We're going to be making a return to deleuze / guattari. the next few weeks will be on chapter 3 of mille plateaux - the geology of morals. there's alot to explore and take from the chapter so i think its worth going into it in some depth..... Tomorrow will be my last session until january, but i hope you'll be able to carry on as normal without me. I'll try to follow the reading from my hammock.....
-Andres
p.s. - I thought i'd post the videos of Delanda's lecture on deleuze we spoke about last time, a really accessable and interesting way into deleuze
Hey lads, tomorrows reading is chapter eins (1) von the society of the spectacle by Guy Debord. its a riveting chapter full of marxian sentance inversions. Good luck!
Also gang, numbers have dwindled a little of late so I propose a renewed marketing campaign. Print the post and stick it up in some good places so that we can suck in some more members..
Saturday, 15 August 2009
This weeks reading (for tuesday 18th August) is Anne McNevin's text -
Here is the second reading we decided on for next week, alongside more of A Thousand Plateaus #3 '10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)'
Manuel De Landa ' The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation':
I haven't had time to go through all of these, but I enjoyed the illustrations a lot, and am just starting with the Hardt lecture notes. I didn't want to suggest these all as reading for the group per se, I thought I would just throw them onto the page and see if anyone is compelled to look into any of them and we'll see how that connects in with and fans out among the other conversations and readings. see you tomorrow! -abc (image from Marc Ngui, from the link below with pictures)
1000 Plateaus on Google Books (with significant portions available in preview, though I don't think they are printable):
I also came accross these quite useful summaries for various works by Deleuze/Guattari where the different chapters are broken down as an index of statements. can be quite useful for extracting the basic claims/arguments made...
You need to create an account/username, then you can download the texts that you see on that page. Also, there are many discussions about various ideas and thinkers, some of which are very helpful.
http://www.avaxhome.ws/ebooks
This searchable site compiles links to various free and anonymous file uploading services (like rapidshare or uploading.com) from where you can download PDFs of over 100,000 texts. They don't have everything, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in here.
Also, a friend of mine at the FU who is taking classes with David Harvey this semester has been inspired to start a blog discussion forum. Harvey gave two free, public talks in the last week, but I didn't find out in time. I'll try to post details if I find out in time, and here's the blog:
I came across this book After Capitalism: PROUT's vision for a new world. It was written by a monk from the organization Ananda Marga. (in another life I used to be very involved with them, but now allergic to transendentalism, dogmatism, and the whole Guru concept).
Still their Guru was sort of an interesting figure. He developed a socio-political system called PROUT, i.e. progressive utilization theory. It's been many years since I read anything about this, so do not know the details. But I think some points would connect to that k-punk post about anti-capitalism and energy.
Anyway, I am always very sceptical now about anything that hints of mysticism. But I think PROUT is at least grounded in rational argument. And the book has an intro by Noam Chomsky, which to me gives it some credibility. If anything, this is another angle/perspective..
Have not read the book myself, but thought I would post the summary now, for general info, and maybe buy it. It might, at some point, be an interesting addition to the discussions.
This book offers a better, practical alternative to global capitalism. It explains the Progressive Utilization Theory, or Prout, a socio-economic model based on decentralized economic democracy, cooperative enterprise, the ethics of inclusion and universal spiritual values. The book asserts that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, based as it is on greed, intense competition and tremendous concentration of wealth. In contrast, Prout provides a model of economic development grounded in universal values. It seeks to balance regional self-reliant economic development with ecological protection, and encourages creativity and innovation.
(Jeroen)
Sunday, 12 July 2009
This weeks reading (for tuesday 14th) is the first chapter of a thousand plateaus - rhizome. download it here
Here is the link to the Foucault article I mentioned in which he presents his concept of 'heterotopias'. Heterotopias are sites in which space and time have an alternative ordering to the dominant spatial and temporal orderings of a society. Could possibly be usefully applied to understanding non-capitalist spaces.
And an introduction to Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974). For those not familiar with his work, Lefebvre is a French Marxist theorist of space who argued that capitalism reproduces itself through the production of an 'abstract space' which is fragmented and hierarchical and dominates over 'lived space'
As I mentioned last time I think it would be really cool to try and author a text collectively - perhaps the theme of scarcity would be a good place to start?.. I will try to write some initial thoughts/notes on this and put them up on the blog and then other can add their thought and change / edit what we have?...
