Tag: Foucault
Being Mediatized: How 3 Realms and 8 Dimensions Explain 'Being' by Peter Blank.
July 8, 2017 AltExploitLeave a comment
Experience of Reflection: 'Self itself is an empty word'
Leary – The neuroatomic winner: "In the province of the mind, what is believed true is true, or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment." (Dr. John Lilly)
Media theory had noted the shoring up or even annihilation of the subject due to technologies that were used to reconfigure oneself and to see oneself as what one was: pictures, screens. Depersonalization was an often observed, reflective state of being that stood for the experience of anxiety dueto watching a 'movie of one's own life' or experiencing a malfunction or anomaly in one's self-awareness.
To look at one's scaffolded media identity meant in some ways to look at the redactionary product of an extreme introspective process. Questioning what one interpreted oneself to be doing in shaping one's media identities enhanced endogenous viewpoints and experience, similar to focusing on what made a car move instead of deciding whether it should stay on the paved road or drive across a field. This enabled the individual to see the formation of identity from the 'engine perspective'.
Experience of the Hyperreal: 'I am (my own) God'
Leary – The metaprogramming winner: "I make my own coincidences, synchronities, luck, and Destiny."
Meta-analysis of distinctions – seeing a bird fly by, then seeing oneself seeing a bird fly by, then thinking the self that thought that – becomes routine in hyperreality. Media represent the opposite: a humongous distraction from Heidegger's goal of the search for 'Thinking': capturing at present the most alarming of what occupies the mind. Hyperreal experiences could not be traced back to a person's 'real' identities behind their aliases. The most questionable therefore related to dismantled privacy: a privacy that only existed because all aliases were constituting a false privacy realm. There was nothing personal about the conversations, no facts that led back to any person, no real change achieved, no political influence asserted.
From there it led to the difference between networked relations and other relations, call these other relations 'single' relations, or relations that remained solemnly silent. They were relations that could not be disclosed against their will because they were either too vague, absent, depressing, shifty, or dangerous to make the effort worthwhile to outsiders.
The privacy of hyperreal being became the ability to hide itself from being sensed by others through channels of information (sight, touch, hearing), but also to hide more private other selves, stored away in different, more private networks from others in more open social networks.
Choosing 'true' privacy, then, was throwing away distinctions one experienced between several identities. As identities were space the meaning of time became the capacity for introspection. The hyperreal being's overall identity to the inside as lived history attained an extra meaning – indeed: as alter- or hyper-ego. With Nietzsche, the physical body within its materiality occasioned a performance that subjected its own subjectivity. Then and only then could it become its own freedom.
With Foucault one could say that the body was not so much subjected but still there functioning on its own premises. Therefore the sensitory systems lived the body's life in connection with (not separated from) a language based in a mediated faraway from the body. If language and our sensitory systems were inseparable, beings and God may as well be.
Being Mediatized
Micropolitics, an Aesthetic. Thought of the Day 28.0
May 29, 2017 May 29, 2017 AltExploitLeave a comment
The Situationists, mutating from their Futurist, Surrealist and Dadaist predecessors, were pivotal in introducing a variegated political aesthetic that traversed polemics and play: taking the détournement to the streets.
Emerging and fading in the Outside 'of uncertain doubles and partial deaths' is a micropolitics, the molecular shapings of perceptions, attitudes, representational systems, etc.; transgressive lines of resistance (Foucault), lines of flight (Deleuze), 'desiring-productions' that interface a creative in-between of extreme macropolitical forces such as fascism and capitalism. Micropolitics produces an ethical aesthetic of the affective kind. It resonates with artistic practice in addressing Foucault's insight that 'resistance comes first'. Micropolitics is a multiplicity, disavowing identifiable unities. Both micropolitics and microperceptions actualize from the immanent cause of the unformed-unthought, from lines of resistance, to perceive, think, act and distribute processually. Points of deterriorialization are cutting edges, the avant-garde as it were, of the distinguishing and convolving of matter and function. As the abstract machine becomes formalized through its conjunctive lines of resistance/flight and cutting edges, it effects a biopolitical aesthetic.
