The Consumer Society

Found Adbild in Frankfurt

2008-07-03T09:54:00.002-04:00

(a work in progress)

2008-04-18T09:29:00.003-04:00

Delineating the sinuous contours of the Hispanic-American consumptive experience, the diagrammatic phalloid above, included in a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, offers a multi-tendriled multi-media marketing strategy for a multi-cultural world. It would seem the multi- has displaced the mass- in an industry increasingly oriented towards segmentation and personalization. The IAB erects the Hispanic Committee in 2004 to account for the population’s growing purchasing power, a power that, as has been recognized by the advertising industry since its inception, is accessed through the eyeballs. Jeff Hicks, president of ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, declares, rather ominously: “Advertisers are going to follow eyeballs, and they’ll find a way to get them.”[1] Eyeblaster, a company whose function it is to manage and calculate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, is aptly named in its invocation of both a violation of the eye (castration[2]) and an overwhelming release (gratification). The illusory moment of release for the castrated individual can perhaps be located in brand loyalty, in the intimacy formed between consumer and product packaging, in that warm sensation generated by the sound of a familiar jingle or the sight of a familiar logo, where desire finds in the promise of its fulfillment the means to its repression.

In 2002’s breakthrough “McDonald’s Grilled Chicken Flatbread Sandwich Case Study,” the IAB concludes that “while television and radio advertising barely affected perception of the image statement ‘combination of great flavors’… online advertising greatly increased image perception.”[3] Internet technologies extend the limits of “image statement” circulation and reception, intensifying market specialization while increasing simultaneously the volume and automacity of consumer feedback. The advertising industry has joined new media art zealots in trumpeting the arrival of the interactive age: “Eyeblaster campaigns turn advertising from a one-way street to an immersive dialog” offering “unprecedented levels of engagement…”[4] The aura of interactivity surrounding online marketing provides a new “enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distractions...”[5]

[1] As quoted by Jeffrey Goldfarb, “Forecasting the Future,” American Advertiser
[2] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1998) 433-434.
[3] http://www.iab.net/media/file/xmos_pdf_xmosdatamcd.pdf
[4] http://www.eyeblaster.com/advantages/advertisers.asp
[5] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 18.

lykánthropos

2008-04-17T13:27:00.002-04:00

“Shapes,” an episode in the first season of the X-Files: untimely deaths force an American Indian reservation in Montana to revisit a legend of a morphological demon that rides the threshold between man and wolf. Fox Mulder uncovers what he is certain is the first ever X-File and an account by Lewis and Clark of ‘Indian Men’ who can turn themselves into wolves. Dana Scully, the physician, the skeptic, responds “Mulder, what this folder describes is called lycanthropy, it’s a type of insanity in which an individual believes that he can turn into a wolf. No one…can physically change into an animal.”

Believed for centuries in Western Society to be a form of melancholia, lycanthropy was literally thought to be a psycholibidinal hallucination, a disorder resulting from a distorted perception of ones own (human) internal dynamics. Epistemologically mutated, schizoid-species, the lycanthrope shows as that representation will always fail when it comes to putting into symbols the voice inside that says ‘you are a wolf.’ This utterance resists externalization as event, recording as enunciation; it is not delusion but exploded truth. The penultimate expression of this interior singularity comes when the wolf-human howls at the moon—Lyotard’s “intensely spun top” at which “one thinks without criteria of falsification.”[1] Perhaps when Deleuze and Guattari speak of the body without organs—“nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience”—they are referring to this same unassignable sound that will always mark the moment before the emergence of value—the amorphous innards of a body under auto-erasure, continually destroying all trace of the inscriptions marking what it is in a perpetual re-recording.[2] The lycanthrope undetermined to be either human or not human (wolf); its simultaneity is the limit point of the event, the imperative to be this or not-this. Deleuze and Guttari take note that this “feeling of transition,” of “naked intensity stripped of all shape and form,” is “often described as hallucinations and delirium.”[3] Hallucinations, however, are merely the smoke rising from binary machines imploded upon themselves; the when they fail to grasp, with a one or a Zero, the non-contingency that is the lycnathrope’s self-effacing scream at the moon, to other wolves: “I am not the producer, the archivist, the knower of this cry.”[4]

[1] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 31.
[2] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 19.
[3] Ibid., 18.
[4] Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 40.

St. Marx (feat. Howe)

2008-03-24T03:56:00.006-04:00

St. Marx

“The Automats of the early 20th century have disappeared from Gotham's cityscape. Now, New York Design Architects has brought the retro concept roaring back, 24-7, at Bamn! Fronting the kitchen of the 350-square-foot storefront is a curving wall of plasterboard with rows of coin-operated stainless-steel doors with glass windows. Each compartment houses an individual portion of comfort food with an international twist. Eight quarters get you a warm pork bun or a PB and J empanada. Change machine on-site.” Craig Kellogg, “Horn & Who?,” Interior Design (September 1, 2006).

Among the many divine consumer spaces in Manhattan’s Lower East Side the BAMN! Automat is a particularly fascinating emplacement. It realizes, most spectacularly, the absurd truth that any palpable separation between Capital’s material and aesthetic dimensions has been eliminated. The commodity no longer obscures the social labor invested in it; this productive process is in fact transparent and moreover forms the basis of the Automat’s discreet appeal –“the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them” emerges in the act of exchange between consumer and automata.[i]

Marx lets us know in The Grundrisse that the process of automation is necessarily extended into the visual: “the full development of capital” occurs when “the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science.”[ii] The aestheticization of automation is thus the expression of Capital fetishizing itself. Automated production gives rise to automated consumption; modes of presentation allow for the automation of desire. BAMN! confidently proclaims that inside “satisfaction is automatic!,” reassuring us of their efficient use of the machine to subordinate desire to Capital’s regulatory flow.

Just as automated machinery consumes the labor energy of the worker—as opposed to the worker consuming the machine as the “material element of his productive activity”[iii]—the technology of the automat works over the consumer. The bliss of “instant foodification”[iv] is produced by the actual placement of the machinery, not by the active seeking out of the establishment: convenience trumps luxury in the instance of augmented survival. Automat foodification embodies the “ghostly objectivity”[v] of the commodity that forces itself upon you by its own volition. Given this consumer-culinary administration BAMN! appears as but one point in the circuit through which bodies flow in the Manhattan nine to five or in the Lower East Side shopping spree. For the lunch-breaker and dedicated shopper, BAMN! is a locus of productive consumption, a site in which human throughputs receive an investment of caloric energy and tender impersonality that keeps them on track.

The exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries employed similar architechnological principles to demonstrate the most up-to-date capabilities to produce, organize, and present the commodity object. BAMN!’s compartmentalization, its geometric structuring of products behind glass, these are the same techniques applied by the engineers of London’s Crystal Palace that was built in 1851 and two years later New York’s Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations or Worlds Fair. In contemplating of the architecture of nineteenth century commodity spaces, Walter Benjamin observes “such technological derivation seems actually to become the signature of everything now produced.”[vi] The nostalgia industry co-opts the historical-material experience and subsequently displaces the dialectic into the realm of ideology. Just as “slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine,” consumption cannot be held as slave to the rate-limiting factors of production and distribution and must instrumentalist all technological forms so as not to lag behind itself.[vii] The formal construction of BAMN! invigorates a retro sensibility but it simultaneously cannot help to epitomize the hyper-modern dream—a dialectical hallucination of converging pasts and futures.

“People want the convenience of choice without having to interact with another human being, which may cause a delay or confusion.” Robert Kwak, co-founder of BAMN!

This “taste of history” is riddled with theological niceties, its fetish-face grinning at every turn. In BAMN! the consumer stands in front of the goods as if in a dream: self-produced commodities sequestered among themselves behind glass; communicating in the language of exchange value; disorienting the consumer as he is sucked into an atemporal maelstrom of past, present and future. Operating in this “ghostly objectivity” BAMN! serves to aestheticize the banal within the framework of a retro scenario, feeding off a nostalgia for antiquated culinary administration by offering just that in updated form. In this way the automat revival has literally reinvented the mediocre. Unlike the exhibitions, the techno-aesthetic display of BAMN! is already integrated into everyday life; fulfillment lies in the immediate gratification of experiencing the future of food service with the “warmth” of the past. At BAMN! the quotidian holds a mirror up to itself and loves what it sees.

Ginsberg, the quotable auto-poet tells us: “There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now."

New York, Capital of the twenty-first century. Today’s neo-Boheme post-Punk can navigate the experiences of Allen Ginsberg and Yoko Ono in the same space but adapted to suit the demands of late-spectacular society. The same strip of sidewalk that is home to BAMN! narrates the transformation of New York City’s urbane intellectual yet transgressive counter-cultural elite. Everything is now profanely illuminated, obscene, stainless.

The opening of BAMN! is announced with the following headline: “Modern Asian Flavors Behind Glass Doors in the East Village.” Florence Fabricant, The New York Times (August 30, 2006).

The exhibition’s organizing of commodities from around the world engages a narrative that solidifies the position of the Western Metropol as locus in the global circulation of cultural Capital. Benjamin notes of the 1867 Paris exhibition “the ‘oriental quarter’ was the center of attraction.”[viii] However, today when we find this same thematization of commodity objects at work—Japanese, Chinese, Thai, ‘Asian Fusion,’ and Middle-Eastern cuisine; cultural goods from Japan, Tibet, and Others–it is inevitably re-inscribed with an appeal to the tradition of the dropout generation; specters of celebrities whose rebellious appropriation of non-Western spirituality and modes of existence was always doomed to the irony presented by Enlightened Capitalism.

The global triumph of general equivalence: foods of the world present themselves within the same frame of speculation. BAMN! is Epcot Center’s dining panorama consolidated, with representative “dishes” just inches apart.

“The dreaming collective knows no history. Events pass before it as always identical and always new.” Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, [S2,1].

“They say everything old is new again.” The Today Show’s Natalie Morales on the opening of BAMN!

Walking down St. Mark’s Place one is continually struck by the products, some of which have made their way out onto the sidewalk. This unrelenting stimulus provides no relief for reflection, the consumer is merely driven forward on the plane of linear, homogenous time.

From the Indymedia.org NYC discussion forum:

Jan 23, 2006 04:54PM EST

EH: Speaking of Anarchy... I remember a cafe between St. Marks & 9th St. across from Cooper Union that was called Anarchy Cafe. Any relation to Anarchism or was this place just using the name? This was around 1995 or so. Unfortunately it was replaced by McDonalds.

Jan 23, 2006 10:26PM EST

Tommy NYC: Anarchy Cafe was a bad faux french fin-de-siecle cabaret themed yuppie bar. You didn't miss anything!

“Naturally,” writes Benjamin, “one can say that the bourgeois comfort of the dining room has survived longest in small cafés.”[ix] Looking east out the window of Starbucks on Astor Pl. one sees how this continuity of comfort is manifest in the urban landscape; whether queuing for a Macchiato or sitting at the counter multitasking, the floor to ceiling windows permit clear visual access to the nearest Starbucks, located a mere 482 ft. from where you currently are. Arriving at the second location, the storefront previously home to the Anarchy Café comes into view. At any rate, you are no more than .3 miles west from the ‘comfort food’ to be procured at BAMN! for eight quarters.[x]

[i] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 294-438.

[ii][ii] Marx, The Grundrisse, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 221-293. [emphasis added]

[iii] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevil McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), [G12a,3].

[iv] Julib.com. This is Juli B. in her review of BAMN! (Get foodified.)

[v] Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [G5,1].

[vi] Ibid., [F3a,5].

[vii] Marx, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 146-202.

[viii] Benjamin, Arcades Project, [G8a,3].

[ix] Ibid., [G1,2].

[x] Distance calculations provided by Google Maps.

