Worth dying for

[gek-opel]

So if most theoretical systems can be effectively incorporated (albeit hollowed out, emptied of normative content and utilised as skeletal conceptual technology) by capitalism, this above all else must influence the design of such concepts (ie- their incorporation and perversion is to be assumed and expressly utilised as the very system by which they can effectively operate on Capitalism itself... rather than critique or whatever... ideas as IEDs... the notion of critique replaced by the model of ideological terrorism)

 

[nomadologist]

Bingo.

 

[gek-opel]

I have no idea how you would create a good enough model for all the potential ways Capital can abuse ideas though in order to make this a workable proposition... (ie you basically have to retro-fit the conceptual technology to take into account the likely abuses... which appears to involve way too much contingency to be effective.) Hmm perhaps some historical studies might be useful tho...

 

[nomadologist]

On a pragmatic level, I think it's misguided to throw out a good idea simply because it can be twisted by the enemy. This is why the war machine is so important.

 

[vimothy]

Well, this is an interesting thread.

Regarding "the discussion of Vimothy's childish, infantile, and quite sad misreading of the Left's established canon":

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.

Oh good.

HMLT:

The insight to be drawn from all of this twisted gibberish is not, of course, the nonsensical allegation of Deleuze and Guattari as 'theorists' of a Zionist-militaristic colonialism - but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being ruggedly "subversive" or impervious to logistical sanitization, can also be 'adapted' to such warped pragmatism, to the military, social, economic, and ideologico-political operational mode of late capitalism.

Gek:

Uh yeah Nick Land has taken a turn for the neo-con it would seem... my friend was telling me about a piece of his (which probably is online) against what Land terms "Transcendental Miserablism" (ie moaning about capitalism)... and his response to it (err "Everything is great- shut the fuck up" apparently) He also is obsessed with Qabbalistic numerology (which I haven't a fucking clue about). And he's ex CCRU so obviously Deleuzian... Lets just say I like his perversity and oppositional status, but I'm not especially sure how productive it is....

 

[gek-opel]

Hey Vim Re:Land/"Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" I did revise my position upon re-reading it... It has a lot of exciting and useful points to make, with some obvious flaws...

 

[vimothy]

@Gek:

Surely you're deliberately misreading Land in overly simplistic terms. He isn't prescribing behaviour in his critique of the modern left, but rather tracing its development from a posited alternative and superior mode of economic production, to a self-contradictory song of "cosmic despair":

Who still remembers Khruschev’s threat to the semi-capitalist West – “we’ll bury you.” Or Mao’s promise that the Great Leap Forward would ensure the Chinese economy leapt past that of the UK within 15 years? The Frankfurtian spirit now rules: Admit that capitalism will outperform its competitors under almost any imaginable circumstances, while turning that very admission into a new kind of curse (“we never wanted growth anyway, it just spells alienation, besides, haven’t you heard that the polar bears are drowning …?”).​

Money-shot:

“Go for growth” now means “Go (hard) for capitalism.” It is increasingly hard to remember that this equation would once have seemed controversial. On the left it would once have been dismissed as risible. This is the new world Transcendental Miserablism haunts as a dyspeptic ghost.​

Brilliant essay.

 

[vimothy]

Hey Vim Re:Land/"Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" I did revise my position upon re-reading it... It has a lot of exciting and useful points to make, with some obvious flaws...

Could we talk a bit about what you mean by "Capital" when you use it upthread?

 

[gek-opel]

I get what he's doing Vim. I'm trying to see what I can drag out of it that might be useful tho (obviously Transc Miserablism is a bleak dead end and most be broken free from). The left is utterly defeated and sits in an elephants graveyard weeping over the bones of its Utopian promise unfulfilled. But time is just as equally out of joint within the fair ship Capital...

 

[gek-opel]

Could we talk a bit about what you mean by "Capital" when you use it upthread?

I'd love to but I have serious amounts of work to get done this afternoon... later perhaps...

 

[vimothy]

This was the passage I was thinking of:

This is cos both he AND the positions he criticises fail to effectively differentiate the fact that Capital shifts through eras, each bringing their own inimitable costs and benefits, and changing regimes of political organisation, changing flows of productive energy. Whats interesting to me is how THIS Capital of now has given rise to effects quite distinct from those of 40 years ago, and how we can intervene to change those effects.

What do you mean here when you capitalise "Capital" - capital as an "epistemological" marker or sink of some sort?

EDIT: Not epistomological, episteme-ic perhaps, in the Foucauldian sense - somehow characterising, representing, embodying or affecting aspects of an episteme / aeon or epistomological order...

How is "Capital" now different to C/capital in the 1960s? Is this a technical, financial difference, in your opinion, or more metaphysical? Ever read any Howard Bloom?

 

[mistersloane]

Maybe we could have a discussion thread about them after we read them? I would be down for that, as long as I don't get distracted by less important things like my midterms.

yeah that'd be fun. I may get distracted by more imprtant things like drugs though.