Cartographies of Disjunction's Relational Dust. Thought of the Day 27.0
The biogrammatic interface, generates a political aesthetic in which action is felt through the affective modulations and/or tonalities it incites. A doubling occurs in the moving towards realization, the rearticulation, of the becoming-thing/gesture. This doubling divides in a central differentiation, referencing a voluminous vocabulary of the interstitial – fissure, gap, disjunction, in-between, crack, interface, fold, non-place – descriptors of a bifurcating rift between content and expression, necessary for realization. Deleuze sums up the crux of this Foucauldian argument:
Things can be realized only through doubling or dissociation, creating divergent forms among which they can be distributed. It is here that we see the great dualities: between different classes, or the governing and the governed, or the public and the private. But more than this, it is here that the two forms of realization diverge or become differentiated: a form of expression and a form of content, a discursive and a non- discursive form, the form of the visible and the form of the articulable. It is precisely because the immanent cause, in both its matter and its functions, disregards form, that it is realized on the basis of a central differentiation which, on the one hand will form visible matter, and on the other will formalize articulable functions.' (Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault)
It can be argued that this central differentiation or interface distinguishes between the movements of two diagrammatic registers: outside from inside and the forms of realization. Transductive processes between these registers mark portals of entry through which all points of the diagram are in superposition, in passage as intensities of non-localizable relations from one point to another. The diagram distributes affective intensities within the context it maps.
Deleuze elasticizes Foucault's reach by translating his oeuvre within the folding/unfolding of a knowledge-power-subjectivity continuum, mapping Foucault's relays between the bifurcating polarities of content/expression, visibilities/statements as they differentiate and integrate through the folding 'zone of subjectification'. The biogramming interface. The 'event' of rearticulation, of knowledge-capture and distribution, takes place through the perceptual filter of differential relations becoming-actual as a perception or thought. This is a topological dynamic mapped by the diagram, affected through the central differentiation (biogram) 'or the 'non-place', as Foucault puts it, where the informal diagram is swallowed up and becomes embodied instead in two different directions that are necessarily divergent and irreducible. The concrete assemblages are therefore opened up by a crack that determines how the abstract machine performs'. It's the process of swallowing up the relational intensities of a milieu and spitting back out certain selected somethings to be swallowed again that's of particular interest to political aesthetics of the performative event. Foucault imagined a cartographic container of forces, affects, attractions and repulsions that modulate the diagram, excite the disjunction that separates forms of realization. The abstract machine begins to actualize its virtual potential as it distributes its relational dust.
Kenneth Knoespel notes that diagramma in the original Greek does 'not simply mean something that is marked out by lines, a figure, a form or a plan, but also carries a second connotation of marking or crossing out,' suggesting not only ephemerality but also an incompleteness that carries an expectation of potential. 'What is interesting is that the diagram participates in a geneology of figures that moves from the wax tablet to the computer screen […] the Greek setting of diagram suggests that any figure that is drawn is accompanied by an expectancy that it will be redrawn […] Here a diagram may be thought of as a relay. While a diagram may have been used visually to reinforce an idea one moment, the next it may provide a means of seeing something never seen before. Diagrams As Piloting Devices…
Biogrammatic Vir(Ac)tuality. Note Quote.
May 24, 2017 AltExploitLeave a comment
In Foucault's most famous example, the prison acts as the confluence of content (prisoners) and expression (law, penal code) (Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault). Informal Diagrams are proliferate. As abstract machines they contain the transversal vectors that cut across a panoply of features (such as institutions, classes, persons, economic formation, etc), mapping from point to relational point, the generalized features of power economies. The disciplinary diagram explored by Foucault, imposes "a particular conduct upon a particular human multiplicity". The imposition of force upon force affects and effectuates the felt experience of a life, a living. Deleuze has called the abstract machine "pure matter/function" in which relations between forces are nonetheless very real.
[…] the diagram acts as a non-unifying immanent cause that is co-extensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations between forces take place 'not above' but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce.