Two Regimes of Madness

2008-03-18T07:15:00.000-04:00

Two Regimes of Madness

by Gilles Deleuze

1. Guattari has spoken of a formalism of power. As agreed, I now interrupt him, but in order to say much the same thing. The question is not the same one that was still being asked several years ago. Today, we’re not asking what is the nature of power, but rather, along with Foucault, how power exerts itself, where it takes shape, and why it is everywhere.
Let’s begin with a tiny example, the puppeteer. He has a certain power, to work the puppets, but also the power he exerts over the children. Kleist wrote an admirable text on the subject. One could say that there are three lines. The puppeteer does not operate according to movements that already represent the figures to be achieved. He makes his puppet move according to a vertical line, wherein the center of gravity, or rather, of the levity of the puppet, is displaced. It is a perfectly abstract line, not in the least figurative, and no more symbolic than figurative. The line is mutant because it is made up of as many singularities as stopping points which nevertheless do not break up the line. There is never any binary relationship or bi-univocal relations between this vertical, abstract line— which is for this reason all the more real—and the concrete movements of the puppet.
In the second place, there are movements of an entirely different kind: tangible, representative curves, an arm that rounds itself out, a head that tilts. This line is no longer made up of singularities but rather of very supple segments—one gesture, then another gesture. Finally, the third line, one of a much harder segmentarity which corresponds to the moments of the story represented by the play of the puppets. The binary relationships and bi-univocal relations that the Structuralists tell us about might form in and between Segmentarizable lines. But the power of the puppeteer himself arises more at the point of conversion between the abstract, non-figurative line, on the one hand, and the two lines of segmentarity, on the other.
A banker, banking-power in capitalism, it’s somewhat the same thing. It is well known that there are two forms of money, but they are sometimes improperly identified. There is money as financing structure, or even as monetary creation and destruction: a non-realizable quantity, an abstract or mutant line with its singularities. And then a second, completely different line, concrete, made of tangible curves: money as means of payment, capable of being segmented, allocated for salaries, profit, interest, etc. And this money as means of payment will carry in turn a third segmentarized line: the entirety of goods produced in a given period, of equipment, and of consumption (the work of Bernard Schmitt, Suzanne de Brunhoff, etc.). Banking-power occurs at the level of conversion between the abstract line, the financing structure and the concrete lines, means of payment--goods produced. The conversion occurs on the level of central banks, the gold standard, the current role of the dollar, etc.
Another example. Clausewitz speaks of a flow which he calls “absolute war,” which would never have existed in a pure state, but which would nonetheless have crossed through history, irresolvable, singular, mutant, abstract. Perhaps this war flow has, in fact, existed as the unique invention of nomads, a war machine independent of states. In fact, it’s striking that the great states, the great despotic apparatuses don’t seem to have based their power on a war machine, but rather on bureaucracy and the police. The war machine is always something that comes from the outside and is of nomadic origin: a great abstract line of mutations. But, for reasons easily understood, states will have to appropriate this machine for themselves. They will put together armies, conduct wars, wars serving their politics. War ceases to be absolute (abstract line), in order to become something that is no more amusing, whether limited war, whether total war, etc., (second line, this time segmentarizable). And these wars take this or that form depending on the political necessities and the nature of the States that conduct them, that impose their ends and their limits upon them (third segmentarized line). There, again, what one calls the power of war is in the conversion of these lines.
One should give many more examples. The three lines do not have the same pace, nor the same speeds, not the same territorialities, nor the same deterritorializations. One of the principle goals of schizoanalysis would be to search in each one of us for the crossing lines that are those of desire itself: non-figurative abstract lines of escape, or of deterritorialization; lines of segmentarities, whether supple or hard, in which one either gets caught up, or moves beneath the horizon of one’s abstract line; and how conversions happen from one line to the others.

2. Guattari is in the process of plotting a chart of semiotic regimes; I would like to give an example, one that could as easily be called pathological as historical. An important case of two regimes of signs was present in the psychiatry of the latter part of the 19th century, but this case also extends well beyond psychiatry to concern all of semiotics. One can conceive of a first regime of signs that functions in a very complex way, but in a way nonetheless easily understood: one sign defers to other signs, and these other signs to still other signs, to infinity (irradiation, an ever extending circularity). Somebody goes out onto the street, he notices that his concierge is glaring at him, he slips, a small child sticks its tongue out at him, etc. In the end, it’s the same thing to say that each sign is doubly articulated, that a sign always defers to another sign, indefinitely, and that the supposedly infinite ensemble of signs itself defers to a greater signifier. Such is the paranoid regime of the sign, but one could just as well call it despotic or imperial.
And then there is a completely different regime. This time, a sign, or a small group, a little bundle of signs, begins to flow, to follow a certain line. We no longer have a vast circular formation in perpetual extension, but rather a linear network. Instead of signs that defer themselves to one another, there is a sign that defers to a subject: the delirium comes about in a localized fashion, it is more a delirium of action than of idea, one line must be maneuvered to the end before another line can be initiated (quibbling delirium, what the Germans called “quarrelsome delirium”). It is in this way that a psychiatrist like Clérambault distinguished between two large groups of delirium, paranoid and passional [passionnel].
It could be that one of the major reasons for the crisis in psychiatry had been this meshing between completely different signs in this regime. The man of paranoid delirium, one can always lock him up, he presents all the signs of madness, but otherwise he is not mad at all, his reasoning is impeccable. The man of passional desire shows no signs of madness, except on certain points that are difficult to discern, and nonetheless he is mad, his madness manifests itself in a rash acting out (for example, the assassin). Here again, Foucault has defined profoundly this difference and complimentarity of the two cases. I mention them in order to give an idea of the plurality of semiotics, that is to say, of the clusters whose signs have neither the same regime nor the same function.

3. It matters little whether a regime of signs receives a clinical or historical name. Not that it’s the same thing, but regimes of signs cross over very different “stratifications.” Just now, I was talking in clinical terms about the paranoid regime and the passional regime. Now let’s talk about social formations. I wouldn’t say that emperors are paranoiacs, nor the reverse. But in the great imperial formations, whether archaic or even ancient, there is the great signifier, the signifier of the despot; and beneath it the infinite network of signs that defer themselves to one another. But you also need all sorts of categories of specialized people whose job it is to circulate these signs, to say what they mean, to interpret them, to thereby freeze the signifier: priests, bureaucrats, messengers, etc. It is the coupling of meaning and interpretation. And then there is still something else: there still must be subjects who receive the message, listen to the interpretation, obey the chore—as Kafka says in “The Great Wall of China,” or “The Emperor’s Message.” And each time one could say that, having reached its limit, the signified generates more meaning, allowing the circle to grow.
Any social formation always appears to work well. There is no reason for it not to work well, for it not to function. Nonetheless, there is always one side through which it escapes, undoes itself. One never knows if the messenger will arrive. And the closer one gets to the periphery of the system, the more subjects find themselves caught in a kind of temptation: whether to submit oneself to signifiers, to obey the orders of the bureaucrat and follow the interpretation of the high priest—or rather to be carried off elsewhere, the beyond, crazy vector, tangent of deterritorialization—to follow a line of escape, to set off as a nomad, to emit what Guattari just called a-signifying particles. Take a belated example like that of the Roman Empire: the Germans are quite taken by the two-fold temptation to penetrate and integrate themselves into the empire—but at the same time pressured by the Huns to form a nomadic line of escape, a war machine of a new variety, marginal and non-integrable.
Let’s take an entirely different regime of signs, namely capitalism. Capitalism, too, appears to function very well, there is no reason for it not to. Furthermore, it belongs to what we just referred to as passional delirium. Contrary to what happens in paranoid imperialist formations, where little bundles of signs, big bundles of signs set off to follow lines, and on these lines all sorts of things appear: the movement of money-capital; the erection of subjects as agents of capital and of work; unequal distribution of goods and means of payment to these agents. One tells the subject that the more he obeys, the more he commands, since he obeys only himself. Perpetually one falls back from the commanding subject onto the obeying subject in the name of the law of capital. And without a doubt this sign system is very different from the imperialist system: it’s advantage is that it fills in the gaps, while carrying the peripheral subject toward the center and freezing nomadism in its tracks. For example, in the history of philosophy, one knows of the famous revolution that moved discourse from the imperial stage, where the sign perpetually deferred to the sign, on to the stage of subjectivity as a properly passional delirium that always threw subject back onto subject. And yet even there, the better it works the better it escapes on all sides. Money-capital’s lines of subjectivization never cease emitting junctions, oblique lines, transversals, marginal subjectivities, lines of deterritorialization that threaten their planes. An internal nomadism, a new type of deterritorialized flow, a-signifying particles that come to compromise any given detail, and the whole configuration. The Watergate affair, global inflation.

Translated by Robert Hardwick Weston

Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium

2008-03-18T07:12:00.000-04:00

Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium

An Interview with Gilles Deleuze

Actuel: When you describe capitalism, you say: “There isn’t the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathology, of this madness, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad; it has been mad from the beginning, and that’s where its rationality comes from.” Does this mean that after this “abnormal” society, or outside of it, there can be a “normal” society?

Gilles Deleuze: We do not use the terms “normal” or “abnormal.” All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. Its like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, its mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn’t been adequately discussed about Marx’s Capital is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalism’s mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a society? It is—the interests being defined in the framework of this society—the way people pursue those interests, their realization. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true history is the history of desire. A capitalist, or today’s technocrat, does not desire in the same way as a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and for themselves, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the “right” to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A “disinterested” love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all.

Q. So what is specific to capitalism in all this?

GD: Are delirium and interest, or rather desire and reason, distributed in a completely new, particularly “abnormal” way in capitalism? I believe so. Capital, or money, is at such a level of insanity that psychiatry has but one clinical equivalent: the terminal stage. It is too complicated to describe here, but one detail should be mentioned. In other societies there is exploitation, there are also scandals and secrets, but that is part of the “code,” there are even explicitly secret codes. With capitalism, it is very different: nothing is secret, at least in principle and according to the code (this is why capitalism is “democratic” and can “publicize” itself, even in a juridical sense). And yet nothing is admissible. Legality itself is inadmissible. By contrast to other societies, it is a regime both of the public and the inadmissible. A very special delirium inherent to the regime of money. Take what are called scandals today: newspapers talk a lot about them, some people pretend to defend themselves, others go on the attack, yet it would be hard to find anything illegal in terms of the capitalist regime. The prime minister’s tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economical and financial mechanisms of capital—in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders; what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissible. If the left was “reasonable,” it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There is no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is being admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals. Instead one talks of “ideology.” But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the “economico-ideological” distinction or opposition, but the organization of power. Because organization of power—that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic—haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression.

Q. So is ideology a trompe l’oeil?

GD: Not at all. To say “ideology is a trompe l’oeil,” that’s still the traditional thesis. One puts the infrastructure on one side—the economic, the serious—and on the other, the superstructure, of which ideology is a part, thus rejecting the phenomena of desire in ideology. It’s a perfect way to ignore how desire works within infrastructure, how it invests it, how it takes part in it, how, in this respect, it organizes power and the repressive system. We do not say: ideology is a trompe l’oeil (or a concept that refers to certain illusions). We say: there is no ideology, it is an illusion. That’s why it suits orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party so well. Marxism has put so much emphasis on the theme of ideology to better conceal what was happening in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power. There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power once it is admitted that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure. Take two examples. Education: in May 1968 the leftists lost a lot of time insisting that professors engage in public self-criticism as agents of bourgeois ideology. It’s stupid, and simply fuels the masochistic impulses of academics. The struggle against the competitive examination was abandoned for the benefit of the controversy, or the great anti-ideological public confession. In the meantime, the more conservative professors had no difficulty reorganizing their power. The problem of education is not an ideological problem, but a problem of the organization of power: it is the specificity of educational power that makes it appear to be an ideology, but it it’s pure illusion. Power in the primary schools, that means something, it affects all children. Second example: Christianity. The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it is a very original, very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and which was able to invent the idea of international power. It’s far more important than ideology.

Félix Guattari: It’s the same thing in traditional political structures. One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determined by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms. There the real divisions show up: a treatment of desire and power, of investments, of group Oedipus, of group “super-egos,” of perverse phenomena, etc. And then political oppositions are built up: the individual takes such a position against another one, because in the scheme of organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his adversary.

Q. Your analysis is convincing in the case of the Soviet Union and of capitalism. But in particulars? If all ideological oppositions mask, by definition, the conflicts of desire, how would you analyze, for example, the divergences of three Trotzkyite groupuscules? Of what conflict of desire can this be the result? Despite the political quarrels, each group seems to fulfill the same function vis-à-vis its militants?: a reassuring hierarchy, the reconstitution of a small social milieu, a final explanation of the world…I don’t see the difference.

FG: Because any resemblance to existing groups is merely fortuitous, one can well imagine one of these groups defining itself first by its fidelity to hardened positions of the communist left after the creation of the Third International. It’s a whole axiomatics, down to the phonological level—the way of articulating certain words, the gesture that accompanies them—and then the structures of organization, the conception of what sort of relationships to maintain with the allies, the centrists, the adversaries…. This may correspond to a certain figure of Oedipalization, reassuring, intangible universe like that of the obsessive who loses his sense of security if one shifts the position of a single, familiar object. It’s a question of reaching, through this kind of identification with recurrent figures and images, a certain type of efficiency that characterized Stalinism—except for its ideology, precisely. In other respects, one keeps the general framework of the method, but adapts oneself to it very carefully: “The enemy is the same, comrades, but the conditions have changed.” Then one had a more open groupuscule. It’s a compromise: one has crossed out the first image, while maintaining it, and injected other notions. One multiplies meetings and training sessions, but also the external interventions. For the desiring will, there is—as Zazie says—a certain way of bugging students and militants , among others.
In the final analysis, all the groupuscules say basically the same thing. But they are radically opposed in their style: the definition of the leader, of propaganda, a conception of discipline, loyalty, modesty, and the asceticism of the militant. How does one account for these polarities without rummaging in the economy of desire of the social machine? From anarchists to Maoists the spread is very wide, politically, as much as analytically. Without even considering the mass of people, outside the limited range of the groupuscules, who do not quite know how to distinguish between the leftist élan, the appeal of union action, revolt, hesitation or indifference…One must explain the role of these machines—these groupuscules and their work of stacking and sifting—in crushing desire. It’s a dilemma: to be broken by the social system or to be integrated in the pre-established structure of these little churches. In a way, May 1968 was an astonishing revelation. The desiring power became so accelerated that it broke up the groupuscules. These later pulled themselves together; they participated in the reordering business with the other repressive forces, the CGT [Communist worker’s union], the PC, the CRS [riot police]. I don’t say this to be provocative. Of course, the militants courageously fought the police. But if one leaves the sphere of struggle to consider the function of desire, one must recognize that certain groupuscules approached the youth in a spirit of repression: to contain liberated desire in order to re-channel it.