"We might mention that the dialogue of scarcity is something we really see beginning in the early modern social contract theorists (most importantly Hobbes and Locke). But scarcity wasn’t the dominant paradigm previously. Most medievals and ancient Greeks emphasize that nature provides humans with the necessary goods in a great deal of abundance – as long as humans, as part of good political regimes, take steps to ensure that the human population is supportable by nature and that the desires of the citizens do not become uncontrollable.
The argument that nature produces abundance rather than scarcity (or that nature is friendly as opposed to hostile) is a plausible one: humans are quite omnivorous, able to eat numerous types of food and find many different kinds of food delicious – from meat and fish to fruits to vegetables to nuts to grains to sea plants. Humans can reside in a wide array of environments. A properly small number of humans can easily find abundant resources for commodious and moderate living."
Natalia has kindly made a document about basic economics with a glossary and some exerpts from Adam Smith etc.. click here to download it
So for next tuesday (7th) we will read this along with the k-punk text below. Hopefully we can grasp a good understanding of the assumptions of neo-liberal economics and go someway towards formulating a critique of it.......
I think it would be good to look not just at the article but also at the discussion section at the end, as thats where some of the most most interesting points come up (rational actor theory etc..)
I'm also very keen on the idea of energistic economies or energistic critiques of capitalism - perhaps i will try to make some notes on this for the meeting.
First of all I found a link to a copy of "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" written by Adorno and Horkheimer, which I think is really a must read. It's located here.
Second, here's the excerpt from Adorno in Minima Moralia which uses the example of film cliche. Then after that I'll stop banging Adornianonandonandonandon.
"In general, subjective class membership roday shows a mobility that allows the rigidity of the economic order itself to be forgotten: rigid things can always be moved about. Even the individual's powerlessness to calculate his economic fate in advance makes its own contribution to this comforting mobility. Downfall is decided not by incompetence but by an opaque hierarchical structure in which no-one, scarcely even those at the very top, can feel secure: an egalitarian threat. When, in the most successful film of the year, the heroic squadron leader returns to be harrassed by petty-bourgeois caricatures as a drug-store jerk, he not only gives the spectators an occasion for unconscious gloating but in addition strengthens them in their consciousness that all men are really brothers. Extreme injustice becomes a deceptive facsimile of justice, disqualification of equality. Sociologists, however, ponder the grimly comic riddle: where is the proletariat?" From fragment 124. Puzzle-picture in Minima Moralia.
Ed
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
Here's an alternative link to the reading for tonights session - as the one sent out on the list did not seem to work:
Hi guys, here's the Adorno article I propose we should look at in the next session. As it's quite short I thought it could be quite interesting to examine some parts of the text quite closely. Despite it's length, I think it's quite an interesting present to unwrap. I've read it several times now and I'm still pulling more from it the more I read it. I think it follows up some tangents we've looked at with Deleuze's political theory quite nicely.
"126 [Minima Moralia]
I.Q. – The modes of behaviour appropriate to the most advanced state of technical development are not confined to the sectors in which they are actually required. So thinking submits to the social checks on its performance not merely where they are professionally imposed, but adapts to them its whole complexion. Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem. Thought, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake. This it leaves, respectfully deluded, to the highest-paid, thereby making itself measurable. It behaves, even in its own eyes, as if it had constantly to demonstrate its fitness. Even when there is no nut to crack, thinking becomes training for no matter what exercise. It sees its objects as mere hurdles, a permanent test of its own form. Considerations that wish to take responsibility for their subject-matter and therefore for themselves, arouse suspicion of being vain, windy, asocial self-gratification.Just as for neo-positivists knowledge is split into accumulated sense-experience and logical formalism, the mental activity of the type for whom unitary knowledge is made to measure, is polarized into the inventory of what he knows and the spot-check on his thinking-power: every thought becomes for him a quiz either of his knowledgeability or his aptitude. Somewhere the right answers must be already recorded. Instrumentalism, the latest version of pragmatism, has long been concerned not merely with the application of thought but the a priori condition of its form. When oppositional intellectuals endeavour, within the confines of these influences, to imagine a new content for society, they are paralysed by the form of their own consciousness, which is modelled in advance to suit the needs of this society. While thought has forgotten how to think itself, it has at the same time become its own watchdog. Thinking no longer means anything more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think. Hence the impression of suffocation conveyed even by all apparently independent intellectual productions, theoretical no less than artistic. The socialization of mind keeps it boxed in, isolated in a glass case, as long as society is itself imprisoned. As thought earlier internalized the duties exacted from without, today it has assimilated to itself its integration into the surrounding apparatus, and is thus condemned even before the economic and political verdicts on it come fully into force."
