event mechanics

Over the fold, my notes on chapter 3 of Foucault’s Society Must be Defended for the biopolitics reading group.

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Via Green Car Congress:

HM Treasury (UK) UK today published the much-anticipated Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, the most comprehensive review yet carried out on the economics of climate change.

Something which I find disturbing is this:

The climate is a public good: those who fail to pay for it cannot be excluded from enjoying its benefits and one person’s enjoyment of the climate does not diminish the capacity of others to enjoy it too. Markets do not automatically provide the right type and quantity of public goods, because in the absence of public policy there are limited or no returns to private investors for doing so: in this case, markets for relevant goods and services (energy, land use, innovation, etc) do not reflect the consequences of different consumption and investment choices for the climate. Thus, climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods. Given the magnitude and nature of the effects initially described in the previous chapter and taken forward in Parts II and III, it has profound implications for economic growth and development. All in all, it must be regarded as market failure on the greatest scale the world has seen. (ital. added, CH2, p. 25)

Right. Global suffering. Oil based economies and their wars. The abandonment of two fifths of the world’s population. None of these are ‘market failures’? There is much rhetoric of ‘market failure’ in the report. As if the ‘market’ were a machine that provided certain outcomes that were not purely, totally, and completely organised by the continual asymmetrical redistribution of wealth?

This post is for my students who wanted some notes on how to read A Thousand Plateaus. I am pitching it as a how to a how to guide. How to read A Thousand Plateaus as a “how to” guide for cultivating and caring for multiplicity.

First, some resources:

1) Michael Hardt’s page at Duke has his reading notes for Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Plus it has his PhD dissertation which after reading the intro looks interesting.) Remember ATP is the second volume of a two volume set. Some of the ideas translate across the two volumes. For example, and something that Hardt doesn’t really discuss, it is pretty well accepted now that ‘desiring-machines’ in the terminology of AO becomes ‘assemblage’ in ATP (Alliez essay in Deleuze and the Social, p. 161). One of the important things to realise about ‘assemblages’ is that as ‘desiring machines’ they are continually breaking down; they only work when they break down (AO 8 ). This is the only addendum needed to Slack and Wise’s brilliant introductory remarks on the Assemblage in their book _Technology and Culture: A Primer_ (they don’t talk about this ‘breaking down’ quality which is important but on a different level for any technological culture). Lastly, the Kafka book is a bridge between AO and ATP and to a certain degree much easier to read than AO or ATP. However, it only really makes sense if you understand the terminology, which is explained in ATP and AO… Hardt is particularly good on faciality which he relates to Debord’s notion of the spectacle. Faciality is an inductive virtual architecture.

2) Next is Hardt’s infamous collaborator on various projects, Antonio Negri, who wrote an essay on ATP in 1992 to mark the event of Guattari’s death. (Negri and Guattari were friends, Guattari used to collect Negri’s mail for him when he was in France, and they wrote a little book together call _Communists Like Us_ which is also worth reading alonside an essay Guattari wrote with Alliez on ‘Integrated World Capitalism’ that foregrounds much of work on ‘globalisation’ and Negri and Hardt’s arguments in _Empire_). Negri has four main points to his essay, and the earlier section is a brief genealogy of Foucault’s project (!!). The four main points all relate to a different way of engaging with mulitiplicity. The ‘theory of expression and arrayments’ is about expression and the aesthetics of assemblage. One of the minimum qualities of an assemblage is as an arrangement of heterogeneous elements (mulitiplicity) that has a consistency. Next is the rhizome which is a direct example of a multiplicity. Nomadology is way of thinking (a ‘way’ like in martial arts) that wages a war against any arborescent form of thought. Minority and majority do not relate to numbers of people. A tending to mulitiplicity requires a becoming-minor of a majoritarian arrangement. Negri’s essay can be read in light of his later work: “Labor is the rhizome which produces the real, which is the passage from the molecular order to the molar order, in the course of development, which irresistibly passes through war and which in war defines liberation.” This is a nascent definition of the ‘multitude’ as it later appears.

3) Charles Stivale’s translation and summary of “L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze” is a great resource. Perhaps read it only when you need to look something up.

There is plenty of other stuff around. The archives to the D&G spoon’s email list is also very good on some things. There are also Deleuze’s lectures online.