Q. What is a liberated desire? I certainly see how this can be translated at the level of an individual or small group: an artistic creation, or breaking windows, burning things, or even simply an orgy or letting things go to hell through laziness or vegetating. But then what? What could a collectively liberated desire be at the level of a social group? And what does this signify in relation to the “totality of society,” if you don’t reject this term as Michel Foucault does.

FG: We have taken desire in one of its most critical, most acute stages: that of the schizophrenic—and the schizo that can produce something within or beyond the scope of the confined schizo, battered down with drugs and social repression. It appears to us that certain schizophrenics directly express a free deciphering of desire. But how does one conceive a collective form of the economy of desire? Certainly not at the local level. I would have a lot of difficulty imagining a small, liberated community maintaining itself against the flows of a repressive society, like the addition of individuals emancipated one by one. If, on the contrary, desire constitutes the very texture of society in its entirety, including in its mechanisms of reproduction, a movement of liberation can “crystallize” in the whole of society. In May 1968, from the first sparks to local clashes, the shake-up was brutally transmitted to the whole of society, including some groups that had nothing remotely to do with the revolutionary movement—doctors, lawyers, grocers. Yet it was vested interests that carried the day, but only after a month of burning. We are moving toward explosions of this type, yet more profound.

Q. Might there have already been a vigorous and durable liberation of desire in history, apart from brief periods of celebration, carnage, war, or revolutionary upheavals? Or do you really believe in an end to history: after millennia of alienation, social evolution will suddenly turn around in a final revolution that will liberate desire forever?

FG: Neither the one nor the other. Neither a final end to history, nor provisional excess. All civilizations, all periods have known ends of history—this is not necessarily convincing and not necessarily liberating. As for excess, or moments of celebration, this is no more reassuring. There are militant revolutionaries who feel a sense of responsibility and say: Yes, excess “at the first stage of revolution,” but there is a second stage, of organization, functioning, serious things…. For desire is not liberated in simple moments of celebration. See the discussions between Victor and Foucault in the issue of Les Temps Modernes on the Maoists. Victor consents to excess, but at the “first stage.” As for the rest, as for the real thing, Victor calls for a new apparatus of state, new norms, a popular justice with a tribunal, a legal process external to the masses, a third party capable of resolving contradictions among the masses. One always finds the old schema: the detachment of a pseudo-avant-garde capable of bringing about a synthesis, of forming a party as an embryo of state apparatus, of drawing out a well brought up, well educated working class; and the rest is a residue, a lumpen-proletariat one should always mistrust (the same old condemnation of desire). But these distinctions themselves are another way of trapping desire for the advantage of a bureaucratic caste. Foucault reacts by denouncing the third party, saying that if there is popular justice, it does not issue from a tribunal. He shows very well that the distinction “avant-garde-lumpen-proletariat” is first of all a distinction introduced by the bourgeoisie to the masses, and therefore serves to crush the phenomena of desire, to marginalize desire. The whole question of is that of state-apparatus. It would be strange to rely on a party or state apparatus for the liberation of desire. To want better justice is like wanting better judges, better cops, better bosses, a better France, etc. And then we are told: how would you unify isolated struggles without a party? How would you make the machine work without a state apparatus? It is evident that a revolution requires a war machine, but this is not a state apparatus. It is also certain that is requires an instance of analysis, an analysis of the desires of the masses, yet this is not an apparatus external to the synthesis. Liberated desire means that the desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective. What counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading: desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prisons, etc. It is not a question of directing, of totalizing, but of plugging into the same plan of oscillation. As long as one alternates between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and hierarchic coding of party organization, there is not liberation of desire.

Q. In the beginning, was capitalism able to assume the social desires?

GD: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monetary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It’s enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomenon of desire. And fascism too—one must say that it has “assumed the social desires,” including the desires of repression and death. People get hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don’t think so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had its organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning the vacuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation.

Translated by Robert Hardwick Weston

INTERVIEW WITH GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI

2008-03-18T07:02:00.001-04:00

Raymond Bellour

INTERVIEW WITH GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI

1. Desire and lack

Raymond Bellour: First of all, I was wondering what is recovered by this notion of desire as the absolute real, and without lack.
Doesn’t the way you make this notion operate represent too high a level of abstraction with regard to the child’s mode of constitution? Visibly, from the first weeks of the child’s life, what one notices is that the child functions out of a certain ensemble of elements of lack.

Félix Guattari: That’s the worst abstraction. Lack of what–- of vitamins, of oxygen? Needful lack, instinctual lack? What?

RB: Take the example of the breast, or the bottle. From the moment you take it away, there is a demand. And what is this demand? Is it an expression of desire, and is it expressed in terms of a lack or not?

Gilles Deleuze: This question seems simple, if one replies with a yes: the little child needs the breast, he lacks something, from that moment we will be spun all the way back to castration, and the lack of the dear Lord, and...

FG: Your question is rotten. As in communication, there is already one entity constituted as the transmitter, and another entity constituted as the receiver– one subject and another and then a thing that passes between them. From the moment you start with three terms, pole A that transmits, pole B that receives and something transmitted from A to B, and you remove one, then it lacks one of the three– that’s unstoppable. But it is all a system of multiplicities, of intensities, like a system of flows and cuts, a system that starts back up, that codes and decodes desire, that is going to reconstitute these poles, represent them. Obviously it’s not that there’s a kid on one side, a mother on the other, and then a breast– there’s none of that, at this level.

GD: When we wrote that desire is not a lack, but production, we obviously didn’t mean that it produces its own object: we don’t mean that the hunger of the little baby suffices to produce milk. We know very well like everybody else that desire doesn’t produce its object. What we’re saying is that the division, the space of segregation, with the object of desire as a person distinct from the desiring subject, already implies a cutting, a cutting which can come from the social field, which can come also from nature. And this is a cutting on a bed of flows that is itself flowing; desire is fundamentally this flowing of flows, in which nothing lacks. The flow of hunger from the little calf and the flow of milk from the cow do not meet up if the little calf has lost its cow– this we know, like everybody else– but we say that desire is, in its essence, these meetings or not-meetings of flows. There are flows that can meet up and that produce the effects of repulsion, or else that don’t meet up again and produce the effects of lack. We know quite well that there are lacks, society is organized to distribute lack in certain places and to distribute excess in certain other places. We are not saying at all that there is no lack, we are saying: phenomena of lack are not desire.

RB: O.K. From there, the same question can have a sort of second level: what the fuck do we care about this desire if it is so fluid, transpersonal, an ungraspable absolute real, that it lacks even more than classic psychoanalytic lack?

GD: You’re talking as though flows are imperceptible...Not at all. Flows are flowing, in any case. I’m thinking of an example even more pathetic than the cow: conditions of drought, in which animals cannot find any more water, and start to flee. There is a flow of dryness, there is a flow of animals fleeing, there is a flow of water at some distance, there is a search. A flow of dryness is something absolutely full, just like a flow of animals; it does not lack anything. That is what exists: this is what we call the real. Anyway, we are inside the flows. We are not people confronted objects. The idea of the flow is not even a concept; one only has to look at something that flows, no matter what–- milk, pee, sperm, money: that is reality. This is precisely what life is, and this is exactly what people live with. It’s not at all that the history of flows changes anything; it’s that people live so little in the experience of flows that they do not understand any of this at all: they look for objects, they take themselves to be persons, etc. A flow in search of other flows, that’s not about lack.

FG: The passage from one flow to another is a kind of theory of attachment [étayage], which means that there is a passage, a mechanical transfer from one flow to another. In all of these flows, connected, disjointed, added on, there are certain flows which are deterritorialized, which means that, among themselves, the flows create not phenomena of lack but a sort of shift [décalage] which will carry desire from one flow to another. This is precisely what will constitute the coding of flows.

GD: When we speak of flows, it’s not to replace one concept by another; it is to imply that this is not the same way of living, and of living desire. It is not at all about an art of flows: it is about living in a form where it's not people, it is not objects, but flows that pass–-this is what one lives. Here, Félix is completely correct: one lives in the form of, and out of, yet another flow, the flow of one’s own flight to the self [fuite à soi], the flow of one’s own search for the self, which is not a lack. An animal senses water ten kilometers away, but one cannot say that it lacks water: it is held in a kind of flow which pushes it or from which it guides itself towards the water.

FG: It’s the water that lacks the animal. It’s not the same thing.

GD: A subject is not someone who is facing the flows; a subject is itself an ensemble of flows. So if that’s really desire, then desire really means to make flow [faire fluer], it really means to produce flows. In this sense the ground which is drying up, or the ground which is moistened, is flowing. The very fact of learning to live in this way changes everything about the consciousness and the unconscious of the desire that one has.

FG: I was saying that it is the water that lacks the animal. This has the appearance of a paradox. One must understand with deterritorialized flows– and they are all deterritorialized, each in relation to others– that with certain flows, flows of abstract quantities, like flows of capital, indeed one sees that they lack something. The moment you have a flow of dollars– somewhere, it lacks a territory, it lacks a labor power [force de travail]. It is the most deterritorialized flow that attracts the constitution of productive entities, which want to reterritorialize themselves somewhere. Therefore it is finally always in a differential system of flows that there is a constitution of the desiring vector.

RB: Isn’t this idea of a sort of capacity for taking things in as one goes along, while creating a series of flows oneself, a utopia in comparison to what is in people’s heads?

GD: In a room where people are taking drugs, and even more so in drug societies (respectable societies, as in India), there is a flow that passes and then there are places where the flow is blocked, and we can thus assign the subject secondarily– that is, the bad element which prevents the flows from passing. Marginal Americans live spontaneously like that.

FG: It is all the same an incredible illusion to think that people have an identity, that they are stuck to their professional function, father, mother and all that. They are completely wandering and wild; they appear to be fixed, caught in a constellation, but they are completely adjacent in relation to the many systems of intensity that run through them. It is necessary to have a completely rationalist intellectual vision to believe that there are well-constituted people who move along in a field while preserving their identity. People are all wanderers. It’s a matter of knowing whether this wandering revolves around a stake, like a goat, or whether it is a desiring wandering which comes precisely to find its bearings in relation to desiring, deterritorialized points of escape.

GD: We’re not saying that there is no lack. We are saying: phenomena of lack do not have anything to do with phenomena of desire.
This is what makes us different from the whole world up to now, from Plato to Lacan [laughter]. They said: ‘Ah, you see, desire is very complicated; it is a problem of lack, and then a problem of satisfaction.’ And from Plato to Lacan they all find themselves back at the church. [laughter]

RB: I would like to know why you call this desire.

FG: Have you seen a person in a situation– familial, conjugal, or otherwise– who is thereby in the field of desire? It is organized in precisely the opposite way, you see. We do not say that it flows all the time; we know that when it does not flow, you aren’t in the field of desire. When it cracks, when there is a door that slams, when there is a draught, pay attention: something happens, just then desire passes– the concierge notices something, she hears something. Without that, with the concierge all alone in her room, there’s no desire.
There is one politics–-fascist, paranoid, capitalist, bourgeois, reterritorializing, let’s say–- and then there is another which, as soon as there is something that cracks, something that escapes, invests itself there.

RB: What strikes me in that is the decisional aspect of the thing– an aspect which is borne out by your use of the word politics. There are two politics, there are two options.

GD: It’s not one individual’s choice in relation to two politics: it is the fact, in one case, of running up against the person, the role, the function, and in the other case, of putting oneself adjacent to a mechanical process. The options are those of the unconscious itself, not the options of decision.

RB: I would like to know how the whole problem of sexuality, in the traditional sense of the term, can be articulated within your problematic. Is sexuality– more specifically the sexual– a more important flow than others?

FG: There is no more important flow with respect to sexuality, resulting as it does from the division of the sexes, precisely because this is already a deduction [prélèvement], a mutilation of a generalized transsexuality. Wherever it is a matter of dividing the sexes, this already means that there has been a forcing back [rabat] of desiring energy into persons, into poles; in one sense the word sexuality itself is an entry, an avenue towards the Oedipalization of desiring energy. It is moreover for this reason that we have spoken more of desiring energy than of pan-sexualism, or of generalized sexuality. So, there's no specifically sexual sexuality, no sexual biological energy resulting from the division of the sexes that would constitute a particular zone of desiring energy. This is because sexual machines, in the sense in which you're taking them, are already nothing but mutilated sequences, cut out from desiring energy. Desiring energy knows no sex, knows no people; it even knows no object. It produces its objects and finds itself forced back onto its origins, forced to attribute social and sexual coordinates–- exclusive coordinates that are in the end restrictive and mutilating. So, insofar as there is an escape of privileged biological energy that would irrigate the social field––by extension, by sublimation––desiring energy is the complete opposite. There is a sexual, transsexual, a-personal energy which accompanies all flows, and which then finds itself recodified in personal relations, in familial relations, in ego relations.

