannot speak of the ‘invisible and immaterial’ if you continue to censor the question of God. When you talk of the Big Bang, of the creation of time and space through the theory of the Big Bang, you’re talking about the question of God. So, let’s call a spade a spade: the Big Bang is about God who has come back among us. And in fact here I think it’s one of the positive aspects of the new technologies. They reintroduce the question of God, and I mean The Question and not Khomeni’s or anyone else’s answer.
CD: You were saying that it’s important to ask questions. When does one see this change of solutions toward questions?
PV: I think it’s our generation. Our generation has to return to questions. Why? Because the preceding generation had all the solutions – the economic solution through capitalism and the consumer society; the political solution through Marxism or capitalism; the military solution through dissuasion. All the solutions were there. Now we’ve seen the results and are experiencing the drama of these solutions, so I believe our generation must again find the questions, and that’s not easy.
CD: The last question: what are the consequences of this dromospheric space, speed-space, for the workings of the city? I’m thinking especially of the difference between urbanity and suburbanity. Does it still exist?
PV: It’s important to return to the city. To return to the city is to return to politics or to the political people. It’s not by chance that in Greek the city is called the ‘polis’. The city was created in a relationship to territorial space. It is a territorial phenomenon, a phenomenon of territorial concentration. Old villages are spread over a territory which is not a territory but a field, in all senses of the term. There is creation, from the old villages, through what has been called kinesis, of an urban territorial unit – the Greek city-state, to take a well-known reference. Since politics and the city were born together, they were born through a right: the creation of a territory or of an estate by right, being established, the right of autochthonism. There are rights because there is territory. There are rights and therefore duties – he who has land has war, as the people of Verde said. He who has rights in an urban territory has the duty to defend it. The citizen is also a soldier-citizen. I feel this situation survives up to the present; we are experiencing the end of that world. Through the ups and downs of the state, the city-state, the more or less communal state, and finally, the nation-state, we have experienced the development of politics linked to the territory; always down-to-earth. In spite of railroads and telephones, we experienced a relationship to the soil and a relationship to a still coherent right. There was still a connection to territorial identity, even in the phenomenon of nationalistic amplification. Today, as we saw earlier with the end of time-space and the coming of speed-space, the political man and the city are becoming problematic. When you talk about the rights of man on the world scale, they pose a problem which is not yet resolved, for a state of rights is not connected with a state of place, to a clearly determined locality. We can clearly see the weaknesses of the rights of Man. It makes for lots of meetings, but not for much in the way of facts. Just take a look at Eastern European countries or Latin America. It seems to me that speedspace which produces new technologies will bring about a loss, a derealization of the city. The megalopolises now being talked of (Calcutta, or Mexico with 30 million inhabitants) are no longer cities, they are phenomena which go beyond the city and translate the decline of the city as a territorial localization, and also as a place of an assumed right, affirmed by a policy. Here, I’m very pessimistic. I feel we’re entering into a society without rights, a ‘non-rights’ society, because we’re entering a society of the non-place, and because the political man was connected to the discrimination of a place. The loss of a place is, alas, generally the loss of rights.
Here, we have a big problem: the political man must be reinvented–a political man connected to speed-space. There, everything remains to be done, nothing’s been accomplished. I’d even say the question hasn’t been considered. The problem of the automatic responder we were talking about earlier, the legal action which Clifford Johnson is taking against the US Congress, is in my opinion the trial of the century. The problem of rights there is the right of the powerful man, the last man, he who decides. Now, he too will no longer have the right, if he delegates his right to an automatic machine. We truly have here a political question and an urban question, because at present the cities are undone by technology, undone by television, defeated by automobility (the high speed trains, the Concorde). The phenomena of identification and independence are posed in a completely new way. When it takes 3 hours to go to New York, and 36 to New Caledonia, you are closer to American identification than to Caledonian or French identification. Before proximity, there was territorial continuity. We were close because we were in the same space. Today we are close in the speed-space of the Concorde, of the high-speed train, of telecommunications. Therefore, we don’t feel conjoined to people, the compatriots of the same people – the Basques or the Corsicans. We no longer have the time to go to Bastia, because practically, we are closer to New York, because you can’t go by Concorde to Bastia. We have here a phenomenon of distortion of the territorial community that explains the phenomenon of demands of independence. Before, we were together in the same place, and could claim an identity. Today, we are together elsewhere, via high-speed train, or via TV. There is a power of another nature which creates distortions. We are no longer in space, but in speed-space. Because of speed-space there are fellow countrymen participating in the same nonplace who feel close, whereas one’s own countrymen in Corsica or New Caledonia are in reality so far away in speed-space, so beyond 36 hours or 10-hours, that they arest rangers and therefore desire their autonomy. There’s a logic there, and it’s a logic which poses problems.
Impulse and Paul Virilio. Interview with Chris Dercon, in Impulse, 12 (4), 1986.
by McKenzie Wark
Education is slavery. Education enchains the mind and makes it a resource for class power. The nature of the enslavement will reflect the current state of the class struggle for knowledge, within the apparatus of education.
The pastoralist class resists education, other than as indoctrination in obedience. It’s interest in education stops short at the pastors who police the sheep like moralsit would instill in the human flock that tends its grain—and sheep.
When capital requires “hands” to do its dirty work, education merely trains useful hands to tend machines, and docile bodies meant to accept as natural the social order in which they find themselves. When capital requires brains, both to run its increasingly complex operations and to apply themselves to the work of consuming its products, more time spent in the prison house of education is required for admission to the ranks of the paid working class. When capital discovers that many tasks can be performed by casual employees with little training, education splits into a minimal system meant to teach servility to the poorest workers and a competitive system offering the brighter workers a way up the slippery slope to security and consumption. When the ruling class preaches the necessity of an education it invariably means an education in necessity .
The so-called middle class achieve their privileged access to consumption and security through education, in which they are obliged to invest a substantial part of their income, acquiring as their property a degree which represents the sorry fact that “the candidate can tolerate boredom and knows how to follow rules.” But most remain workers, even though they grep information rather than pick cotton or bend metal. They work in factories, but are trained to think of them as offices. They take home wages, but are trained to think of it as a salary. They wear a uniform, but a retrained to think of it as a suit. The only difference is that education has taught them to give different names to the instruments of exploitation, and to despise those of their own class who name them differently.
Education is organised as a prestige market, in which a few scarce qualifications provide entree to the highest paid work, and everything else arranges itself in a pyramid of prestige and price below . Scarcity infects the subject with desire for education as a thing, and a thing that confers a magic ability to gain a “salary” with which to acquire still more things. Through the instrument of scarcity and the hierarchical rationing of education, workers are persuaded to see education much as the ruling class would have them see it— as a privilege.
Workers have a genuine interest in education that secures employment. They desire an education that contain at least some knowledge, but often conceived of in terms of opportunity for work. Capitalist scan also be heard demanding education for work. But where workers have an interest in education that gives them some capacity to move between jobs and industries, thus preserving some autonomy , capitalists demand a paring down of education to its most functional vocational elements, to the bare necessity compatible with a particular function.
The information proletariat—infoproles—stand outside this demand for education as unpaid slavery that anticipates the wage slave’s life. They embody a residual, antagonistic class awareness, and resist the slavery of education. They know only too well that capital has little use for them other than as the lowest paid wage slaves. They know only too well that scholars and the media treat them like objects for their idle curiosity. The infoproles resent education and live by the knowledge of the streets. They are soon known to the police.
The hacker class has an ambivalent relation to education. Hackers desire knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into being though the pure liberty of knowledge in and of itself. This puts the hacker into an antagonistic relationship to the struggle on the part of the capitalist class to make education an induction into wage slavery .
Hackers may lack an understanding of the different relationship workers have to education, and may fall for the elitist and hierarchical culture of education, which merely reinforces its scarcity and its economic value. The hacker may be duped by the blandishments of prestige and put virtuality in the service of conformity , professional elitism in place of collective experience, and depart from the emergent culture of the hacker class. This happens when hackers make a fetish of what their education represents, rather than expressing themselves through knowledge.
Education is not the same as knowledge. Nor is it the necessary means to acquire knowledge. Knowledge may arise just as readily from everyday life. Education is the organisation of knowledge within the constraints of scarcity , under the sign of property .Education turns the subjects who enter into its portals into objects of class power, functional elements who have internalised its discipline. Education turns those who resist its objectification into known and monitored objects of other regimes of objectification—the police and the soft cops of the disciplinary state. Education produces the subjectivity that meshes with the objectivity of commodified production.One may acquire an education, as if it was a thing, but one becomes knowledgeable through a process of transformation. Knowledge, as such, is only ever partially captured by education. Knowledge as a practice always eludes and exceeds it. "There is no property in thought, no proper identity , no subjective ownership".
The hack expresses knowledge in its virtuality, by producing new abstractions that do not necessarily fit the disciplinary regime that is managing and commodifying education. Knowledge at its most abstract and productive may be rare, but this rarity has nothing to do with the scarcity imposed upon it by the commodification and hierarchy of education. The rarity of knowledge expresses the elusive multiplicity of nature itself, which refuses to be disciplined. Nature unfolds in its own time.
In their struggle for the heart and soul of the learning apparatus, hackers need allies. By embracing the class demands of the workers for knowledge that equips them with the cunning and skill to work in this world, hackers can break the link between the demands of the capitalist class for the shaping of tools for its own use, and that of the workers for practical knowledge useful to their lives. This can be combined with a knowledge based in the self-understanding of the worker as a member of a class with class interests.
The cultures of the working class, even in its commodified form, still contain a class sensibility useful as the basis for a collective self-knowledge. The hacker working within education has the potential to gather and propagate this experience by abstracting it as knowledge. The virtuality of everyday life is the joy of the producing classes. The virtuality of the experience of knowledge is the joy that the hacker expresses through the hack. The hacker class is only enriched by the discovery of the knowledge latent in the experience of everyday working life, which can be abstracted from its commodifed form and expressed in its virtuality.
Understanding and embracing the class culture and interests of the working class can advance the hacker interest in many ways. It provides a numerically strong body of allies for a much more minoritarian interest in knowledge. It provides a meeting point for potential class allies. It opens the possibility of discovering the tactics of everyday hacking of the worker and farmer classes.
Both workers and hackers have an interest in schooling in which resources are allocated on the socialised—and socialising—basis Marx identified: “To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities.” No matter how divergent in their understanding of the purpose of knowledge, workers and hackers have in common an interest in resisting educational “content” that merely trains slaves for commodity production, but also in resisting the inroads the vectoralist class wishes to make into education as an industry.
Within the institutions of education, some struggle as workers against the exploitation of their labour. Others struggle to democratise the institution’s governance. Others struggle to make it answerable to the needs of the productive classes. Others struggle for the autonomy of knowledge. All of these sometimes competing and conflicting demands are elements of the same struggle for knowledge that is free production in itself and yet is not just free production for itself, but rather for the productive classes.
Forewarned is forearmed.In the underdeveloped world, in the south and the east, the pastoral class still turns peasants into farmers, expropriating their traditional rights and claiming land as property. Peasants still struggle to subsist in their new-found freedom from the means of survival. Capital still turns peasants into workers and exploits them to the maximum biologically possible. They produce the material goods that the vectoral class in the overdeveloped world stamps with its logos, according to designs it protects with its patents and trademarks. All of which calls for a new pedagogy of the oppressed, and one not just aimed at making the subaltern feel better about themselves as subjects in an emerging vectoral world of multicultural spectacle, but which provides the tools for struggling against this ongoing objectification of the world’s producing classes.
The ruling classes desire an educational apparatus in which quality education can be purchased for even the most stupid heirs to the private fortune. While this may seem attractive to the better paid workers as securing a future for their children regardless of talent, in the end even they may not be able to afford the benefits of this injustice. The interests of the producing classes as a whole are in a democratic knowledge based on free access to information, and the allocation of resources based on talent rather than wealth.
Where the capitalist class sees education as a means to an end, the vectoralist class sees it as an end in itself. It sees opportunities to make education a profitable industry in its own right, based on the securing of intellectual property as a form of private property. It seeks to privatise knowledge as a resource, just as it privatises science and culture, in order to guarantee their scarcity and their value. To the vectoralists, education is just more “content” for commodification as “communication.”
The vectoralist class seeks the commodification of education on a global scale. The best and brightest are drawn from around the world to its factories of prestige higher learning in the overdeveloped world. The underdeveloped world rightly complains of a “brain drain,” a siphoning of its intellectual resources. Intellectual capacity is gathered and made over into the image of commodification. Those offered the liberty of the pursuit of knowledge in itself still serve the commodification of education, in that they become an advertisement for the institution that offers this freedom in exchange for the enhancement of its prestige and global marketing power.
Many of the conflicts within higher education are distractions from the class politics of knowledge. Education “disciplines” knowledge, segregating it into homogenous “fields,” presided over by suitably “qualified” guardians charged with policing its representations. The production of abstraction both within these fields and across their borders is managed in the interests of preserving hierarchy and prestige. Desires that might give rise to a robust testing and challenging of new abstractions is channelled into the hankering for recognition. The hacker comes to identify with his or her own commodification. Recognition becomes formal rather than substantive. It heightens the subjective sense of worthatthe expense of objectifying the products of hacking as abstraction. From this containment of the desire for knowledge arises the circular parade of false problems of discipline and the discipline of false problems.
Only one intellectual conflict has any real bearing on the class issue for hackers: the property question. Whose property is knowledge? Is it the role of knowledge to authorise subjects that are recognised only by their function in an economy? Or is it the function of knowledge to produce the ever-different phenomena of the hack, in which subjects learn to become other then themselves, and discover the objective world to contain potentials other than as it appears? This is the struggle for knowledge of our time.
To hack is to express knowledge in any of its forms. Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a politics of free information, free learning, the gift of the result in a peer-to-peer network. Hacker knowledge also implies an ethics of knowledge open to the desires of the productive classes and free from subordination to commodity production. Hacker knowledge is knowledge that expresses the virtuality of nature, by transforming it, fully aware of the bounty and danger. When knowledge is freed from scarcity , the free production of knowledge becomes the knowledge of free producers. This may sound like utopia, but the accounts of actually existing temporary zones of hacker liberty are legion. Stallman: “It was a bit like the garden of Eden. It hadn’t occurred to us not to cooperate.”