OK, so ‘caring for mulitiplicity’ means cultivating particular dispositifs that allow and indeed encourage a certain kind of open relation. The overcoding signifiers of the State-assemblages attempt to capture and incorporate multiplicity. In AO it was called Oedipalisation. An example, the n-sexes were reduced to some variant of the male::female binary. To allow and encourage an open relation to multiplicity means carrying out very careful experimentations. This is outlined in the “How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” chapter of ATP. It is called the ‘art of caution’ or ‘the art of dosages’ (160-161). An assemblage is formed on/as/through a plane of immanence, so that on one side of the assemblage is strata — the State, the familial unit, etc. — and on the other side is the plane of immanence. See the section of ABC on Desire where Deleuze talks about young people reading Anti-Oedipus. So when reading ATP look for the multiplicities, or diagrammatic traces of them, such as the war machine, the ‘pack’ (of a becoming animal), the BwO, and of course the rhizome.

Here is a list of five general areas that I think are useful to think about when reading ATP:

1) How to read a mixed semiotics
2) Why can’t war machines be fluffy? (care of Sandy)
3) Micro to the molecular to the minor.
4) How to ward off ‘Deleuze and Guattari’ as a Despotic Signifier?
5) Sobriety and an ethics of becoming.

The below is a little rushed, sorry.

1) Deleuze and Guattari offer a mixed semiotics. A semiotics of force across and between arrays of bodies; see Chapter 3, but Guattari is the one who develops this the best in his solo work.

2) Don’t think of war machines or any other sort of multiplicity as necessarily hyper-masculine Terminator-type assemblages, you’ll end up sharing the deleusions of the Israeli army. War machines can be fluffy. A classic example from the world of pop-culture is the ‘Min Mei’ weapon in Robotech (nee Super Macross).

3) Micropolitics is normally associated with Foucault. In the preface to AO Foucault calls the book an Introduction to the Non-Facist Life. Many commentators have discounted Foucault’s comments, and for AO they may be right, however ATP is a different book and the ethics of becoming that requires care for multiplicity is one of its goals. More needs to be said here. I don’t have time.

4) Don’t treat Deleuze and Guattari as priests of the truth. I like their work cause it is an outrageous attempt to think the world. We have computers to do other kinds of thinking, humans are just trained to do it because they are cheaper.

5) No green thumbs, only schizo-thumbs. Tend to your multiplicities. Allow them to grow, give them sunshine, and take them to the park to play with other multiplicities.

Unfinished list of links to Francis Bacon’s paintings online. It is numbered according to the list published in Gilles Deleuze’s book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

(I will add to this the next time there is a music awards show or the like on tv.)

List is over the fold, too big for the front page.

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They’re gonna clean up your looks
With all the lies and the books
To make a citizen out of you
Because they sleep with a gun
And keep an eye on you, son
So they can watch all the things you do

Because the drugs never work
They’re gonna give you a smirk
‘Cause they got methods of keeping you clean
They’re gonna rip up your heads
Your aspirations to shreds
Another cog in the murder machine

– My Chemical Romance, “Teenagers”

Yes, ‘of the charts’. I am unfortunate. However, there is something is this recent spate of epic punk-rock hitting the charts (Green Day and Muse). Does the ‘epicity’ give us something to believe in? My Chemical Romance currently has “Welcome to the Black Parade” in the charts.

Forgot to mention what triggered the previous post. I rowed a PB on the ergo today of 6m 35s for 2km (drag setting 10). Previous PB was 6:38.

If you didn’t know, indoor rowing (as it is called) is a competitive sport, and my time would’ve got me into the Australian rankings (66). lol… What a joke!! Below 6 minutes is world class. Below 6:30 is still very very good, and that is my next target. They have a 500m class, too. I would do alright for that as I can ‘pull’ flat 1:30′s for 500 (just not for 2km, which would make me famous).

To a certain degree I have the ‘body’ of a rower. At 194cm I am the right height, but I weigh 115kgs so I am a little too fat. Over 75kgs is classified as ‘heavyweight’.

Oh, and my ergo is just a warm for what is roughly a 2 hour gym session. I have never tried to row flat out with nothing else to do after it (which for gym sessions is a waste of time). I also added a 10 minute ergo to the end of my 20 minute bike, 20 minute skier, and 20 minute stairmaster cardio routine. Remember, powered by daydreams!