The processual conjunction of content and expression; the cutting edge of deterritorialization:
The relations of power and resistance between theory and practice resonate – becoming-form; diagrammatics as praxis, integrates and differentiates the immanent cause and quasi-cause of the actualized occasions of research/creation. What do we mean by immanent cause? It is a cause which is realized, integrated and distinguished in its effect. Or rather, the immanent cause is realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual presupposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages
Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect of self by self […] Time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside…forces every present into forgetting but preserves the whole of the past within memory: forgetting is the impossibiltiy of return and memory is the necessity of renewal.
The figure on the left is Henri Bergson's diagram of an infinitely contracted past that directly intersects with the body at point S – a mobile, sensorimotor present where memory is closest to action. Plane P represents the actual present; plane of contact with objects. The AB segments represent repetitive compressions of memory. As memory contracts it gets closer to action. In it's more expanded forms it is closer to dreams. The figure on the right extrapolates from Bergson's memory model to describe the Biogrammatic ontological vector of the Diagram as it moves from abstract (informal) machine in the most expanded form "A" through the cone "tissue" to the phase-shifting (formal), arriving at the Strata of the P plane to become artefact. The ontological vector passes through the stratified, through the interval of difference created in the phase shift (the same phase shift that separates and folds content and expression to move vertically, transversally, back through to the abstract diagram.)
A spatio-temporal-material contracting-expanding of the abstract machine is the processual thinking-feeling-articulating of the diagram becoming-cartographic; synaesthetic conceptual mapping. A play of forces, a series of relays, affecting a tendency toward an inflection of the informal diagram becoming-form. The inflected diagram/biogram folds and unfolds perception, appearances; rides in the gap of becoming between content and expression; intuitively transduces the actualizing (thinking, drawing, marking, erasing) of matter-movement, of expressivity-movement. "To follow the flow of matter… is intuition in action." A processual stage that prehends the process of the virtual actualizing;
the creative construction of a new reality. The biogrammatic stage of the diagrammatic is paradoxically double in that it is both the actualizing of the abstract machine (contraction) and the recursive counter-actualization of the formal diagram (détournement); virtual and actual.
It is the event-dimension of potential – that is the effective dimension of the interrelating of elements, of their belonging to each other. That belonging is a dynamic corporeal "abstraction" – the "drawing off" (transductive conversion) of the corporeal into its dynamism (yielding the event) […] In direct channeling. That is, in a directional channeling: ontological vector. The transductive conversion is an ontological vector that in-gathers a heterogeneity of substantial elements along with the already-constituted abstractions of language ("meaning") and delivers them together to change. (Brian Massumi Parables for the Virtual Movement, Affect, Sensation)
Skin is the space of the body the BwO that is interior and exterior. Interstitial matter of the space of the body.
The material markings and traces of a diagrammatic process, a 'capturing' becoming-form. A diagrammatic capturing involves a transductive process between a biogrammatic form of content and a form of expression. The formal diagram is thus an individuating phase-shift as Simondon would have it, always out-of-phase with itself. A becoming-form that inhabits the gap, the difference, between the wave phase of the biogrammatic that synaesthetically draws off the intermix of substance and language in the event-dimension and the drawing of wave phase in which partial capture is formalized. The phase shift difference never acquires a vectorial intention. A pre-decisive, pre-emptive drawing of phase-shifting with a "drawing off" the biogram.
If effects realize something this is because the relations between forces or power relations, are merely virtual, potential, unstable vanishing and molecular, and define only possibilities of interaction so long as they do not enter a macroscopic whole capable of giving form to their fluid manner and diffuse function. But realization is equally an integration, a collection of progressive integrations that are initially local and then become or tend to become global, aligning, homogenizing and summarizing relations between forces: here law is the integration of illegalisms.
Topological Drifts in Deleuze. Note Quote.
Brion Gysin: How do you get in… get into these paintings?
William Burroughs: Usually I get in by a port of entry, as I call it. It is often a face through whose eyes the picture opens into a landscape and I go literally right through that eye into that landscape. Sometimes it is rather like an archway… a number of little details or a special spot of colours makes the port of entry and then the entire picture will suddenly become a three-dimensional frieze in plaster or jade or some other precious material.