excerpt from the book: A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
by Jean Baudrillard Two images: that of the bronze technocrat, bent over his brief-case, sitting on a bench at the foot of the Twin Towers, or, rather, shrouded in the dust of the collapsed towers like one of those bodies found in the ruins of Pompeii. He was, so to speak, the signature of the event, the pathetic ghost of a global power hit by an unforeseeable catastrophe. Another figure: that of that artist working in his; studio in the Towers on a sculpture of himself - his body pierced with aeroplanes - intended to stand on the plaza of the World Trade Centre like a modern Saint Sebastian. He was still working on it on the morning of 11 September when he was swept away, together with his sculpture, by the very event the work prefigured. The supreme consecration for a work of art: to be realized by the very event that destroys it. Two allegories of an exceptional, earth-shattering event, cutting at a stroke through the monotony of a declared end of history. The only event worthy of the name, contrasting starkly with the non-event to which we are condemned by the hegemony of a world order nothing must disturb. At this present stage of networking of all functions - of the body, of time, of language - of a drip - feeding of all minds, the slightest event is a threat; even history is a threat. It is going to be necessary, then, to invent a security system that prevents any event whatever from occurring. A whole strategy of deterrence that does service today for a global strategy. Steven Spielberg's recent film, Minority Report, provides an illustration of such a system. On the basis of brains endowed with a gift of pre-cognition (the 'pre-cogs'), who identify imminent crimes before they occur, squads of police (the 'pre-crimes') intercept and neutralize the criminal before he has committed his crime. There is a variant in the film Dead Zone (directed by David Cronenberg): the hero, who, following a serious accident, is also endowed with powers of divination, ends up killing a politician whose future destiny as a war criminal he foresees. This is the scenario of the Iraq war too: the crime is nipped in the bud on the strength of an act that has not taken place (Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction). The question is clearly whether the crime would really have taken place. But we shall never know. What we have here, then, is the real repression of a virtual crime. Extrapolating from this, we can see looming beyond the war a systematic de-programming not only of all crime, but of anything that might disturb the order of things, the policed order of the planet. This is what 'political' power comes down to today. It is no longer driven by any positive will; it is merely a negative power of deterrence, of public health, of security policing, immunity policing, prophylaxis. This strategy is directed not only at the future but also at past events - for example, at that of 11 September, where it attempts, by the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, to erase the humiliation. This is why this war is at bottom a delusion, a virtual event, a 'non-event' Bereft of any objective or finality of its own, it merely takes the form of an incantation, an exorcism. This is also why it is interminable, for there will never be any end to conjuring away such an event: It is said to be preventive, but it is in fact retrospective, its aim being, to defuse the terrorist event of 11 September, the shadow of which hovers over the whole strategy of planetary control. Erasure of the event, erasure of the enemy, erasure of death: in the insistence on 'zero casualties' we see the very same imperative as applies in this obsession with security. The aim of this world order is the definitive non-occurrence of events. It is, in a sense, the end of history, not on the basis of a democratic fulfillment, as Fukuyama has it, but on the basis of preventive terror, of a counter-terror that puts an end to any possible events. A terror which the power exerting it ends up exerting on itself under the banner of security. There is a fierce irony here: the irony of an anti-terrorist world system that ends up internalizing terror, inflicting it on itself and emptying itself of any political substance - and going so far as to turn on its own population. Is this a remnant of the Cold War and the balance of terror? But this time it's a deterrence without cold war, a terror without balance. Or rather it is a universal cold war, ground into the tiniest interstices of social and political life. This headlong rush by power into its own trap reached dramatic extremes in the Moscow theatre episode when the hostages and the terrorists were jumbled together in the same massacre. Exactly as in Mad Cow Disease: you kill the whole herd as a precautionary measure - God will recognize his own. Or as in Stockholm Syndrome: being jumbled together in death makes them virtually partners in crime (it is the same in Minority Report: the fact that the police seize the presumptive criminal before he has done anything proves a posteriori that he cannot be innocent). And this is, in fact, the truth of the situation: the fact is that one way or another, populations themselves are a terrorist threat to the authorities. And it is the authorities themselves who, by repression, unwittingly set the seal on this complicity. The equivalence in repression shows that we are all potentially the hostages of the authorities. By extension, we can hypothesize a coalition of all governments against all populations - we have had a foretaste of this with the war in Iraq, since it was able to take place in defiance of world opinion, with the more or less disguised assent of all governments. And if the world-wide demonstrations against war may have produced the illusion of a possible counterpower, they demonstrated above all the political insignificance of this 'international community' by comparison with American Realpolitik. We are dealing henceforth with the exercise of power in the pure state with no concern for sovereignty or representation; with the Integral Reality of a negative power. So long as it derives its sovereignty from representation, so long as a form of political reason exists, power can find its equilibrium - it can, at any rate, be combated and contested. But the eclipsing of that sovereignty leaves an unbridled power, with nothing standing against it, a savage power (with a savagery that is no longer natural, but technical). And which, in a strangely roundabout way, might be said to get back to something like primitive societies, which, not knowing power, were, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, societies without history. What if we, the present global society, were once again, in the shadow of this integral power, to become a society without history? But this Integral Reality of power is also its end. A power that is no longer based on anything other than the prevention and policing of events, which no longer has any political will but the will to dispel ghosts, itself becomes ghostly and vulnerable. Its virtual power -its programming power in terms of software and the like - is total, but as a result it can no longer bring itself into play, except against itself, by all kinds of internal failures. At the height of its mastery, it can now only' lose face. This is, literally, the 'Hell of Power'. The policing of events is essentially carried out by information itself. Information represents the most effective machinery for de-realizing history. Just as political economy is a gigantic machinery for producing value, for producing signs 'of wealth, but not wealth itself, so the whole system of information is an immense machine for producing the event as sign, as an exchangeable value on the universal market of ideology, of spectacle, of catastrophe, etc. - in short, for producing a non-event. The abstraction of information is the same as the abstraction of the economy. And, as all commodities, thanks to this abstraction of value, are exchangeable one with another, so all events become substitutable one for another in the cultural information market. The singularity of the event, irreducible to its coded transcription and its staging, which is what quite simply constitutes an event, is lost. We are passing into a realm where events no longer truly take place, by dint of their very production and dissemination in 'real time' - where they become lost in the void of news and information. The sphere of information is like a space where, after having emptied events of their substance, an artificial gravity is recreated and they are put back in orbit in 'real time' - where, having shorn them of historical vitality, they are re-projected on to the trans-political stage of information. The non-event is not when nothing happens. It is, rather, the realm of perpetual change, of a ceaseless updating, of an incessant succession in real time, which produces this general equivalence, this indifference, this banality that characterizes the zero degree of the event. A perpetual escalation that is also the escalation of growth - or of fashion, which is pre-eminently the field of compulsive change and built-in obsolescence. The ascendancy of models gives rise to a culture of difference that puts an end to any historical continuity. Instead of unfolding as part of history, things have begun to succeed each other in the void. A profusion of language and images before which we are defenseless, reduced to the same powerlessness, to the same paralysis as we might show on the approach of war. It isn't a question of disinformation or brainwashing. It was a naive error on the part of the FBI to attempt to create a Disinformation Agency for purposes of managed manipulation - a wholly useless undertaking, since disinformation comes from the very profusion of information, from its incantation, its looped repetition, which creates an empty perceptual field, a space shattered as though by a neutron bomb or by one of those devices that sucks in all the oxygen from the area of impact. It's a space where everything is pre-neutralized, including war, by the precession of images and commentaries, but this is perhaps because there is at bottom nothing to say about something that unfolds, as this war, to a relentless scenario, without a glimmer of uncertainty regarding the final outcome. It is in the sphere of the media that we most clearly see the event short-circuited by its immediate image-feedback. Information, news coverage, is always already there. When there are catastrophes, the reporters and photojournalists are there before the emergency services. If they could be, they would be there before the catastrophe, the best thing being to invent or cause the event so as to be first with the news. This kind of speculation reached a high point with the Pentagon's initiative of creating a 'futures market in events', a stock market of prices for terrorist attacks or catastrophes. You bet on the probable occurrence of such events against those who don't believe they'll happen. This speculative market is intended to operate as the market in soya or sugar. You might speculate on the number of AIDS victims in Africa or on the probability that the San Andreas Fault will give way (the Pentagon's initiative is said to derive from the fact that they credit the free market in speculation with better forecasting powers than the secret services). Of course it is merely a step from here to insider trading: betting on the event before you cause it is still the surest way (they say Bin Laden did this, speculating on TWA shares before 11 September). It's like taking out life insurance on your wife before you murder her. There's a great difference between the event that happens (happened) in historical time and the event that happens in the real time of information. To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the 'global' event-or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc. Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events. Francois de Bernard analyses. The war in Iraq this way, as a pure transcription of film theory and practice. What we are watching as we sit paralyzed in our fold-down seats isn't ' like a film'; it is a film. With a script, a screenplay, that has to be followed unswervingly. The casting and the technical and financial resources have all been meticulously scheduled: these are professionals at work. Including control of the distribution channels. In the end, operational war becomes an enormous special effect; cinema becomes the paradigm of warfare, and we imagine it as 'real', whereas it is merely the mirror of its cinematic being. The virtuality of war is not, then, a metaphor. It is the literal passage from reality into fiction, or rather the immediate metamorphosis of the real into fiction. The real is now merely the asymptotic horizon of the Virtual. And it isn't just the reality of the real that's at issue in all this, but the reality of cinema. It's a little like Disneyland: the theme parks are now merely an alibi - masking the fact that the whole context of life has been Disneyfied. It's the same with the cinema: the films produced today are merely the visible allegory of the cinematic form that has taken over everything -social and political life, the landscape, war, etc. - the form of life totally scripted for the screen. This is no doubt why cinema is disappearing: because it has passed into reality. Reality is disappearing at the hands of the cinema and cinema is disappearing at the hands of reality. A lethal transfusion in which each loses its specificity. If we view history as a film - which it has become in spite of us - then the truth of information consists of the post-synchronization, dubbing, and subtitling of the film of history. In the former West Germany they are going to build a theme park where the decor and ambience of the now defunct East will be re-created (Ost-algia as a form of nostalgia). A whole society memorialized in this way in its own lifetime (it has not completely disappeared). So the simulacrum does not merely telescope actuality but gives the impression that the 'Real' will soon eventuate only in 'real time' without even passing through the present and history. As a result, history becomes once again for us an object of nostalgia, and a desire for history, for rehabilitation, for sites of memory, can be seen flourishing everywhere, as though, even as we suffer it, we are striving to fuel this same end of history. History too is operating beyond its own end. There was a definition of the historical event and the French Revolution was its model. The very concepts of event and history date really from that point. The event could be analyzed as the high point in a continuous unfolding and its discontinuity was itself part of an overall dialectic. It is not that way at all now, with the rise of a world order exclusive of all ideology and exclusively concerned with the circulation of flows and networks. In that generalized circulation, all the objectives and values of the Enlightenment are lost, even though they were at its origin. For there was once an idea, an ideal, an imaginary of modernity, but these have all disappeared in the exacerbation of growth. It is the same with history as it is with reality. There was a reality principle. Then the principle disappeared and reality, freed from its principle, continues to run on out of sheer inertia. It develops exponentially, it becomes Integral Reality, which no longer has either principle or end, but is content merely to realize all possibilities integrally. It has devoured its own utopia. It operates beyond its own end. But the end of history is not the last word on history. For, against this background of perpetual non-events, there looms another species of event. Ruptural events, unforeseeable events, unclassifiable in terms of history, outside of historical reason, events which occur against their own image, against their own simulacrum. Events that break the tedious sequence of current events as relayed by the media, but which are not, for all that, a reappearance of history or a Real irrupting in the heart of the Virtual (as has been said of 11 September). They do not constitute events in history, but beyond history, beyond its end; they constitute events in a system that has put an end to history. They are the internal convulsion of history. And, as a result, they appear inspired by some power of evil, appear no longer the bearers of a constructive disorder, but of an absolute disorder. Indecipherable in their singularity, they are the equivalent in excess of a system that is itself indecipherable in its extension and its headlong charge. In the New World Order, there are no longer any revolutions, there are now only convulsions. As in an allegedly perfect mechanism, a system that is too well integrated, there are no longer any crises, but malfunctions, faults, breakdowns, aneurysmal ruptures. Yet events are not the same as accidents. The accident is merely a symptom, an episodic dysfunction, a fault in the technical (or natural) order that can possibly be prevented. This is what all the current politics of risk and prevention is about. The event, for its part, is counter-offensive and much stranger in inspiration: into any system at its peak, at its point of perfection, it reintroduces internal negativity and death. It is a form of the turning of power against itself; as if, alongside the ingredients of its power, every system secretly nourished an evil spirit that would ensure that the system was overturned. It is in this sense that, unlike accidents, such events cannot be predicted and they form no part of any set of probabilities. The analysis of revolution and the specter of communism by Marx offers plenty of analogies with the current situation. He too made the proletariat the historical agent of the end of capital - its evil spirit, so to speak, since, with the rise of the proletariat, capital fomented the internal virus of its own destruction. There is, however, a radical difference between the specter of communism and that of terrorism. For capital's great trick was to transform the agent of disintegration it carried within it into a visible enemy, a class adversary, and thus, beyond economic exploitation, to change this historic movement into a dynamic of reintegration leading to a more advanced stage of capital. Terrorism operates at a higher level of radicalism: it is not a subject of history; it is an elusive enemy. And if the class struggle generated historical events, terrorism generates another type of event. Global power (which is no longer quite the same as capital) finds itself here in direct confrontation with itself. It is now left to deal not with the specter of communism, but with its own specter. The end of revolutions (and of history in general) is not, then, in any sense a victory for global power. It might rather be said to be a fateful sign for it. History was our strong hypothesis, the hypothesis of maximum intensity. Change, for its part, corresponds to a minimum intensity - it is where everything merely follows everything else and cancels it out, to the point of re-creating total immobilism: the impression, amid the whirl of current events, that nothing changes. Generalized exchange - the exchange of flows, of networks, of universal communication - leads, beyond a critical threshold we passed long ago, to its own denial, which is no longer than a mere crisis of growth, but a catastrophe, a violent involution, which can be felt today in what might be called the 'tendency of the rate of reality to fall' (similarly, the profusion of information corresponds to a tendency of the rate of knowledge to fall). Zero degree of value in total equivalence. Globalization believed it would succeed in the neutralization of all conflicts and would move towards a faultless order. But it is, in fact, an order by default: everything is equivalent to everything else in a zero-sum equation. Gone is the dialectic, the play of thesis and antithesis resolving itself in synthesis. The opposing terms now cancel each other out in a leveling of all conflict. But this neutralization is, in its turn, never definitive, since, at the same time as all dialectical resolution disappears, the extremes come to the fore. No longer a question of a history in progress, of a directive schema or of regulation by crisis. No longer any rational continuity or dialectic of conflicts, but a sharing of extremes. Once the universal has been crushed by the power of the global and the logic of history obliterated by the dizzying whirl of change, there remains only a face-off between virtual omnipotence and those fiercely opposed to it. Hence the antagonism between global power and terrorism - the present confrontation between American hegemony and Islamist terrorism being merely the visible current twist in this duel between an Integral Reality of power and integral rejection of that same power. There is no possible reconciliation; there never will be an armistice between the antagonistic forces, nor any possibility of an integral order. Never any armistice of thought either, which resists it fiercely, or an armistice of events in this sense: at most, events go on strike for a time, then suddenly burst through again. This is, in a way, reassuring: though it cannot be dismantled, the Empire of Good is also doomed to perpetual failure. We must retain for the event its radical definition and its impact in the imagination. It is characterized entirely, in a paradoxical way, by its uncanniness, its troubling strangeness - it is the irruption of something improbable and impossible - and by its troubling familiarity: from the outset it seems totally self-explanatory, as though predestined; as though it could not but take place. There is something here that seems to come from elsewhere, something fateful that nothing can prevent. It is for this reason, both complex and contradictory, that it mobilizes the imagination with such force. It breaks the continuity of things and, at the same time, makes its entry into the real with stupefying ease. Bergson felt the event of the First World War this way. Before it broke out, it appeared both possible and impossible (the similarity with the suspense surrounding the Iraq war is total), and at the same time he experienced a sense of stupefaction at the ease with which such a fearful eventuality could pass from the abstract to the concrete, from the virtual to the real. We see the same paradox again in the mix of jubilation and terror that characterized, in a more or less unspoken way, the event of 11 September. It is the feeling that seizes us when faced with the occurrence of something that happens without having been possible. In the normal course of events, things first have to be possible and can only actualize themselves afterwards. This is the logical, chronological order. But they are not, in that case, events in the strong sense. This is the case with the Iraq war, which has been so predicted, programmed, anticipated, prescribed and modelled that it has exhausted all its possibilities before even taking place. There is no longer anything of the event in it. There is no longer anything in it of that sense of exaltation and horror felt in the radical event of 11 September, which resembles the sense of the sublime spoken of by Kant... The non-event of the war leaves merely a sense of mystification and nausea. It is here we must introduce something like a metaphysics of the event, indications of which we find once again in Bergson. Asked if it was possible for a great work to appear, he replied, No, it was not possible, it is not possible yet, it will become possible once it has appeared: 'If a man of talent or genius emerges, if he creates a work, then it is real and it thereby becomes retrospectively, retroactively possible.' Transposed to events, this means that they first take place, ex nihilo as it were, as something unpredictable. Only then can they be conceived as possible. This is the temporal paradox, the reversed temporality that designates the event as such. As a general rule, we conceive of an ascending line running from the impossible to the possible, then to the real. Now, what marks out the true event is precisely that ¢e real and the possible come into being simultaneously and are immediately imagined. But this relates to living events; to a living temporality, to a depth of time that no longer exists at all in real time. Real time is violence done to time, violence done to the event. With the instantaneity of the Virtual and the precession of models, it is the whole depth of field of the duree, of origin and end, that is taken from us. It is the loss of an ever-deferred time and its replacement by an immediate, definitive time. Things have only to be concentrated into an immediate present-ness by accentuating the simultaneity of all networks and all points on the globe for time to be reduced to its smallest simple element, the instant -which is no longer even a 'present' moment, but embodies the absolute reality of time in a total abstraction, thus prevailing against the irruption of any event and the eventuality of death. Such is 'real time', the time of communication, information and perpetual interaction: the finest deterrence-space of time and events. On the real-time screen, by way of simple digital manipulation, all possibilities are potentially realized -which puts an end to their possibility. Through electronics and cybernetics, all desires, all play of identity and all interactive potentialities are programmed in and auto-programmed. The fact that everything here is realized from the outset prevents the emergence of any singular event. Such is the violence of real time, which is also the violence of information. Real time dematerializes both the future dimension and the past; it dematerializes historical time, pulverizes the real event. The Shoah, the year 2000 - it did not take place, it will not take place. It even pulverizes the present event in news coverage [information], which is merely its instantaneous image feedback. News coverage is coupled with the illusion of present time, of presence - this is the media illusion of the world 'live' and, at the same time, the horizon of disappearance of the real event. Hence the dilemma posed by all the images we receive: uncertainty regarding the truth of the event as soon as the news media are involved. As soon as they are both involved in and involved by the course of phenomena, it is the news media that afe the event. It is the event of news coverage that substitutes itself for coverage of the event. The historic time of the event, the psychological time of affects, the subjective time of judgment and will, the objective time of reality - these are all simultaneously thrown into question by real time. If there were a subject of history, a subject of knowledge, a subject of power, these have all disappeared in the obliteration by real-time of distance, of the pathos of distance, in the integral realization of the world by information. Before the event it is too early for the possible. After the event it is too late for the possible. It is too late also for representation, and nothing will really be able to account for it. September 11th, for example, is there first - only then do its possibility and its causes catch up with it, through all the discourses that will attempt to explain it. But it is as impossible to represent that event as it was to forecast it before it occurred. The CIA's experts had at their disposal all the information on the possibility of an attack, but they simply didn't believe in it. It was beyond imagining. Such an event always is. It is beyond all possible 'causes (and perhaps even, as Italo Svevo suggests, causes are merely a misunderstanding that prevents the world from being what it is). We have, then, to pass through the non-event of news coverage (information) to detect what resists that coverage. To find, as it were, the 'living coin' of the event; To make a literal analysis of it, against all the machinery of commentary and stage-management that merely neutralizes it. Only events set free from news and information (and us with them) create a fantastic longing. These alone are 'real', since there is nothing to explain them and the imagination welcomes them with open arms. There is in us an immense desire for events. And an immense disappointment, as all the contents of the information media are desperately inferior to the power of the broadcasting machinery. This disproportionality creates a demand that is ready to swoop on any incident, to crystallize on any catastrophe. And the pathetic contagion that sweeps through crowds on some particular occasion (the death of Diana, the World Cup) has no other cause. It isn't a question of voyeurism or letting off steam. It's a spontaneous reaction to an immoral situation: the excess of information creates an immoral situation, in that it has no equivalent in the real event. Automatically, one wants a maximal event, a 'fateful' event - which repairs this immense banalization of life by the information machine. We dream of senseless events that will free us from this tyranny of meaning and the constraint of causes. We live in terror both of the excess of meaning and of total meaninglessness. And in the banal context of social and personal life these excessive events are the equivalent of the excess of signifier in language for Levi-Strauss: namely, that which founds it as symbolic function. Desire for events, desire for non-events - the two drives are simultaneous and, doubtless, each as powerful as the other. Hence this mix of jubilation and terror, of secret elation and remorse. Elation linked not so much to death as to the unpredictable, to which we are so partial. All the justifications merely mask precisely this obscure desire for events, for overthrowing the order' of things, whatever it may be. A perfectly sacrilegious desire for the irruption of evil, for the restitution of a secret rule, which, in the form of a totally unjustified event (natural catastrophes are similarly unjustified), re-establishes something like a balance between the forces of good and evil. Our moral protestations are directly proportionate to the immoral fascination that the automatic reversibility of evil exerts on us. They say Diana was a victim of the 'society of the spectacle' and that we were passive voyeurs of her death. But there was a much more complex dramaturgy going on, a collective scenario in which Diana herself was not innocent.