EDIT 27 Oct: ANOTHER PB! 6:30.9!!!!!!!! Of course, I was only trying to impress the boy in the zoot suit (zoot suit = proper rowing apparel, looks like a one-piece lycra bodysuit). That, or doing my 20min bike first (because all the ergos were busy) served as a good warm up. However, one can’t just accidently do a good time. It has to be attempted from the start. So I must have definitely been out to do another PB. Sweet. Next target is therefore 6:25, but after I have repeated today’s effort a number of times. I still did the rest of my 2 hour workout…

The title of this post is inspired by those stickers on the side of race cars (and nowadays computers) that say things like “Powered by Ford” (or “Powered by Intel”) or something. It derives from a phenomenon I have noticed when at the gym. Sinthome notes a similar phenomenon in his post on visceral reactions. He begins by noting he hadn’t had breakfast and was hungry, and describes how he got angry at someone for mispromouncing his name at the barber shop. He takes the psychoanalytic line about fantasy, which can be critically recast as the shifting antagonisms of the social. At one point he says:

I suspect that these antagonistic social relations often occur at a visceral and immediate level, such that we only retroactively find reasons for our hatred and anger.

Later he continues:

On the one hand, if it is true that there is an ineradicable real at the heart of social relations, if it is true that social relations will always be contaminated by antagonistic jouissance, then knowing this can certainly bring some peace of mind in public discussions.

My question is rather basic. Sinthome posits the event of an emotional outburst at an immediate visceral level, but then the retroactive coding of this event by the sense making apparatus of our minds places this event within the orbit of certain narrativised causal chains (‘immigrants’, ‘D&G’, ‘homosexuals’, etc). Why overcode the outburst as causally linked to a transcendentally displaced social antagonism? Why can’t the event of the outburst be an immanent acceleration within the body of a sensation that has more in common with evolutionary psychology (ie an instinctual response to one’s hunger) than the aporias at the heart of social antagonisms? Brian Massumi has explored some of the dynamics between affect and the retroactive coding of affect (as a potential movement between two intensities). That is, at that precise moment, one’s hunger seeks out the ‘social antagonism’ to express itself and prepare the body for acquiring food. Would a fully satiated body seek out social antagonism? Just look at the Australian middle-class…

I thought of my experiences at the gym when I first read Sinthome’s post. I often find myself thinking of funny, sad, acutely embarrassing, and/or frustrating events that have happened or I imagine could happen. At first I thought such intense daydreaming was perhaps because I was mildly psychotic or something. I think about my work a lot. Arranging certain arguments and so on. I replay conversations in my head. Sometimes for conversations that haven’t yet happened and may never happen. I often think about the stupidity of myself and others. It is not all so morose, sometimes it is just a little bit weird.

I often day dream about a particular pretty girl that also works out at the gym. A friend of mine dubbed her “checkout chick” after she discovered that she works at a supermarket as a checkout operator (and as a subtle dig against me because of my romantic predilictions for bourgies). I would never approach or even talk to someone with romantic intensions in mind when at the gym as it is not an ethically appropriate act for the space. However, I also quickly realised that by not even speaking to her and being able to daydream about a particular fantasy — even if it involves merely focusing on say, for example, her extremely beautiful eyes — then my body is flooded with adrenaline or whatever other chemicals the body has to make itself feel good, and I feel good, and I can go full tilt on the cardio machines for another five minutes and then again and again for different fantasies for over an hour. I have chosen a particular example of feeling good but I often find myself fired up to the point of wanting to kill certain people, all the while working out furiously.

Perhaps a psychoanalytic approach would interpret my actions in terms of my gym work as an outlet for my fantasies — I get to burn off my libidinal energy, etc. However, this is not correct as I started going to the gym because I was using my unhealthiness (smoking, bad food, bad sex, etc) to close my body off from the mulitiplicity of the world, and the mulitiplicity of my own body. I use my fantasies to push myself further, to enable myself so as to see what I can do. Indeed, I have translated the same practice into my writing and scholarly work, I push myself beyond fulfilling the expectations of others (and their fantasies) by getting into a highly-charged affective state where my mind dances very quickly and all over the place. This may not be the most conventional scholarly practice, which is allegedly meant to be slow and patient — more ‘library’ than ‘motor race’ — but I am not much of a scholar! It is something else, a kind of propulsion or, better, a surfing across fantasy and the body that leads to weird ideas.

Ien Ang just circulated a CFP for this conference on the CCR email list!