The word fornix means "an archway" or "vault" (in Rome, prostitutes could be solicited there). More directly, fornicatio means "done in the archway"; thus a euphemism for prostitution.
Diagrammatic praxis proposes a contractual (push, pull) approach in which the movement between abstract machine, biogram (embodied, inflected diagram), formal diagram (drawing of, drawing off) and artaffect (realized thing) is topologically immanent. It imagines the practice of writing, of this writing, interleaved with the mapping processes with which it folds and unfolds – forming, deforming and reforming both processes. The relations of non-relations that power the diagram, the thought intensities that resonate between fragments, between content ad expression, the seeable and the sayable, the discursive and the non-discursive, mark entry points; portals of entry through which all points of the diagram pass – push, pull, fold, unfold – without the designation of arrival and departure, without the input/output connotations of a black boxed confection. Ports, as focal points of passage, attract lines of resistance or lines of flight through which the diagram may become both an effectuating concrete assemblage (thing) and remain outside the stratified zone of the audiovisual. It's as if the port itself is a bifurcating point, a figural inflected archway. The port, as a bifurcation point of resistance (contra black box), modulates and changes the unstable, turbulent interplay between pure Matter and pure Function of the abstract machine. These ports are marked out, localized, situated, by the continuous movement of power-relations:
These power-relations … simultaneously local, unstable and diffuse, do not emanate from a central point or unique locus of sovereignty, but at each moment move from one point to another in a field of forces, marking inflections, resistances, twists and turns when one changes direction or retraces one's steps… (Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault)
An inflection point, marked out by the diagram, is not a symmetrical form but the difference between concavity and convexity, a pure temporality, a "true atom of form, the true object of geography." (Bernard Cache)
Figure: Left: A bifurcating event presented figurally as an archway, a port of entry through order and chaos. Right: Event/entry with inflexion points, points of suspension, of pure temporality, that gives a form "of an absolute exteriority that is not even the exteriority of any given interiority, but which arise from that most interior place that can be perceived or even conceived […] that of which the perceiving itself is radically temporal or transitory". The passing through of passage.
Cache's absolute exteriority is equivalent to Deleuze's description of the Outside "more distant than any exterior […] 'twisted', folded and doubled by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and the exterior". This folded and doubled interior is diagrammed by Deleuze in the folds chapter of Foucault.
Thinking does not depend on a beautiful interiority that reunites the visible ad articulable elements, but is carried under the intrusion of an outside that eats into the interval and forces or dismembers the internal […] when there are only environments and whatever lies betwen them, when words and things are opened up by the environment without ever coinciding, there is a liberation of forces which come from the outside and exist only in a mixed up state of agitation, modification and mutation. In truth they are dice throws, for thinking involves throwing the dice. If the outside, farther away than any external world, is also closer than any internal world, is this not a sign that thought affects itself, by revealing the outside to be its own unthought element?
"It cannot discover the unthought […] without immediately bringing the unthought nearer to itself – or even, perhaps, without pushing it farther away, and in any case without causing man's own being to undergo a change by the very fact, since it is deployed in the distance between them" (Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault)
Figure: Left: a simulation of Deleuze's central marking in his diagram of the Foucaultian diagram. This is the line of the Outside as Fold. Right: To best express the relations of diagrammatic praxis between content and expression (theory and practice) the Fold figure needs to be drawn as a double Fold ("twice twice" as Massumi might say) – a folded möbius strip. Here the superinflections between inside/outside and content/expression provide transversal vectors.
A topology or topological becoming-shapeshift retains its connectivity, its interconnectedness to preserve its autonomy as a singularity. All the points of all its matter reshape as difference in itself. A topology does not resemble itself. The möbius strip and the infamous torus-to-coffe cup are examples of 2d and 3d topologies. technically a topological surface is totalized, it can not comprise fragments cut or glued to produce a whole. Its change is continuous. It is not cut-copy-pasted. But the cut and its interval are requisite to an emergent new.