GD: Sexuality in the hypertrophied state, as one can see with the work of Miller, with Lawrence– with the authors that were called pornographic, erotic– is a sexuality which appears to us already as a system of codification linked to all phenomena of Oedipalization, of castration. The whole analytical or schizo-analytical process, the experimentation of these authors, consists in being able to disengage themselves from this system, and find lines of escape, faultlines in this social encoding.
We don’t mark off one narrow sexuality for persons, whether this would mean women, men, chickens or anything else, and then one broad sexuality, which would be the equivalent of a sublimation and which would flood the social field. On the contrary, that's the last thing we would say; it simply doesn’t work like that. We're saying: whatever you may like sexually, whatever you invest in through sexuality, whether it be a woman, a man, a piece of clothing, a shoe, a chicken, it is a political and social field. Sexed objects are not at all coincident with the difference between the sexes. This is already our first disagreement with psychoanalysis: we do not attach any importance to sexual difference, we do not attach any privilege to it. It can happen this way, or it can happen in other ways, but regardless of what you espouse sexually, through the sexual object, the sexuated object [sexué]––and regardless of how this object may be sexuated, whether homosexuated, heterosexuated, or bestiosexuated––in any case it is a social and political field. Thus for us there is not one narrow sexuality and one broad sexuality; there is never anything but one single sexuality which is the same everywhere and which floods everything. And this sexuality does not sublimate itself in the social field: it invests the social field directly. If you love the daughter of an army captain, then in a certain way you make love to the army, or to the counter-army–-anything is possible. But there aren't two distinct sexualities. Insofar as sexuality is narrow, it is socio-political; it simply passes through certain objects that arouse it, that erect it, that provoke erection. These subjects are channels for relations of flows. The more that this is contrasted with sex itself, the more it in fact broadens out into the world, into the social and political world, in the same way that in Burroughs’s work, the more that it focuses on drugs, the more it brings about a social delirium, a complete social delirium, with the police, etc. This is evident in Miller too: the more it retracts onto scenes of pure sexuality, the more it opens up...

FG: A little kid who begins to jerk off in a taxing and painful and catastrophic way, one could conceive of this as some sort of contraction of sexuality into meaning, the partial zone which takes it on. But I believe that even in this case it is in the final analysis a certain way of finding an experimentation outside of the social field; the proof is that masturbation is condemned precisely insofar as it marks the appearance of a sexuality outside the norm. What counts is not whether the sexuality takes place in the street, or hidden beneath the sheets, it's that it breaks with the way society wants to channel every sexual practice within the limits of a familialism or within the limits of a series of chains of integration.

RB: Yes, but even so I see a difference there. If sexuality has been given an extraordinary privilege in the last century, for example, it is precisely because there is a kind of perpetually secret, hidden activity, which does not become more and more apparent in the form of transgressions and provocations.

FG: It’s always the same mistaken reasoning. If you start by posing the object, and from the object want to deduce the conduct, you’re going to get it all wrong. Desire has no object, and it is not a vector which departs from a personal totality that fixes itself onto an object. Desire receives its personological repression and counter-determines its object, but it manufactures, it produces its object. It’s not because you jerk off or because you have some preoccupation with a partial object that you experience guilt; it’s because you have a guilty sexual practice that you adopt some object or some social practice. So it’s just the opposite. It is thus that the individual, in order to be placed in conjunction with deterritorialized flows, takes on territoralities that are more and more partial, guilty, painful, masochistic; it is thus that the individual appropriates [prélève] a certain number of body parts, or voyeuristic practices, or things like that. Guilt is first of all a practice of sexuality that is privatized, that is made guilty, that is capitalized, and that goes on to select its objects in the social field.

RB: But then do you conceive of sexual life as something equivalent to gastronomy– that is, an art which is carried out on an extremely varied register of dishes, and which moreover completely evades all that is secret?

GD: Whether there’s something secret or not, nothing changes. Nothing prevents the libido from branching out on an open social field, and not at all on a closed familial field .

RB: From the moment one says secret, there is already a tendency towards a restriction onto the person...

GD: No, because the secret is a very coded social form which itself implies its whole social field. The secret is not at all the private. It doesn’t mean the reduction of sexuality to the private; it means that the forms into which sexuality invests the social field pass through the secret. But the secret, far from being a removal from the social field, is a certain structuring of the social field itself.
I want to come back to the first point, what you were saying about Miller and Lawrence. It seems to me that the more they fall back [se rebattent] onto non-sublimated sexual forms, the more there is at the same time an opening into the political and social world, and it matters little whether that opening is good or bad, whether it is in fascist form or in mystical form, or in real political form . These are not two distinct things in Miller’s oeuvre– Tropic of Capricorn with its sexual scenes and The Colossus of Maroussi with Greece, and its delirium over Greece. It’s the same thing: that is, he fucks Greece by way of the scenes of Capricorn. For Lawrence, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Etruscan Places, there really is a wrong side and a right side. And again, it is due to a non-sublimated sexuality that it opens into the historical, social, political world.

FG: I can take as an example that of Kafka: it's the crossing over to animal sexuality, or from a nearly schizo-sexuality, from a schizo-incest, in a certain way. Far from resulting in a contraction of sexuality, it's through that crossing-over that he carries out his analysis of the involution of the forms of bureaucracy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the forms of modernist capitalist bureaucratism that begin to appear in the sectors he is confronted with–– insurance companies, etc.

GD: When Miller writes The Colossus of Maroussi, it’s not sublimated sexuality in relation to Tropic of Capricorn. It is simply the historical and social field which is developing itself on its own, which had already been invested by the moment when he got a hard-on for that woman. This is not sublimation, it is the exploration of the social, historical, and bureaucratic field, which corresponds to the way he fucks or doesn’t fuck his ol' lady.

FG: In his Letter to His Father, Kafka says of his father: when you were in the shop, when you were doing business, then you were admirable. . . and at the same time he hated him. But what he saw there was not a relationship of jealousy, of possession, not a miraculous relationhip between mother and father, but a certain social field of tyranny that his father established.

RB: Foucault has said: “The secret is perhaps more difficult to raise than the unconscious.” Capitalism has a certain way of literally making all sexual objects impotent, of cutting them off from their real connections.

FG: Yes, you offer all the more genitals, breasts, etc. . . since that way you can be sure that nobody will talk about money, about micro-political force relations, which are components of the essence of desire.

GD: And I would stress that the secret is not at all a move outside the social field. With societies other than our own, with, for example, secret societies. Secret societies are structured within the society itself. A secret society is a certain way of inducting [investir] society into a particular mode, even if this is only the mode of anarchist societies. Secret societies for blowing society up, these are completely hooked up to society. The secret itself is never a distancing from society, but a structural element of any society, so much so, that the idea of a sexuality forced back onto [rebattue sur] a certain secret is fully part of the way in which sexuality continues to invest the social field.

RB: So you don’t think that it is exactly the breaking of this secret that constitutes the sexual as the privileged place of a superior, hidden pleasure [jouissance]?

GD: No. We know too well that a public sexuality, a community sexuality, can produce familialism as much as private sexuality. It doesn’t happen that way, it won’t happen that way: the problem is not there.

FG: I would like to add that there's all that naturalism, all that good conscience in sexuality, through psychoanalysis, through medicine, through pedagogy, through sex education, which consists in the crushing of desire, in the cutting off of a certain number of objects of sexual difference precisely in order to cut them off from desire. Personally, I don’t like the term “secret” very much, and Gilles likes it, but we can agree in saying that what is secret in desire is that there is something absolutely unforeseeable in it. When desire exists somewhere, you never know at all where it’s going to be released. [déboucher]. You never know the object of desire, for the good reason that desire has a certain goal, and then it is a process that is going to release onto something else. It's the exact opposite of the way sexuality is represented–-as a satisfaction, in a discharge with a known object, with a known drop in tension, with a known protocol, one which is totally coded. The opening of desire onto the social field is a certain kind of innovation, a certain kind of production, with particular objects, and it is precisely this that people do not want to hear about: people want everything to be predictable– at such-and-such a stage of infancy you have such-and-such a type of object, at such-and-such other stage you have such-and-such other one, and if you lack such-and-such a type of object, then something isn’t working, you have to rectify something there. You have such-and-such an erogenous zone which is normally developed at one period, and abnormally developed at another, etc., everything is completely programmed. . .

GD: When you think you love a woman, or anything else, in fact what you love through that object is an entirely different thing. The question is to know up to what point you are conscious of this, in a vital manner. This is not to say that you really love someone else, like your mother–-that's a load of shit, it’s a disgrace to say things like that–- but rather that what you love through someone is of a non-personal order, of an order of flows which passes or does not pass. So there may be a secret or there may not, but in any case it emerges onto a social field, an historical field, an insane field.

FG: One can say that desire proceeds in its production through what could be called an a-signifying semiotics; that is, in order to produce itself, it makes use of flows, it makes use of substances, and does not make use, in a privileged way, of formal relations, of relations made discrete or bi-univocal--to be precise, of all signifying semiotics. Such that each time one wants to cause desire to pass outside intensive substances and into the limits of formal relations--that is to say localized, coordinated and personalized relations, depending on the principle of contradiction, etc. So at the same time one falls back on the whole dichotomy of partial sexuality. . .

GD: I have just the image we need. There are words like "to be delirious." To be delirious means precisely “to slip out of the furrow” . There is in Sade the strange word déconner, “to defuck,” and then, in all pornographic literature there's the word déculer -- “to debugger." To “debugger” means to pull out of someone you’ve just been fucking in the ass; to “defuck” means to pull out of someone you're presently inside of; and to be delirious, that’s the farmer who misses the furrow with his plow. All sexuality is right there. The difference, it’s not whether there is a secret or not, it’s the fact that delirium, defucking, debuggering, that's the fundamental state of sexuality. One addresses oneself to a person, one aims at a person, an object or whatever, and it slips through that, inevitably it slips through, in happiness or sadness (but in happiness too, there's something else that one feels), all at once and through that person or object. Maybe, in certain cases, it it had to be that person, it had to be that thing, that event. In Kafka’s case, it had to be Felice-– so that all at once it defucks, so that all at once it raves deliriously onto some social formation. But it’s not the social formation that maintains a given sublimation; instead, it is the social formation that maintains the lines which we have been calling lines of deterritorialization– -that is, of defucking, of delirium, etc. This implies that it won’t work if there isn’t love or desire for a particular person; but it works through this person, the person is completely undone. It is thus that psychoanalysis seems so weak to us in this regard.

RB: How do you situate yourselves in regard to what one could call the biological problem of sexuality, the sexual instinct?

FG: I am going to take up the terms Gilles has given us: what causes defucking, debuggering, delirious raving? It is the fact that from one substance to another, one passes from a certain coefficient of deterritorialization to another, whatever formal structures one encounters. A system of intensities does not allow for the representation of another system of intensities, but allows for a connection of systems of intensities. There is a particular flow of signs which needs to come back into conjunction with a particular flow of caresses, of sperm, of milk. Outside of this connection, each of the flows is sent back to its own formal structure. An event is produced from these conjunctions of intensive flows: something else, another desiring-machine appears outside of the formal correlations. This, I believe, is the biological aspect, in the restricted sense in which you’re speaking. At a certain moment the deterritorialization can only be carried out when it comes back into this particular conjunction, which causes something in the human machine to blow a fuse.

RB: You have often placed in opposition the phenomena of production and of anti-production, and in particular in all that has to do with dreams, fantasies– with images, let’s say. I'd like you to try to specify the status that you give to what one could call the different representations of psychological life, in order to determine what of it is production, and what is anti-production.

FG: In my opinion the significance of the dream, of the fantasy, of the phantasm, is that it is a machine for detecting Oedipal garbage, a machine for detecting the areas where reterritorializations take hold. The dream is an activity that tends by definition to be cut off from all connection to the real.

RB: From all connection with the social field.

FG: At the same time it is as if the dream were an X-ray of all the points of blockage. It is extremely interesting to locate all these points of blockage. I think that the dream– I’m taking up Freud’s expression– is the royal view, not of the unconscious, but of the Oedipalization of the unconscious. It is still very interesting to know in what way we have a tendency to become fascist, to become our own cop; and it’s a way of locating another possible politics. The dream, at the same time that it has these fascist impacts, there is at precisely the same place the umbilicus of the dream, which is the mechanical index of something else, of another possible politics. It is in the very place where it is the most fascist, where it is the most blocked, that something can open onto another chain. It is all the more fascist at that place because there is a mechanical threat behind it.
So it all depends on what you want to do with the dream. If you want to interpret the dream, to reify it, to objectify it, in a grid of interpretations, then at the same time the dream serves to reinforce a fascist politics. If you want conversely to put it in a system of production, a system of breaking the habitual schemas, the real schemas, if you want to proceed for example by a technique of experimentation, then it is possible to use the particular semiotics of the dream to reinforce an a-signifying semiotics, more than to feed an Oedipal semiotics.

RB: But at that moment, it seems to me a problem arises: how can one establish both a locating and a dividing up? How does one pose the problem of this division: isn’t it again an operation of knowledge which risks another reification?

GD: No, it is an operation of critique, not of knowledge. We have tried to contrast a domain of experimentation and a domain of interpretation, which is that of psychoanalysis in general. The interpretation machine is really a paranoiac machine that functions at all kinds of levels–-at the social level, at the familial or conjugal level. It is obvious that psychoanalysis did not invent the interpretation machine, but psychoanalysis has profited from it, and has given it a new face. And the interpretation machine means first of all:
1) I know or will know the meaning of what you are saying, or someone– be it only the good Lord or the psychoanalyst– can know what it means.
2) What you are or what you say is something comprehensible, even if I don’t know it myself, as it follows from what you have been, your past.