Wow, should I be happy about this or sad? lol!

Really if I want to do research on media events then I can’t really miss this conference can I? CRAP! From the complete CFP found on the conference website:

In addition, one has to take into account that media events are part of popular culture. In times of the differentiation of media technologies and the fragmentation of media landscapes as part of the ongoing process of global deregulation, the ‘eventization’ of the media is increasingly important for the marketing and everyday appropriation of popular media texts. On the one hand, many Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters, many TV shows, dailies, reality and talk shows are marketed as media events – which, in the case of formats like Big Brother or Who Wants to be A Millionaire, is done transculturally. On the other hand, ‘events’ like blockbusters or mediated concert shows offer people an opportunity for joining situative communities in individualised and fragmented societies. This kind of media event, which in many ways differs from the ritual media events described above, could be called a ‘popular media event’ as it is a main part of present popular culture. It is important to note though that these media events are not just ‘made’ by the media industry, but articulated in the interaction between media actors and everyday people.

You might say that from a biopolitical perspective there are collectively individuated transversal media events?

I’d better send off an abstract

…and start saving!

…and finish my PhD!

As I have noted previously, Ghost in the Shell is my favourite anime and gradually becoming my favourite pop-culture text of all time.

The a third film has just been broadcast on Japanese television: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Solid State Society.

The whole thing is available on youtube if you look, although only torrents of the file can be subtitled (with another torrent). I am not sure if I should try to explain any of the plot or not. What I do want to mention is that it provides the clearest indication of what a ‘stand alone complex’ actually is. Let me just say that the term ‘rhizome’ is used about a dozen times in short succession (yes, RHIZOMES! as in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion) along with ‘network’ and ‘collective consciousness’. Someone needs to send Lazzarato and any other of the neo-Tardeans a copy.

From the subtitles:

This is the full scope of the rhizome formed by the collective consciousness of those elderly invalids in the network.

There is no concept of a center in a rhizome, …

… therefore the hub has no fixed position within the rhizome, or rather, the rhizome itself is constantly in flux.

Why can’t we have Deleuzian pop-culture on Australian television?

I just posted a longer version of this to the Event, Badiou email list, suggesting that it would be advantageous to develop a working bibliography of literature on the ‘event’. It would be a functional tool. The idea was floated a while ago, when the list changed from spoons Lyotard list, but I think it is time to kick it into gear.

From my perspective there are three major areas of the ‘event’, and one application that I can think of:

1) the event as exception (lacanian, also ‘truth event’ badiou),
2) event as supplement (derridean, also ‘pure event’ deleuze),
3) the event as actualisation/individuation/becoming (deleuzian),
4) the application as the ‘media event’ (‘event’ Dayan and Katz, ‘non-event’ Boorstin, Baudrillard, ‘vector’ Virilio, Wark).

This is a very cursory representation and there are plenty of other texts, such as those by Whitehead, Lyotard, etc that need to be included here, but i have not read them or am comfortable enough with them to include them in the list, so someone else will need to include them. I imagine debates over the way this resource is organised will trigger a lot of discussion(!!). There are other texts, such as Paul Patton’s essay on Deleuzian media events that would cut across this categories and would need some other non-list form of representation. Other concepts, such as Debord’s ‘spectacle’, can be understood as a synergy of the ‘media event’ and biopolitical ‘individuation’, and so will have to be included at some point.

If you can help update the list then leave a comment or send me an email. Eventually I hope to set up or help set up a wiki-type resource that includes annotated entries.

Lacanian

?

Derridean

?

Deleuzian

Primary

Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense. New York, Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Secondary

Foucault, M (1977) “Theatricum Philosophicum” reprinted in various places i have it in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. ed Donald Bouchard

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, London, Duke University Press.

Stivale, C. J. (2003). Feeling the Event: Spaces of Affects and the Cajun Dance Arena. Animations (of Deleuze and Guattari). J. D. Slack. New York, Peter Lang: 31-58.

Colwell, C. (1997). “Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy.” Theory & Event 1(2).

Media Event

Primary

Boorstin, D. J. (1963). The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin.

Dayan, D. and E. Katz (1992). Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Virilio, P. (1991). The Lost Dimension. New York, Semiotext(e)

Virilio, P. (2000). A Landscape of Events. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Wark, M. (1994). Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Secondary

Merrin, W. (2005). Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, Polity.

Historical

Kwinter, S. (2001). Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.