For Deleuze, the essence of meaning, the essence of essence, is best expressed in two infinitives; 'to cut " and "to die" […] Definite tenses keeping company in time. In the slash between their future and their past: "to cut" as always timeless and alone (Massumi).
Add the individuating "to shift" to the infinitives that reside in the timeless zone of indetermination of future-past. Given the paradigm of the topological-becoming, how might we address writing in the age of copy-paste and hypertext? The seamless and the stitched? As potential is it diagram? A linguistic multiplicity whose virtual immanence is the metalanguage potentiality between the phonemes that gives rise to all language?
An overview diagram of diagrammatic praxis based on Deleuze's diagram of the Foucaultian model shown below. The main modification is to the representation of the Fold. In the top figure, the Fold or zone of subjectification becomes a double-folded möbius strip.
Four folds of subjectification:
1. material part of ourselves which is to be surrounded and folded
2. the fold of the relation between forces always according to a particular rule that the relation between forces is bent back in order to become a relation to oneself (rule ; natural, divine, rational, aesthetic, etc)
3. fold of knowledge constitutes the relation of truth to our being and our being to truth which will serve as the formal condition for any kind of knowledge
4. the fold of the outside itself is the ultimate fold: an 'interiority of expectation' from which the subject, in different ways, hopes for immortality, eternity, salvation, freedom or death or detachment.
Deleuzo-Foucauldian Ontological Overview From the Machine to the Archive. Thought of the Day 26.0
In his book on Foucault first published in 1986, Deleuze drew a diagram in the last chapter, Foldings, that depicts in overview the Outside as abstract machine, defined by the line of the outside (1), which separates the unformed interplay of forces and resistance from the strategies and strata that filter the affects of power relations to become "the world of knowledge".
The central Fold of subjectification, of 'Life' is "hollowed out" and ignored by the forces of the outside as they are realized in the strata fulfilling the obligation of the diagram to "come to fruition in the archive." This is dual process of integration and differentiation. The residual dust of the affective relations produced by force upon force, integrate into the strata even as they differentiate to forms of realization – visible or articulable. The 'empty' fissure/fold attracts and repels these moving curvilinear strategies as they differentiate and "hop over" it. Ostensibly, the Fold of subjectification effectuates change as both continuously topological, and as discontinuously catastrophic (as in leaping over). So, the process of crystallization from informal to formal paradoxically integrates as it differentiates. Deleuze's somewhat paradoxical description follows:
The informal relations between forces differentiate from one another by creating heterogeneous curves which pass through the neighborhood of particular features (statements) and that of the scenes which distribute them into figures of light (visibilities). And at the same time the relations between forces became integrated, precisely in the formal relations between the two, from one side to the other of differentiation. This is because the relations between forces ignored the fissure within the strata, which begins only below them. They are apt to hollow out the fissure by being actualized in the strata, but also to hop over it in both senses of the term by becoming differentiated even as they become integrated. Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault
So this "pineal gland" figure of the Fold is the "center of the cyclone", where life is lived "par excellence" as a "slow Being".
As clarifying as Deleuze's diagram is in summarizing the layered dimensionality of the Foucauldian/Deleuzian hybrid, some modifications will be drawn off to alternatively express the realizations of the play of informal forces as this diagram takes on the particular features of a Research Creation praxis. True to the originating wax tablet diagramma, the relations are drawn and redrawn, in recognition, after Bergson's notion of recognition as the intensive point where memory meets action of the contemporary social field that situates it. The shifts from the 19C to 20C disciplinary diagram of Foucault's focus modulates with the late 20C society of control diagram formulated by Deleuze. The shorthand for the force field relevant to the research creation diagram of practice-led arts research today is a transdisciplinary diagram, the gamespace of just-in-time capitalism, which necessarily elicits mutations in the Foucault/Deleuze model. Generating the power-resistance relations in this outside qua gamespace are, among others, the revitalized forces of the military-academic-entertainment complex that fuel economic models such as the Creative Industries that pervade the conditions of play in artistic research. McKenzie Wark concludes his book GAMER THEORY, with prescient comments on the black hole quality of a topology of the outside qua contemporary "gamespace" from Deleuze and Guattari (ATP) and Guy Debord. "Only by going further and further into gamespace might one come out the other side of it, to realize a topology beyond the limiting forms of the game. Deleuze and Guattari: "… one can never go far enough in the direction of [topology]: you haven't seen anything yet — an irreversible process. And when we consider what there is of a profoundly artificial nature […] we cry out, 'More perversion! More artifice!' — to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of [topology] creates of necessity and by itself a new earth."