FG: It’s not by chance that...

GD: The first aspect of the interpretation machine is the signifier: it means something. The second aspect is the anamnesis, that is: what you are, you were in the past.
3) The third aspect, it seems to me, is representation. That is, what you do or what you say represents something, and I will corner you in this domain of representation– it is the relationship of force. The interpretation machine and the relationship of force, they are one.
Psychoanalysis lives by these three aspects. It gives an original face to three aspects which are the old faces of the couple. It’s not even necessary to say, as we wrote in Anti-Oedipus, that the place of psychoanalysis is the family; one should just say that the place of psychoanalysis is conjugality.
Schizo-analysis would consist of, among other things, the undoing of all interpretation machines: it is understood that what you say does not go back to anything else, it does not signify anything; you say it because you desire to say it, what is important is which relationship, with which desire. In the interpretation it always means something else: in experimentation. . .

FG: It’s always in the present. It’s not recursive, it’s not prospective–

GD: It’s a raw given. What is the position of desire in the present situation?

FG: What are you putting together, what politics are you leading, where do you want to get to, what are your coordinates?

GD: Yes, experimentation equals politics. What is it that you want?
The second point is that there is no reference to the past–-this is not at all to suppress the past. In this I feel again quite Bergsonian: it’s the idea that the constitution of the past and the present of which this past is the past are strictly contemporaneous. The memory of childhood and the present moment when childhood was childhood arrive at the same time; there is simply a radical distortion between the two.
The memory of childhood is contemporaneous to childhood itself–- only no, that’s garbage. The child manufactures its Oedipal memories of childhood, and at the same time, there are what Félix calls “childhood blocks” [blocs d’enfance], which are of a completely different nature, and which have nothing to do with Oedipus, and with the family. In the novels of Tony Duvert, there are childhood blocks, in the sense that one sees an infantile sexuality that has absolutely no Oedipal elements, and it is at the same time that the Oedipal memories of childhood are being constructed. So our rejection of the anamnesis does not consist at all of saying that there’s no reference to the past. That is what the people who broke with Freud said; that’s the trap they fell into. Jung and Adler said: let’s consider the present- that is, non-infantile– factors. O.K., Freud was right about everything that is childhood, but there are problems specific to the adult, or to the young man. We aren’t saying that at all: we’re saying that even if you just take the child, it’s not right, it’s not what Freud says it is.
Childhood memories are constructed during childhood, at the same time that one is a child, and so one is already betraying one’s childhood. Even at the level of childhood, you already find mystification– that is, the cleavage between Oedipal structures and pure childhood blocks. In infantile factors there are factors of the present, eternally present, and then there are virtual factors. Virtual factors are the fabrication of Oedipus; they are the object, they are the product of repression. But the true life of the child has nothing to do with that.
Childhood is already political. A kid thinks about bombs, he thinks about fucking his sister, and this is not about the family: it’s about sexuality and the social field. Thus there is no operation of anamnesis to perform. The theme of experimentation is that by nature you do not know what you are. The child didn’t know what he was, and doesn’t know it any more now. One can know what one is only by the outcome of experimentation, as something of the future, the exploration of a future childhood. For once, memory and forgetting are set in opposition. Psychoanalysis proceeds by memory, and we proceed by forgetting–- and not by awakening through forgetting. We say that the more you forget the better, because the more you forget the more you live, and the less you know what you are, the better: the more you’re already finding. It is for this reason that we like American sadomasochists, who don’t read Freud. A psychoanalyst says: I am going to tell you if you are sadistic or masochistic, or one more than the other. It seems to me that American sado-masochists say instead: you don’t know anything about what I am, no one knows anything about it, so you’d better experiment. That seems like good schizo-analysis to us. Indeed, it is even delightful to see faggots who say I am a faggot: any formula that says “I am” is impossible. Maybe the faggot who says to you, See, I’m a faggot, maybe he is something totally different. And that’s the object of a schizo-analysis, to know what he is.
And the third and final point, in which we completely set ourselves in opposition to psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis has always consisted of negotiating--in the proper sense of the word–- that is, merchandise for money, and you live your purchases. So there I come back to the question regarding fantasy: the fantasy has never been a lived state. The fantasy is a completely fabricated state, and is trafficked illicitly. It is a coin, and the psychoanalyst is someone who proposes to translate lived states into fantasy for you. I'm going to make you spit out cash.

RB: For meaning and for money.

GD: For money. We say: the lived is intensive by nature. It is intensities that pass, and with these intensities, it’s not representative: it runs through the beautiful woman, it addresses itself to the people one loves, etc., but it’s not representative.

RB: Even so, it produces images.

FG: No. When the analyst gives you images, you are caught in a system of coordinates. You have a subject position which represents something. From the perspective of desire, as soon as there is an image, one can say that already there is cessation, short-circuiting of desire, since there is the subjective cut [coupure] which has instituted the representation of the image on one side, and the intensity which has been partialized, cut in a field of representation and in a field of production, and moreover in a field of useful labor and a field of harmful labor.

GD: It’s like when you read a book: there is an erotic relationship with what you’re reading, an amorous relationship with what you’re reading.

RB: But you have images when you stop reading.

GD: Yes, when you’ve had enough, when you want to think. So then come the images, that’s the fantasy going on strike. At that moment the intensities stop, they are blocked off. When the intensities pass, there are no images.

FG: It’s quite simple: when you’ve just been fucking, when you’ve just come–

GD: There are no images.

FG: It’s cut off.

RB: But it seems extremely curious to me that all “imaginary” life is entirely subordinate because it contains productions of images...

GD: It is Oedipal.

FG: Let’s be clear. You are up to your neck in images, in any case; we’re not going to say that images are not necessary. The question is knowing what to do with the images.

GD: The image is by definition a stop in the intensities, the image is an extension. It is when the intensities, all at once, overflow into an extension, put themselves into an extension, in order to form a scene. Then that is what one calls a phantasm.

RB: But then, with drugs, for example...

FG: There are flows.

RB: It is well known that with drugs you have accelerations of images, a multiplication of images. . .

FG: Yes, there are flows of images. The intensities drain the images. . .

GD: Nothing can be separated out completely. In the dream there is a system of images, and then something else passes through that–-what must be found is what other thing passes through, and how it passes through. Psychoanalysis, far from finding what passes under the dream, locks itself up in the dream. It locks itself up in a system of images and signifiers, but for us it’s all the same thing: image, signifier, symbolic imagination. In any case there is always an image-intensity complex. What seem to us to be the key are the non-representative intensities, because they are deterritorializing, they swallow territories, you don’t know where you are anymore.

RB: And every image is inevitably territorializing.

FG: Inevitably, an image is a territory, it is an operation of subjectivization, of interpretation, and of territorialization. It’s the difference between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, if you like.

GD: Images rush forward to such a point that they rediscover pure intensities. For example, it’s not as if we’re saying that film is shit, because it consists of images...

FG: On the contrary.

GD: On the contrary, film is great because it can bring in such a flow of images (for example in Godard) that it unblocks images, even using a fixed camera shot. It’s not the speed, it’s not the acceleration of images that does this; we are not making any kind of dualism. At the same time the image is the extension which takes on an intensity when it dies, like a stream running into a pond. This is the fantasy, but it is also a rush of images, or else a fixed image where things are happening all over; this completely restores the intensity through the image. The Lacanians believed that it sufficed to find the signifier in order to get past the representational. We're just saying that the signifier is still pure representation. What interests us is discovering the intensities.

RB: There are some texts written by Charlotte Brontë at the age of sixteen or seventeen that offer much evidence of sexual lack, that crystallize upon purely phantasmatic things, with massive representations of derived satisfaction, and at the same time there are on the contrary images that slip by, that are sorts of states of ecstasy that she is creating in a systematic fashion, alone in the blackness. She creates images: sometimes they slip by completely and sometimes they are blocked. And it seems to me that the two phenomena are very important, and that neither is exclusive from the other.

GD: Yes, but there, that’s a little bit the difference between Félix and me. Félix says: be Oedipal all the way. The more you are Oedipal, the better it will be. If you don’t dream, your lines of pure intensity, your non-oedipal lines, will not be found.

FG: Yes, I believe that one characteristic of Oedipus is that it is always a happy medium. It’s the difference between psychoanalytic technique in the office, and psychoanalytic technique in for example the attempts of Laing at Kingley Hall. In the latter, they lose the happy medium: they do Oedipus on the scale of an entire community. So being Oedipal means staying inside the happy medium of the triangular normalization. If you ever make yourself Oedipal all the way to abolition, all the way to narcissism, all the way to the death drive, then at that moment something changes. The characteristic of the whole Romantic movement is that they start from a triangulated position with partial objects, and then at certain moments they take the tangent. Werther is so Oedipal, he ends up not being Oedipal at all.

GD: When one compares Werther's suicide with that of Kleist, or when one says that, given a dream, you can separate out by abstraction (but not at all by real separation) the representative directions and the intensive directions, and that a dream is never something pure, but has an oedipal direction and a non-figurative direction--an intensive direction--and one must find what is intensive in the phenomena of the dream's expanse; that seems to me to be true of dreams.

RB[?]: Yes, what seems important to me is what you call non-figurative, it makes me think back to Anti-Oedipus, at the base of which there are two movements with respect to the problem of the non-figurative. And you are well aware, when you speak of art in the end as art classified historically as non-figurative, that this can also be an excellent booby-trap.

FG: With respect to the figural, and here Lyotard's notion seems important, where the figural would surpass [depasser] the opposition of figurative and non-figurative, and perhaps [even] that of image-phantasm.

GD: Except that "figural" is a bad word for us, not for Lyotard, but for us it's a bad word.

FG: It's not that I'm particularly fond of it myself, but it indicates a direction of surpassing [dépassement].

GD: The direction of surpassing is not abstract in the sense of abstract art, because abstract art seems also to be completely representative.

FG: If there is anything that is often in its structure full of snares, it's surely [abstract art].

GD: Completely spread out [étendu], the real difference is the intensive [thing] itself and the entire domain of extension, whether it be abstract extension, abstract space, or representative space.

FG[?]: As for intension [intension] there is something that has puzzled me, ever since Difference and Repetition where you've already taken it up; namely, how, if there has been a science of extension--which is classical psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.--is the very scientific term "intensity" even thinkable. [In other words, how] can the structure be pin-pointed, measured, quantified, articulated, etc.? Can intensity determine itself simply by opposition to the fact that it is not structure, that it cannot be reduced to structure, or to some other thing that might quantify it, think it. . . How is it that this can be spoken of in terms of science, or is this excluded?

GD: There have always been efforts [essais] toward a science of intensity, and hence the question must be looked at historically. It's an endeavor which has been perpetually quelled but which reemerges all the time: there was an effort toward a science of real intensity, a real science of intensity in scholastics--one of great importance to me. Intensive magnitudes play an essential role in both physics and metaphysics. Also in the work of Dun Scott there are efforts towards a science of intensive magnitudes; both on the level of the modes of physics and on the level of God, of theology. There was also an effort for a science of intensive magnitudes in 19th Century energetics, in pure physics, in distinguishing the nature of intensive magnitudes from extensive magnitudes.

RB: Intensity can only be placed in opposition to structure or image. Is the very term "science of intensities" itself thinkable, and if so, what would that mean?

GD: A science of intensities is very possible. For me, the question would be more why––since there have been so many attempts on the part of the sciences, throughout history, for a science of intensities––why have these attempts been suppressed and quelled in favor of a science of extensive magnitudes? It's not that this science of extensive magnitudes is the last avatar of [science's] success, that was the human sciences. In physics, there have been all sorts of chances for [developing] a science of intensities, on many occasions. And why did they fail? Why were they defeated again and again? This already poses many problems. A science of intensive magnitudes would imply, along with its own history, a completely different relation. I mean that epistemology is not reconcilable with a science of intensive magnitudes. Epistemology is made up entirely as a function of a science of extensive magnitudes. Everything that has been attempted in the way of intensive magnitudes has remained marginal. Whether it be things like acupuncture, which I consider to be in the domain of intensive magnitudes, [or] all the attempts of intensive physics, of intensive linguistics, or in the human sciences. As for the Hjelslevian school, there are those who have made efforts toward an intensive interpretation of language. One must look at the role of intensities in the music of John Cage. The first question is: Why is all this marginal by [its very] nature? The second question is: Can there be a science for all this? Not even this has been done. There's a marginal literature on the subject. Why hasn't it taken hold? Personally, I see all sorts of differences between intensive and extensive magnitudes. Once again, I feel Bergsonian, attacking extensive magnitudes. I'll take one characteristic of intensive magnitudes that seems to me to pose exactly the problem you brought up: Is such a science possible? I'm saying an extensive magnitude is easy to recognize. It's when what you grasp simultaneously, what you grasp in an instant is, by definition, a unity[. And multiplicity, you can only take it successively, There you have an extensive magnitude.] If you say that the length of this table is an extensive magnitude, you mean some division that I grasp of this length, which I apprehend in an instant. From the moment that I apprehend it in an instant, I constitute it as a unity, whether it be half the table, or a fourth, or a tenth, whatever I grasp in an instant will be a unity. And whatever I grasp as multiple will be grasped successively. From that very moment there is extensive magnitude and there is representative space. Intensive magnitude is the opposite. I mean: It's a multiplicity that you grasp in an instant as multiplicity. When you say about heat that it's 20 degrees, that doesn't mean it's 10 degrees plus 10 degrees, it means that it's the multiplicity 20 degrees that I apprehend in an instant. [In other words] it's either hot or it's cold, or it's not too hot. A multiplicity apprehended intensely as multiplicity, that's an intensive magnitude.