 

[trouc]

A couple thoughts,

1, theories are not subversive, only actions can be so. The IDF isn't misappropriating D&G, it's a tool like any other. To riff on Massumi, a tool's what you do with it, not what it was meant to do. I actually think the two of them might admire this. At any rate, you're not going to theorize your way out of capitalism.

2, a strict constructionist reading of D&G just strikes me as an off the wall chunk of insanity, not least because I'd judge them guilty of providing more diagnoses than prescriptions. I read both MP & AO as extremely pessimistic books.

3, it's off base to read D&G as against capitalism anyway. It seems more appropriate to see them as anti-capitalist and anti-corporatist

 

[gek-opel]

Mistersloane/Nomadologist- yeh im up for this... which ones did you guys get in the end by the way...? (the new issue on Deleuze is being delivered to me as we speak...)

Vim: (quickly as these midterms aren't going to write themselves)... yeah something along those lines though more orientated in the other direction (ie ontological primacy given above all to Capital/ism), the forms of relation and exchange bringing with it shifts in the episteme/cultural shifts etc etc... the technical differences (ie how finance is organized, yes but probably lots of other stuff I haven't even begun to think about yet) and how they impact on everything else... how they end up shifting and manipulating man/time/everything considered "natural"... and most importantly HOW these interact, exactly how the effects are transmitted into culture more generally.

Also obviously it isn't a block, a monolith... it would be better to talk of Capitalisms... different regimes occurring at the same time, an ecosystem of Capitals...

And yeah metaphysically the impact can definitely be felt in terms of post modernity (ie- the logic of late Capital)... But differentiating different eras enables one to identify why certain good, productive, innovative aspects decline across time, others replacing them. In this way culture can be used to trace the shapes of Capital as it mutates...

 

[vimothy]

@trouc:

Fully agree with 1 & 2. Point 3 is probably irrelevant to me, even if accurate - I think it runs straight into point 1. Whatever D&G intended, Zizek, Land and the IDF are beyond their control, as are all their other readers.

 

[gek-opel]

theories are not subversive, only actions can be so. The IDF isn't misappropriating D&G, it's a tool like any other. To riff on Massumi, a tool's what you do with it, not what it was meant to do. I actually think the two of them might admire this. At any rate, you're not going to theorize your way out of capitalism.

Spot on. Didn't D+G devise their ideas as a "conceptual toolbox" anyway?

 

[mistersloane]

Mistersloane/Nomadologist- yeh im up for this... which ones did you guys get in the end by the way...? (the new issue on Deleuze is being delivered to me as we speak...)

I lumped em 30 quid which covers up to three and four if they do one, if not hey ho. I'm flush this month.

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

theories are not subversive, only actions can be so. The IDF isn't misappropriating D&G, it's a tool like any other. To riff on Massumi, a tool's what you do with it, not what it was meant to do. I actually think the two of them might admire this. At any rate, you're not going to theorize your way out of capitalism.

Spot on. Didn't D+G devise their ideas as a "conceptual toolbox" anyway?

Isn't this somewhat deeply flawed reasoning? Next someone will be arguing that if D&G had been writing in the 1930s, they might have admired how Nazi architects and engineers 'applied' their conceptual schemas to the design, construction, and operation of the concentration camps and gas chambers [or alternatively having Einstein admiring Nagasaki and Hiroshima].

Theories can indeed be subversive (unless you haven't actually read Marx), language itself can be extremely subversive, but this can never be enough - The philosophers have only interpreted the world, etc, and what a very important 'etc' that is ...

[When you peel back Land's deep accretions of scrambled jargon in that Miserabilism article, what emerges is both a ridiculously simplistic, nay, naive, understanding of Capital and yet another strawman (his mis-reading of an imagined K-punk).]

EDIT:

Fully agree with 1 & 2. Point 3 is probably irrelevant to me, even if accurate - I think it runs straight into point 1. Whatever D&G intended, Zizek, Land and the IDF are beyond their control, as are all their other readers.

Here we go again [the real intent of your tired ravings] ... D&G's anti-capitalism is now in question because Land is now a right-wing looney and the IDF are supposedly 'using' their ideas. Yeah, and Nietzsche was a Nazi ...

And the IDF, fortunately, are far from being beyond our control, numbnut.