(in terms of display of self), but in which the masses played an immediate role in a positive 'reality show' of the public find private life of Lady Di with the media as interface. The paparazzi were merely the vehicles, together with the media, of this lethal interaction, and behind them all of us, whose desire shapes the media -we who are the mass and the medium, the network and the electric current. There are no actors or spectators anymore, we are all immersed in the same reality, in the same revolving responsibility, in a single destiny that is merely the fulfillment of a collective desire. Here again, we are not far removed from Stockholm Syndrome: we are the hostages of news coverage, but we acquiesce secretly in this hostage-taking. At the same time we violently desire events, any event, provided it is exceptional. And we also desire just as passionately that nothing should happen, that things should be in order and remain so, even at the cost of a disaffection with existence that is itself unbearable. Hence the sudden convulsions and the contradictory affects that ensue from them: jubilation or terror. Hence also two types of analysis: the one that responds to the extreme singularity of the event and the other whose function might be said to be to routinize it - an orthodox thinking and paradoxical thinking. Between the two there is no longer room for merely critical thought. Like it or not, the situation has become radicalized. And if we think this radicalization is that of evil-evil being ultimately the disappearance of all mediation, leaving only the clash between extremes - then we must acknowledge this situation and confront the problem of evil. We do not have to plump for the one or the other. We experience the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the event and the non-event. Just as, according to Hannah Arendt, we are confronted in any action with the unforeseeable and the irreversible. But, since the irreversible today is the movement towards virtual ascendancy over the world, towards total control and technological 'enframing', towards the tyranny of absolute prevention and technical security, we have left to us only the unpredictable, the luck of the event. And just as Mallarme said that a throw of the dice would never abolish chance - that is to say, there would never be an ultimate dice throw which, by its automatic perfection, would put an end to chance - so we may hope that virtual programming will never abolish events. Never will the point of technical perfection and absolute prevention be reached where the fateful event can be said to have disappeared. There will always be a chance for the troubling strangeness [das Unheimliche] of the event, as against the troubling monotony of the global order. A fine metaphor for this is that video artist who had his camera trained on the Manhattan peninsula throughout the month of September 2001, in order to record the fact that nothing happens, in order to film the non-event. And banality went right ahead and blew up in his camera lens with the Twin Towers! excerpt from the book:The Intelligence of Evil by Jean Baudrilliard by McKenzie Wark Some might think it a new low, when a candidate for high office starts talking on television about the size of his penis. As if the regular, non-penile spectacle within which we all live and breathe was somehow some lofty public sphere. But perhaps its more a question of the current stage of spectacular live exposing itself in its ruined perfection. The spectacle has a history. Its current stage is what I have called, in a book of the same name, the spectacle of disintegration. I wrote it three years ago, but really to talk about some people who say it coming thirty years ago. Here is how I explain what I think the spectacle of disintegration is and what it means. The book from which it forms the introduction is here. The spectacle of disintegration is this big — a totality, actually. When the storm hit the Hansa Carrier, twenty-one shipping containers fell from its decks into the Pacific Ocean, taking some 80,000 Nike sneakers with them. Seattle-based Oceanographer Curtis Ebbsmeyer used the serial numbers from the sneakers that washed up on the rain coast of North America to plot the widening gyre of ocean-going garbage that usually lies between California and Hawaii. Bigger than the state of Texas, it is called the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and sailors have known for a long time to steer clear of this area from the equator to 50 degrees north. It’s an often windless desert where not much lives. Flotsam gathers and circles, biodegrading into the sea. Unless it is plastic, which merely photo-degrades in the sun, disintegrating into smaller and smaller bits of sameness. Now the sea here has more particles of plastic than plankton. The Gyre is a disowned country of furniture, fridges, cigarette lighters, televisions, bobbing in the sea and slowly falling apart, but refusing to go away. New Hawaii is the name some humorists prefer for the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre now that it has the convenience of contemporary consumer goods. Or one might call it a spectacle of disintegration. It is as good an emblem as any of the passing show of contemporary life, with its jetsam of jostling plastic artifacts, all twisting higgledy-piggledy on and below the surface of the ocean. Plastic and ocean remain separate, even as the plastic breaks up and permeates the water, insinuating itself into it but always alien to it. The poet Lautréamont once wrote: “Old Ocean, you are the symbol of identity: always equal to yourself… and if somewhere your waves are enraged, further off in some other zone they are in the most complete calm. But this no longer describes the ocean, which now appears as far from equilibrium. It describes instead the spectacle, the Sargasso Sea of images, a perpetual calm surrounded by turbulence, at the center always the same. When Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle (1967), he thought there were two kinds: the concentrated and the diffuse spectacle. The concentrated spectacle was limited to fascist and Stalinist states, where the spectacle cohered around a cult of personality. These are rare now, if not entirely extinct. The diffuse spectacle emerged as the dominant form. It did not require a Stalin or Mao as its central image. Big Brother is no longer watching you. In His place is little sister and her friends: endless pictures of models and other pretty things. The diffuse spectacle murmured to its sleeping peoples: “what appears is good; what is good appears.” The victory of the diffused spectacle over its concentrated cousin did not lead to the diffusion of the victor over the surface of the world. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), Debord thought instead that an integrated spectacle had subsumed elements of both into a new spectacular universe. While on the surface it looked like the diffused spectacle, which molds desire in the form of the commodity, it bore within it aspects of concentration, notably an occulted state, where power tends to become less and less transparent. That the state is a mystery to its subjects is to be expected; that it could become occult even to its rulers is something else. The integrated spectacle not only extended the spectacle outwards, but also inwards; the falsification of the world had reached by this point even those in charge of it. Debord wrote in 1978 that “it has become ungovernable, this wasteland, where new sufferings are disguised with the names of former pleasures; and where the people are so afraid…. Rumor has it that those who were expropriating it have, to crown it all, mislaid it. Here is a civilization which is on fire, capsizing and sinking completely. Ah! Fine torpedoeing!” Since he died in 1994, Debord did not live to see the most fecund and feculent form of this marvel, this spectacular power that integrates both diffusion and concentration. In memory of Debord, let’s call the endpoint reached by the integrated spectacle the disintegrating spectacle, in which the spectator gets to watch the withering away of the old order, ground down to near nothingness by its own steady divergence from any apprehension of itself. And yet the spectacle remains, circling itself, bewildering itself. Everything is impregnated with tiny bits of its issue, yet the new world remains stillborn. The spectacle atomizes and diffuses itself throughout not only the social body but its sustaining landscape as well. As Debord’s former comrade T. J. Clark writes, this world is “not ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’ to quote the famous phrase from Guy Debord, but images dispersed and accelerated until they become the true and sufficient commodities.” The spectacle speaks the language of command. The command of the concentrated spectacle was: OBEY! The command of the diffuse spectacle was: BUY! In the integrated spectacle the commands to OBEY! and BUY! became interchangeable. Now the command of the disintegrating spectacle is: RECYCLE! Like oceanic amoeba choking on granulated shopping bags, the spectacle can now only go forward by evolving the ability to eat its own shit. The disintegrating spectacle can countenance the end of everything except the end of itself. It can contemplate with equanimity melting ice sheets, seas of junk, peak oil, but the spectacle itself lives on. It is immune to particular criticisms. Mustapha Khayati: “Fourier long ago exposed the methodological myopia of treating fundamental questions without relating them to modern society as a whole. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, the mass of details obscures the totality.” Even when it speaks of disintegration, the spectacle is all about particulars. The plastic Pacific, even if it is as big as Texas, is presented as a particular event. Particular criticisms hold the spectacle to account for falsifying this image or that story, but in the process thereby merely add legitimacy to the spectacle’s claim that it can in general be a vehicle for the true. A genuinely critical approach to the spectacle starts from the opposite premise: that it may present from time to time a true fragment, but it is necessarily false as a whole. Debord: “In a world that really has been turned on its head, the true is a moment of falsehood.” This then is our task: a critique of the spectacle as a whole, a task that critical thought has for the most part abandoned. Stupefied by its own powerlessness, critical thought turned into that drunk who, having lost the car keys, searches for them under the street lamp. The drunk knows that the keys disappeared in that murky puddle, where it is dark, but finds it is easier to search for them under the lamp, where there is light – if not enlightenment. And then critical theory gave up even that search and fell asleep at the side of the road. Just as well. It was in no condition to drive. In its stupor, critical thought makes a fetish of particular aspects of the spectacular organization of life. As Todd Gitlin says, the critique of content became a contented critique. It wants to talk only of the political, or of culture, or of subjectivity, as if these things still existed, as if they had not been colonized by the spectacle and rendered mere excrescences of its general movement. Critical thought contented itself with arriving late on the scene and picking through the fragments. Or, critical thought retreated into the totality of philosophy. It had a bone to pick with metaphysics. It shrank from the spectacle, which is philosophy made concrete. In short: critical thought has itself become spectacular. Critical theory becomes hypocritical theory. It needs to be renewed not only in content but in form. When the American Food and Drug Administration announced that certain widely prescribed sleeping pills would come with strong warnings about strange behavior, they were not only responding to reports of groggy people driving their cars and making phone calls, but also purchasing items over the internet. The declension of the spectacle into every last droplet of everyday life means that the life it prescribes can be lived even in one’s sleep. This creates a certain difficulty for prizing open some other possibility for life, even in thought. Debord’s sometime comrade Raoul Vaneigem famously wrote that those who speak of class conflict without referring to everyday life, “without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” Today this formula surely needs to be inverted. To talk the talk of critical thought, of biopolitics and biopower, of the state of exception, bare life, precarity, of whatever being, or object oriented ontology without reference to class conflict is to speak, if not with a corpse in one’s mouth, then at least a sleeper. Must we speak the hideous language of our century? The spectacle appears at first as just a maelstrom of images swirling about the suck hole of their own nothingness. Here is a political leader. Here is one with better hair. Here is an earthquake in China. Here is a new kind of phone. Here are the crowds for the new movie. Here are the crowds for the food riot. Here is a cute cat. Here is a cheeseburger. If that were all there was to it, one could just load one’s screen with better fare. But the spectacle is not just images. It is not just another name for the media. Debord: “The spectacle is a social relationship between people mediated by images.” The trick is not to be distracted by the images, but to inquire into the nature of this social relationship. Emmalee Bauer of Elkhart worked for the Sheraton Hotel company in Des Moines until she was fired for using her employer’s computer to keep a journal which recorded all of her efforts to avoid work. “This typing thing seems to be doing the trick,” she wrote. “It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important.” And indeed she was. Her book-length work hits on something fundamental about wage labor and the spectacle, namely the separation of labor from desire. One works not because one particularly wants to, but for the wages, with which to then purchase commodities to fulfill desires. In the separation between labor and desire is the origins of the spectacle, which appears as the world of all that can be desired, or rather, of all the appropriate modes of desiring. “Thus the spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is itself a product of real activity.” The activity of making commodities makes in turn the need for the spectacle as the image of those commodities turned into objects of desire. The spectacle turns the goods into The Good. The ruling images of any age service the ruling power. The spectacle is no different, although the ruling power is not so much a ruling monarch or even a power elite any more, but the rule of the commodity itself. The celebrities that populate the spectacle are not its sovereigns, but rather model a range of acceptable modes of desire from the noble to the risqué. The true celebrities of the spectacle are not its subjects but its objects. Billionaire Brit retailer Sir Philip Green spent six million pounds flying some two hundred of his closest friends to a luxury spa resort in the Maldives. The resort offers water sports and a private beach for each guest. Much of the décor is made from recycled products and there is an organic vegetable garden where residents can pick ingredients for their own meals. ‘Sustainability’ is the Viagra of old world speculative investment.Sir Philip is no fool, and neither is his publicist. This retailer of dreams has the good sense to appear in public by giving away to a lucky few what the unlucky many should hence forth consider good fortune. And yet while this story highlights the fantastic agency of the billionaire, the moral of the story is something else: even billionaires obey the logic of the spectacle if they want to appear in it. The spectacle has always been an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. But things have changed a bit. The integrated spectacle still relied on centralized means of organizing and distributing the spectacle, run by a culture industry in command of the means of producing its images. The disintegrating spectacle chips away at centralized means of producing images and distributes this responsibility among the spectators themselves. While the production of goods is out-sourced to various cheap labor countries, the production of images is in-sourced to unpaid labor, offered up in what was once leisure time. The culture industries are now the vulture industries, which act less as producers of images for consumption than as algorithms which manage databases of images that consumers swap between each other – while still paying for the privilege. Where once the spectacle entertained us; now we must entertain each other, while the vulture industries collect the rent. The disintegrating spectacle replaces the monologue of appearances with the appearance of dialogue. Spectators are now obliged to make images and stories for each other that do not unite those spectators in anything other than their separateness. The proliferation of means of communication, with their tiny keyboards and tiny screens, merely breaks the spectacle down into bits and distributes it in suspension throughout everyday life. Debord: “The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and universally demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason’s relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe.” Ever finer fragments of the time of everyday life become moments into which the spectacle insinuates its logic, demanding the incessant production and consumption of images and stories which, even though they take place in the sweaty pores of the everyday, are powerless to effect it. It is comforting to imagine that it is always someone else who is duped by the spectacle. Former movie star turned tabloid sensation Lindsay Lohan allegedly spent over one million dollars on clothes in a single year, and $100,000 in a single day, before consulting a hypnotist to try to end her shopping addiction. Lohan’s publicist denied the story: “There is no hypnotist, and Lindsay loves clothes, but the idea that she spent that much last year is completely stupid.” The alleged excess of an other makes the reader’s own relation to the spectacle of commodities seem just right. Its all about having the right distance. For Debord, “no one really believes the spectacle.” Belief, like much else these days, is optional. The spectacle is what it is: irrefutable images, eternal present, the endless yes. The spectacle does not require gestures of belief, only of deference. No particular image need detain us any longer than this season’s shoes. They call themselves the Bus Buddies. The women who travel the Adirondack Trailways Red Line spend five and even six hours commuting to high paid jobs in Manhattan, earning much more money than they could locally in upstate New York. They are outlier examples of what are now called extreme commuters, who rarely see their homes in daylight and spend around a month per year of their lives in transit. It is not an easy life. “Studies show that commuters are much less satisfied with their lives than non-commuters.” Symptoms may include “raised blood pressure, musculoskeletal disorders, increased hostility, lateness, absenteeism, and adverse effects on cognitive performance.” Even with a blow-up neck pillow and a blankie, commuting has few charms. For many workers the commute results from a simple equation between their income in the city and the real estate they can afford in the suburbs, an equation known well by the real estate development companies. “Poring over elaborate market research, these corporations divine what young families want, addressing things like carpet texture and kitchen placement and determining how many streetlights and cul-de-sacs will evoke a soothing sense of safety. They know almost to the dollar how much buyers are willing to pay to exchange a longer commute for more space, a sense of higher status and the feeling of security.” By moving away from the city, the commuter gets the space for which to no longer have the time. Time, or space? This is the tension envelope of middle class desire. Home buyers are to property developers what soldiers are to generals. Their actions are calculable, so long as they don’t panic. There are ways to beat the commute. Rush hour in Sao Paulo, Brazil features the same gridlocked streets as many big cities, but the skies afford a brilliant display of winking lights from the helicopters ferrying the city’s upper class home for the evening. Helipads dot the tops of high-rise buildings and are standard features of Sao Paulo’s guarded residential compounds. The helicopter speeds the commute, bypasses car-jackings, kidnappings – and it ornaments the sky. “My favorite time to fly is at night, because the sensation is equaled only in movies or in dreams,” says Moacir da Silva, the president of the Sao Paulo Helicopter Pilots Association. “The lights are everywhere, as if I were flying within a Christmas tree.” Many Paulistanos lack not only a helicopter, but shelter and clean water. But even when it comes with abundance, everyday life can seem strangely impoverished. Debord: “the reality that must be taken as a point of departure is dissatisfaction.” Even on a good day, when the sun is shining and one doesn’t have to board that bus, everyday life seems oddly lacking. Sure, there is still an under-developed world that lacks modern conveniences such as extreme commuting and the gated community. Pointing to this lack too easily becomes an alibi for not examining what it is the developing world is developing towards. And rather than a developed world, perhaps the result is more like what the Situationists called an over-developed world, which somehow overshot the mark. This world kept accumulating riches of the same steroidal kind, pumping up past the point where a qualitative change might have transformed it and set it on a different path. This is the world, then, which lacks for nothing except its own critique. The critique of everyday life – or something like it – happens all the time in the disintegrating spectacle, but this critique falls short of any project of transforming it. The spectacle points constantly to the more extreme examples of the ills of this world – its longest commutes, its most absurd disparities of wealth between slum dwellers and the helicopter class, as if these curios legitimated what remains as some kind of norm. How can the critique of everyday life be expressed in acts? Acts which might take a step beyond Emmalee Bauer’s magnum opus and become collaborations in new forms of life? Forms of life which are at once both aesthetic and political and yet reducible to the given forms of neither art nor action? These are questions that will draw us back over several centuries of critical practice. Once upon a time there was a small band of ingrates – the Situationist International – who aspired to something more than this. Their project was to advance beyond the fulfillment of needs to the creation of new desires. But in these chastened times the project is different. Having failed our desires, this world merely renames the necessities it imposes as if they were desires. Debord: “It should be known that servitude henceforth truly wants to be loved for itself, and no longer because it would bring any extrinsic advantage.” by McKenzie Wark This land is your land, this land is my land —Woody Guthrie This land is your land, this land is my land —Gang of Four This land is your land, this land is my land —Luther Blissett CLASSA class arises—the working class—able to question the necessity of private property . A party arises, within the worker’s movement, claiming to answer to working class desires—the communists. As Marx writes, “in all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” This was the answer communists proposed to the property question: “centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state.” Making property a state monopoly only produced a new ruling class, and a new and more brutal class struggle. But is that our final answer? Perhaps the course of the class struggle is not yet over. Perhaps there is another class that can open the property question in a new way—and in keeping the question open end once and for all the monopoly of the ruling classes on the ends of history. There is a class dynamic driving each stage of the development of this vectoral world in which we now find ourselves. The vectoral class is driving this world to the brink of disaster, but it also opens up the world to the resources for overcoming its own destructive tendencies. In the three successive phases of commodification, quite different ruling classes arise, usurping different forms of private property. Each ruling class in turn drives the world towards evermore abstract ends. First arises a pastoralist class. They disperse the great mass of peasants who traditionally worked the land under the thumb of feudal lords. The pastoralists supplant the feudal lords, releasing the productivity of nature that they claim as their private property. It is this privatisation of property—a legal hack—that creates the conditions for every other hack by which the land is made to yield a surplus. A vectoral world rises on the shoulders of the agricultural hack. As new forms of abstraction make it possible to produce a surplus from the land with fewer and fewer farmers, pastoralists turn them off their land, depriving them of their living. Dispossessed farmers seek work and a new home in cities. Here capital puts them to work in its factories. Farmers become workers. Capital as property gives rise to a class of capitalists who own the means of production, and a class of workers, dispossessed of it—and by it. Whether as workers or farmers, the direct producers find themselves dispossessed not only of their land, but of the greater part of the surplus they produce, which accumulates to the pastoralists in the form of rent as the return on land, and to capitalists in the form of profit as the return on capital. Dispossessed farmers become workers, only to be dispossessed again. Having lost their land, they lose in turn their culture. Capital produces in its factories not just the necessities of existence, but a way of life it expects its workers to consume. Commodified life dispossess the worker of the information traditionally passed on outside the realm of private property as culture, as the gift of one generation to the next, and replaces it within formation in commodified form. Information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property monopolised by a class, a class of vectoralists, so named because they control the vectors along which information is abstracted, just as capitalists control the material means with which goods are produced, and pastoralists the land with which food is produced. This information, once the collective property of the productive classes—the working and farming classes considered together—becomes the property of yet another appropriating class. As peasants become farmers through the appropriation of their land, they still retain some autonomy over the disposition of their working time. Workers, even though they do not own capital, and must work according to its clock and its merciless time, could at least struggle to reduce the working day and release free time from labour. Information circulated within working class culture as a public property belonging to all. But when information in turn becomes a form of private property, workers are dispossessed of it, and must buy their own culture back from its owners, the vectoralist