RB: But when you make use of the "degree" you make use of a whole system of codification, that is the problem with science.

GD: This brings us back to the problem raised by Felix. In any case, it's related. Intensity is related to its translation in extension. A science of intensive magnitude would be a science that would begin to be able to do away with numerical principles, [it would be] a non-extensive numerical system, and I'm saying that this has been done a thousand times and each time thwarted. Take, for example, ordinal systems, the attempts to interpret ordinal numbers, Russell's essays [essais], Meinhorf's essays [essais], the considerations of intensive magnitudes in scholastics; such attempts have been made continually. We cannot ask the question: Is such a science possible? We should rather ask: Who or what is it that has thwarted the development of such a science?

FG: Basically, I don't think the question is worth asking. A science of intensive magnitudes is absurd since at the core of the problem lies the connection of all science with a political field, with the field of desire. Hence that cannot be a science, it could be one type of politics at the heart of science, at the heart of art, at the heart of experimentation on daily life, at the heart of the revolutionary field. And whoever would propose a science of intensive magnitudes would place himself in the same position as the epistemologue, and would propose a sort of metalanguage of intensive magnitudes with respect to the sciences or with respect to politics. And one can easily imagine an Althusserism of intensive magnitudes, with the same disastrous result. Intensive magnitudes means, for me, the process of deterritorialization, i.e., the conjunction of processes. One cannot have a conjunction of processes since. . .

RB: It's the very character of a politics of realization which is contrary to scientific shift [décalage ].

FG: Exactly.

RB: Deleuze philosophizes the whole thing to an extreme. This is what struck me especially in the article in Minuit, because there you clearly posed the problem [about] no longer [being] able to associate, it's the no longer able to which is important. It's not a positive formula of disassociating, it's a negative formula of not associating. From the moment when one doesn't associate, in a certain way one knows that one has a good chance of being in connection with a desiring machine.

FG: There's no guarantee, in the same way that there is no guarantee for a revolutionary protocol, no guarantee for intensive magnitudes in the order of the sciences or in that of art, or in anything, for that matter. . .The problem of desiring magnitudes is not one of science; it's just as much a political field as a desiring field as a field of revolutionary ecstasy. One cannot imagine a science of desiring magnitudes that would be in some way an epistemology of intensive magnitudes and at the same time [hypercoding]. . .

GD: You who are always talking about the science-machine, in that sense, yes. Even the science-machine is made up of intensities. The relationship sign-particle is an intensive one.

FG: Yes, it's a thing. But the constitution of a science, the scientific discourse involved, will never offer any guarantee of any sort of consistency, of whatever nature it might be.

GD: No, but it's the madness of science. Intensity is the madness of science.

FG: Or rather the politics of science.

GD: Whatever.

FG: Of a desiring politics.

GD: Of a politics of particles. It's intense, the holes and all that. We haven't spoken about holes, you've got to ask Felix: BLACK holes, BLACK HOLES, does that work? BLACK HOLES are holes of intensity. It's when holes, for example hyperphysical, or fantastic [holes], are considered as particles. Not [just] things for which particles pass, but as particles that move faster than. . .

FG: Than full particles. . .

GD: [Than] all particles, than light, all that. Holes are particles. This destroys the phenomenon of castration, this demonstrates that. . .[Guattari laughs]. . .there's no difference between the sexes.

FG: In the hole, in the hole. . .

ACT III: SCHIZO-ANALYSIS

RB: Schizo-analysis, what is its reality: by whom, for whom, when or how, until when?

FG: If schizo-analysis ever must exist, it exists already; it would never appear in the frame-work of a school, of an established association, or of a flow of pressure [courant de pression], because an analysis can be nothing but the conjunction of different local experiences, instances of taking charge, of taking desire into consideration, nothing if it's not about a teacher in his classroom, about a community, a psychotherapist in his practice, a group of [attendants] [soignants] who want to change bureaucratic relations[.] If there is, at one time or another, a connection [between] different practices concerning desire that [themselves] bring about a connection of a criticism of, for example , the bureaucratization of organizations, criticism of oppressive pedagogical relations, criticism of the subjective and alienating relations of psycho-therapeutic agreements; then at that point an analytical activity will be established, that will be at the crossroads of a whole series of political struggles. At the same time, schizo-analysis would be the result of groups, or of individuals who would be at once militants and analysts, that is to say, quite the opposite of those [people] who profit [tirer dans] from the legitimacy of co-optation by a pyschoanalytical association. Quite the opposite of people who would cut off the field of their private practice, or of their therapeutic practice, of signifying reading, from the field of revolutionary struggle. Schizo-analysis is everywhere that this question is asked, if it is ever asked.

GD: Having said that it's not at all about something that would be the basis for a group, in the sense of a school, In schizo-analysis, there are very general principles. In fact, it's a matter of very few principles. These principles are, for example, research on non-figurative intensities, non-oedipal unconscious, experimentation versus interpretation, oblivion versus anamnesis, suppression of the Id and of subjectivization. So the psychoanalyst would more likely say, "Come back to your ego", but we're saying: your ego, you haven't dissolved it enough. No neutrality. . .

FG: Politicization, enlistment [engagement ] of the patterns [types] that are in the very structure of analysis, where people are imprisoned, not some scientific status that is isolated, protected. . .

GD: Nobody competent.

RB: Which means that just anybody could be. . .

FG: Exactly.

GD: No, not just anybody. But everybody.

FG: Group-subjects

GD: In other words, to set up places. I think there's an essential point between schizo-analysis and psychoanalysis--in fact it's Freud's stroke of genius--namely, to discover the unconscious and to be the enemy of the unconscious; insofar as the unconscious is what one must reduce by means of analysis. Very well. For us, the problem is something entirely different. It's rather, under what condition can one produce unconscious? And there we see clearly the theoretical and practical difference between psychoanalysis and us. It's that, for us, the unconscious isn't there. Psychoanalysis is someone, is something that says that the unconscious is there, you're stuck with it, and I'm going to interpret it for you. We say: the unconscious isn't there, and I'm going to try and make it for you. The problem is: under what conditions someone whose unconscious is stifled by nature, curbed (not repressed, since that's just the hypothesis of that old fool), whose unconscious doesn't exist, under what conditions can this be a product of the unconscious [itself].
And one sees that all social instances, including psychoanalysis, are set up to deter the production of the unconscious. When Felix analyses precisely the said therapeutic instances of sectorization [sectorization], or of some other thing, one can see, on a concrete level, that practically everything is set up so that a guy who goes in to see a psychoanalyst, by the very nature of the set-up, won't have any chance to speak.
That is, he can speak, but he has no chance of making the slightest statement in what he says. Because it's immediately taken up into a machine where no matter what he says is stifled in advance. It's chattering [mouline] in such a system that he is screwed in advance. You can speak, my boy, in any case that won't change anything. We're waiting for you, we've got the grid, what you say means this, and you cry out in vain, you howl in vain--and that's why when Andre Green reproaches us for not considering the sufferings of the neurotic, I say: it's odd, because as for the sufferings of the neurotic, he cries out in vain on the couch, nothing happens.

FG: The system of schizo-analysis, this would consist of-- given a multiplicity, given a complex situation--a guy who comes to see you. Rather than of making this reduction which consists in throwing everything back onto a system of pre-established grids where the height of interpretation becomes that everything the guy says collides with the silence of the analyst[.] That's where you find the strongest interpretation, that's even where you find an intensity of high seduction since the silence of the analyst becomes, so to speak, the celestial music; it's the response to everything that can present itself, and it is this extremely seductive music, a kind of music of death. . .

RB: Of Nirvana. . .

FG: The death instinct, that's the silence of the analyst. Rather than that, given a multiplicity, a situation, a guy who comes, one could very well draw a connection such that his relation to desire would be of another nature; in other words, rather than introduce the problem: How do we get rid of the situation, relieve it, what have we got to reduce--with us it's: What have we got to complexify. Rather than reduce complexes, how might we render them more complex, by way of the real connection of real machines in order make sure that there be other workings [rouages] other branchings off.
I mean, what is the role of an analytic group or an analyst? It's to decode, it's to help put into words, to put into action, [au pied de l'acte, et non pas au pied de la lettre], what are the potentialities, the possibilities for connection. To register, to log down[reperer] that
certain things could be further experienced, that perhaps the analyst himself could plant the seed, can find workings, can intervene.
It's because it's a group that this will be better. A group can have the worst politics, familialist, suburban familial therapy. It has to conduct itself on certain, very broad grounds, of the like: no translation into phantasm, no interpretation.

RB: Concerning the permissiveness, do you imagine it to be total, in the sense that just anybody can produce himself in schizo-analysis?

GD: Total, since, as Felix has said so well, the difference is not dual versus group analysis; the difference lies entirely elsewhere. For example, the MLF [Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes] engages in heavy interpretation, crushing, abominable. What you have done means this--with respect to the phallus, to the mother-child--which is appalling. In response, one can conceive of a dual relation that would not be interpretative.

RB: Even a husband and wife or brother-sister relation.

GD: Much more than that, we think that brother-sister incest is a schizo-analytic escape completely different than all oedipal relations, one that is formidable [terrific?]–--that this [escape] can be turned into [versé dans] the Oedipus if the sister is the substitute for the mommy, and that this can open up phantastic things when there aren't any rules. The rule, it's on the level of an individual [d'un]: do I interpret or do I not interpret. Now, to not interpret--that's why these are not abstract systems--to begin to not interpret, this would imply a veritable ascesis, a phantastic discipline, a kind of yoga. . .

FG: A micro-politics of [a] permanent class.

GD: As soon as there is interpretation, there is death. Ah, you did this, why did you do this. I would say it's the complete opposite of liberty. The old opposition determinism/liberty, we're trying to transpose it as interpretation/ experimentation. And experimentation, this doesn't mean: I'm playing with [your head], that means I'm trying something out on you. Which is not at all a renewal with respect to my childhood; again, our duality does not run through childhood/adult, it's something else altogether. Who, then, is a schizo-analyst? Whoever with respect to whomever else.
On the condition that this doesn't happen by way of contract, as with the case of teaching. To make as many things as possible pass through an existing structure, while calling on what people are doing elsewhere; they weren't expecting us. In a corner, there's a bunch of guys who are making stuff up about schizo-analysis, that's obvious. We're the first to announce something that's going on-–-and who has not expected us––to know that things will no longer happen by reading Freud, by reading psychoanalysis, but will happen through experimentation. It's what the Americans have been doing for a long time through not-culture, and not through culture.

Bellour: Can children escape the Oedipus?

GD: It's at the same time that kids make their oedipal childhood memories and lead their non-oedipal childhood. There is no fatality to the system in which they're caught. What do they do, kids? They dream of bombs, they dream of firecrackers, and they dream of explosion, and that's not oedipal.

RB: They've got problems with their daddy , and that's oedipal.

GD: No, because they also fabricate their childhood memories at the same time. One must distinguish childhood blocks [blocs]–--in Felix's formulation-–-and childhood memories. Freud and the Freudians, and even dissidents of Freud, have always asked the question: Let's see, aren't there childhood memories that come after childhood and that are rejected. . .

FG: Memory-screens.

GD: It's completely about that.

FG: There's nothing but memory-screens!

GD: There's nothing but memory-screens that are fabricated in the very moment. So, when my son says to me: I want to make you blow up, daddy; or when my daughter sleeps in my bed, it's oedipal. The psychoanalysts are right. There is already some childhood memory in there. [My daughter] fabricates it at the same time. She is already in memory.

FG: She militates in Freudianism.

GD: It's for when she's 30, or 20. Ah, I slept in daddy's bed.

FG: She's preparing her future!

GD: But you shouldn't battle yourself in order to change that, you should do something else. Because in a community, this would be even worse. That's not what counts. [What counts] is to liberate childhood blocks as much as possible in opposition to childhood memories. And these childhood blocks, it's not that. It's like when my son says: I'm going to blow up Chaptal high school. He's talking about blowing up daddy too, since it's both at the same time; there too, there is still this mixture, this branching off into the social field, which the psychoanalysts completely ignore. When he says: I want to blow up Chaptal high school, he doesn't mean: I want to blow up daddy. And when Emilie sleeps in my bed, she doesn't mean: I want to make love with daddy. She means that too, she means other things as well. She means, I want something that belongs to me, I want to make my own life, etc.

RB: One shouldn't struggle against the one, but from there liberate the other. And to struggle completely against the one makes it resurge all the more.