 

[dHarry]

Anyone read Delanda on Braudel's theory that "Capitalism" as a term should be abandoned as it fails to take account of its top-down control of "free" markets (He's also a D&G fan, so the antimarket/market idea is roughly analogous to striated/smooth space, arborescent/rhizomatic etc.)? Interesting and germane to the both Vimothy and the lefties around here:

In this discipline, we tend to uncritically assume systematicity, as when one talks of the "capitalist system", instead of showing exactly how such systematic properties of the whole emerge from concrete historical processes. Worse yet, we then tend to reify such unaccounted-for systematicity, ascribing all kinds of causal powers to capitalism, to the extent that a clever writer can make it seem as if anything at all (from nonlinear dynamics itself to postmodernism or cyberculture) is the product of late capitalism. This basic mistake, which is, I believe, a major obstacle to a correct understanding of the nature of economic power, is partly the result of the purely top-down, analytical style that has dominated economic modeling from the eighteenth century. Both macroeconomics, which begins at the top with concepts like gross national product, as well as microeconomics, in which a system of preferences guides individual choice, are purely analytical in approach. Neither the properties of a national economy nor the ranked preferences of consumers are shown to emerge from historical dynamics. Marxism, is true, added to these models intermediate scale phenomena, like class struggle, and with it conflictive dynamics. But the specific way in which it introduced conflict, via the labor theory of value, has now been shown by Shraffa to be redundant, added from the top, so to speak, and not emerging from the bottom, from real struggles over wages, or the length of the working day, or for control over the production process. [4]

Besides a switch to a synthetic approach, as it is happening, for instance, in the evolutionary economics of Nelson and Winter in which the emphasis is on populations of organizations interacting nonlinearly, what we need here is a return to the actual details of economic history. Much has been learned in recent decades about these details, thanks to the work of materialist historians like Fernand Braudel, and it is to this historical data that we must turn to know what we need to model synthetically. Nowhere is this need for real history more evident that in the subject of the dynamics of economic power, defined as the capability to manipulate the prices of inputs and outputs of the production process as well as their supply and demand. In a peasant market, or even in a small town local market, everybody involved is a price taker: one shows up with merchandise, and sells it at the going prices which reflect demand and supply. But monopolies and oligopolies are price setters: the prices of their products need not reflect demand/supply dynamics, but rather their own power to control a given market share. [5]

When approaching the subject of economic power, one can safely ignore the entire field of linear mathematical economics (so-called competitive equilibrium economics), since there monopolies and oligopolies are basically ignored. Yet, even those thinkers who make economic power the center of their models, introduce it in a way that ignores historical facts. Authors writing in the Marxist tradition, place real history in a straight-jacket by subordinating it to a model of a progressive succession of modes of production. Capitalism itself is seen as maturing through a series of stages, the latest one of which is the monopolistic stage in this century. Even non-Marxists economists like Galbraith, agree that capitalism began as a competitive pursuit and stayed that way till the end of the nineteenth century, and only then it reached the monopolistic stage, at which point a planning system replaced market dynamics.

However, Fernand Braudel has recently shown, with a wealth of historical data, that this picture is inherently wrong. Capitalism was, from its beginnings in the Italy of the thirteenth century, always monopolistic and oligopolistic. That is to say, the power of capitalism has always been associated with large enterprises, large that is, relative to the size of the markets where they operate. [6]

Also, it has always been associated with the ability to plan economic strategies and to control market dynamics, and therefore, with a certain degree of centralization and hierarchy. Within the limits of this presentation, I will not be able to review the historical evidence that supports this extremely important hypothesis, but allow me at least to extract some of the consequences that would follow if it turns out to be true.

First of all, if capitalism has always relied on non-competitive practices, if the prices for its commodities have never been objectively set by demand/supply dynamics, but imposed from above by powerful economic decision-makers, then capitalism and the market have always been different entities. To use a term introduced by Braudel, capitalism has always been an "antimarket". This, of course, would seem to go against the very meaning of the word "capitalism", regardless of whether the word is used by Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan. For both nineteenth century radicals and twentieth century conservatives, capitalism is identified with an economy driven by market forces, whether one finds this desirable or not. Today, for example, one speaks of the former Soviet Union's "transition to a market economy", even though what was really supposed to happen was a transition to an antimarket: to large scale enterprises, with several layers of managerial strata, in which prices are set not taken. This conceptual confusion is so entrenched that I believe the only solution is to abandon the term "capitalism" completely, and to begin speaking of markets and antimarkets and their dynamics.

Emphases mine.
http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/de_landa/antiMarkets.html

 

[nomadologist]

1, theories are not subversive, only actions can be so. The IDF isn't misappropriating D&G, it's a tool like any other. To riff on Massumi, a tool's what you do with it, not what it was meant to do. I actually think the two of them might admire this. At any rate, you're not going to theorize your way out of capitalism.

2, a strict constructionist reading of D&G just strikes me as an off the wall chunk of insanity, not least because I'd judge them guilty of providing more diagnoses than prescriptions. I read both MP & AO as extremely pessimistic books.

3, it's off base to read D&G as against capitalism anyway. It seems more appropriate to see them as anti-capitalist and anti-corporatist

Do you have any idea what I was referring to when I said "strict constructionist"? I was referring to a traditional way of reading the U.S. Constitution, but go ahead and be uninformedly literal about it if you want to be.

Vimothy, you have no idea what you're talking about RE D&G, and the only extent to which I sympathize with Land is insofar as I do not think the left have gone FAR LEFT ENOUGH.

Until you show an even basic mastery of a single work by D and/or G, I have no interest in hearing your opinions about it.