N
nomadologist
Guest
I think his horrible gabba music went to his head. Poor Vim.
Sigh. It's a faulty analogy. It doesn't apply here.
Seriously people, read Vimothy's blog (if you can keep from hurling), and then check out his myspace. It's the most schizoid vascillation between two completely diametric personalities and ideologies, I have to wonder whether this is all some kind of elaborate prank.
I think his horrible gabba music went to his head. Poor Vim.
Check out Vimothy's Myspace: he lists Deleuze and Bataille as "influences."
Burroughs, too. But any mention of heroin addiction by me is strictly off limits!!
Earth to Vimothy: Bataille, Burroughs, and Deleuze were all radically anti-capitalist.
you're a retard, Vimothy. I think maybe literally.
All this interest is extremely gratifying, Nomadologist:
And it's fairly easy to read a pro-capitalist D&G, surely. (Right)? That's one of the things that pisses people off about them (and their so-called "vitalism").
In any case, to quote Whitman:
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
In 1980, William S. Burroughs delivered a speech at the Planet Earth Conference at the Institute of Ecotechnics in Aix-en-Provence titled ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’.1 In this speech, Burroughs, following religious tradition, says that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are Famine, Plague, War, and Death and moves on to prophesise a more contemporaneous apocalypse. In Burroughs’ apocalypse, War and Plague, for example, have become allies; this alliance, Burroughs announces, ‘was cemented with the first germ experiments’ (Burroughs, 1984, p. 12). The danger of these experiments lies in their ability to not only create new viruses but to also turn them into biological weapons. But for Burroughs there is a significant similarity between a twentieth-century-specific apocalypse, with its radiation and contamina...
What about the CCRU?
If they've posted any anti-D&G articles, so be it--it's most likely because they're trying to advance some sort of Baudrillardian agenda no doubt.
I highly doubt this, however, because I've read k-punk's blog extensively, and he is an intelligent and well-versed person. Check the thread on the BwO for k-punk's own take on Deleuzian resistance to capitalism.
http://www.akpress.org/2002/items/hatredofcapitalism
Hatred Of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader
Paul Virilio (Contributor), Gilles Deleuze (Contributor), Felix Guattari (Contributor), Michel Foucault (Contributor), Michelle Tea (Contributor), Assata Shakur (Contributor), Georges Bataille (Contributor), William S. Burroughs (Contributor), Jean Baudrillard (Contributor), Sylvere Lotringer (Editor), and Chris Kraus (Editor)
From Simon Reynolds Ccru interview, posted on K-Punk's blog:
“Cyberpositive” was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land. First aired at the 1992 drug culture symposium Pharmakon, “Cyberpositive” was a gauntlet thrown down at the Left-wing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term “cyberpositive” was a twist on Norbert Wierner's ideas of “negative feedback” (homeostasis), and “positive feedback” (runaway tendencies, vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener valorized “negative feedback,” Plant/Land re-positivized positive feedback—specifically the tendency of market forces to generate disorder and destabilize control structures.
“It was pretty obvious that a theoretically Left-leaning critique could be maintained quite happily but it wasn't ever going to get anywhere,” says Plant. “If there was going to be scope for any kind of....not ‘resistance,’ but any kind of discrepancy in the global consensus, then it was going to have to come from somewhere else.” As well as Deleuze & Guattari, another crucial influences were neo-Deleuzian theorist Manuel De Landa's idea of “capitalism as the system of antimarkets.” Plant and the CCRU enthuse about bottom-up, grass-roots, self-organizing activity: street markets, “the frontier zones of capitalism,” what De Landa calls “meshwork,” as opposed to corporate, top-down capitalism. It all sounds quite jovial, the way CCRU describe it now—a bustling bazaar culture of trade and “cutting deals.” But “Cyberpositive” actually reads like a nihilistic paean to the “cyberpathology of markets,” celebrating capitalism as “a viral contagion” and declaring “everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind.” In Nick Land’s essays like “Machinic Desire” and “Meltdown,” the tone of morbid glee is intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse and literally anti-humanist identification with the “dark will” of capital and technology, as it “rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities.”
This gloating delight in capital's deterritorializing virulence is the CCRU’s reaction to the stuffy complacency of Left-wing academic thought. “There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely scleroticised, institutionalized thought,” says CCRU's Mark Fisher. “It's obvious that capitalism isn’t going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!” Exulting in capitalism's permanent “crisis mode,” CCRU believe in the strategic application of pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos.
*sighs*
This is possibly the most teenage argument I have had on this board.
I have studied this stuff extensively, as has HMLT and several others here. I'm sure they will be glad to clear things up for you eventually.
The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths . . . the elements of his dwelling are concretized in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them . . . Whereas the migrant leaves behind a [hostile] milieu, the nomad is one who does not depart, [nor wants to] depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest . . . the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving . . . [and] knows how to wait [with] infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catatonia and rush, a “stationary process” [are nomadic] . . . He is a vector of deterritorialization . . . [adding] desert to desert. . . It is a vital concern of every State . . .to vanquish nomadism [because] . . . each time there is an operation against the State – subordination, rioting, guerilla warfare or revolution as act – it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 50-60)