What is Deleuze?

[Clinamenic]

with a personal butler service and a helipad.

Naturally, we're not gonna slum it.

 

[other_life]

right. I'd rather not be a servant in climatic boys harem. Filipina, Kurdish, it's probably all the same to the San Francisco cultural mafia. I speak from knowing some of them from 2017-2021, the Oakland cultural mafia if you will. Heaven forbid I ever interact with Oaklanders again!

since when r u beefing with mac dre

 

[other_life]

I'm working on a small treatise on economic philosophy, and next I want to do a short essay on applying schizoanalysis to Machiavelli's political arguments.

(Draft 2) On the Reconciliation of the Economic Tenets of Liberalism and Progressivism

On the Reconciliation of the Economic Tenets of Liberalism and Progressivism It appears that, over the course of the twentieth century, the primary cultural thrust of progressivism has, insofar as it is characterized by its discontent with the socio-economic status quo, identified the economic ...

docs.google.com

insanely busted

 

[Clinamenic]

insanely busted

What can I say, we love our liberty here in America.

 

[thirdform]

since when r u beefing with mac dre

I beef with everyone.

 

[thirdform]

What can I say, we love our liberty here in America.

until you get fed up of your boys dying in whichever godforsaken war your country is committed to. It's like cocaine, actually.

 

[luka]

What can I say, we love our liberty here in America.

other-life is a proud corn-fed midwestern american who drives a literal pick-up truck.

 

[Clinamenic]

other-life is a proud corn-fed midwestern american who drives a literal pick-up truck.

What is your stance on neoliberalism @other_life ?

 

[other_life]

i think its tres drab

 

[Clinamenic]

i think its tres drab

Oh that I'd agree with.

 

[Clinamenic]

Maybe my machiavellian theory fiction will be a bit spicier.

 

[Clinamenic]

Its definitely an area worth improving on, in this discourse I'm doing lately. I'm mainly concerned with conveying ideas, using minimal rhetorical slant (a good term for which is, ironically, 'clinamen'), but if ideas can be clearly conveyed while the writing style itself is also engaging, that would be even better.

 

[Clinamenic]

I also just love the byzantine syntax of enlightenment era discourse, it suits me well.

 

[versh]

I may not have become a capitalist, philosophically, if it weren’t for D&G.

This does seem to be one of the glaring flaws in their thinking. Everything else looks like window dressing when their grand idea boils down to "Why don't we just become capitalists and model ourselves on it at its most extreme?".

 

[Clinamenic]

This does seem to be one of the glaring flaws in their thinking. Everything else looks like window dressing when their grand idea boils down to "Why don't we just become capitalists and model ourselves on it at its most extreme?".

I think if you consider them as the grandfathers of accelerationism, then this approach can make sense as a counter-intuitive or chameleonic form of anti-capitalism.

 

[versh]

I think if you consider them as the grandfathers of accelerationism, then this approach can make sense as a counter-intuitive or chameleonic form of anti-capitalism.

It isn't anti-capitalist though. It's presented as such, but in practice they're capitalists. What material difference is there between a rabid, 'deregulate everything' capitalist and D&G? They've a different end in mind, but the means are the same.

 

[Clinamenic]

In my mind accelerationism is anti-capitalist if it is intended to expedite capitalist processes until they collapse (which marxian doctrines often seem to posit as teleologically inevitable), but it is capitalist if it is intended to just, say, evade regulations in order to preserve some private sector vanguard's ability to maximize profits without social accountability. I haven't read enough D&G to say whether or not they'd endorse the former, but I do doubt they'd endorse the latter.

 

[versh]

In my mind accelerationism is anti-capitalist if it is intended to expedite capitalist processes until they collapse (which marxian doctrines often seem to posit as teleologically inevitable), but it is capitalist if it is intended to just, say, evade regulations in order to preserve some private sector vanguard's ability to maximize profits without social accountability. I haven't read enough D&G to say whether or not they'd endorse the former, but I do doubt they'd endorse the latter.

The problem I have is nobody really knows what will happen if capitalism suffers an irrevocable collapse because it's never happened, so all we have to go on is the ongoing process and that currently leaves D&G's embrace of its flows in the same spot as anyone else's embrace.

They're fun to read and I usually like them when they're talking about other things, but that particular aspect of their thought just doesn't sit well with me. It's great as a description of capitalism and a creative strategy, but I'm not convinced by it as a political program. It feels like a more involved way of essentially adopting the hippy "go with the flow" thing and I dunno how "radical" or "revolutionary" that is at this point. Also, the idea that people like them could somehow hijack and redirect capitalism from the inside seems naive/idealistic at best.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah I totally agree that, as a political praxis, acceleration (pro- or anti-capitalist) makes little sense overall.

That said, one angle where I think it can make sense is if you are trying to dismantle the fabric of democracy by expediting trends like Citizens United and "money as free speech" and whatnot in order to eventually disrupt mixed-market liberal capitalist and instead install some neofeudal autocratic regime. In that sense, an anti-capitalistic accelerationism makes sense theoretically (and maybe even practically), but again I don't think this is where D&G were thinking and personally I find it pretty scary. But this is what comes to mind when certain big tech folks argue that democracy has failed.

 

[versh]

I read 'On the Line' over the last couple of days, the Semiotext(e) thing where they first published the 'Rhizome' chapter from ATP, and the second essay is one just called 'Politics' where Deleuze talks about some of this. What he says about lines is interesting and perhaps useful, but once he gets into the politics of it it just feels too individualist to really achieve anything or offer any sort of serious alternative.

Here's the blurb for that section if you can't be arsed to read the whole thing:

In “Politics,” superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvents politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the “becoming revolutionary.” Throughout, he keeps dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows.

Read 'Forget Foucault' recently too, which was a real slog, but Lotringer's intro was decent and covered Baudrillard's opposition to this sort of thing:

No wonder French post-'68 thinkers, Baudrillard included, looked somewhere else for revolutionary alternatives. Failing to enlist their allies, they resolved to sleep with the enemy. It was a bold theoretical move, outdoing Marx in his analysis of capital. All of the "children of May," revolutionaries bereft of a revolution, turned to capitalism, eager to extract its subversive energy they no longer found in traditional class struggles. Updating the theory of power and the fluctuations of subjectivity to the erratic shifts of the semiotic code, they assumed that they could redirect its flows and release in their wake new "deterritorialized" figures - psychotic creativity, desire, nomadism, becoming revolutionary - in spite of the abrupt "reterritorializations" that the system was bound to impose in order to insure its own survival. (Deterritorializations result from the absolute decodification of capital).

Baudrillard didn't disagree with them on the nature of the beast, only on the extent of the damage. Contrary to them, he maintained that their willful distinctions between various "regimes of madness," or between thresholds and gradients of intensity (necessary to identify the direction and consistency of the flows) could not hold anymore. Libidinal distinctions would prove powerless to stem the flow. He saw them as doomed attempts to reintroduce a modicum of human agency in a process that had become both irreversible (linear, cumulative) and inhuman. Energetic and intense, capital was gradually gnawing away at every singularity. Simulating its fluidity, they had been engulfed by it. Revolution had come and gone; they arrived too late, one day after the orgy, like Kafka's Messiah. Boldly going beyond Marx, they had simply lost their moorings. "Theoretical production, like material production," Baudrillard wrote, "loses its determinacy and begins to turn around itself, slipping en abyme towards a reality that cannot be found. This is where we are today: indeterminacy, the era of floating theories, as much as floating money . . . " (SE, p. 44) . All the efforts to enlist capitalism on their side were bound to fail.