class. The farmer becomes a worker, and the worker, a slave. The whole world becomes subject to the extraction of a surplus from the producing classes that is controlled by the ruling classes, who use it merely to reproduce and expand this spiral of exploitation. Time itself becomes a commodified experience. The producing classes: farmers, workers, hackers — struggle against the expropriating classes - pastoralists, capitalists, vectoralists — but these successive ruling classes struggle also amongst themselves. Capitalists try to break the pastoral monopoly on land and subordinate the produce of the land to industrial production. Vectoralists try to break capital’s monopoly on the production process, and subordinate the production of goods to the circulation of information: “The privileged realm of electronic space controls the physical-logistics of manufacture, since the release of raw materials and manufactured goods requires electronic consent and direction.” That the vectoralist class has replaced capital as the dominant exploiting class can be seen in the form that the leading corporations take. These firms divest themselves of their productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. They rely on a competing mass of capitalist contractors for the manufacture of their products. Their power lies in monopolizing — patents, copyright and trademarks—and the means of reproducing their value— the vectors of communication. The privatization of information becomes the dominant, rather than a subsidiary, aspect of commodified life. “There is a certain logic to this progression: first, a select group of manufacturers transcend their connection to earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as the pinnacle of their business, they attempt to alter marketing’s social status as a commercial interruption and replace it with seamless integration.” With the rise of the vectoral class, the vectoral world is complete. As private property advances from land to capital to information, property itself becomes more abstract. Capital as property frees land from its spatial fixity. Information as property frees capital from its fixity in a particular object. This abstraction of property makes property itself something amenable to accelerated innovation—and conflict. Class conflict fragments, but creeps into any and every relation that becomes a relation of property. The property question, the basis of class, becomes the question asked everywhere, of everything. If “class” appears absent to the apologists of our time, it is not because it has become just another in a series of antagonisms and articulations, but on the contrary because it has become the structuring principle of the vectoral plane which organises the play of identities as differences. The hacker class, producer of new abstractions, becomes more important to each successive ruling class, as each depends more and more on information as a resource. Land cannot be reproduced at will. Good land lends itself to scarcity , and the abstraction of private property is almost enough on its own to protect the rents of the pastoral class. Capital’s profits rest on more easily reproducible means of production, its factories and inventories. The capitalist firm sometimes needs the hacker to refine and advance the tools and techniques of productions to stay a breast of the competition. Information is the most easily reproducible object ever captured in the abstraction of property. Nothing protects the vectoralist business from its competitors other than its capacity to qualitatively transform the information it possesses and extract new value from it. The services of the hacker class become indispensable to an economy that is itself more and more dispensable—an economy of property and scarcity. As the means of production become more abstract, so too does the property form. Property has to expand to contain more and more complex forms of difference, and reduce it to equivalence. To render land equivalent, it is enough to draw up its boundaries, and create a means of assigning it as an object to a subject. Complexities will arise, naturally, from this unnatural imposition on the surface of the world, although the principle is a simple abstraction. But for something to be represented as intellectual property, it is not enough for it to be inadifferent location. It must be qualitatively different. That difference, which makes a copyright or a patent possible, is the work of the hacker class. The hacker class makes what Bateson calls “the difference that makes the difference.” The difference that drives the abstraction of the world, but which also drives the accumulation of class power in the hands of the vectoral class. The hacker class arises out of the transformation of information into property, in the form of intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, copyright and the moral right of authors. These legal hacks make of the hack a property producing process, and thus a class producing process. The hack produces the class force capable of asking—and answering—the property question, the hacker class. The hacker class is the class with the capacity to creates not only new kinds of object and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form in which they may be represented, but new kinds of relation, with new properties, which question the property form itself. The hacker class realises itself as a class when it hacks the abstraction of property and overcomes the limitations of existing forms of property . The hacker class may be flattered by the attention lavished upon it by capitalists compared to pastoralists, and vectoralists compared to capitalists. Hackers tend to ally at each turn with the more abstract form property and commodity relation. But hackers soon feel the restrictive grip of each ruling class, as it secures its dominance over its predecessor and rival, and can renege on the dispensations it extended to hackers as a class. The vectoralist class, in particular, will go out of its way to court and coopt the productivity of hackers, but only because of its attenuated dependence on new abstraction as the engine of competition among vectoral interests themselves. When the vectoralists act in concert as a class it is to subject hacking to the prerogatives of its class power. The vectoral world is dynamic, struggling to put new abstractions to work, producing new freedoms from necessity. The direction this struggle takes is not given in the course of things, but is determined by the struggle between classes. All classes enter into relations of conflict, collusion and compromise. Their relations are not necessarily dialectical. Classes may form alliances of mutual interest against other classes, or may arrive at a “historic compromise," for a time. Yet despite pauses and setbacks, the class struggle drives history into abstraction and abstraction into history . Sometimes capital forms an alliance with the pastoralists, and the two classes effectively merge their interests under the leadership of the capitalist interest. Sometimes capital forms an alliance with workers against the pastoralist class, an alliance quickly broken once the dissolution of the pastoralist class is achieved. These struggles leave their traces in the historical form of the state, which maintains the domination of the ruling class interest and at the same time adjudicates among the representatives of competing classes. History of full of surprises. Sometimes—for a change—the workers form an alliance with the farmers that socializes private property and put it in the hands of the state while liquidating the pastoralist and capitalist classes. In this case, the state then becomes a collective pastoralist and capitalist class and wields class power over a commodity economy organized on a bureaucratic rather than competitive basis. The vectoralist class emerges out of competitive, rather than bureaucratic states. Competitive conditions drive the search for productive abstraction more effectively. The development of abstract forms of intellectual property creates the relative autonomy in which the hacker class can produce abstractions, although this productivity is constrained within the commodity form. One thing unites pastoralists, capitalists and vectoralists— the sanctity of the property form on which class power depends. Each depends on forms of abstraction that they may buy and own but do not produce. Each comes to depend on the hacker class, which finds new ways of making nature productive, which discovers new patterns in the data thrown off by nature and second nature, which produce new abstractions through which nature maybe made to yield more of a second nature—perhaps even a “third nature.” The hacker class, being numerically small and not owning the means of production, finds itself caught between a politics of the masses from below and a politics of the rulers from above. It must bargain as best it can, or do what it does best--hack out a new politics, beyond this opposition. In the long run, the interests of the hacker class are in accord with those who would benefit most from the advance of abstraction, namely those productive classes dispossessed of the means of production—farmers and workers. In the effort to realise this possibility the hacker class hacks politics itself, creating a new polity, turning mass politics into a politics of multiplicity, in which all the productive classes can express their virtuality . The hacker interest cannot easily form alliances with forms of mass politics that subordinate minority differences to unity in action. Mass politics always run the danger of suppressing the creative, abstracting force of the interaction of differences. The hacker interest is not in mass representation, but in a more abstract politics that expresses the productivity of differences. Hackers, who produce many classes of knowledge out of many classes of experience, have the potential also to produce a new knowledge of class formation and action when working together with the collective experience of all the productive classes. A class is not the same as its representation. In politics one must beware of representations held out to be classes, which represent only a fraction of a class and do not express its multiple interests. Classes do not have vanguards that may speak for them. Classes express themselves equally in all of their multiple interests and actions. Through the development of abstraction, freedom may yet be wrested from necessity. The vectoralist class, like its predecessors, seeks to shackle abstraction to the production of scarcity and margin, not abundance and liberty. The formation of the hacker class as a class comes at just this moment when freedom from necessity and from class domination appears on the horizon as a possibility. Negri: “What is this world of political, ideological and productive crisis, this world of sublimation and uncontrollable circulation? What is it, then, if not an epoch-making leap beyond everything humanity has hitherto experienced?... It constitutes simultaneously the ruin and the new potential of all meaning.” All that it takes is the hacking of the hacker class as a class, a class capable of hacking property itself, which is the fetter upon all productive means and on the productivity of meaning. The struggle among classes has hitherto determined the disposition of the surplus, the regime of scarcity and the form in which production grows. But now the stakes are far higher. Survival and liberty are both on the horizon at once. The ruling classes turn not just the producing classes into an instrumental resource, but nature itself, to the point where class exploitation and the exploitation of nature become the same unsustainable objectification. The potential of a class divided world to produce its own overcoming comes not a moment too soon. excerpt from the book: A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
Horváth Márk – Lovász Ádám
Absentology Műhely Abstract
The theme of our essay is the digital architecture of memory, and the aesthetic implications of memory-digitalization. Information storage technologies and other methods of archivality are exteriorizing memory to an unprecedented degree, contributing to the progressive emergence of an inhuman abstractive agglomeration that has certain identifiable aesthetic features. In our view, the dispersion of social agency throughout networks has resulted in the complexification of social and technological processes. As a consequence, the space of aesthetics has also changed in fundamental ways.
According to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, new media represent a kind of near-infinite replaceability that threatens to dislocate memory from lived experience. Audiovisual technologies do not expand visibility but rather blur it.[1] Instead of natural seeing, what we have in algorithmic visibility is exteriorized, programmed and outsourced vision. In new media, we find a multitude of recursive processes. As Brian Massumi notes, social and ontological causalities, far from being one-sided, are, rather, reversible and affect one another through „intensities and incorporeal movements.”[2] An aesthetics of archivality represents a method of accessing a posthuman future, wherein human teleologies are exposed as broken, derailed and empty. The trauma of our own absence suggests the possibility that we never were present to begin with.[3] [1] Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2013) Programmed Visions (Cambrdige, Mass.: MIT Press) [2] Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham és London: Duke University Press) 203. [3] Berger, James (1999) After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
loading...
1. Dark matter and code-trauma
The threatening depth of digitality thrusts into social networks through an aesthetic operativity predicated upon the lack of access. Image-streams necessitate a hybrid visual aesthetics, an expanded aesthetic science that is capable of grasping, if only in a negative sense, the grammatical subsystems that serve as the infrastructure of binary-based reality-reducing algorithms. Binary code reduces material and corporeal multiplicity to the one-dimensional subreality of simulation. Even language is not as it used to be: in contemporary social reality, all we find are the fragments of linguistic wholeness. It is as if all our lives were permeated by a new mother-tongue, a grammatology composed of hardware and software sub-components, an inhuman structure that equates deep exchanges with superficial conferences and sexual adventures, feeding upon each and every form of communication. To the code, it matters not whether we are speaking with our lover or our manager. Our new mother-tongue is digital language, a function of the self-functioning machinery of archivation. Complex coding-and decoding operations are required so that we may connect with alterities-without-otherness. Behind the cloud, there could very well be no God, not even a hidden god, a Deo abscondito such as that proposed by Nicholas of Cusa. Source codes, batch files and ransomwares command our beleaguered attention. In the manner of vampires, these codes parasitise users. Katherine N. Hayles differentiates two levels of code: so-called „natural language-based codes” that are accessible to human actants, and codes that are characterized by a lack of access.[4]
With the help of Hayle’s distinction, we may analyze the example of ransomware, identifying access with the user’s fear, and the lack of access with the documents foreclosed to the user by such malicious programs. Ransomware is a software that blocks flows of information, archiving and encrypting files. Only with countermeasures and/or sending Bitcoins to untraceable bank accounts may we hope to regain our lost affordances. Ransomware traps are traumatic experiences that make of us unwilling hostages. Foreign, nameless forces take our computers hostage, and thereby our own sense of identity and coherence is endangered. As Alexander Galloway has noted, computer hardware and software alike may be viewed as constituting different kinds of „black boxes.”[5] Indeed, API-s function in a manner analogous to black boxes.[6] The term „black box” originates from the early 1940s, when important technological assets were smuggled out from the United Kingdom to the United States inside a dark metal box, an originary act of militarily-actuated technological transferrence.[7] Information storage is inherently „black box-like” in nature, and this characteristic cannot but affect the subjectivities exposed to its operativity.[8] Returning to the example of ransomware, codes and informational black boxes represent what is essentially a military, tactical logistics. As Paul Virilio writes, social reality, overcoded by cybernetic technologies, is tending towards the disappearance of any and all dimensionality; all that remains is the „lost dimension”, „an informational node, a pixel, that allows the immediate transmission of data.”[9] In a matter of moments, the openness of data transubstantiates itself into closure, and our panicked clicks fail to avert a disaster of monumental proportions. Cybernetic spatiality, the space of virtual culture, is a form of space wherein „knowledge is literally vacummed from all the orifices of the body, society and economy, downloaded into data storage banks, and then sampled and resampled across the liquid media-net.”[10] Not only are the contours of the body blurred by cybernetic operativity, but all informational forms lose their boundaries. Although the linguistics of digital codes may seem, at first glance, direct and accomodating, the ever increasing complexity of networks, translated by program languages and source codes, is, in its actuality, contributing to the construction of a post-anthropocentric symbolic system, founded upon foreclosure and absence, while, at its outer, accessible edges, emphasizing total transparency. [11] Hayles differentiates three levels of code, so to speak. The first level is the „openness” of code, the second the sovereignty of algorithms, and, third, the anti-vitalist, subversive bursting forth of viruses.[12] Invisible forces manipulate languages in cyberspace, forming, mutating and replanning entities, enclosing information within binary darkness. Intentionality is incapable of controlling cyberspace and, for that matter, any other communicational field. The inorganic logic of codes, its perverse anti-aesthetics, is the operativity that beclouds our own usages of language. Dan Hill utilizes a notion of theoretical physics, „dark matter”, transforming it into an aesthetic and programming concept. [13] In Hill’s view, dark matter may serve as a useful metaphor to name the uncoded substrate that tends to remain hidden from view in the process of coding.[14] The „black box” logic of digital codes is analogous to dark matter, which only manifests itself during the course of hostage dramas or social traumas. Collapsed virtuality heightens awareness of hidden presences, present absences saturating codings. According to Hill, programmers must keep note of the presence of dark matter, as the latter is an important aspect of all productivity.[15] Everything is permeated by dark matter; even the process of original installation is always affected by its vacuous presence.[16]
[4] Hayles, Katherine N. (2013) “Traumas of Code”, In: Kroker, Arthur és Kroker, Marlouise (eds. 2013) Critical Digital Studies Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) 39.
[5] Galloway, Alexander (2013) Black Box, Black Bloc”, In: Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marlouise (eds. 2013) Critical Digital Studies Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 218-227 [6] Galloway 2013: 221. [7] Uo. [8] Galloway 2013: 222. [9] Virilio, Paul (2012) Lost Dimension (Los Angeles: semiotext(e)) 147. [10] Kroker, Arthur (1994) Data Trash. The Theory of the Virtual Class (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin) 24. [11] Hayles 2013: 39. [12] Hayles 2013: 44. [13] Hill, Dan (2014) Dark Matter and Trojan Horses. A Strategic Design Vocabulary (Moscow: Strelka Press) [14] Hill 2014: 82-83. [15] Hill 2014: 84. [16] ibid.
loading...
2. Saturation in digital mapping
Digital codes and representational technologies freeze actants and achor them to screens, locking movement into situations, while promising „direct manipulation.” Ben Sneiderman emphasizes that “certain interactive systems generate glowing enthusiasm among users — in marked contrast with the more common reaction of grudging acceptance or outright hostility.”[17] As Chun writes, commenting on Sneiderman’s piece, direct manipulation gives the illusion of control to the user, resulting in „a feeling of mastery.”[18] One concrete example mentioned by Chun is Google Earth. When using the program, we are offered „a god’s eye view” that „allows us to zoom in on any location, to fly from place to place, and to even control the amount of sunshine in any satellite photo. Google Earth, however, hardly represents the world as it is, but rather a more perfectly spherical one in which it hardly ever rains.”[19] The Earth represented to us by Google Earth and other such software is a profoundly arid, flattened and deserted planet, a space free of events and contingencies. Within this ideal sphere, there can be no change, no movement. Thus, digital mapping gives us a false sense of security that fails to correspond with the very real degradation of Earth. Google Earth, as opposed to life on the real thing, obfuscates the fact that we can never occupy any divine viewpoint. There is no „god’s eye view” that is capable of synthesizing all perspectives within itself. While digitality fills up with errors, mistakes and viruses, it attempts to integrate various homely features of everyday reality into its interstices, disguising its true nature with such add-ons. Yet, as Arthur Kroker highlights, „flesh cannot sustain virtuality.”[20] Technology blocks, destroys, obliterates and disassembles organic sensory processes, and, through such deconstructive work, seeks to „make the world safe for virtuality.”[21] Simply put, in the Anthropocene, „the flesh is losing.”[22] Earth is being replaced by Google Earth. Chun writes further on that „the digital (...) is the enduring ephermal.”[23] Although the past is seemingly preserved by digital archiving, in reality this preservation is a kind of degradation, for it is conducted solely through an „ahistorical (or memoryless) functioning.”[24] Chun sees digital mapping as a process of corruption and degradation, but also sees it as a creative opportunity, a way of introducing new hybrids into the world and a chance for us to rethink hybridity. Mapping is therefore not a merely representational method, but rather, as we hope to show, a strange, recombinatory world-constituting process.
We hope to make our point through analyzing several examples of errors in digital maps. The presence of data errors uncovers the recombinatory possibilities latent within code systems. The „god’s eye view” mentioned by Chun is obviated by archiving mistakes, specifically, mapping errors. Following Peter Schwenger, we can say that "the system at its extreme reveals itself to be arbitrary, unreal.[25] At its extremity, mapping becomes a veritable see of error and mischief.
During archiving, certain bodily features, corporeal elements become unnaturally over-and underscaled. Above we can see such an example of slippage, captured (created?) by Google Earth. While in reality the businessman’s arm fits with his body almost seamlessly in real life, in virtual reality the arms becomes grossly, unnervingly large. The arm only appeals to us, as the other participants in this scene are external, oblivious to the otherness of our own, pre-programmed vision. Although the lived, „real” reality of the image is a boring, everyday one, the Google camera has, through phenomenal reduction, created a new scene, a mutation, making the invisible mutant visible and accessible. After uploading, things lose their lived relation to multiplicity, but gain new emphasis in a spectral, strange recontextualization. One could say that in spite of the fact that the aura of uniqueness is lost, this loss allows for the reconstruction of a living-dead, spectral and, in the final instance, virtual aura. Nostalgic memory would, in this context, be a cloning machine that reproduces errant visibility. In Schwenger's view, melancholic memory perpetuates the present, resulting in an extratemporality that is "like an object, en-soi, self-sufficient and outside of time and the world."[26] Perpetuated visibility means, ironically, that things reject permanent immobility, as well as the following of commands. Things are "animated by a restless life beyond the grave of categories."[27] The extended arm that carries the briefcase is therefore an instance of ecstatic archival disquiet.
The next image was purportedly obtained from Apple Maps, and shows a seemingly post-apocalyptic digital Picadilly Square. Digitalized emptiness makes space and existents within space vacuous, debased. Human actants have already been removed from this petrified image, devoid of content. The flesh has disappeared, the human has been outsourced into a reality beyond representation, at least in the inhuman world of Apple Maps. Solely melted, destabilized architectures remain, shadowy remnants of what was formerly London City. Representation, after a while, degrades reality until the latter is simplified into oblivion. Authenticity is always an act, a gesture of appresentational operativity. Emptiness is the sole organ of genuineness. Spectral particularity, through stimulative simulation, breeds ever more spectral outpourings of emptiness. By consequence, phenomena are impoverished, rendered naked, deprived of content. The roads, in Apple’s rendition of Picadilly Square, seem to turn upward, cracking. Infrastructure, in hyperreality, comes undone, due to some infernal saturation. It would seem that digitality, code trauma, is bursting forth, to the detriment of any other intentionality. Digital codes irradiate the grey concrete, and space is deformed by the frenzied mayhem of recombinant hybrid entities.
Our final example would be the hyperreal effects of digital mapping. In 2010, an area of Costa Rica was accidentally „gifted” by Google Earth to Nicaragua, resulting in a conflict of near-continental proportions.[28] Using the map as a convenient excuse, Nicaraguan forces invaded the disputed area. Archivational processes function in a near-automatic manner, and „do not obey any human intentionality.”[29] Hiding behind their anonymity, mapping apparatuses pit human actants against one another, bringing entire nations to the brink of war. Digital cataclysms can therefore translate themselves at any moment into real catastrophes, military conflicts. Vilém Flusser is correct when he writes that technologies of representation „program the viewer to act magically and functionally and, by extension, automatically.”[30] Magically, it is true, but invisibly, latent forces control human actants, integrating them into totalizing, inorganic machinic assemblages.
Human intentionality becomes, in this context, similar to a rotting corpse. It is no longer alive, or at least, no longer sovereign, yet still exerts a kind of zombie-operativity, reacting far too late to digital acceleration and totalization. Corporeality is a connection that brings the spectacle before us. Of the dead body, Schwenger writes that it is "in a sense already defiled by death, a mere piece of ungainly waste."[31] The sight of the cadaver is unnerving for us, because it points toward the primordial incoherence of its own abjection. [32] The blurring of the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua is also an ambiguous manifestation of the dislocation of human/animal and real/hyperreal boundaries. Limits are replaced by intensifying replaceability. We are becoming ghosts in our own lifeworlds, cadavers that, in spite of their movements, are rendered immobile and incapable of arriving at any destination.
[17] Sneiderman, Ben (2003) “Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages”, In: Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (ed. 2003) The New Media Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) 486.
[18] Chun 2013: 63. [19] Chun 2013: 62. [20] Kroker 1994: 91. [21] ibid. [22] Kroker 1994: 86. [23] Chun 2013: 95. [24] ibid. [25] Schwenger, Peter (2006) The Tears of Things. Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 119. [26] Schwenger 2006: 92. [27] Schwenger 2006: 118. [28] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/nov/15/google-map-dispute-nicaragua [29] Flusser, Vilem (2014) Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books) 73. [30] Flusser 2014: 74. [31] Schwenger 2006: 158. [32] ibid. 3. Viruses, worms and Corrupted Blood
Digital culture is a non-representative, algorithmic flow. In this section of our essay, we emphasize the marginality of human agency in relation to viral reproduction, and the centrality of viral-and worm-operativities in post-anthrpocentric networks.