GD: Actually, the problem isn't there. One shouldn't struggle against the one, the problem is that [if] it be in the family, in the community, in boarding school, in society, these same aspects will present themselves. The problem is that for each case--if it were possible to find the outlet--in this distinction childhood block/ childhood memory (I want to sleep with daddy). It's already part of childhood memory. I masturbate my dolly, that's childhood block. I want to blow up Chantal high school, that's childhood block. I want to put a bomb where daddy's sitting, that's a childhood memory. The family favors this, and does nothing thereby but to fill its social function, which is to divert all the child's political aggression. Since the child is [caught up] in the political from birth, politicized, as poor child or rich child, it is completely political-–-it is politico-sexed. While Freud said: The child is sexed but not political, we're saying: The child is politico-sexed, there is no sexuality without politics. And to be sexed is to live as rich and poor. That's the daughter of the boss, etc. The sexuality of a kid is not within the familial frame-work, it's the maid, the rich woman, the poor woman, etc., Whether the kid prefers the rich or the poor, that's it's affair, it's own thing, but schizo-analysis is done no matter where, no matter when, without agreement, that's what's important, without transfer.

That's all for today: down with interpretation, long live experimentation. Experimentation means: Let the flows through. Down with interpretation means: death to persons, to the whole personologic system, familialism, etc.

translated by: Brent Hayes Edwards
Robert Hardwick Weston

2008-03-17T22:42:00.002-04:00

“For the world to get better, people need to buy things that make it better.”
-thechangestrategy.com

Increasingly rapid and dynamic processing of material flows precipitated the emergence of a crisis of control in the nineteenth century that, for Beniger, found its inaugural gesture in the spectacular violence of the head-on collision. The persistent danger of early railroad transportation in America provided the threat of such violence, and with it, the dis-integration of human organisms trapped inside the dis-integrating body of the train-car. What the rising death tolls ultimately expressed was a failure in the organizational structure of railroad industries to coordinate and control the movement of humans and material goods at the speed of steam power, over increasingly vast expanses of land. Managing the rate and regularity of matter and energy distribution required the introduction of control technologies, just as it would for industries during the crises in production and consumption that followed. Developments in information processing, programming, and communication with feedback maintained order at all levels of the material economy, and thus served to maintain the counter-entropic direction of society as living system. According to Beniger, “all open systems, if they are to postpone for a time their inevitable heat death, must control the extraction and processing of matter, its internal distribution and storage, continuous conversion into energy, and elimination as by-product wastes.”[1]

The extent to which capitalism could function as a sustainable processing system was once again put into question over a century after the crisis in railroad transportation; and once again it arrived in the form of a catastrophic loss of human life. In 1984 the Bhopal disaster likewise constituted a failure of control—the dual imperatives of overproduction and cost reduction led Union Carbide not merely to ignore, but to exacerbate the continuing threat of technological and organizational malfunction. The release of methyl isocyanate from the Carbide facility and the resulting death of thousands while they slept, however, stimulated little in the way of revolution, control or otherwise. What is significant instead is the ease with which the historical event became incorporated into preexisting mechanisms of social control. From its largely symbolic passage through the legal system, to its representation and consumption as news-worthy catastrophe, Bhopal reflects at once an increasing friction between the capitalist world-economy and ecological integrity, and the efficacy of control technologies to adapt to growing public awareness by generating new markets for the production and consumption of “eco-friendly” goods.

Ecological disasters would thus appear to confront the existing system as perturbations, to be resolved according to the internal dynamics of that system. If, however, those dynamics are structurally incapable—if growth under the conditions of the capitalist world-economy is incompatible with the stability of human and non-human ecosystems—then there exists not merely a perturbation but a systemic crisis, defined by Wallerstein as the point at which difficulties “cannot be resolved within the framework of the system, but instead can be overcome only by going outside of and beyond the historical system of which the difficulties are a part.”[2] Despite continuing movement towards information processing, society remains fundamentally dependent on the extraction and processing of material resources to counter entropy within, necessarily “increasing entropy in the matter it consumes”[3] without. The rate of this consumption as determined by capitalism requires the sustained intervention of control technologies, and as the system attempts to resolve under its own terms an increasingly hostile position vis-à-vis living ecosystems, to quote Joel Kovel, it “raises the spectre of a world like a gigantic Potemkin village, where a green and orderly façade conceals and reassures, while accelerated breakdown takes place behind its walls.”[4]

1. James Beniger, The Control Revolution, 37.
2. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 76.
3. Beniger, 55.
4. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 24.

joggers, college kids: get on the inside track

2008-03-14T13:24:00.006-04:00

sell your chest space; identify with your class; be the cutting edge as you run through the park wearing your free gift!
note the entrepreneurial thread following Scott's post, particularly this tidbit:

"I was one of those people who thought they would never wear stuff with their employer's logo on it - but I have to admit slowly and surely, branded items have crept into all aspects of my desk, wardrobe, home, and even my car!! It's insidious because you really can't turn down a free, useful item, right?"

The signs of corporate culture have been thoroughly deterritorialized, launched into the ether of circulation (quantity of signs, or the a-signifiers of advertising language: apparently the ad can precede the company or even be it). The sacred is no longer what contaminates, the profane is contagious. Department store wardrobe administration is only the underdeveloped form of the "free gift" of the corporate tee--the total liberation of managerial life-style signification from the 9 to 5. Jogger-/ gym-wear is a particular site of this lifestyle camaraderie. 1983's "The Big Chill": Kevin Kline strikes an insider deal with William Hurt during the morning jog; upon returning home, Kline promptly orders Nike's for all his fellow class warriors "chilling" for the weekend. Forrest Gump articulates this baby-boomer tendency as well. Even his jog cannot resist the sign.

2008-03-14T00:01:00.002-04:00

The New York Times reported on March 11 that “if nature is left to is own devices, in about 7.59 billion years, the Earth will be dragged from its orbit by an engorged red sun and spiral to a rapid vaporous death”. Dr. Robert Connon Smith, after empirically decoding the algorithmic warning from the sun, responded that the admonishment was “a touch depressing, but looked at in another way it is an incentive to do something about finding ways to leave our planet and colonize other areas in the galaxy”.
Barely disparaged by the calendarization of the earth's entropic descent into the sun, Dr. Smith most patiently awaits the technological extension of our natural processing capabilities. There is, for Dr. Smith, no perceivable limit to this movement, the establishment and subsequent articulation of new space. That these spaces are created and not preexisting is of no question – pressures exerted by increasingly complex organizations of energy, matter and information open up new territories subject to new deployments of control. Internet Utopianism and manifest destiny, despite their radical differences, share a unified fervor for the physical possession of the frontier: interestingly enough, the most expensive piece of real estate in the United States, valued at 250 dollars per square foot, is a telco hotel in Los Angeles which functions as an information hub for distribution as well as servers for the for electronic storage of internet content.
Encompassing explanations of such a dynamic have been offered at multiple points in history across differing disciplines; these syntheses all employ the movement of a single force through time, whose movements articulate strata of organization: Bergson's elan vital scatters like a shell, manifesting itself through the material it passes through, Teilhard de Chardin's constantly generative radial energy centripetally sheds unexplained fuel for the otherwise impossible geo-, bio- , and noo- geneses, Bataille's concentrations of solar energy are transferred to “increasingly burdensome” modes of living, and Maturana and Varela's metabolism and structural coupling define the membrane of autopoietic unity from within and without. A superabundance of philosophies of superabundance. When conducted from the most general of viewpoints these genealogies and structural descriptions of of social forms tend to take recourse to counter-entropic fantasies of Maxwell's demon.
Beniger revisits the vitalist tradition and recoups the possibility of accounting for the eventual emergence of capitalism from cellular chemistry through an analysis of teleonomic control. Life processes and their social extensions are arranged into levels of control – each new articulation of control encompasses greater terrain (both geographic and social), develops for it self more sophisticated and channelized information storage and retrieval systems (which themselves constitute new real estate), and has a greater capability recurse upon and reprogram previous modes of control. Recursion of technological programming onto bureaucratic, behavioral, and genetic programs can even be located in one sector, the pharmaceutical industry for example.
Because bureaucratic and technological programs are to some extent determined by teleological operations, the generational extent of bureaucratic and technological systems upon their programatic descions. Unresponsive bureaucracies and technologies in the midst of a crises of control are adaptable – they may be manually reprogrammed, and passage of program from one system to another need not destroy its parent program (as in the fusing of ovum and sperm). The unity of non-biological open programs need not be compromised in their proliferation – capital's genetic code, comprised of dead labor, most closely resembles that of the non-biotic bacteriophage which inserts its code into the cellular organism and hijacks its mode of production. Because the genetics of capital are essentially modular, each component bearing the same essential information, its method of movement is insertion into interstitial time and free space. Paradoxically, it must first opportunistically create these spaces. they appeal to us not as inserted coded information but as an integral part of vital sociality: in the form of advertisements, the institutions of holidays, and the do-it-yourself spirit which can become a decontexualized reenactment of capitalistic production. That Capitalism is an ever consolidating and totalizing system should aid in locating it, but it appears only as viral insertion, in the altered modes of production in pre-existing systems. Metaphors describing the active features of capital proliferate as its activities do; Marx's turned up wooden table turning out thought as it itself was wood-turned. Miraculation suggests another possible formulation of the illusory spatiality of capital: “As Marx observes, in the beginning capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labor, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasing plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on all of production”. [1] Miraculating capital (as opposed to capital as phage) brings into relief another facet of its ability to reprogram other open programs; the recording surface claims ownership of surplus production and appears to be the substratum of the agents of production. Capital, long understood as governing the maintenance of the metabolism and membrane of geopolitical masses can be held accountable for the creation and cartography of imagined space as well.

Postscript:
A 'pataphysics of communications infrastructure elucidates the integration of higher levels of control + the reprogramming of the gift:

One of the superstitions of Man is to throw the written expression of his warmth and affection into ad hoc orifices, resembling gully-holes, in order to converse with his near relations when they are far away, after having charitably encouraged the sale of tobacco – nonetheless deadly – and acquired in return some small pictures, probably consecrated, whose backsides they lick devoutly. This is not the place to criticise the incoherence of these manoeuvres for, undeniably, long-distance communication is made possible by their means. [3]
-Alfred Jarry, The New Stamps

The letter's entry into a channelized communications infrastructure radiates outward as an economized form of ritual social exchange; the cost of the new stamps and other “purely social transactions are not charged against their immediate material beneficiaries” [2], but dissipates as festive expenditure in the name of institutionalized social relations. Infrastructures of the state (and privatized communications firms granted tax breaks for their services to the public) miraculate long distance sociality, the letter writer during the purchase of stamps becomes consumer of his own words.

1. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 11.
2. James Beniger, The Control Revolution, 99.
3. Alfred Jarry, Adventures in 'Pataphysics

Dilberito

2008-03-13T05:04:00.014-04:00

From Business Week’s Top Products of 2000:
“Scott Adams, the famed Dilbert cartoonist, pined for a convenient vegetarian meal. The result: the Dilberito, a tasty $2.70 meatless burrito fortified with 23 vitamins and minerals.”

The Dilberito is currently out-of-production; however, as a commodity depicts the essential attributes of the post-Fordist imformation economy and its tendency towards mediocrity in both the products of labor and labor itself. With the mantra “We Make it Easy to Eat,” Scott Adams Food, Inc. condenses the gastronomy, convenience, and economy (the would-be price in 2008, adjusted to inflation, is $3.31) into one object, eliminating the need for contemplation and decision. At the same time it demonstrates modernity’s greater tendency toward integration and rapidization of life. In addition to conforming to ‘vegan’ dietary guidelines, the Dilberito also manages to engage a cross-continental and cosmopolitan culinary discourse as it is offered in Mexican, Indian, Barbeque, and Garlic & Herb varieties. It is perfect for the on-the-go intellectual laborer. In a similar fashion of biometric engineering that brought about Frederick Winslow Taylor's 21-pound shovel, its familiar ‘hand held’ size makes it tactilely uniform to other monodigital accessories of the page-a-day laborer: the iPod, cell (i)phone, pager, the mouse, the Palm Pilot, and, during free-time the universal remote control.

When Anson Rabinbach writes on the personal productivity of the worker he subjects nutrition to his historical analysis of how the flow of energy was most effectively harnessed to produce surplus-value. As a “subjective aspect of labor power,” diet and nutrition contribute to a general “lessening of fatigue and the improvement of the social milieu in which the work was accomplished.” (Rabinbach 217) As labor became increasingly rationalized during the 19th century, during which also occured the rise of bureaucracy and the bureaucratic class, the energetic intake of the worker (measured in calories) became important in determining how energy moved through various inputs to produce desired outputs. In this period of heightened attention to the measurability of the worker, calories meant more than the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C; caloric intake by the laboring body became just another factor in the equation that translated quantities of energy into Capital.

In the late 19th century physiologist Armand Gautier believe that he could determine “the minimum number of calories necessary to power a worker or soldier at different tasks.” (Rabinbach 130) The Dilberito expresses the success of this project; as an object of potential nutritional it is designed to provide the precise amount of energetic stimulation to drive a non-laboring (non-manual) labor army. The replacing of meat protein with synthetically derived '23 vitamins and minerals' provides the bare means-of-subsistence for the paper pushing intellectual while at the same time illustrating. As a source of caloric energy and ‘nutrition’ it can be put in terms of the reproduction of the worker, the maintenance of the means of production, and therefore as a means of relative surplus-value extraction.

