In Perth at the moment. My dad went into surgery yesterday and they gave him a new heart valve and a couple of bypasses. Everything went as planned. He is recovering extremely quickly and has already been shifted out of ICU.
Internet here is fux0red as the dedicated innernets/fax line is broken. I got a dial-up modem to use the back-up dial up account. Shitty 4.4kps. Omg. I want to go home to my 8.1mbps. So not much playing on innernets while I am here.
I read Max Barry’s Company. It has some neo-Kafka-eque thing going on, but now I sound like a wanker from a Woody Allen movie. If only I was that sophisticated…
I read Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault. I reckon Baudrillard gets it right. I wish he would’ve pushed beyond his lame ass fascination with death and the form of the social. In the Forget Baudrillard intervirew section, Lotringer is spot on with the question about force versus forms. Who gives a fuck about form, or the impossibility of certain forms, or the depletion of certain forms? WHAT DOES IT DO? Baudrillard invokes the example from D&G’s Kafka:
the transcendental Law as it is found in The Castle is opposed to the immanence of desie in the adjacent offices. How can we fail to see that the Law of the Castle [overcoding signifier] has its “rhizomes” [multiplicities] in the corridors and the offices — the “bar” or the break constituted by the law has simply been geared down ad infinitum in cellular and molecular succession. Desire is therefore only the molecular version of the Law. And what a strange coincidence to find schemas of desire and schemas of control everywhere. It is a spiral of power, of desire, and of the molecule which is now brining us openly toward the final peripeteia of absolute control. Beware the molecular!
Beware the hyperbolic frenchman! Baudrillard’s spiral is too neat. The multiplicities and their subjacent abstract machines (i.e. abstract machine of the castle that overcodes the multiplicity of desire) populate assemblages. There is not one multiplicity but multiple. The Law is of course a seduction, but as an apparatus of capture it assembles flows from the molecular desire. The flows come first.
Been working on the diss. Need to finish off this performance chapter and start assembling the media chapter. Few more days on performance and then media just before I go back to Sydney. Oh, back in Sydney Wednesday night.