Through the instrumentalization of certain materialities (screens, cursors, remote controls, mouses), digitality connects with human agents and their avatars, recoding the former into virtual-reality playgrounds. Yet the human element as such is merely one substrate among many, and is becoming ever more peripheral. In Jussi Parikka’s view, viruses are characterized by hybridity, synthesizing a number of different materialities, corporealities and incorporeal transformations.[33] Cybernetic operativity necessitates continous recoding and relearning, resulting in the degradation of inelastic agents unable to cope with the strain of network participation. Relearning and the compulsion to recode breeds disaffection, hatred of both life and one’s own lifeworld, reducing the odds of survival. Indeed, it is the more contented actants that stand any chance at all of long-term species existence.[34] Actants ground to dust are swiftly replaced by viral agents. As Parikka notes, „a virus may be understood as a calculational process at the material level of computer circuits, but when this accident (event) is called 'malicious software' it connects to a whole incorporeal sphere of morals, crimes, criminals, laws and judgements."[35] As opposed to modern methods of archiving that were based primarily upon hearing and visibility, viruses subvert existing human networks through unperceptibility and inaccessibility. Their reality carries within itself horrific contents, a fundamental inability to communicate. This inability is characteristic of horror in general, for horror is, to a large extent, a meeting with „the strangeness of a world without us.”[36] Biologists have had to face the difficulty of identifying microscopic pathogenic agents from the 19th century onwards.[37] When the „order of things becomes truly unhinkable", the abyss opens.[38] In David Peak’s view, the abyss constitutes the „core of existence”, its most essential base.[39] Similarly, viruses may be interpreted as the deepest core of information, whose malignant effects emanate not from a space beyond, outside of information, but from within information itself. Parikka in his essay on viruses emphasizes that the virus as expression – through its invisibility and unpossessibility – was used in a variety of areas unamenable to scientific investigation. [40] Brian Massumi, writing of virtuality, highlights that „the virtual is non-quantifiable. Quasi causality cxpresses a real, material reserve of unpredictable potential.”[41] The virtual multiplicity of viruses cannot be subordinated to any one signification or visualization. With their self-organizing calculational processes, viral agents produce sick bodies, infected corporealities. Precisely because of their unnameability, ineffability, an unknowable abyss opens and the identity of software is put in doubt question.[42] Even „normal”, calculable software is demonic/daemonic, because in the background, hard to locate demons make possible the executability of even legitimate software. According to Chun, even non-pathological networks are inhabited by „invisible, orphan processes”, and may be called „daemonic media.”[43]
loading...
The first famous computer virus was „Brain”, infecting a number of IBM computers in 1986. Its name is telling, for it concerns the primary „organ” of cognitive capitalism. Viruses attack not only organs, but network infrastructures. Connectivity is transformed, as a consequence of viral invasion, disconnectivity, the impossibility of any further (non-pathological) connection. Disconnectivity is injected into logocentric network cultures. The virus even produces its own Dada-poem: “BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791.443248. 280530. Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for vaccination...” The virus, as opposed to non-pathogenic agents, is capable of maximum self-reproduction, multiplying darkness until light is subsumed. Global capitalism gleans upon the virtual horizon.
Internalities, torn asunder, make visible „spasmodic passivity”, the foreclosure of flesh.[44] The brain of global cognitive capitalism comes to be consumed by a virus from Pakistan. It is of note that for Massumi, emotion in general is none other than „a contamination of empirical space by affect”, an affectivity born of anonymous virtualized corporeality, or hyperreal incorporeal intensities.[45] Virality spreads across nerve pathways, producing ecstatic emotions and self-affections. Emotion may be considered a perverse infection of the brain. Real biological entities and metaphorical information codes consume actants. Naegalaria fowleri, a brain-eating bacterium discovered in 1965, is as capable of eradicating logocentric operativity as viruses are of disrupting online networks. Once it reaches the brain, the microbes become amoebacysts, then trophozoites. Similarly to computer viruses, they are invisible and, once inside the brain, all but inaccessible, and signs of infection only arise later. For the most part, Naegalaria fowleri may be found is tropical areas of the globe. The „Brain” virus also originated from a relatively hot area of Earth (Pakistan). An ontological affinity may be uncovered between virality and tropicality. „Vision is always infected” – so Massumi would have it.[46] Surfaces are chiasmatically intertwined, and purity is but an exception to the rule of uncleanliness.[47] For this very reason, virtuality is all but inseparable from multiplicity.[48] Viral proliferation always appears in the form of multiplicity. We cannot know precisely from whence brain-eating amoeba arrived into the world. What is sure is that we must search for its origin in one or another swampland. The objects of vision are, for Massumi, „hallucinations”, spectral entities, ghosts.[49] It is a peculiar characteristic of UNIX-demons that – with the help of minor modifications – newer versions of these minions may be manufactured.[50] In Chun’s view the source of daemonic spectrality may be found in „real time processes.”[51] Daemonology’s source is the permanence of real-time data feeds, parasitizing the real so as to construct an infinitely self-referential hyperreality. When networks oversecuritize themselves, they become prone to systematic chaos and breakdown.[52] A primary characteristic of archiving is discontinuity, the fragmentation of memory.[53] In spite of this fragmentation, the reduction of information into discrete entities does not ensure a proper defense against rogue entities and subversive infectious movements. The Logos is foreclosed once neural circuits are disconnected. In other words, visual force morphs into the impossibility of representation, a state of marginality and weakness.[54] Every temporality that concerns „a body-without-image” is inherently foreclosed, precluded.[55]
Without representation, the body remains enclosed within spasmatic passivity, sinking into passionate impotentiality.[56] The brain infected with trophozoites, emerging from cysts buried among the tissues, may be interpreted as a form of inoperative corporeality. Code languages, once they fall prey to viral subversion, become infinitely incoherent incorporealities, deconstructed textualities. Every form of textuality is, of necessity, in some way corporeal, for even incorporeality is, even if negatively, a manifestation of corporeal nature. The ethereality of hypertextual spectrality must be traced back to fleshy reality. We ourselves are affected by the corruption of code languages, we ourselves are debased, reduced in significance, when our files are locked away from us. We ourselves are the wounded ones, the victimes of errant codes. Although the characters of zombie-films routinely smear themselves with the innards of zimbies, to prevent laceration and consumption by these errant, ill entities, they do not cease, for all their striving, to be potential victims. Our infected social reality produces victimhood in unprecedented proportions. The self-replication of viruses entails the debasement of human actants to the level of potential victims, always open to attack, occupation, subsumption and reformulation.
Networked social reality is always fraught with danger. The 1988 film, Brain Damage, plays on such fears of infection and parasitization. Worms are subversive, diabolical agents in the scheme of this film, manipulating human agents in unpredictable and surprising ways. In one particularly gruesome scene, the main character attempts to pull the worm out of his skull. Bits and pieces of his brain are also removed in the process, for the worm has already become part of his lifeworld, his body. The seconds of removal seem to take forever; we are enclosed within a nightmarish temporality; as distinct from the accelerated temporality of connected life, attempts at emancipation seem to lengthen temporality in frightful and painful ways. We ourselves cannot free ourselves of the network, for we live in a chiasmatic relationship with its worms and viruses.
Externality and internality are entwined in a seemingly eternal affinity. Even in its deepest layers, flesh is chiasm. In Kroker’s view, the Internet is the „garbage-dump” of the body, a place where „the flesh goes, so it may be virtualized.”[57] Foreclosure exerts a seductive force upon the bodies integrated into its circuits, for it promises that the fleshlike remainder” may be disposed of.[58] In the aforementioned scene of Brain Damage, the entirety of the parasitised human body becomes one large, fleshlike remainder, collapsing from the seat of the Logos downwards. Endless connectivity becomes a horrendous ordeal, that can only be confronted by the affected man through inarticulate screams. His brain is infected with an endless worm. Paradoxically, the scene also highlights that permanent connectivity tends to cut off memory from experience, making the latter almost completely incoherent.
However, James Berger proposes that memory is always already characterized by incoherence.[59] This is especially true in the case of traumatic memory. As the survivors are always reminded of death’s inevitability, they become, living as they do in the shadow of death, living corpses. To bear witness is to live as if one were dead. [60] Instead of communication, we hear incoherent screams, whose animality is intended, no doubt, to shock us out of our complacency. The character attempts to remove the worm, alas not altogether in vain. Only with the sacrifice of the flesh may emancipation be achieved. In a final, self-mutilating gesture, the man frees himself of the worm, but at the expense of losing his ear. The ear falls to the ground, and the camera (a substitute, no doubt, for out own bearing-witness) focuses on this abject, newly functionless organ. Yet we cannot remove ourselves from trauma, as if there were some safe distance from our own wounds, for "trauma is what returns, and it returns as symptom, which is itself a reenactment of trauma. The existence of the symptom, like the present of the ghost, is a sign that the trauma is still active, still has power to wound and disrupt."[61] The fallen ear remains, provoking our vision to look, a traumatic sign of the ambiguity of emancipation.
In another scene of Brain Damage, the same man offers his own cerebreal tissues to the worm, whose multifunctional mouth organ feasts upon the sacrifice. During the sacrificial ceremony, electronic impulses are seen, which temporarily incapacitate the „victim”/Host’s nervous system.[62] It is of importance that during the process of integration into rule-based systems, „change, variation, is captured and contained.”[63] Digitality, reduction into binary code-systems, reduces the latitude of affected agents, even the space of thought, as the parasitised brain attests.
In conclusion, we would seek to demonstrate the importance of corporeal infestation with another empirical example. In 2005 World of Warcraft, an Internet social game, was infected with an epidemic.[64] With virtuality, new opportunities for infection and experimentation have emerged. The 2005 epidemic, known as „Corrupted Blood”, was a hybrid epidemic, straddling the boundary between „reality” and „simulation”, connecting the virtual and the multiple in a relationship of reversibility. As Lofgren and Fefferman, epidemologists, emphasize, „human agent simulations, where the subjects are virtual but have their actions controlled by human beings interacting with each other, may potentially bridge the gap between real-world epidemiological studies and large-scale computer simulations.”[64] The case highlights that virtuality and reality are, to a great extent, reversible categories. Digital aesthetics must somehow come to terms with what Berger summarizes in the following manner: "all texts transmit their wounds - this is something in the nature of texts, and wounds - and in speaking about one, you speak abou all."[66] Textalities, in World of Warcraft, not only transmitted wounds, but also infected, festering, rotten bodily remains, opening up newer and ever more intensive nodes of infection.
„Corrupted Blood” itself commenced from a specific place within the game, „Zul’Gurub”, which only the most experienced gamers could access.[67] In spite of the fact that these avatars did not succumb to the virus, once the „victorious” avatars returned to the large urban conglomerations, unwittingly transmitting the disease, the outbreak began in earnest.[68] It is especially interesting that the majority of avatars received the fatal infection from their own pets.[69] Infected avatars disintegrated, with only disjoined bones remaining, and traumatized the streets of cities long after they themselves had died. As the game contained certain avatars that could not, under any circumstances be killed, the epidemic could not be stopped, for these latter avatars carried the virus with them. The cities became „death traps.”[70] The epidemologists – who regard the „Corrupted Blood incident” as a real epidemic in all but name – also state that the altruism of certain users actually served to lengthen the timespan of the epidemic, rather than attenuating it, for they supplied „clean blood” to other dying avatars, lengthening their ordeal and contributing to newer infections.[71] The users, because of their emotional investments in the game, could be said to react almost realistically to in-game events. As we may see patterns of interaction between virutal viruses and real, corporeal players, one could say that the users themselves were, in a certain way, infected, saturated, impregnated with „Corrupted Blood.” Corruption is both cause and effect. It disintegrates and prises open bodily cavities, returning organic entities to inorganic disincarnational abstraction.
The streets emptied by „Corrupted Blood” may be compared to a white canvas that has been painted black, which points "no to a past and vanished existence but to a still-to-be-realized future one."[72] Our futureality may be said to have already ceased, for the „Corrupted Blood incident” is a traumatic message from the future to an overly populous homo sapiens, a retroactive memory, an externalized withoutness. Schwenger is correct when he emphasizes "what remains after annihilation is tabula rasa, white as the blank page."[73] The virus only ended once Activision Blizzard, the owner of the game, refreshed the servers. As the epidemologists note with no small irony, refreshing the servers is „an option that remains unavailable to public-health officials.”[74] All the objects of the world are "always implicated with a metaphysical nonexistence, an unknowableness that is - a least for the perceiving eye - a kind of death."[75] Without effective quarantine actions (the avatars, because of the great spatial mobility, could not be restricted to one section of the in-game landscape), the virus could only be eliminated through a radical resetting of the computers, a refereshment that obviated the previous events. The story did not quite end here, however. The authors of the above-quoted study maintain that World of Warcraft and other such games afford an ideal opportunity for epidemological observations, as a virtual simulation lacks the ethical dilemmas that accompany real life experimentation.[76] Merely three years after the outbreak, Activision Blizzard deliberately introduced, to the great chagrin of gamers, a new virus into the system, this time with the express intent of observing in-game behavior.[77] The illness transformed infected avatars into „undead zombies.” Several hundred thousand gamers were infected by the time the company decided to heed protests and abandon the experiment.[78] In this latter case, the infection was „curable”, albeit only by „suicide” and „resurrection.”
[33] Parikka, Jussi (2009): “Archives of Software. Malicious code and the aesthesis of media accidents” In: Parikka, Jussi és Sampson, Tony D. (szerk.) (2009) The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (New York: Hamptom Press) 107.
[34] Gao Y, Edelman S (2016) „Between Pleasure and Contentment: Evolutionary Dynamics of Some Possible Parameters of Happiness.” PLoS ONE 11(5): e0153193. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0153193 [35] Parikka 2009: 107. [36] Peak, David (2014) The Spectacle of the Void (Schism Press) 57. [37] Parikka 2009: 109. [38] Peak 2014: 57. [39] Peak 2014: 58. [40] Parikka 2009: 109. [41] Massumi, Brian (2002): Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press) 226. [42] Parikka 2009: 111. [43] Chun 2013: 87 [44] Massumi 2002: 61. [45] ibid. [46] Massumi 2002: 155. [47 ibid. [48] Massumi 2002: 154. [49] Massumi 2002: 155. [50] Chun 2013: 88. [51] Chun 2013: 89. [52] Parikka 2009: 115. [53] Chun 2013: 212 [54] Massumi 2002: 60. [55] ibid. [56] Massumi 2002: 60-61 [57] Kroker 1994: 104. [58] Kroker 1994: 105. [59] Berger, James (1999) After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 73. [60] Berger 1999: 72. [61] Berger 1999: 79. [62] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oOgdtvNoho [63] Massumi 2002: 79. [64] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/21/wow_virtual_plague/ [65] Lofgren, Eric T., and Nina H. Fefferman. “The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics.” The Lancet infectious diseases 7.9 (2007): 627. [66] Berger 1999: 122 [67] Lofgren, Eric T. – Nina H. Fefferman 2007: 625. [68] Uo. [69] Uo. [70] Lofgren, Eric T. – Nina H. Fefferman 2007: 626. [71] Lofgren, Eric T. – Nina H. Fefferman 2007: 628. [72] Schwenger 2006: 171. [73] Schwenger 2006: 170. [74] Lofgren, Eric T. – Nina H. Fefferman 2007: 627. [75] Schwenger 2006: 174. [76] Lofgren, Eric T. – Nina H. Fefferman 2007: 628. [77] http://www.webcitation.org/5tbD2NeVO [78] Uo.
Bibliography
Berger, James (1999) After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2013) Programmed Visions. Software and Memory (Cambrdige, Mass.: MIT Press) GAO Y, EDELMAN S (2016) „Between Pleasure and Contentment: Evolutionary Dynamics of Some Possible Parameters of Happiness.” PLoS ONE 11(5): e0153193. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0153193 Flusser, Vilem (2014) Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books) Galloway, Alexander (2013) “Black Box, Black Bloc”, In: Kroker, Arthur és Kroker, Marlouise (ed.) Critical Digital Studies Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 218-227. Hayles, Katherine N. (2013) “Traumas of Code”, In: Kroker, Arthur és Kroker, Marlouise (ed.) Critical Digital Studies Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 39-59. Hill, Dan (2014) Dark Matter and Trojan Horses. A Strategic Design Vocabulary (Moscow: Strelka Press) Kroker, Arthur (2004) The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) Kroker, Arthur (1994) Data Trash. The Theory of the Virtual Class (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin) Lofgren, Eric T., and Nina H. Fefferman “The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics.” The Lancet infectious diseases 7.9 (2007): 625-629. Massumi, Brian (2002): Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press) Parikka, Jussi és Sampson, Tony D. (ed.) (2009) The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (New York: Hamptom Press) Peak, David (2014) The Spectacle of the Void (Schism Press) Phillips, Dougal (2009) “Can Desire Go On Without A Body?”, In: Parikka, Jussi – Sampson, Tony D. (ed. 2009) The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (New York: The Hampton Press), 195-229. Schwenger, Peter (2006) The Tears of Things. Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) Sneiderman, Ben (2003) “Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages”, In: Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (ed. 2003) The New Media Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) 485-499. Virilio, Paul (2012) Lost Dimension (Los Angeles: semiotext(e))
loading...
