Firestorm

Bomberg, The Mud Bath

Twins. Capitalism is nihilism, an endless betrayal of production in favor of an infinite — imaginary — debt or Void, which implies the transcendental equivalence of all processes, their essential or characteristic meaninglessness. Indeed the hostility towards life evinced in the machinations of capitalism are strictly correlate to the heterogeneous means by which nihilism achieves its destructive victory: through a generalized deterritorialization which can barely halt before its radically external, schizophrenic limit.

Firestorm. Heidegger reminds us that despite our apparent control over the machines we create, that in fact we do not even control the desire within us which causes us to create, to use them, or to extend our control over the world through the conception and production of new machines. To this problem, indeed, there is no solution, and very likely there will never be any solutions. The mystery, the secret truth of desire, lies within the machine.

Noises

 

 

Non-expression. Speaking is a donation of words; but in this donation is dramatized an idea of alterity, an uncanny and infinite Power mysteriously unleashed, and this by a seemingly peaceful sharing of signs. 

Is it possible? Ten thousand years of speaking, and still we are waiting for a sign.

Problems. We owe to Deleuze the discovery that the difficulty of a problem is not simply the number of differential elements it assembles within a single ideal situation, but rather the process of problematization of an element or elements which somehow causes the contents of the problem to problematize the very situation itself. This marks  a radical becoming-social of problematics — or if you like, the becoming-event of the concept (becoming-problem.) Yet does it not seem as though this method is still profoundly Lacanian somehow, as though the real is being implicitly understood as a strange hyper-real gap between Difference and itself — mysteriously and paradoxically allowing a differentiation to differenciate itself infinitely, suspending both the emotional-organic ontology of desiring-repression as well as the mechanical logic that underlies materialism, allowing thought to move at infinite speed on a hyperplane of immanence — ripping a hole through the symbolic networks, allowing the transpiercing and reprogramming of the assemblage by the outside? The difficulty remains even if we understand the practice of militant problematization or counter-actualization to be a process of differentiating problematic or ‘insurgent’ elements of the situational social assemblage with respect to their capacity for transformation.

A certain noise is all it takes. Parasites can indeed be shaken off and immediately so; but they are chased out only by a greater noise, by the willing invitation of still more powerful parasites. –So at least there are specific cries which are anathema to a given variety of parasite: the roaring of their host-cum-predators. Of collective liberation.

Notes to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: Chapters 1 and 2

Separation Perfected

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence…illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
–Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity

Feuerbach—copy/original—simulacrum—Deleuze and Baudrillard?
Accumulation of spectacles—”All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (12).
Detached images enter into a common stream—partial aspects of reality congeal into a pseudo-world set apart as object of contemplation/autonomous image where deceit deceives itself–autonomous movement of non-life.
Three aspects of the spectacle—society itself/parts of society/means of unification. This is the place of false consciousness because it is where all consciousness converges–it is merely the official language of generalized separation

Reconstructing Reality

Just as total war renders ethics derisory, consumer society annihiliates the horizons of authentic experience. God, the State, Father: abysses for the erasure of thought, until the only idea of which we are capable is a permitted one. The unconscious is a battlezone of images, brands, consumption algorithms. Ideology is repetition, a recording surface for lies which grows deeper and more complex with each iteration; the con, however, is always the same: alone we are nothing, we must unite with power to stand, to be able. The subtlety here lies in the more-or-less explicit coup d’etat of individual desire; corporate life makes the public individual a double-agent between himself and his secret desires.

Simulated faces, simulated worlds: the invisible lines connecting our fates together slowly grind us into grains, instants, monads, image-fragments, partial objects. The geometric exponentiation of desire is also the micro-isolation of the infinitesimal partial object, the human subject. We are only able to simulate love for what the object is or what it does; thus love becomes currency. From the perspective of desire, the future is the possibility of authentic life, of a total human being both spiritual and material; from the perspective of power, the future promises only tighter integration, further submersion into semiotic networks — until the human being is indistinguishable from a commodity.

Debord: Society of the Spectacle Notes (Part 2)

