Transfixing Machines

• 2013-05-16

  

  Barthes, Leaving the Movie Theatre, in The Rustle of Language

  this gluing of the subject to ideology (and vice-versa) is again in contrast to the Lacan/Zizek ‘pinning down’.

• 2013-05-15

  concrete rules, differences & equivalences...: Tools do not have a history, whether its the hand axe, the hair brush or the state...

  driftwork:

  Malinowski used to sneer at diffusionists for mistaking museum collections for genealogy, having seen crude flint implements put in glass museum cases before the more refined ones, this spoke of an impossible tools history. Malinowski merely jeered as if that this was as if one stone axe begat…

  Source: driftwork

• →

  Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after
  seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.

  — 

  Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ch3

  between 1815 and 1914 the british empire had dominated the world in a fashion which is unimaginable now [because other states had atomic and thermonuclear weapons the hegemony of the USA was not as total] and these young english extras from Glengarry Glen Ross show us that by 1922 … 1925 that domination was over. those white flannels smooth that former territory and allow another dominium to establish itself. 

• 2013-05-09

  

  driftwork:

  Reading Derrida at Moorfields…. My eyes cannot focus now as a result of the eyedrops…. Still here I am thinking  about Peeters text Derrida and its implicit representation of the  (masculine) philosophical imaginary in the 1960s and 1970s, i’m struck by how unlike  the world of Moorfields Eye Hospital this strange philosophical universe is. Woman and children  are marginal in Derrida, though occasionally they rise to the surface and become noticed within the the the fields of men, for in the text relationships are between men.  But of course we know that the philosophical imaginary hasn’t changed as much as it should have in the intervening years …. (witness the  ’New accelerationist’  conference next week…)  …. and then it is clear that its Moorfields which by any everyday standard is the future and past as both culture and philosophical moment. In this sense then the reverse is true to what the book presents, the imaginary of Moorfields is as multicultural as one could imagine. That the structure is as problematic as everything else in the rest of Western Europe goes without saying, yet the gender and cultural differences are clearly more interesting  and representative of everyday life than the Derrida allows for or even misrepresents… so here we are, having left the utopian moment of the hospital, wondering whether philosophy will ever be able to move beyond its reactionary imaginary…

  Source: driftwork

• 2013-05-04

  1922 1925 

  there at the beginning of both the consumer society that Marcuse showed us and the spectacle that Debord illuminated is The Great Gatsby. the novel works on the world and the people (subjects) that the new regime of Fordo-Bernaysism was producing but also tidies up the ruins of previous regime of capital (Anglo-European Imperialism) with its allegorical machines. 

  the production of cinema versions of The Great Gatsby in 1974 and now in 2013 is very simply indicative of the crises of these moments (at the birth and death of neoliberalism - a moment in the wider regime of capital) because this is “the expression of the economy in its culture” [Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N1a,6].

• 2013-04-27

  once upon a time there was a bourgeoisie that you could see, perhaps even encounter in your daily life, because the ownership of the means of production & consumption was organised on a local (regional-national) scale. as such the bourgeoisie was also a local phenomena and its social interactions and cultural practices experienced locally.
  this encounter with the bourgeoisie began to come to an end with the regime of Fordo-Bernaysism and the social technologies of ‘consumer-society’ and ‘the spectacle’ that regime engendered. finally, with the advent of neoliberalism in 1970, the ownership of the means of production reached a point where it was organised on a global scale, and only a global scale, and so the bourgeoisie became a global phenomenon separate from the local socio-cultural formations we still live in.
  all the parts of life in the local regimes we still live in which had once been the mark and privilege of the bourgeoisie became instead the stain of membership of, at best, the global petit-bourgeoisie and more likely of the working class itself.
  the local dominance of a regional-national faction/section of the petit-bourgeoisie has been the fate of the world for forty years now and we need to lift that curse.

• 2013-04-22

  … modes of production of subjectivity … modes of production of capitalist subjectivity.

  — 

  Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p45

  cf 

• 2013-04-20

  On the doctrine of the ideological superstructure. It seems, at first sight, that Marx wanted to establish here only a causal relation between superstructure and infrastructure. But already the observation that ideologies of the superstructure reflect conditions falsely and invidiously goes beyond this. The question, in effect, is the following: if the infrastructure in a certain way (in the materials of thought and experience) determines the superstructure, but if such determination is not reducible to simple reflection, how is it then - entirely apart from any question about the originating cause - to be characterized? As its expression. The superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure - precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to “condition.” The collective, from the first, expresses the conditions of its life. These find their expression in the dream and their interpretation in the awakening.

  — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, [K2,5]

• 2013-04-11

  Powers over external territorialities, deterritorialized knowledges of human activities and machines, and, finally, the creativity proper to subjective mutations: although inscribed at the heart of historical diachrony and enduringly incarnated in sociological divisions and segregations, these three voices/pathways don’t stop mixing together in strange ballets, alternating fights to the death and the promotion of new figures.

  — Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, p3

• →

  language culture / interaction society

  the structure:
  language culture /
  interaction society
  points towards the different productive apparatuses involved.