by Steven Craig Hickman [W]hy do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a reactionary type? And more rarely, how do certain people whose interest is objectively reactionary come to effect a preconscious revolutionary investment? -Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari in their introduction to Schizoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus will offer us four thesis: (1) Every investment is social, and (2) within the social investments we will distinguish the unconscious libidinal investment of group or desire, and the preconscious investment of class or interest; (3) third, schizoanalysis posits the primacy of the libidinal investments of the social field over the familial investment, both in point of fact and by statute: an indifferent stimulus at the beginning, an extrinsic result at the point of arrival; and, (4) finally, the distinction between two poles of social libidinal investment: the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascisizing pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole. (see AO: pp. 361, 362, 375, 385) Those who have read us this far will perhaps find many reasons for reproaching us: for believing too much in the pure potentialities of art and even of science; for denying or minimizing the role of classes and class struggle; for militating in favor of an irrationalism of desire; for identifying the revolutionary with the schizo; for falling into familiar, all-too-familiar traps. This would be a bad reading, and we don’t know which is better, a bad reading or no reading at all. (AO, p. 398) Have we ever read Anti-Oedipus? Reading the scholars one gets an image of many things, but what one misses is the schizo in the crevices of desire and investment. Investment or “to clothe (with attributes)” both in the Latin sense of investiture (i.e., to clothe with the attributes of office, rank, etc.), and in the capitalistic sense of investing for profit, as well as the military or strategic sense of surrounding oneself with armor as defensive measure. Which feeds into this double sense of libidinal economy of investment into group (desire), and the hidden or unrevealed pre-conscious investment of class or interest (irrational or automatic?). Telling is the priority of the larger molar aggregate over the familial romance (Freud), and the splitting of this social investment into binary or dyadic poles of paranoiac and schizoid. Under the Oedipal (Freudian) regime of Big Daddy paranoia of castration or lack we discover the ways and means of capital investment as it enslaves desiring-production. Describing this reactionary formation Deleuze and Guattari remark: “It is very important for it that the limit of this production be displaced, and that it pass to the interior of the socius, as a limit between two molar aggregates, the social aggregate of departure and the familial subaggregate of arrival that supposedly corresponds to it, in such a way that desire is caught in the trap of a familial psychic repression that comes to double the weight of social repression. The paranoiac applies his delirium to the family—and to his own family—but it is first of all a delirium of races, ranks, classes, and universal history. In short, Oedipus implies within the unconscious itself an entire reactionary and paranoiac investment of the social field that acts as an oedipalizing factor, and that can fuel as well as counteract the preconscious investments. From the standpoint of schizoanalysis, the analysis of Oedipus therefore consists in tracing back from the son’s confused feelings to the delirious ideas or the lines of investment of the parents, of their internalized representatives and their substitutes: not in order to attain the whole of a family, which is never more than a locus of application and reproduction, but in order to attain the social and political units of libidinal investment. (AO. p. 384) We see the mechanics of this played out in recent history of the Trump/BREXIT consolidation of Oedipal power and withdrawal, paranoiac formations of populist investments in traditional to fascist modes and strategies. The disinvestment in larger global collective projects (Paris accord, NATO, etc.). The heating up of military and nationalist isolation and might. Shoring up the ruins of past glory in economic and mythic pride of homeland and its patriotic gore. But at the same time we see a paranoiac element in the Left as well: the accusations of Russian hackers leading to wider conspiracies; the methodical fear mongering and strategies in the DNC and Hilary to displace blame onto the Other; the digital spin games and circuits of selective propaganda feeding the masses, etc. This familial romance of the two paranoiac structures of reactionary vs. progressive revolutionary feeding into what D&G will call the Oedipal unconscious itself: “an entire reactionary and paranoiac investment of the social field that acts as an oedipalizing factor, and that can fuel as well as counteract the preconscious investments” (AO, p. 384). Schizoanalysis will treat the social body in the same way Freud and psychoanalysis treated the patient on the couch, except that it will disinvest the Oedipal or family romance as the monomyth of this analytical endeavor. Or, as they tell it: “Once again, we see no objection to the use of terms inherited from psychiatry for characterizing social investments of the unconscious, insofar as these terms cease to have a familial connotation that would make them into simple projections, and from the moment delirium is recognized as having a primary social content that is immediately adequate.” (AO, p. 385) What is difficult to except in our own moment that this dichotomy of reactionary/revolutionary is no longer viable to the extant that in our supposed neoliberal society there is a duopoly of paranoiac structures and investments from both Left and Right in the class investiture of the moneyed groups in power; both seek to enslave the gregarious (herd) aggregates (masses) under the technocratic paradigm of the Media-tainment regimes of propaganda and ideological institutions. The old separations in this in-between time of chaos no longer hold sway and the populist undergrid and shadow climes of both sides of the aisle take on the colors (tropes, figurations) of each other in a duplicitous masquerade of socio-cultural mutations and mutual enslavements of desire. As Klossowski whom D&G remark took the two pole theory furthest comments: “Every sovereign formation would thus have to foresee the destined moment of its disintegration. . . . No formation of sovereignty, in order to crystalize, will ever endure this prise de conscience: for as soon as this formation becomes conscious of its immanent disintegration in the individuals who compose it, these same individuals decompose it. . . . By way of the circuitous route of science and art, human beings have many times revolted against this fixity; this capacity notwithstanding, the gregarious [herd mentality] impulse in and by science caused this rupture to fail. The day humans are able to behave as intentionless phenomena—for every intention at the level of the human being always obeys the laws of its conservation, its continued existence—on that day a new creature will declare the integrity of existence. . .”(AO, p. 387). This notion of an emerging “intentionless” mode of existence as the production of a new creature – a posthuman mode of existence outside either paranoiac reactionary pole or the schizorevolutionary pole is the underlying motion of schizoanalytic task, its telos. Klossowski’s appeal to a new countersociology in which art and the sciences replace politics in priority, a convergence that seeks to “establishing themselves as dominant powers, on the ruins of institutions.” (AO, p. 387) D&G will ask why art and sciences should take priority, when they are already bound to the sovereign power of capital? Answer: “Because art, as soon as it attains its own grandeur, its own genius, creates chains of decoding and deterritorialization that serve as the foundation for desiring-machines, and make them function.” (AO, p. 387) It’s this accelerationist strategy of endless decoding and deterritorialization that we discovered in the last post that leads to the irreversible process in which the “earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth”. (AO, p. 340) Of course this could be seen as a throw back to the Gnostic or Utopian (Marxian: Ernst Bloch, etc.) revolutionary break and rupture, but D&G throughout AO seek to dissuade such a reading. Instead for them this break, or break through is to be seen as in Nietzsche, Artaud, Burroughs as experiment, continuous experimental discovery of the processes within modernity that were always there hiding in the interstices and crevices below the stratified layers, churning and energetic awaiting their moment to emerge and transform, mutate, and metamorphosize the social body and its investments. As they’ll state it these schizz’s “not only flee across the social axiomatic, but pass beyond their own axiomatics, generating increasingly deterritorialized signs, figures-schizzes that are no longer either figurative or structured, and reproduce or produce an interplay of phenomena without aim or end: science as experimentation, as previously defined.” (AO, p. 390) Do we not see in the experimental endeavors of art and sciences in NBIC convergence between optimizing intelligence and the mutant movement of enhancement therapies, as well as the investment in AI, Robotics, and the machinic learning and self-replication of intelligence and design of current experimental modes of art and the sciences this tendency? Even as Capital underwrites this new experimental socio-cultural transformation it is itself obsolesced into new investments and modes of economic change of which it itself is neither aware nor controls. As it under the mask of economic investment Capital has become itself an alien intelligence from the future retroactively investing in its own socio-cultural logics beyond the two poles of either reactionary paranoia or schizorevolutionary rupture and change. It’s this acknowledgement of the hidden convergence toward a singular point, a Singularity that is broadcast within the folds of this investment. It’s as if with the demise of industrial capitalism, the break up of the old Factory model, the disinvestment in the socio-cultural programs that tied capitalism to the familial romance of bosses and unions, the dismantling of the logics of imperial capital by this alien intelligence which has itself reformatted capital from the ground up over the past sixty years. All this as D&G will state it “a flow of financing and a flow of payment or incomes in the monetary inscription of capitalism, a market flow and a flow of innovation as machinic surplus value in the operation of capitalism (surplus value as the first aspect of its immanence), a ruling class that is all the more ruthless as it does not place the machine in its service, but is the servant of the capitalist machine: in this sense, a single class, content for its part with drawing incomes that, however enormous, differ only arithmetically from the workers’ wages-income, whereas this class functions on a more profound level as creator, regulator, and guardian of the great nonappropriated, nonpossessed flow, incommensurable with wages and profits, which marks at every step along the way the interior limits of capitalism, their perpetual displacement, and their reproduction on an always larger scale; the effusion of antiproduction within production, as the realization or the absorption of surplus value, in such a way that the military, bureaucratic, and police apparatus finds itself grounded in the economy itself, which directly produces libidinal investments for the repression of desire.” (AO, p. 392) There is not one of these aspects—not the least operation, the least industrial or financial mechanism—that does not reveal the insanity of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality: not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathological state, this insanity, “the machine works too, believe me”. The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality. (AO, p. 392) This sense of a mad logics, of an inhuman or alien, or non-human intelligence at the core of Capital using the elite and the workers toward its own ends, enslaving the desires of art and the science toward a mutant transformation and metamorphosis has yet to be explored except in the conspiratorial philosophies of Nick Land and a few others. Of course its mad to those on this side of the divide, of those whose mind’s are still bound within the two poles of reactionary paranoia or schizo-flows of rupturing revolutionary modes of thought and being. Such will not accept such strange and weird prognostications. Marx’s black humor, the source of Capital, is his fascination with such a machine: how it came to be assembled, on what foundation of decoding and deterritorialization; how it works, always more decoded, always more deterritorialized; how its operation grows more relentless with the development of the axiomatic, the combination of the flows; how it produces the terrible single class of gray gentlemen who keep up the machine; how it does not run the risk of dying all alone, but rather of making us die, by provoking to the very end investments of desire that do not even go by way of a deceptive and subjective ideology, and that lead us to cry out to the very end, Long live capital in all its reality, in alt its objective dissimulation! (AO, p. 392) Capital Terror and CrueltyCapitalism is defined by a cruelty having no parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Capital never dies it only expands its terror and cruelty. “The reproduction of the interior limits of capitalism on an always wider scale has several consequences: it permits increases and improvements of standards at the center, it displaces the harshest forms of exploitation from the center to the periphery, but also multiplies enclaves of overpopulation in the center itself, and easily tolerates the so-called socialist formations.” (AO, p. 392) The densification of nomadic influx of migrant workers from the periphery to the center we see in Europe and America is part of this strategy. The truth is the center is a digital panopticon, a prison of surveillance capitalism that can decode the programmatic world of work and workers, stratifying society into ever denser hierarchies within the new supercity complexes, where the ranking systems of the near future will include/exclude access based on securitization with the wealthy and powerful ranking access to the luxury portals of higher commodity transactions. The favela cultural complexes of the South will in this new world become the Kafkan mole people forced into underground compounds and complexes hidden away from view as untouchables much like the hidden tunnels under the various Disney complexes that hide the machinery of support systems that allow servants and workers from the hive to enter and go without notice, sectioned and partitioned off from the wealthy classes. A new apartheid will arise as it has already in such enclaves as Dubai and other neoliberal imperial cities. Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other. Never an individual exile, never a personal desert, but a collective exile and a collective desert. It is only too obvious that the destiny of the revolution is linked solely to the interest of the dominated and exploited masses. But it is the nature of this link that poses the real problem, as either a determined causal link or a different sort of connection. It is a question of knowing how a revolutionary potential is realized, in its very relationship with the exploited masses or the “weakest links” of a given system. Do these masses or these links act in their own place, within the order of causes and aims that promote a new socius, or are they on the contrary the place and the agent of a sudden and unexpected irruption, an irruption of desire that breaks with causes and aims and overturns the socius, revealing its other side? (AO, p. 396). The Schizorevolutionary Moment…the rupture with causality that forces a rewriting of history on a level with the real, and produces this strangely polyvocal moment when everything is possible. (397) Is the Singularity such a moment, a convergence point of socio-cultural and technological desire where anything is possible? The singularity like the schizorevolutionary prognosis is from elsewhere, an event uncharted, a movement or emergence out of the temporal command and control systems that would block its rupture and rechannel its desires into a territorialize flow. “It will be a decoded flow, a deterritorialized flow that runs too far and cuts too sharply, thereby escaping from the axiomatic of capitalism.” (AO, p. 397). D&G would foresee a moment when the scientist and the artist would “rejoin an objective revolutionary situation in reaction against authoritarian designs of a State that is incompetent and above all castrating by nature” (AO, p. 398). Have we begun to see such a turn in the sciences as scientists suddenly have become revolutionary protestors? In this sense the scientists of this protest were greeted by shouts of “We love science!” Eager strangers asked the scientists to pose for photographs with the signs they carried, which bore slogans such as “Stand up 4 Science”… for many researchers at the event, the president’s positions on scientific issues are equally worrisome. Is the Oedipal authority of the new populist leader coming under fire from the very experts who have been financed by capital for so long? Is this a revolt from within the Cathedral of the Neoliberal State itself? In their bid to explode the capitalist configuration into a decoded flow and ultra deterritorialization of this programmatic authoritarianism and recursion to the Great Leader as Oedipus mythos in present populist systems D&G tell us they “put forward desire as a revolutionary agency, it is because we believe that capitalist society can endure many manifestations of interest, but not one manifestation of desire, which would be enough to make its fundamental structures explode, even at the kindergarten level. We believe in desire as in the irrational of every form of rationality, and not because it is a lack, a thirst, or an aspiration, but because it is the production of desire: desire that produces—real-desire, or the real in itself.” (AO, p. 398) This sense of blowing away the mask of our present world system and its logics and inventing a new earth, a new real is an irrational project at the heart of the rational itself. Or, an inhuman revolt from the center of humanity? This explains why we have only spoken of a schizoid pole in the libidinal investment of the social field, so as to avoid as much as possible the confusion of the schizophrenic process with the production of a schizophrenic. The schizophrenic process (the schizoid pole) is revolutionary, in the very sense that the paranoiac method is reactionary and fascist; and it is not these psychiatric categories, freed of all familialism, that will allow us to understand the politico-economic determinations, but exactly the opposite. (AO, p. 399). Those who mistake schizoanalysis for a political program are mistaken: “Schizoanaiysis as such does not raise the problem of the nature of the socius to come out of the revolution; it does not claim to be identical with the revolution itself.” (AO, p. 399) Ultimately for schizoanalysis it is a question whether schizophrenics are the living machines of a dead labor, which are then contrasted to the dead machines of living labor as organized in capitalism. Or whether instead desiring, technical, and social machines join together in a process of schizophrenic production that thereafter has no more schizophrenics to produce. (AO, p. 400) Let us face the truth schizoanalysis is not for the feint of heart, it is the negative task of schizoanalysis that it must be violent, brutal: defamiliarizing, de-oedipalizing, decastrating; undoing theater, dream, and fantasy; decoding, deterritorializing—a terrible curettage, a malevolent activity. (AO, p. 400) For the task of the mechanic who is a schizoanalyst we haven’t see nothing yet. The dismantling of the capture systems of capitalist investment that have enslaved the world in a system of intensifying death-machines is to be torn asunder. “Completing the process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We’ll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth (“In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing”) is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed.” (AO, p. 401) taken from : by Steven Craig Hickman Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn’t effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary—withdrawal, freaks—provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the shuffle. What matters is to break through the wall… Deleuze/Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia For Deleuze and Guattari we are all caught in the glue of a temporal machine whose labors are those of Eternal return of the Same: a presentism that seeks to close us off in a dark world of capitalist familial aggression and theatre of cruelty. A social, political, and economic world system that seeks to freeze time in an eternal present of absolute presence. Within such a static world the powers of command and control could manipulate and modulate the desires of their slaves without fear of reprisal; for they had created a system of such utter destitution and austerity that no one could escape or withdraw. With the separation of politics and the economy, the last linkage of democracy was severed and what remained was an iron clad prison of circulating capital sucking at its citizenry from center to periphery of the earth the surplus value and profit it needed to continue in its isolated world of speed. In such a world the populace is fed just enough to keep them alive till such a time as the machines will replace them, and then they too will become obsolesced and excluded from the world system. Delirium is the general matrix of every unconscious social investment. Every unconscious investment mobilizes a delirious interplay of disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments. But we have seen in this context that there were two major types of social investment, segregative and nomadic, just as there were two poles of delirium: first, a paranoiac fascisizing (fascisanf) type or pole that invests the formation of central sovereignty; overinvests it by making it the final eternal cause for all the other social forms of history; counterinvests the enclaves or the periphery; and disinvests every free “figure” of desire—yes, I am your kind, and I belong to the superior race and class. And second, a schizorevolutionary type or pole that follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery—proceeding in an inverse fashion from that of the other pole: I am not your kind, I belong eternally to the inferior race, I am a beast, a black.1 There are such moments when the two poles snap, the center does not hold and the forces of fascism and revolution collide in massive upheavals rivaling the darkest periods of genocide and holocaust. We are entering such an age, and yet it will not be based on ethnic or racial modes of horror but will be shown to be a confrontation between superior and inferior descendants of Homo sapiens sapiens. As the rich and powerful invest in human enhancement for their children in the coming century there will develop a separation of wide (supernormal) humanity from its predecessor and parental branch or clade. Along with this manifestation is the other tendency of machinic governance and technicity. With the incorporation of the NBIC technologies the advancement of Automatic Society as seen in Bernard Stiegler and other thinkers, the emergence of what many term the Algorithmic Civilization is in the offing. As AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and Robotics along with nanotechnology and other machinic systems of intelligence and physical prowess replace humanity in the world of work we will see again other forms of exploitation and exclusion emerge. Obviously this is only one scenario, the scenario being underwritten by the world system of Capital. The other scenario is that of the schizorevolutionary world defined by Deleuze/Guattari in several works during the late twentieth century. Can or will such a line of revolutionary schizz’s escape or exit this darker scenario of the ruling biological castes? Or will the bitter rivalries of twentieth-century forms of racial, gender, and other identity politics bring about an even more embittered systems of destruction? So that instead of humanity coming together to define a struggle against the coming catastrophe they instead hasten it? The populist politics of our era is that of the masses and packs, the wolf-delirium of the Alpha Leader who as Elias Canetti has clearly shown is a paranoiac organizing hungry and angry masses and “packs.” As D&G will say of it the “paranoiac opposes them to one another, maneuvers them. The paranoiac engineers masses, he is the artist of the large molar aggregates, the statistical formations or gregariousness’s, the phenomena of organized crowds. He invests everything that falls within the province of large numbers.” (ibid., p 298) He practices a macrophysics. Yet, the two poles paranoia (fascism) and schizophrenia (schizorevolutionary) are “ultimate products under the determinate conditions of capitalism” (ibid., p. 300). These were not metaphors or tropes for D&G but rather the truth of an underlying energetic unconscious, a productive unconscious: “But in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself.” (ibid., p. 302) As they explain: In the unconscious there are only populations, groups, and machines. When we posit in one case an involuntariness of the social and technical machines, in the other case an unconscious of the desiring-machines, it is a question of a necessary relationship between inextricably linked forces. Some of these are elementary forces by means of which the unconscious is produced; the others, resultants reacting on the first, statistical aggregates through which the unconscious is represented and already suffers psychic and social repression of its elementary productive forces. (ibid., p. 302) A dynamism is at play of creation and destruction, a continuous cycle of excess and decay, production and composition. Throughout their combined production D&G would struggle against those who would reduce their machinism to the vitalist camp: “it should be noted that, in one way or another, the machine and desire thus remain in an extrinsic relationship, either because desire appears as an effect determined by a system of mechanical causes, or because the machine is itself a system of means in terms of the aims of desire. The link between the two remains secondary and indirect, both in the new means appropriated by desire and in the derived desires produced by the machines.” (ibid., p. 303) They would grapple and formulate to varying degrees of success a narrative that would stipulate the difference between such unities of desire in Bergson’s Élan vital, and their own sense of desire. Speaking of Samuel Butler, “The Book of the Machines,” they tell us that “He shatters the vitalist argument by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling in question the structural unity of the machine.” (ibid., p. 303) It’s this questioning of “unity” in both the organism or machine that redefines D&G’s non-vitalist conceptuality as against all those neo-vitalist materialist reductions we’ve seen in recent philosophical circles.2 Speaking of the various symbiotic relationships of machine/man, or Bee/flower in the sense of reproductive relations D&G will remark: We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or a society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualize it; we look at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single center; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact that no vapour-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapour-engines have no reproductive system. (ibid., p. 304) In fact it is at this point they’ll return to Butler’s fable commenting that Butler encounters the phenomenon of surplus value of code, when a part of a machine captures within its own code a code fragment of another machine, and thus owes its reproduction to a part of another machine: the red clover and the bumble bee; or the orchid and the male wasp that it attracts and intercepts by carrying on its flower the image and the odor of the female wasp. (ibid., p. 304) This sense of a dyadic relation, of a process in which two separate and equally different biota or machinic being/process are enfolded into each others reproductive cycles and dependent of each other for this propagation. All this leads to the conclusive argument that: Once the structural unity of the machine has been undone, once the personal and specific unity of the living has been laid to rest, a direct link is perceived between the machine and desire, the