The $3.31 does not stop here— the Dilberito’s capacity to exponentially increase surplus value extraction operates on an absolute level as well. If we are to take Adorno and Horkheimer seriously and believe that the worker always works two jobs—that of both producer and consumer—we find that the Dilberito has an ideological function to facilitate the extraction of surplus-value absolutely. Aside from assimilating the nutrients embedded in the formal properties of the food, the consumer assimilates himself qua-worker via the Dilberito as self-reflective cultural object. Thus, in addition to consuming caloric energy, the Dilberarian is reifeing their own non-class-consciousness and producing themselves during consumptive time while consuming himself during productive time. The spheres of production and consumption overlap in such a way that they collapse the temporal distinction that Adorno and Horkheimer posit. The energy supplied by the Dilberito that allows the managerial-class to carry on in a dreamlike daze throughout the workday proper permits the same continuous participation in cultural products on both company-time and free-time.

Despite its orientation towards efficiency and rationality it does not eliminate food’s quality of pleasure and enjoyment. When asked “Why Dilberito?,” Adams responded and at the same time gave a lucid ethical truth: “I knew that we could do something to make the world a better place, and make some money in the process. It's called enlightened capitalism.”

He [Adams] did not know to what extent he was right.

[WORK IN PROGRESS, LEAVE SUGGESTIONS ]

2008-03-11T01:27:00.001-04:00

“The economic world does not stand still. One change precipitates another. There is always an opportunity for a strong nation to mix in. Here, too, the slogan “Carpe diem” is to be applied.”
-Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen.

The problem is to think of capital as a dynamic system without recourse to analogical interpretations of capital-as-organism. However, the movements of biological systems seem to inhere to capital’s reproduction and reprogramming of itself both spatially and historically. We should therefore be engaging the relation between capital and its environment and interrogate capital as a “total [global] system” capable of distributing, processing and organizing “liquid”/material flows. Without biologizing capital, we should treat it as an extension of life, or a reflection upon it. Capitalism is the perceived technology deemed necessary for survival within its own totalizing systematicity.

Beniger (1986, 106-9) defines “life” in terms of organization, metabolism and growth, responsiveness, adaptability, reproduction and evolution. The earliest organisms were (and in many cases are) resultant of a solar “energy bombardment” that continually produce(d) new, diverse arrangements of molecules. These organisms arranged themselves and entered into subsequent relations with one another through the management of solar energy. Being that each of these “new” organisms constitute autopoietic unities, they, by definition, are programmed for reproduction: the processing and control of solar energy is subordinated to the organism’s program, which lends itself teleonomically toward preservation and reproduction. In other words, the system’s metabolism (itself programmatically oriented) synthesizes energy and inorganic material to “fuel” the system in reproduction and sustenance. Viewing capitalism as a “processing system” (Beniger, 32-3), we see a parallel self-sustenance to that of the organism: the processing of material, information and energy flows is caught up in the teleonomic movement of preservation and reproduction. The metabolizing phenomenon of living systems is clearly at hand in the capitalistic appropriation of various energies (biospheric, libidinal) for these counter-entropic purposes. However, it seems necessary, as Maturana and Varela (1987, 59-60) do in relation to biological systems, to distinguish between two types of reproduction—replication and copying—and project the appropriate back onto capital.

It would seem that the “homogenizing” tendency of capital is that of pure replication: the cropping up of identical systematic unities in diverse territories. However, the replicated unity, as they point out, is “operationally different” (ibid.) from the program that produced it and therefore exists outside the lineage of the producer, outside its network of communication and reciprocity. It must be said then that in reproduction, capital copies itself, or copies its model which is continually adapting, evolving, and rearranging its elements relation to the environment. The heightened procession of this movement into the realm of information, media and medicine has meant the implosion/convergence of capital and its model: “All energy, all events are absorbed by this concentric gravitation, everything condenses and implodes toward the only micromodel of control…as conversely, in the other, biological dimension, everything converges and implodes on the micromodel of the genetic code” (Baudrillard 1994, 35). In this sense the evolution of capital is not synonymous with its geographical expansion; its basis of operation and control has evolved from (yet still encompasses) the macro-level of the nation-state (the metropole and the periphery) to the micro-level of genetics, atmospherics (Muzak, allergy medication, the airport, the mall) and molecular electronics. Just as DNA is the integrating component that provides the communicative link between the differentiated parts of multicellular organisms, the micromodel of control provides the means for organizing production beyond the factory.

The generational (meant in the historical sense but again in the spatial sense as well) copying of the capitalist system can be described via the nature of “reproductive fracture” which allows for variation in the structure of a system while preserving the organization of the original (Maturana and Varela, 61-2). The molecular composition of capital “admit[s] many planes of fracture” (ibid.), meaning that it can rearrange, displace or de-emphasize any of its components to affectively adapt to new terrain while still maintaining its relation as part of a larger (metacellular, or metasystematic) unity. Thus, the total systemic unity of capital is made of parts with “no separation between the reproducing system and the reproduced system” (ibid. 63).

Mercantile capitalism and modern colonial ventures embody reproductive fracture and the simultaneous establishment of integrated circuitry between the parts and unity of an expanding system. Expansion and integration draw upon two facets or “analytic dimensions” of living systems: the static dimension of organization, which is preserved in the reproduced, and a dynamic metabolism, which allows the reproduced system to creatively adapt, process and appropriate environmental phenomena that differs from that processed by the original system (Beniger, 110). Reproductive fracture accounts for the ease with which new parts (or subsystems) interact with its predecessor; capital’s “genome” is the “operational instructions” that are given in reproduction. Distribution via roads, railways and air is wholly dependent upon the consistency of operational instructions throughout the network of subsystems. Greenwich Mean Time provides a system-wide reference point around which the distribution of goods and the global workday revolve. But the clock does more than merely measure homogenous units of time: it functions as a “social machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 141-2) that intervenes in the continuous flow of events to produce functionally differentiated times of day. Work, leisure, dinnertime, Miller Time, iPod time, “me-time,” etc…these vintage temporal institutions would lack distinction without the social implications of universal time. The various global monetary equivalents (the pound, the dollar, etc.) also provide for the efficient movement of capital regardless of the nation-state –a sight of possible friction to be circumnavigated.

The notion of production as advanced universally by capitalism draws on both the consistency of a specific organization that can respond to friction generated by incompatible phenomena while still processing environmental variants in order to adapt. In terms of production we see that capital (or a facet thereof) can reproduce itself as agent of control on the level of materiality and of desire. Preserving homeostasis and regulating flows requires a metabolism of desire and industry in relation to system-wide considerations—there is “productions of production” at a multiplicity of levels (ibid.). Production as a particular program of control—as a teleonomic activity with specifications for excreting “product”—is a kind of indissoluble mechanism with an infinitude of applications. Programmatized production, however, would not be a universal technique of capital if it did not metabolize environmental perturbations, or mediate itself in relation to the terrain of the market, the libido, the ontological orientation of a society or class, etc. Fracture upon fracture, this is how capital molecularizes itself.

Here a distinction appears between the evolution of living systems and that of the capitalist system, but the difference is presently unclear. For the living system, cellular compartmentalization and the integration of micro-phenomena such as neuronal structures and genetic code is the base from which biological expansion, diversification and complexification proceeds. On the one hand, capital proceeds negatively in relation to this biological model particularly in its dissolution into the micromodel and hyper compartmentalization, which appear to embody an evolutionary ascendency to the molecular (as opposed to proceeding from it). On the other, we see the movement of decomplexification (Luhmann 1984, 26-8) that concretizes the total system, eliminating extraneous components and coordinating subsystems (i.e. systems of production in the Global South) to a universal, translatable standard. A working answer (without actually drawing the above distinction) could be that the tension between a molecular-based program of control and the system-wide directive of decomplexification is a necessary one. Molecular micro-management of everyday life—i.e. its fragmentation—is the means by which disparate subsystems (for the subject is a type of systemic machine inscribed within processes) can be integrated into a system with increasingly less friction and less complexity.

Neologistics

2008-03-11T00:46:00.008-04:00

Conceiving of etymology as an evolutionary science it may be possible to determine how a system of signification demonstrates principles of adaptation and differentiation that are in many ways analogous to those seen in living systems. In developing the idea of reflective consciousness Matturana and Varela posit that “language enables those who operate in it to describe themselves and their circumstances through the linguistic distinction of linguistic distinctions.”[1] The evolution of a mode of description, its variations, and its internal dynamics, reveal much about the circumstances it is describing and moreover about the historical phenomenon resulting from the structural coupling between autonomous systems. However this system that describes and creates meaning is, much like the nervous system, neither representational nor solipsistic. It is structurally determined by its own internal configuration and dynamics but also interacts with other systems in such a way that certain adaptational requirements are triggered from within. Indeed, these variations are preserved in the semantic drift and “meaning becomes part of our domain of conservation of adaptation.”[2] Etymology concerns itself with meaning’s fossil record and discerning how the distinctions made by the linguistic domain change over time.

In The Control Revolution, James Beniger subjects the evolution of information technology in the late 19th and 20th centuries to his analytic model that shows systems responding to ‘crises of control’ by asserting a more rigorous control over energy and information. Addressing language as means of description demanded by new forms of control technology, Beniger somewhat fails to account for the technology of signification systems to assimilate new phenomena into an existing épistémè. Nonetheless, in his study of information technology Beniger asserts that “the crucial aspect of a definition is exposed by etymology.”[3] Etymology does not provide a mere genealogy of words and the history of their circulation, dissemination and use. It also presents us with more complex image of the dynamics and exchanges of energy (information) that results from the structural coupling of systems. This correspondence between the linguistic domain and the domain of actions is of primary concern to Matturana and Varela: “the linguistic domain becomes part of the environment in which linguistic coordination’s of actions take place.”[4]

Although Beniger excludes “those capabilities that occur naturally in living systems” from his treatment of control technology, he points to language as an exception given that it purposively “defines the limits on what a society can do” by setting the parameters of what can be said or otherwise located within a linguistic domain of meaning.[5] While industrial technologies may indicate an historical expansion of societies capabilities, it is the linguistic system that provides the ‘knowing how we know’—the reflection upon historical phenomena—that Matturana and Varela see as quintessential to the self-reflexive cognitive act. Beniger captures the “co-ontogenic structural drift” that “occurs as the members of a social system live together,” but he never critically apprehends the linguistic domain as its own form of control technology the co-evolves with other systems be them technological, economic, or social.

Neologisms, literally ‘new words,’ exemplify how the informatics of control technology can react to environmental perturbations triggering variations in the evolution of a system of signification. The semantic drift occurring in the phylogenetic evolution of a language over time demonstrates languages capacity for “continual readjustment to environmental variation and change over successive generations.”[6] This response to various crises fits into Benigers model of ‘crisis of control’; that is, when there is a disjuncture between material conditions and the second order system that accounts for these systems (social, technological, etc.) with reference to its own evolutionary dynamics and organization. The necessity of such a tendency in evolutionary drift—the for new modes of reflexivity—is provided for by the condition that “each new technological innovation extends the processes that sustain life, thereby increasing the need for control and hence for improved control technology.”[7] A similar pattern is easily recognizable in the continual delineations taking place in linguistic domains; the observers “linguistic distinctions of linguistic distinctions” that reflects a tendency of complexification and differentiation within the circumstances it is describing. As technological forms diversify and increase in complexity the need for language as control technology demands greater differentiation within the linguistic domain.

This need for control correlates to a more general imperative of control that demands counter-entropic responses to movements towards disorder. The word entropy as we are to understand it first appeared in 1868 in Peter G. Tait’s Sketch Thermodynamics wherein he revised and reversed German physicists Clausius’ earlier conception of the term; however, the concept does not limit itself to its original application of studying the tendencies of molecular energy in closed systems. As Beniger demonstrates, information processing as a historical phenomenon is closely related to energy processing and the control of information corresponds to “the synthesis of matter and energy into more organized forms…the organization and support of these processes in well-integrated systems.”[8] If entropy is to be conceived of as the energy in a system that is lost to increasing disorder, its application for information systems seems to be that entropy indicates a failure of information to account for the increasing complexity in the dynamics of historical phenomena. Beniger cites Ludwig Boltzmann’s idea that “entropy is related to ‘missing information’,” conceptually linking the organization of organic and meta-discursive unities.[9] A word that is more precise or more specifically captures the idea of its corresponding material reality is a stronger and more adaptogenic form of control technology. On the contrary a word that leaves more mystery about its correspondence to historical phenomena will ultimately prove insufficient to control the crisis of complexification. Whether avoiding heat death, the Big Chill, or the destabilization of linguistic signification, control technologies are all purposively organized counter to entropic movement and helps narrow the distance that maintains the distinction between living and non-living systems.
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1. Humberto Matturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, 210.
2. Matturana and Varela, 211.
3. James Beniger, The Control Revolution, 48.
4. Matturana and Varela, 211.
5. Beniger, 9.
6. Beniger, 108-109.
7. Beniger, 10.
8. Beniger, 38.
9. Beniger, 47.