Diagrammatic Political Via The Exaptive Processes
The principle of individuation is the operation that in the matter of taking form, by means of topological conditions […] carries out an energy exchange between the matter and the form until the unity leads to a state – the energy conditions express the whole system. Internal resonance is a state of the equilibrium. One could say that the principle of individuation is the common allagmatic system which requires this realization of the energy conditions the topological conditions […] it can produce the effects in all the points of the system in an enclosure […]
This operation rests on the singularity or starting from a singularity of average magnitude, topologically definite.
If we throw in a pinch of Gilbert Simondon's concept of transduction there's a basis recipe, or toolkit, for exploring the relational intensities between the three informal (theoretical) dimensions of knowledge, power and subjectification pursued by Foucault with respect to formal practice. Supplanting Foucault's process of subjectification with Simondon's more eloquent process of individuation marks an entry for imagining the continuous, always partial, phase-shifting resolutions of the individual. This is not identity as fixed and positionable, it's a preindividual dynamic that affects an always becoming- individual. It's the pre-formative as performative. Transduction is a process of individuation. It leads to individuated beings, such as things, gadgets, organisms, machines, self and society, which could be the object of knowledge. It is an ontogenetic operation which provisionally resolves incompatibilities between different orders or different zones of a domain.
What is at stake in the bigger picture, in a diagrammatic politics, is double-sided. Just as there is matter in expression and expression in matter, there is event-value in an exchange-value paradigm, which in fact amplifies the force of its power relations. The economic engine of our time feeds on event potential becoming-commodity. It grows and flourishes on the mass production of affective intensities. Reciprocally, there are degrees of exchange-value in eventness. It's the recursive loopiness of our current Creative Industries diagram in which the social networking praxis of Web 2.0 is emblematic and has much to learn.
Negri's Dismissive Approach to Re-engaging Growing Ideological Opposition to Capitalism. Note Quote.
April 12, 2017 AltExploit1 Comment
Negri's politics are shaped by the defeat of the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His borrowed economic theory was shaped by the triumphalism following the restructuring of US capitalism in the 1980s and the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Having created a Marxism gutted of its central emphasis on the working class, he filled this empty shell with the poststructuralist philosophy developed by a generation of disappointed post-1968 French intellectuals.
Atilio Boron argues that Hardt and Negri's increasing reliance on poststructuralist philosophers flows from a shared backdrop of trying to come to terms with working class defeat and capitalist hubris. Faced with a system that appears, for the time being, unbeatable:…a series of theoretical and practical consequences emerge that…are neatly reflected in the postmodern agenda. On the one hand, an almost obsessive interest in the examination of the social forms that grow in the margins or in the interstices of the system; on the other hand, the search for those social forces that at least for now could commit some sort of transgression against the system, or could promote some type of limited and ephemeral subversion against it.
This concern with subversion and transgression is indeed characteristic of many of the autonomist movements with which Negri is associated. But for Negri, with the rise of post-industrial production and the multitude, the potential for postmodern subversion has spread across the whole social terrain, and across the globe. One might expect Hardt and Negri to explain what such a confrontation would look like. However, what we instead get is a retreat into philosophy and descriptions of the multitude that the authors themselves admit are merely 'poetic'.
Hardt and Negri also borrow from the poststructuralists, especially Deleuze and Guattari, an eclectic form of expression known as 'assemblage'.