machine passes to the heart of desire, the machine is desiring and desire, machined. Desire is not in the subject, but the machine in desire—with the residual subject off to the side, alongside the machine, around the entire periphery, a parasite of machines, an accessory of vertebro-machinate desire. In a word, the real difference is not between the living and the machine, vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the machine that are two states of the living as well. The machine taken in its structural unity, the living taken in its specific and even personal unity, are mass phenomena or molar aggregates; for this reason each points to the extrinsic existence of the other. All this leads back to their concepts of the molar and molecular as a defining difference, no matter whether it is social, technical, or organic/machinic. In this way it is the way these machines, which are all the same machines, are organized: either under the paranoid-molar formation of politics (fascism), or under the Add to schizorevolutionary-molecular formation of politics (non-fascistic). “It is not a matter of biologizing human history, nor of anthropologizing natural history. It is a matter of showing the common participation of the social machines and the organic machines in the desiring-machines” (ibid., p. 308) It’s this linkage that they will describe as schizoanalysis: the theory of schizophrenia—is biological, biocultural, inasmuch as it examines the machinic connections of a molecular order, their distribution into maps of intensity on the giant molecule of the body without organs, and the statistical accumulations that form and select the large aggregates. (ibid., p. 308) Accelerating the Process: The Murder of DemocracyThe schizoanalytic argument is simple: desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement—desiring-machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production. We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having shunted it into representation. A Thousand Plateaus Shall we say it again? Yes. The Secular Age of Democratic Enlightenment is dead. Caput! The logic of the demos murdered it, the very civilization of the bourgeoisie killed it. It was our very belief in its Universalist ideology of tolerance, equality, happiness, justice that killed it. The very figure (Representation) of the Great Leader, the one who would lead us out of Golgotha, this representative figure of the heroic people, the folk, etc. who would restore the greatness of a Nation: this myth of redemption, salvation, the secular gospel of progressive liberalism. All this would kill democracy, strip it of its ancient power, bring the world of the demos to a populist mass of murderers. Left and Right in genocidal accord. “…the link between representation-belief and the family is not accidental; it is of the essence of representation to be a familial representation. But production is not thereby suppressed, it continues to rumble, to throb beneath the representative agency that suffocates it, and that it in return can make resonate to the breaking point.” (ibid., p. 315) Big Daddy Trump (Oedipus) making a pact with the wolfish clan-worlds of the forgotten masses. The populist uprising of the decadent and resilient outcasts of the progressive demos returning to the home hearth to slaughter their kindred. Genocidal, cannibalistic, the zombification of a Nation – of a World. “…representation must inflate itself with all the power of myth and tragedy, it must give a mythic and tragic presentation of the family—and a familial presentation of myth and tragedy.” (ibid., p. 316) The more the Left strives against the Right, the more it plays into the hands of the dramatic mythos, captured by the very actions of its machinic desires. The Left has become its own nightmare, its own worst enemy. It has lost its way in the labyrinth of its own false consciousness. Even Marx is turning in his grave. Destruction. This ideational rubbish out of which our world has erected its cultural edifice is now, by a critical irony, being given its poetic immolation, its mythos, through a kind of writing which, because it is of the disease and therefore beyond, clears the ground for fresh superstructures. (317) Only in this confusion, in-between acts, in the shambles and catastrophe of the present movement does the exaltation of the process as a schizophrenic process of deterritorialization that must produce a new earth; and even the functioning of the desiring-machines against tragedy, against “the fatal drama of the personality,” against “the inevitable confusion between mask and actor.” (318) The movement of abstraction in economics (Ricardo to now) and psychoanalysis (Freud to Foucault) taught us that “subjective abstract desire, like subjective abstract labor, is inseparable from a movement of deterritorialization that discovers the interplay of machines and their agents underneath all the specific determinations that still linked desire or labor to a given person, to a given object in the framework of representation.” (ibid., p. 319) For it is myth and tragedy, these systems of symbolic representation that still refer desire to determinate exterior conditions as well as to particular objective codes—the body of the Earth, the despotic body—and that in this way confound the discovery of the abstract or subjective essence. (319) Representation hides the abstract truth hidden in the darkness of unconscious production. It’s just here that psychoanalysis and capitalism touch each other: “the discovery of an activity of production in general and without distinction, as it appears in capitalism, is the identical discovery of both political economy and psychoanalysis, beyond the determinate systems of representation”. (321) The point here D&G make is that “the identity of desire and labor is not a myth, it is rather the active Utopia par excellence that designates the capitalist limit to be overcome through desiring-production.” (321) Capitalism knows of this and uses it to break these limits, overcome the very power of its own limitations, and as D&G will remark: Capitalism is inseparable from the movement of deterritorialization, but this movement is exorcised through factitious and artificial reterritorializations. Capitalism is constructed on the ruins of the territorial and the despotic, the mythic and the tragic representations, but it re-establishes them in its own service and in another form, as images of capital.(322) It’s this very power of re-presentation, of a re-enactment of myth and tragedy at the heart of the capitalist project that keeps it bound within a circle of symbolic accord, a temporal timelessness of presentism: some have termed this the “Whiggish” triumphalist mode of temporality, a historical telos that in a way uses the past to validate its own political beliefs. As David H. Fischer defines it this interpretation was presentist because it did not depict the past in objective historical context but instead viewed history only through the lens of contemporary Whig beliefs.3 In our age it can be seen through either the neoliberal or progressive lens, both Left and Right ordering the temporal void of politics under the duopoly of shared representationalism (i.e., managed perception and algorithmic governmentality). Both capitalism and psychoanalysis would privatize the property of the Kantian inward turn, shaping desire from its external to internal systems of representation of the economic and desiring familial conflicts and figures of dream and myth. Rather than staging this as public event as in ancient Greece, the new world of secularized mythos turns into the private nightmares of individual citizenry bound to the cycles of capitalist desire, repression, and irruption. Ultimately “What is left in the end is an intimate familial theater, the theater of private man, which is no longer either desiring-production or objective representation. The unconscious as a stage. A whole theater put in the place of production, a theater that disfigures this production even more than could tragedy and myth when reduced to their meager ancient resources.” (324) In this subjective theatre of the mind, the revolving door of an internalized world of simulated contrivance we’ve ended in a bizarre world of solipsism. As D&G remark: “We are alone with our bad conscience and our boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing left but images that revolve within the infinite subjective representation.” (327) It is the bedrock or foundation of psychoanalysis on castration, on “lack” that D&G will attack so ferociously: Everything, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, is taken up again as shadows projected on a stage. The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations. What a perverse operation psychoanalysis is, where this neoidealism, this rehabilitated cult of castration, this ideology of lack culminates: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! In truth, they don’t know what they are doing, nor what mechanism of repression they are fostering, for their intentions are often progressive. But no one today can enter an analyst’s consulting room without at least being aware that everything has been played out in advance: Oedipus and castration, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the great lesson of the inadequacy of being or of dispossession. Psychoanalysis as a gadget, Oedipus as a reterritorialization, a retimbering of modern man on the “rock” of castration [“Lack”]. (327) The notion that in politics as on the couch of the psychoanalyst that one is repeating the gestures of a tragic myth, an eternal return of the same theatrical personages, the farce of a replay that is going nowhere, an infinite regression into abstraction and apathy. All this binds us to the presentist’s world of temporal impasse: a world without a future. Beyond the Metaphysics of Lack: The Way of DestructionDestroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction—a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. … schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions. Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent. -Deleuze/Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia The base materialist approach to desire begins with the productive unconscious: it “lacks nothing, because it is defined as the natural and sensuous objective being, at the same time as the Real is defined as the objective being of desire” (303). They explain it this way: For the unconscious of schizoanalysis is unaware of persons, aggregates, and laws, and of images, structures, and symbols. It is an orphan, just as it is an anarchist and an atheist. It is not an orphan in the sense that the father’s name would designate an absence, but in the sense that the unconscious reproduces itself wherever the names of history designate present intensities (“the sea of proper names”). The unconscious is not figurative, since its figural is abstract, the figure-schiz. It is not structural, nor is it symbolic, for its reality is that of the Real in its very production, in its very inorganization. It is not representative, but solely machinic, and productive. (330) Psychoanalysis is itself the mirror image of capital, the internalization of its perverse capture system. “Psychoanalysis, no less than the bureaucratic or military apparatus, is a mechanism for the absorption of surplus value, nor is this true from the outside, extrinsically; rather, its very form and its finality are marked by this social function.” (331) In fact, “the whole of psychoanalysis is an immense perversion, a drug, a radical break with reality, starting with the reality of desire; it is a narcissism, a monstrous autism: the characteristic autism and the intrinsic perversion of the machine of capital.” (332) The path of destruction is fraught with peril. “In its destructive task, schizoanalysis must proceed as quickly as possible, but it can also proceed only with great patience, great care, by successively undoing the representative territorialities and reterritorial-izations through which a subject passes in his individual history. For there are several layers, several planes of resistance that come from within or are imposed from without. Schizophrenia as a process, deterritorialization as a process, is inseparable from the stases that interrupt it, or aggravate it, or make it turn in circles, and reterritorialize it into neurosis, perversion, and psychosis.” (337) Even as we move along the line of flight out of the territory of capitalist capture there are forces that seek to reroute us, bind us, lure us back into the old paths, old habits. “In each case we must go back by way of old lands, study their nature, their density; we must seek to discover how the machinic indices are grouped on each of these lands that permit going beyond them. How can we reconquer the process each time, constantly resuming the journey on these lands—” (331) The only path forward D&G tell us would be a political anti-psychiatry: One that would consist therefore in the following praxis: (1) undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2) liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the flows, in such a way that this characteristic can no longer qualify a particular residue as a flow of madness, but affects just as well the flows of labor and desire, of production, knowledge, and creation in their most profound tendency. (340) AS D&G in agreement with Foucault will explain: In this perspective Foucault announced an age when madness would disappear, not because it would be lodged within the controlled space of mental illness (“great tepid aquariums”), but on the contrary because the exterior limit designated by madness would be overcome by means of other flows escaping control on all sides, and carrying us along. (340) We’re accustomed to thinking of the technological singularity as that period of transitional phase shift with some superior intelligence suddenly emerges out of the artificial soup of our collective scientific projects, but what if instead it is this very collapse of the future on the present as the escape, exit, and line of flight out of the command and control systems that have for so long capture our desires, reterritorialized our schizophrenizing processes into the old molds and modulations. What if instead it promises the collective awakening of humanity from its deep sleep in representational tragedy, in the mythic circle of family romance? What if it is to emerge out of the clutches of both the political and economic captures systems that have fed of human surplus value and into a break through realm that cannot be reterritorialized or reduced to the Same but is finally an escape from all reductions, all territories, all authoritarian and paranoid systems of fascism? Sheer fantasy? Utopian dream? Or, an actual path out of the nightmare of this false history of presentism? And, as they would say earlier in this book, they repeat it again: It should therefore be said that one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you haven’t seen anything yet—an irreversible process. And when we consider what there is of a profoundly artificial nature in the perverted reterritorializations, but also in the psychotic reterritorializations of the hospital, or even the familial neurotic reterritorializations, we cry out, “More perversion! More artifice!”—to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth. (340) The acceleration of a process of deterritorialization that is irreversible, one that cannot be reterritorialized in the same way, brought back into the capitalist capture systems of the family romance of Oedipus and Lack. A New Earth martialed out of this artificial movement through Singularity. “The schizoanalytic flick of the finger, which restarts the movement, links up again with the tendency, and pushes the simulacra to a point where they cease being artificial images to become indices of the new world. That is what the completion of the process is: not a promised and a pre-existing land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization. The movement of the theater of cruelty; for it is the only theater of production, there where the flows cross the threshold of deterritorialization and produce the new land— not at all a hope, but a simple “finding,” a “finished design,” where the person who escapes causes other escapes, and marks out the land while deterritorializing himself. An active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine, and the (schizo) analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another.” (341)
taken from : by Nick Land Imagine, hypothetically, that you wanted the regime to succeed. Would you recommend Cathedralization? Cynically considered, the track record is, at least, not bad. Planetary dominion is not to be sniffed at. (Suggestions in this direction are not unknown, even in XS comment threads.) The Cathedral, defined with this question in mind, is the subsumption of politics into propaganda. It tends — as it develops — to convert all administrative problems into public relations challenges. A solution — actual or prospective — is a successful management of perceptions. For the mature Cathedral, a crisis takes the consistent form: This looks bad. It is not merely stupid. As Spandrell recently observes, in comments on power, “… power isn’t born out of the barrel of a gun. Power is born out of the ability to have people with guns do what you tell them.” (XS note.) The question of legitimacy is, in a real sense, fundamental, when politics sets the boundaries of the cosmos under consideration. (So Cathedralism is also the hypertrophy of politics, to the point where a reality outside it loses all credibility.) Is your civilization decaying? Then you need to persuade people that it is not. If there still seems to be a mismatch between problem and solution here, Cathedralism has not entirely consumed your brain. To speculate (confidently) further — you’re not a senior power-broker in a modern Western state. You’re even, from a certain perspective, a fossil. Cathedralism works, in its own terms, as long as there are no definite limits to the efficacy of propaganda. To pose the issue at a comparatively shallow level, if the political response to a crisis simply is the crisis, and that response can be effectively controlled (through propaganda, broadly conceived), then the Cathedral commands an indisputable practical wisdom. It would be sensible to go long on the thing. If however (imagine this, if you still can) manipulation of the response to crisis is actually a suppression of the feedback required to really tackle the crisis, then an altogether different story is unfolding. Is reality subordinated to the Cathedral because — and exactly so far as — ‘the people’ are? That is the question. The article is taken from here: http://www.xenosystems.net/cathedralism/ by Steven Craig Hickman One of the things of profound interest in Castaneda’s books, under the influence of drugs, or other things, and of a change of atmosphere, is precisely that they show how the Indian manages to combat the mechanisms of interpretation and instill in the disciple a presignifying semiotic, or even an asignifying diagram: Stop! You’re making me tired! Experiment, don’t signify and interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight! —Deleuze / Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Most of us live in a box, a black box, a reality system of which we assume we know everything but in fact know nothing at all. This notion of ‘stopping the world’, of countering the hegemonic reality system, of coming up against circumstances ‘alien to the flow’ of normalization in which most of our life is seen as a automatic process in which we act as sleeper agents in a world controlled by the thought police of some nefarious religio-secular organization: an assemblage or Secular Cathedral. All this is the truth of our lives in the world today! Most of the fringe systems of thought underlying our world history, the magical systems that run counter to the hegemonic order of signs that create our daily world have been anathematized and tabooed by the State or what some now love to call the Cathedral (Moldbug/Land). The Cathedral is the subsumption of politics into propaganda. It tends — as it develops — to convert all administrative problems into public relations challenges. A solution — actual or prospective — is a successful management of perceptions. (see Land) Listen to Deleuze/Guattari again: ‘Stopping the world’ was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to the flow.” What Land said above is that our perception of reality is managed by a system of experts, a technocracy of academic, political, socio-cultural, media-tainment machines that command and control our perceptions – our awareness of the reality matrix within which we move and breath day by day. D&G tell us that we are in a social formation, then ask us to see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. The moment you do this you’re awakened to the other side of the propaganda system that has entrapped you in its meshes for so long. Or, as D&G will put it, you’ll see the “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities”. Each of us lives in a machine, a bubble land of thought and desire, and as we move about the world we plug ourselves into other machines like ourselves that have been normalized or even hypernormalized by the cultural systems that have educated us into the collective assemblage of this civilization (Bw0: Body-without-Organs). D&G will take the work of Carlos Castaneda as an exemplary example of breaking away from the reality matrix of one’s cultural prison: Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a “place,” already a difficult operation, then to find “allies,” and then gradually to give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not “my” body without organs, instead the “me” (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds). (Kindle Locations 3471-3479). It’s this slow process of unwinding the black box we’ve been bound too for so long, of awakening to a wider frame of reference, of de-programming the reality systems that have locked us in a world of social and political lies and propaganda. In reading such works as Castaneda’s D&G will admit it doesn’t matter if one believes it is neither an actual ethnographic tale of a real Shaman named Don Juan, or if it is rather just a meta-fictional parable written by a literary wizard steeped in the magical literature of such worlds. Doubt or not what is important is the truth underlying the fictions. As they say of the Fourth book in the series: The fourth book, Tales of Power, is about the living distinction between the “Tonal” and the “Nagual.” The tonal seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is organized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is memorizable in the form of something recalling something else; finally, it is the Self (Moi), the subject, the historical, social, or individual person, and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including God, the judgment of God, since it “makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world.” Yet the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems: it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata, the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The nagual, on the contrary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don’t ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is “your goddam mother” or something else entirely). There is no longer a Self [Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is “a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist” that has affects and experiences movements, speeds. The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: “The tonal must be protected at any cost.” (Kindle Locations 3480-3501). Put it in Kantian terms of phenomenal/noumenon distinction, the tonal is the realm of phenomenon that we’ve been taught to apprehend by the supposed categories of the Mind, while the nagual is the noumenal sphere of being and becoming that is situated outside the prescribed temenos or magic circle of reality constructed by our culture. Those who break down the barriers between these two systems, who forcibly vacate and destroy the walls between these two realms end up locked away in asylums under the rubric of a disease we term schizophrenia. Those who will as D&G propose slowly dismantle the tonal step by step, methodically decoding its lies, its propaganda systems; systems that have locked us into a prison house of the mind, where we’ve been (hyper)normalized to believe it is the only Real world follow the Greater Path of schizophrenizing reality: without becoming schizophrenics in the diseased sense. It bares repeating you must keep and be aware of the tonal (phenomenal) during this de-programming process: “You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual [noumenon/noumenal]. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: “The tonal must be protected at any cost.” [my italics] This notion of de-programing mainstream reality, of entering a special place, plane, or collective system or agonistic relation to the tonal has been at the heart of a whole history of magical practices from the ancient Shamans, to the Oracles and Dionsyian festivals or Mysteries of Greece and other ancient pagan systems, to the Voodoan soul-riders of certain African systems, to the multifarious mystical orders from Sufi, Gnostic, Apophatic, and other systems within the monotheistic world system down to our own time of syncretism. Nothing new here, only that certain respectable and academic scholars such as Deleuze and others have opened their discourse to these ancient systems, allowed them to be brought back into the light of scholarly and experimental modes of becoming as ways of preparing us to de-program the reality matrix of our current malaise. That we live in a stratified and codified reality system is at the heart of D&G’s diagnosis, and that there is a way, a path out, a ‘line of flight’ or path of destratification and deterritorialization out of this prison house of the mind is also true. As they’ll tell us, The study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions. (Kindle Locations 4751) Like two ancient Magus’s D&G were slowly developing a methodology to de-program the reality system of modern capitalist society and civilization. They’d speak of the dangers facing anyone who would seek a way out of this control system: According to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Castaneda’s Indian Don Juan, there are three or even four dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust, the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition. Speaking to Fear: “We can guess what fear is. We are always afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organization that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us — we desire all that.” Speaking to Clarity: “The second danger, Clarity, seems less obvious. Clarity, in effect, concerns the molecular. Once again, everything is involved, even perception, even the semiotic regime, but this time on the second line. Castaneda illustrates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception to which drugs give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the molar structure. That is precisely what clarity is: the distinctions that appear in what used to seem full, the holes in what used to be compact; and conversely, where just before we saw end points of clear-cut segments, now there are indistinct fringes, encroachments, overlappings, migrations, acts of segmentation that no longer coincide with the rigid segmentarity. Everything now appears supple, with holes in fullness, nebulas in forms, and flutter in lines. Everything has the clarity of the microscope.” Speaking to Power: “Power (Pouvoir) is the third danger, because it is on both lines simultaneously. It stretches from the rigid segments with their overcoding and resonance to the fine segmentations with their diffusion and interactions, and back again. Every man of power jumps from one line to the other, alternating between a petty and a lofty style, the rogue’s style and the grandiloquent style, drugstore demagoguery and the imperialism of the high-ranking government man. But this whole chain and web of power is immersed in a world of mutant flows that eludes them. It is precisely its impotence that makes power so dangerous. The man of power will always want to stop the lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in the overcoding machine. But he can do so only by creating a void, in other words, by first stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it within the local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving the assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the “closed vessel.”” Speaking to Disgust: “But there is a fourth danger as well, and this is the one that interests us most, because it concerns the lines of flight themselves. We may well have presented these lines as a sort of mutation or creation drawn not only in the imagination but also in the very fabric of social reality; we may well have attributed to them the movement of the arrow and the speed of an absolute — but it would be oversimplifying to believe that the only risk they fear and confront is allowing themselves to be recaptured in the end, letting themselves be sealed in, tied up, reknotted, reterritorialized. They themselves emanate a strange despair, like an odor of death and immolation, a state of war from which one returns broken: they have their own dangers distinct from the ones previously discussed. This is exactly what led Fitzgerald to say: “I had a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set — simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.” Like the Shamans of old D&G were developing a cartography of escape and flight from the reality matrix of our cultural malaise, developing techniques that would allow the wary victim of the dark and nefarious systems that regulated every thought, every action of our normalized lives. It is not an easy path to follow, and this schizophrenizing process as they observe is fraught with a multitude of dangers. The enemy has set traps, and even as we dissolve the barriers the greatest enemy is our own mind which will defend its integrity against any and all forms of assault on the logic and reason of its current enmeshed prison system. It knows nothing else, the brain is trapped by the very cultural systems of logic and reason that have adapted it to the environment within which it was born and lives. Exit is fraught with little success, few and far between are those who have escaped and returned to tell the tale. The Nagual or Noumenal zones of being and becoming are chaos itself, and can tear the psyche into shreds. Most of ancient mythologies and primitive shamanic or voodoun practices or praxis from the ancient Bon, Taoist, Brahmanic, Buddhist, Zain, to all the magical traditions of the West were check systems to map and cartographically delimit and control in a measured way the exploration of this slow immersion in the dark zones of the unknown. In our Secular Age we have closed the door on this area of life to our own detriment, confusing it with two thousand years of monotheistic religious apophaticism and negative theological practices we have lost our knowledge of the more dynamic and energetic cosmos surrounding us, the Dionysian vision of Life of which Nietzsche speculated. For those within the Reality Matrix such exits and escapes seem sheer criminal madness, and the Reality Police who govern these propaganda machines and systems that command and control, manage our perceptions lay in wait for any and all who would seek a way out. One’s family, friends, associates will all believe you are going mad, that you need help and will try to dissuade you from this path. And, they will even seek out the authorities in such matters to trap you and bring you back into the fold. Escape is not for the weak minded. This is why there is a need for support groups, for those who have already surmounted the barriers of the mainstream reality matrix and developed a circle of friends and accomplices. Some might see this as a fall into irrationalism and cultic madness. And, many of such groups that have fallen by the wayside, entered into the irrational zones of fake or self-taught masters have truly gone the way of diseased minds, schizophrenics of a mental aberration. One could recite the litany of such groups that have even led to mass suicide in the name of some false prophet and leader’s whim. As D&G admit there is no assured path out, no exit or mapped system without dangers. This is why one must be careful. Breaking down the walls of logic and reason as attested even in the great poets of the 19th and early 20th Century is not only difficult but can lead not to break through but to break down and failure to complete the task. As D&G tell us, If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off. Carlos Castaneda’s books clearly illustrate this evolution, or rather this involution, in which the affects of a becoming-dog, for example, are succeeded by those of a becoming-molecular, microperceptions of water, air, etc. A man totters from one door to the next and disappears into thin air: “All I can tell you is that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibers.” All so-called initiatory journeys include these thresholds and doors where becoming itself becomes, and where one changes becoming depending on the “hour” of the world, the circles of hell, or the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms, and cries in variation. From the howling of animals to the wailing of elements and particles.(Kindle Locations 5193-5199). Knights of NarcoticsAre there not even knights of narcotics, in the sense that faith is a drug (in a way very different from the sense in which religion is an opiate)? —Deleuze / Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus From the sixties through the end of the seventies I experimented with various psychedelics, yoga, magical systems, New Age occult and other abstruse systems that that era propagated into popular culture and mythology from music to cultic and non-cultic inroads. All of these pursuits opened the doors of perception as Huxley in his famous book would opine. As D&G would ask: “Are there not even knights of narcotics, in the sense that faith is a drug (in a way very different from the sense in which religion is an opiate)? These knights claim that drugs, under necessary conditions of caution and experimentation, are inseparable from the deployment of a plane. And on this plane not only are becomings-woman, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, becomings-imperceptible conjugated, but the imperceptible itself becomes necessarily perceived at the same time as perception becomes necessarily molecular: arrive at holes, microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection.(Kindle Locations 5907-5912) Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis has consistently botched… Deleuze / Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus As D&G would explain “The Americans of the beat generation had already embarked on this path, and spoke of a molecular revolution specific to drugs. Then came Castaneda’s broad synthesis.” Speaking of drugs D&G say this, It is our belief that the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as the imperceptible is perceived. Drugs then appear as the agent of this becoming. This is where pharmacoanalysis would come in, which must be both compared and contrasted to psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis must be taken simultaneously as a model, a contrasting approach, and a betrayal. Psychoanalysis can be taken as a model of reference because it was able, with respect to essentially affective phenomena, to construct the schema of a specific causality divorced from ordinary social or psychological generalities. But this schema still relies on a plane of organization that can never be apprehended in itself, that is always concluded from something else, that is always inferred, concealed from the system of perception: it is called the Unconscious. Thus the plane of the Unconscious remains a plane of transcendence guaranteeing, justifying, the existence of psychoanalysis and the necessity of its interpretations. This plane of the Unconscious stands in molar opposition to the perception-consciousness system, and because desire must be translated onto this plane, it is itself linked to gross molarities, like the submerged part of an iceberg (the Oedipal structure, or the rock of castration). The imperceptible thus remains all the more imperceptible because it is opposed to the perceived in a dualism machine. Everything is different on the plane of consistency or immanence, which is necessarily perceived in its own right in the course of its construction: experimentation replaces interpretation, now molecular, nonfigurative, and nonsymbolic, the unconscious as such is given in microperceptions; desire directly invests the field of perception, where the imperceptible appears as the perceived object of desire itself, “the nonfigurative of desire.” The unconscious no longer designates the hidden principle of the transcendent plane of organization, but the process of the immanent plane of consistency as it appears on itself in the course of its construction. For the unconscious must be constructed, not rediscovered. There is no longer a conscious-unconscious dualism machine, because the unconscious is, or rather is produced, there where consciousness goes, carried by the plane. Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine episode marked a turning point that forced Freud to renounce a direct approach to the unconscious).(Kindle Locations 5936-5954) [italics mine] The tonal and nagual of Castaneda is nothing but this conscious/unconscious division that must be breached, but not too quickly nor destroyed lest one ends in madness. “We are all too familiar with the dangers of the line of flight, and with its ambiguities. The risks are ever-present, but it is always possible to have the good fortune of avoiding them.” (ibid.) In Schizoanalyis D&G were seeking a therapy that would free us from the clutches of the capitalist reality system, one that would guide us into a wider stream of the perceptual Real than the Reality Studio of the current regimes would allow. In this sense they were developing a Secular Shamanism. More on this at a future time… AddendumAlways interesting how when anyone mentions Castaneda that the great debunkers and scholars of the Reality Studio come out of the woodworks to castigate and belittle one as naïve for even reading such fare. In the above post I even use statements by Deleuze and Guattari who had already surmised that Don Juan was probably a fictional character rather than an actual ethnographical personage, but for them that was besides the point since the underlying portrayals and fictions, adaptations, and imaginal complex bespoke of aspects of breaking apart the rigid structures of the Reality Studio that were part of D&G’s whole complex of schizophrenizing tendencies toward their critique and exit, lines of flight, and deterritorialization of capitalism and its fictional reality system that kept people in a milieu or socio-cultural prison. As I’d said in the fifth paragraph of my post: It’s this slow process of unwinding the black box we’ve been bound too for so long, of awakening to a wider frame of reference, of de-programming the reality systems that have locked us in a world of social and political lies and propaganda. In reading such works as Castaneda’s D&G will admit it doesn’t matter if one believes it is neither an actual ethnographic tale of a real Shaman named Don Juan, or if it is rather just a meta-fictional parable written by a literary wizard steeped in the magical literature of such worlds. Doubt or not what is important is the truth underlying the fictions. Castaneda the man may have perpetrated a hoax on both his academic advisors, and on the public at large over a period of years; yet, it is the power of his vision and meta-fiction that awakened a generation to see that reality is not always what we assume it is that is the key, rather than the truth that he literally was an apprentice of some Yaqui sorcerer. For those that try to debunk such things what we’re reminded of is how badly the cultural police seek to maintain command and control over the Reality Studio rather than the underlying truth of such visions. That many academics and para-academics would debunk Castaneda tells us more about such academic pursuits than about him per se. Strangely the point of my post was more about Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytical endeavors and their use of magical systems in their pursuit of breaking out of the prison house of what Land would term the Cathedral: the set of institutions that keep a tight control over knowledge and propaganda in our Western Civilization.
The article is taken from here : https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2017/05/31/deleuzeguattari-stop-the-world/ Earlier, we encountered two axes, signifiance and subjectification. We saw that they were two very different semiotic systems, or even two strata. 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 twos, 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. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choices ("Hey, he seems angry ..."; "He couldn't say it..."; "You see my face when I'm talking to you ..."; "look at me carefully..."). A child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to specific faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye. Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that constitutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape on the white wall. It vaguely begins to appear in the black hole. In film, the close-up of the face can be said to have two poles: make the face reflect light or, on the contrary, emphasize its shadows to the point of engulfing it "in pitiless darkness." A psychologist once said that the face is a visual percept that crystallizes out of "different varieties of vague luminosity without form or dimension." A suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures, a face. According to this account, the dimensionless black hole and formless white wall are already there to begin with. And there are already a number of possible combinations in the system: either black holes distribute themselves on the white wall, or the white wall unravels and moves toward a black hole combining all black holes, hurtling them together or making them "crest." Sometimes faces appear on the wall, with their holes; sometimes they appear in the hole, with their linearized, rolled-up wall. A horror story, the face is a horror story. It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it needs all by itself; it is certain that subjectivity does not dig its hole all alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces, or will produce. The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance juncture when you are just falling asleep, or into a twilight state or hallucinating, or doing an amusing physics experiment ... Kafka's novella, "Blumfeld":2 the bachelor returns home in the evening to find two little ping-pong balls jumping around by themselves on the "wall" constituted by the floor. They bounce everywhere and even try to hit him in the face. They apparently contain other, still smaller, electric balls. Blumfeld finally manages to lock them up in the black hole of a wardrobe. The scene continues the next day when Blumfeld tries to give the balls to a small, feebleminded boy and two grimacing little girls, and then at the office, where he encounters his two grimacing and feebleminded assistants, who want to make off with a broom. In a wonderful ballet by Debussy and Nijinsky, a little tennis ball comes bouncing onto the stage at dusk, and at the end another ball appears in a similar fashion. This time, between the two balls, two girls and a boy who watches them develop passional dance and facial traits in vague luminosities (curiosity, spite, irony, ecstasy. . .).3 There is nothing to explain, nothing to interpret. It is the pure abstract machine of a twilight state. White wall/black hole? But depending on the combinations, the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white. The balls can bounce off of a wall or spin into a black hole. Even upon impact they can have the relative role of a hole in relation to the wall, just as when they are rolling straight ahead they can have the relative role of a wall in relation to the hole they are heading for. They circulate in the white wall/black hole system. Nothing in all of this resembles a face, yet throughout the system faces are distributed and faciality traits organized. Nevertheless, the abstract machine can be effectuated in other things besides faces, but not in any order, and not without the necessary foundation (raisons). The face has been a major concern of American psychology, in particular the relation between the mother and the child through eye-to-eye contact. Four-eye machine? Let us recall certain stages in the research: (1) Isakower's studies on falling asleep, in which so-called proprioceptive sensations of a manual, buccal, cutaneous, or even vaguely visual nature recall the infantile mouth-breast relation. (2)Lewin's discovery of a white screen of the dream, which is ordinarily covered by visual contents but remains white when the only dream contents are proprioceptive sensations (this screen or white wall, once again, is the breast as it approaches, getting larger and then pressing flat). (3) Spitz's interpretation according to which the white screen, rather than being a representation of the breast itself as an object of tactile sensation or contact, is a visual percept implying a minimum of distance and upon which the mother's face appears for the child to use as a guide in finding the breast. Thus there is a combination of two very different kinds of elements: manual, buccal, or cutaneous proprioceptive sensations; and the visual perception of the face seen from the front against the white screen, with the shape of the eyes drawn in for black holes. This visual perception very quickly assumes decisive importance for the act of eating, in relation to the breast as a volume and the mouth as a cavity, both experienced through touch. We can now propose the following distinction: the face is part of a surface-holes, holey surface, system. This system should under no circumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the (proprioceptive) body. The head is included in the body, but the face is not. The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, triangular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps a volume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more than holes. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded'by something we shall call the Face. This amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes, the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality. But the operation does not end there: if the head and its elements are facialized, the entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevitable process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An operation worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand, breast, stomach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized. Fetishism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these processes of facializa-tion. It is not at all a question of taking a part of the body and making it resemble a face, or making a dream-face dance in a cloud. No anthropomorphism here. Facialization operates not by resemblance but by an order of reasons. It is a much more unconscious and machinic operation that draws the entire body across the holey surface, and in which the role of the face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all of the decoded parts. Everything remains sexual; there is no sublimation, but there are new coordinates. It is precisely because the face depends on an abstract machine that it is not content to cover the head, but touches all other parts of the body, and even, if necessary, other objects without resemblance. The question then becomes what circumstances trigger the machine that produces the face and facialization. Although the head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face, the face is produced in humanity. But it is produced by a necessity that does not apply to human beings "in general." The face is not animal, but neither is it human in general; there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face. It would be an error to proceed as though the face became inhuman only beyond a certain threshold: close-up, extreme magnification, recondite expression, etc. The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face—freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities. "I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever. ... I have broken the wall. . .. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling.... Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth."5 BwO. Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective. But so far we have explained nothing of what we sense. The move from the body-head system to the face system has nothing to do with an evolution or genetic stages. Nor with phenomenological positions. Nor with integrations of part-objects, or structural or structuring systems. Nor can there be any appeal to a preexisting subject, or one brought into existence, except by this machine specific to faciality. In the literature of the face, Sartre's text on the look and Lacan's on the mirror make the error of appealing to a form of subjectivity or humanity reflected in a phenomenological field or split in a structural field. The gaze is but secondary in relation to thegazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality. Neither will we speak of a genetic axis, or the integration of part-objects. Any approach based on stages in ontogenesis is arbitrary: it is thought that what is fastest is primary, or even serves as a foundation or springboard for what comes next. An approach based on part-objects is even worse; it is the approach of a demented experimenter who flays, slices, and anatomizes everything in sight, and then proceeds to sew things randomly back together again. You can make any list of part-objects you want: hand, breast, mouth, eyes... It's still Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without organs, animated by various intensive movements that determine the nature and emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an organism, or even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part. It becomes apparent that the slowest of movements, or the last to occur or arrive, is not the least intense. And the fastest may already have converged with it, connected with it, in the disequilibrium of a nonsynchronic development of strata that have different speeds and lack a sequence of stages but are nevertheless simultaneous. The question of the body is not one of part-objects but of differential speeds. These movements are movements of deterritorialization. They are what "make" the body an animal or human organism. For example, the prehensile hand implies a relative deterritorialization not only of the front paw but also of the locomotor hand. It has a correlate, the use-object or tool: the club is a deterritorialized branch. The breast of the woman, with her upright posture, indicates a deterritorialization of the animal's mammary gland; the mouth of the child, adorned with lips by an outfolding of the mucous membranes, marks a deterritorialization of the snout and mouth of the animal. Lips-breast: each serves as a correlate of the other.6 The human head implies a deterritorialization in relation to the animal and has as its correlate the organization of a world, in other words, a milieu that has itself been deterritorialized (the steppe is the first "world," in contrast to the forest milieu). But the face represents a far more intense, if slower, deterritorialization. We could say that it is an absolute deterritorialization: it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as signi-fiance and subjectification. Now the face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized world. There are a number of face-landscape correlations, on this "higher" level. Christian education exerts spiritual control over both faciality and landscapity (paysageit'e): Compose them both, color them in, complete them, arrange them according to a complementarity linking landscapes to faces.7 Face and landscape manuals formed a pedagogy, a strict discipline, and were an inspiration to the arts as much as the arts were an inspiration to them. Architecture positions its ensembles—houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories—to function like faces in the landscape they transform. Painting takes up the same movement but also reverses it, positioning a landscape as a face, treating one like the other: "treatise on the face and the landscape." The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape; that is the definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen and camera. But the same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting, even the novel: close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations. So, is your mother a landscape or a face? A face or a factory? (Godard.) All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it, providing an unexpected complement for its lines and traits? Even when painting becomes abstract, all it does is rediscover the black hole and white wall, the great composition of the white canvas and black slash. Tearing, but also stretching of the canvas along an axis of escape (fuite), at a vanishing point (point defuite), along a diagonal, by a knife slice, slash, or hole: the machine is already in place that always functions to produce faces and landscapes, however abstract. Titian began his paintings in black and white, not to make outlines to fill in, but as the matrix for each of the colors to come. The novel--A flock of geese flew which the snow had dazzled. [Perceval] saw them and heard them, for they were going away noisily because of a falcon which came drawing after them at a great rate until he found abandoned one separated from the flock, and he struck it so and bruised it that he knockedit down to earth.... When Perceval saw the trampled snow on which the goose had lain, and the blood which appeared around, he leaned upon his lance and looked at that image, for the blood and the snow together seemed to him like the fresh color which was on the face of his friend, and he thinks until he forgets himself; for the vermilion seated on white was on her face just the same as these three drops of blood on the white snow.... We have seen a knight who is dozing on his charger. Everything is there: the redundancy specific to the face and landscape, the snowy white wall of the landscape-face, the black hole of the falcon and the three drops distributed on the wall; and, simultaneously, the silvery line of the landscape-face spinning toward the black hole of the knight deep in catatonia. Cannot the knight, at certain times and under certain conditions, push the movement further still, crossing the black hole, breaking through the white wall, dismantling the face— even if the attempt may backfire?8 All of this is in no way characteristic of the genre of the novel only at the end of its history; it is there from the beginning, it is an essential part of the genre. It is false to see Don Quixote as the end of the chivalric novel, invoking the hero's hallucinations, harebrained ideas, and hypnotic or cataleptic states. It is false to see novels such as Beckett's as the end of the novel in general, invoking the black holes, the characters' line of deterritorialization, the schizophrenic promenades of Molloy or the Unnameable, their loss of their names, memory, or purpose. The novel does have an evolution, but that is surely not it. The novel has always been defined by the adventure of lost characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking for, or what they are doing, amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics. They differentiate the genre of the novel from the genres of epic or drama (when the dramatic or epic hero is stricken with folly or forgetting, etc., it is in an entirely different way). La princesse de Cleves is a novel precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the people of the time: the states of absence or "rest," the sleep that overtakes the characters. There is always a Christian education in the novel. Molloy is the beginning of the genre of the novel. When the novel began, with Chretien de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would accompany it over the entire course of its history was already there: The knight of the novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing, what people say to him, he doesn't know where he is going or to whom he is speaking, he is continually drawing a line of absolute deterritorialization, but also losing his way, stopping, and falling into black holes. "He awaits chivalry and adventure." Open Chretien de Troyes to any page and you will find a catatonic knight seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting, seeing the face of his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to make him respond. Lancelot, in the presence of the queen's white face, doesn't notice his horse plunge into the river; or he gets into a passing cart and it turns out to be the cart of disgrace. There is a face-landscape aggregate proper to the novel, in which black holes sometimes distribute themselves on a white wall, and the white line of the horizon sometimes spins toward a black hole, or both simultaneously. excerpt from the book A Thousand Plateaus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia), Deleuze and Guattari |
Steven Craig Hickman - The Intelligence of Capital: The Collapse of Politics in Contemporary Society
Steven Craig Hickman - Hyperstition: Technorevisionism – Influencing, Modifying and Updating Reality
Archives
April 2020
|