Society of the Spectacle 3. Unity and Division within Appearances

A lively new polemic about the concepts ‘one divides into two’ and ‘two fuse into one’ is unfolding on the philosophical front in this country. This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are against the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions of the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois conception. Those who maintain that ‘one divides into two’ is the fundamental law of things are on the side of the materialist dialectic; those who maintain that the fundamental law of things is that ‘two fuse into one’ are against the materialist dialectic. The two sides have drawn a clear line of demarcation between them, and their arguments are diametrically opposed. This polemic is a reflection, on the ideological level, of the acute and complex class struggle taking place in China and in the world.
–Red Flag (Peking), 21 September 1964
54. Spectacle and modern society are united and divided, but the unity is grounded in a split—however, the spectacle inverts the image and presents division as unity, unity as division.
55. Struggles between forces to run the same socioeconomic system are passed off as real antagonisms—these struggles actually partake of a real unity.
56. The spectacle is able to portray other politico-economic systems (colonial, semi-colonial, despotic, etc.) as radically distinct social systems, but they are merely sectors under a universal system whose tendency is capitalism.
57. Thus there is a society of the spectacle—this society frames the agenda of a ruling class and offers false models of revolution at the local level—even if the spectacle takes on a local manifestation of totalitarianism, from the global point of view it’s all about the worldwide division of spectacular tasks.
58. Though destined to maintain the existing order, the spectacle is rooted in the economy and owes its allegiance to it and not the State.
59. Banalizing trend of the spectacle—pseudo-gratifications that still embody repression. A smug acceptance of what exists is a purely spectacular rebelliousness wherein dissastisfaction itself becomes a commodity to be reterritorialized.
60. Media stars distill the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles:
Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labor, they mimic by-products of that labor, and project these above labor so that they appear as its goal. The by-products in question are power and leisure—the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and the omega of a process that is never questioned. In the former case, government power assumes the personified form of the pseudo-star; in the second, stars of consumption canvas for votes as pseudo-power over life lived (39).
61. The individual in stardom’s spotlight is in fact the opposite of an individual and the enemy of the individual in himself as well as the individual in others. Kennedy the orator survives himself his speech writer continues to write in the same vein for future presidents.
62. Spectacular abundance and the roles signified by and embodied in objects—vulgar rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority. Youth and age applied to things in capitalism: things rule and vie with each other and usurp one another’s place.
63. Spectacular antagonisms conceal the unity of poverty—the spectacle may be concentrated or diffuse depending upon the particular stage of poverty—the spectacle is merely the semblance of harmony.
64. Concentrated form of the spectacle normally associated with bureaucratic capitalism—commodity production is also concentrated in form—the bureaucracy appropriates the totality of social labor and sells back to society its survival. Dictatorship of the bureaucracy must be attended by permanent violence. To quote Debord:
For this figure [the dictator] is the master of not-being-consumed, and the heroic image appropriate to the absolute exploitation constituted by the primitive accumulation accelerated by terror. If every Chinese has to study Mao, and in effect be Mao, this is because there is nothing else to be. The dominion of the spectacle in its concentrated form means the dominion, too, of the police (42).
65. Diffuse form of the spectacle—apologetic catalogue for the grandeur of commodity production in general—the automobile entails a deterritorialization of the old city centers, but also a conservation and reterritorialization of these centers into museums.
66. Each individual commodity fights for itself as though it were alone—the spectacle is the epic poem of this strife. The commodity’s becoming worldly turns the world into commodity—thus where particular commodities wear themselves out, commodity as abstract form continues on its way to absolute self-realization.
67. The satisfaction that the commodity in its virtue can no longer supply is now sought in acknowledgement of its value qua commodity. Enthusiasm for particular products—the fad item shows that as commodities get more absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity—collecting the commodity’s indulgences—the use in evidence here is the use of submission to commodity fetishism.
68. Commodity’s mechanical accumulation unleashes a limitless artificiality in which living desire is disarmed.
69. Image of blissful unification of society through consumption—The would-be singularity of an object-commodity can be offered to eager hordes only if it has been mass produced.
70. Continual process of replacement—false gratifications are exposed as objects and means of production change. Each new lie of the advertising industry is implicitly acknowledges the one before.
71. Whatever lays claim to the permanence in the spectacle must change according to the spectacle’s foundation—There is nothing dogmatic in the spectacle—it shows itself to have no stable dogma.
72. The unreal unity of the spectacle masks the real unity on which the capitalist mode is based:
What brings together men liberated from local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What pushes for greater rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What creates society’s abstract power also creates its concrete unfreedom (46).

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Socioeconomics and Ideology

At first glance, the two spheres of human existence seem hardly even to touch one another. The socioeconomic situation in a given society already seems so material, so concrete, that the lofty abstractions and vainglorious rationalizations of political ideology seem almost as excrement of the functioning of the political economy, culture as mass-produced fractured residue of the production process, as a consumptive afterthought, called in only to justify, explain, speculate about or apologize for the status quo.
It is Capital’s great triumph to link the social and economic struggle of the oppressed against the priveleged to the self-serving political agendas of the warlords of the global economy, to the central ideology of capitalism itself. The guiding principle of capitalism is expansion, accumulation, increase in the production and extraction of surplus value– it is surplus, unpaid labor which furnishes the basis of accumulation and essential direction of capitalist expansion. Capitalism can only expand through greater and greater social and economic exploitation of labor. Marx gives the general law of capitalist accumulation, which is NOT some kind of natural law, as a relationship between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages. In this selection, he demonstrates a fundamental barrier to wage increases–that for the system to work there must be a critical amount of unpaid labor which turns into profit–which allows the foundation and endless reproduction of the capitalist political economy. Marx only briefly notes the possibility of an alternative state of affairs as an “inverse situation, in which wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development.” Instead, like in religion where we are governed by ideas we make up, in capitalistm, we are governed by the law of commodity-fetishism. The mode of production turns labor into a commodity that workers are forced to sell at a loss:

The relation between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages is nothing other than the relation between the unpaid labor which has been transformed into capital and the additional paid labor necessary to set in motion this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes which are mutually independent, i.e., between the magnitude of the capital and the numbers of the working population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labor of the same working population. If the quantity of unpaid labor supplied by the working class and accumulated by the capitalist class increases so rapidly that its transformation into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labor, then wages rise and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labor diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at which the surplus labor that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalized, accumulation slows doewn, and the rising movement of wages comes up against an obstacle. The rise of wages is therefore confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalist system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale. The law of capitalist accumulation, mystified by the economists into a supposed law of nature, in fact expresses the situation that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labor, and every rise in the price of labor, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever larger scale, of the capital-relation… Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

(See also: Cambridge Capital Controversy)

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007