Timothy Brennan writes in his Italian Ideology:
It expresses itself as a gathering of substantively incompatible positions. In Empire's assemblage, the juxtaposition of figures whose political views are mutually hostile to one another…is presented as the supersession of earlier divisions in pursuit of a more supple and inclusive combination.
So, in Empire, philosophers such as Michel Foucault or Baruch Spinoza and revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg rub shoulders with Bill Gates, former US labour secretary Robert Reich and St Francis of Assissi. This form of expression evolved as a rejection of attempts at a 'grand narrative' such as Marxism that could hope to explain and help transform the world, or of an agency such as the working class that could carry through such a transformation. For Hardt and Negri this method mirrors the multitude that they describe—a series of heterogeneous, isolated subjects, coming together to fleetingly act in common. Indeed they have gone so far as to say that the struggles of the multitude have become 'incommunicable' and lack a 'common enemy'.
Their assertion would be contested by most of those who have attended the great international gatherings and protests of the anti-capitalist movement since Seattle. Here opposition to neo-liberalism and war have become common themes. The world working class may have been traumatised by the impact of neo-liberalism and the defeat of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But, rather than celebrating the much-exaggerated demise of the working class, the challenge today is to re-engage the growing ideological opposition to capitalism with the potential power that workers still hold. Negri is dismissive of such a project, but offersanothing substantial in its place.
His faux pas—over neo-liberalism, the EU constitution and the war in Iraq—stem from his failure to come to terms with either the defeats of the past or the nature of contemporary capitalism. Almost every assertion in his recent writings vanishes into thin air once subjected to even a cursory empirical examination. As for strategy, Multitude ends:
We can already recognise that today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living – and that yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous. In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future. This will be the real political act of love.
With an upsurge of the Techno-Commercial Right in the world, multinationals and Commodity Trading firms and HFTs and states wreaking havoc, and global warming (believe it or not!) threatening our very survival as a species, waiting for an act of political love to save us sounds like bad advice.
Foucault, Noys, Grammar of Neoliberalism and the Bizarre Concessions to Market Resiliency
January 12, 2017 AltExploitLeave a comment
According to Foucault, the state intervention of neoliberalism is Kantian; it is designed to act on the conditions of the social to create the possibility of competition and enterprise. Neo-liberalism is opposed to the specter of the passive consumer just as much as various forms of leftism and anarchism. Second, the philosophical roots of neoliberal intervention can be traced back to the roots of German neoliberalism in the philosophy of Husserl. In this case, competition does not arise naturally but only as an essence that has to be constructed and formalized; neoliberalism is Husserlian. Foucault remarks that according to Marxism, there can be only one capitalism with one logic, contrasting this with the historical institutional argument that capitalism is a singularity with different possibilities. Neoliberals then try to invent a new logic for capitalism.
If we accept that we are not dealing with an essential capitalism deriving from the logic of capital, but rather with a singular capitalism formed by an economic-institutional ensemble, then we must be able to act on this ensemble and intervene in such a way as to invent a different capitalism.
For Benjamin Noys, the neoliberal government intervention is no less dense, active, frequent and continuous than in any other system. The difference is rather the point of application. It intervenes on society so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulative role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way, its objective will become possible, that is to say a general regulation of the society by market. The necessity is to analyze how neoliberalism creates a new form of government in which state performs a different function, permeating society to subject it to the economic.
Despite the aggressive role the state plays, Noys tells us it misses the point to identify neoliberalism as another form of statism, rather the state subjects society to the economic. Now which "economic" would that be? The only "economic" Noys mentions are competition and the market. To this point in his 2010 paper, Noys has not even discussed capital the social relation itself. The single social relation that connects classical liberalism to fascism to neoliberalism is itself never discussed by Noys.
How the fuck does this happen?
Noys explains, "the state constantly intervenes to construct competition at all levels, so that the market economy is the 'general index' for all governmental action", but Noys never explains that this construction is not ideology driven but aimed at the production of surplus value. What Noys never mentions is that the state itself is acting as the social capitalist and is imposing a capitalist regime on all of society. This is important for Noys to ignore because, despite his actual narrative that this is the action of the fascist state, the real problem identified by Noys is the market. It is not that the state is functioning as society's capitalist, but that it is doing this by imposing the market on society.
Clever money versus the accelerationists reaches its crescendo here: The real poverty in Noys' paper on grammar of neoliberalism is in his embarrassingly piss poor grasp of labor theory, and his obsession with the ideology of neoliberalism, rather than real relations of production. Icing on the cake happens with the #accelerate club seeming to be a variation of the post-humanist desire-assemblage forming among the 25-35 year old Caucasianistas that wants us to get our Übermensch on without giving up Xboxes and smartphones…..
The Differentiated Hyperreality of Baudrillard
January 5, 2017 AltExploitLeave a comment
A sense of meaning for Baudrillard connotes a totality that is called knowledge and it is here that he differs significantly from someone like Foucault. For the latter, knowledge is a product of relations employing power, whereas for the former, any attempt to reach a finality or totality as he calls fit is always a flirtation with delusion. A delusion, since the human subject would always aim at understanding the human or non-human object, and, in the process the object would always be elusive since, it being based on signifiers would be vulnerable to a shift in significations. The two key ideas of Baudrillard are simulation and hyperreality. Simulation accords to representation of things such that they become the things represented, or in other words, representations gain priority over the "real" things. There are certain orders that define simulations viz. signs get to represent objective reality, signs veil reality, signs masking the absence of reality and signs turning into simulacra, since they have relation to reality thus ending up simulating a simulation. In Hegarty's reading of Baudrillard, there happen to be three types of simulacra each with a distinct historical epoch. The first is the pre-modern period, where the image marks the place for an item and hence the uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as irreproducibly real. The second is the modern period characterized by industrial revolution signifying the breaking down of distinctions between images and reality because of mass reproduction of copies or proliferation of commodities thus risking the essential existence of the original. The third is the post-modern period, where simulacra precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes implying only the existence of simulacra and relegating reality as a vacuous concept. Hyperreality defines a condition wherein "reality" as known gets substituted by simulacra. This notion of Baudrillard is influenced by Canadian communication theorist and rhetorician Marshall McLuhan. Hyperreality with its insistence of signs and simulations fit perfectly in the post-modern era and therefore highlights the inability or shortcomings of consciousness to demarcate between reality and the phantasmatic space. In a quite remarkable analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard (166-184) clarifies the notion of hyperreality, when he says,
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that adults are everywhere, in the "real" world and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusion of their real childishness.
Although his initial ideas were affiliated with those of Marxism, he differed from Marx in his epitomizing consumption as the driving force of capitalism as compared to latter's production. Another issue that was worked out remarkably in Baudrillard was historicity. Agreeing largely with Fukuyama's notion of the end of history after the collapse of the communist block, Baudrillard only differed by placing importance on the idea of historical progress to have ended and not history necessarily. He forcefully makes the point of ending of history as also the ending of dustbins of history. His post-modern stand differed significantly with that of Lyotard's in one major respect, despite finding common grounds elsewhere. Despite showing growing aversion to the theory of meta-narratives, Baudrillard, unlike Lyotard, reached a point of pragmatic reality within the confines of an excuse laden notion of universality that happened to be in vogue.
Baudrillard has been at the receiving end with some very extreme, acerbic criticisms directed at him. His writings are not just obscure, but also fail in many respects like defining certain concepts he employs, totalizing insights that have no substantial claim to conjectures, and often hinting strongly at apodicticity without paying due attention to the rival positions. This extremity reaches a culmination point when he is cited as a purveyor of reality-denying irrationalism. But not everything is to be looked at critically in his case and he does enjoy an established status as a transdisciplinary theorist, who, with his provocations have put traditional issues regarding modernity and philosophy in general at stake by providing insights into a better comprehensibility of cultural studies, sociology and philosophy. Most importantly, Baudrillard provides for autonomous and differentiated spaces in cultural, socio-economic and political domains by an implosive theory that cuts across boundaries of various disciplines paving the way for a new era in philosophical and social theory at large.
If reality could be copied, the mapping or simulation of a neural network digitally is possible.