I want to say very quickly how I recognize a philosopher in his activity. One can only confront these activities as a function of what they create and of their mode of creation. One must ask, what does a woodworker create? What does a musician create? For me, a philosopher is someone who creates concepts. This implies many things: that the concept is something to be created, that the concept is the product of a creation. 

I see no possibility of defining science if one does not indicate something that is created by and in science. And, it happens that what is created by and in science, I'm not completely sure what it is, but not concepts properly speaking. The concept of creation has been much more linked to art than to science or to philosophy. What does a painter create? He creates lines and colors. That suggests that lines and colors are not givens, but are the product of a creation. What is given, quite possibly, one could always call a flow. It's flows that are given, and creation consists in dividing , organizing, connecting flows in such a way that a creation is drawn or made around certain singularities extracted from flows. 

A concept is not at all something that is a given. Moreover, a concept is not the same thing as thought: one can very well think without concepts, and everyone who does not do philosophy still thinks, I believe, but does not think through concepts. If you accept the idea of a concept as the product of an activity or an original creation. 

I would say that the concept is a system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow. A philosopher is someone who invents concepts. Is he an intellectual? No, in my opinion. For a concept as system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow... Imagine the universal thought flow as a kind of interior monologue, the interior monologue of everyone who thinks. Philosophy arises with the action that consists of creating concepts. For me, there are as many creations in the invention of a concept as in the creation by a great painter or musician. One can also conceive of a continuous acoustic flow (perhaps that is only an idea, but it matters little if this idea is justified) that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow: notes? Aggregates of notes? No? What will we call the new sound from a musician? You sense then that it is not simply a question of the system of notes. It's the same thing for a philosopher, it is simply a question of creating concepts rather than sounds. It is not a question of defining philosophy by some sort of search for the truth, for a very simple reason: this is that truth is always subordinate to the system of concepts at one's disposal. What is the importance of philosophers for non-philosophers? It is that although non-philosophers don't know it, or pretend not to be interested, whether they like it or not they think through concepts which have proper names.

(Gilles Deleuze, Cours Vincennes - 15/04/1980)

"...the Whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes, though it has an effect on these other parts simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between non communicating vessels, transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences within their own particular boundaries."

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from Anti-Oedipus)

"A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction."

(Gilles Deleuze, Preface to Difference and Repetition)

Deleuze on Israel and Palestinine (1978)

This piece written by Gilles Deleuze in 1978 is eerily relevant to the current crisis in Gaza. Indeed, I'd argue that the tactics on both sides have changed very little in 30 years.

How could the Palestinians be "genuine partners" in peace talks when they have no country? But how could they have a country when it was taken from them? The Palestinians were never given any choice other than unconditional surrender. All they were offered was death. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the actions of the Israelis are considered legitimate retaliation (even if their attacks do seem disproportionate), whereas the actions of the Palestinians are without fail treated as terrorist crimes. And the death of a Palestinian has neither the same interest nor the same impact as the death of an Israeli.

Since 1969, Israel has unrelentingly bombed and strafed Southern Lebanon. Israel has explicitly said that its recent invasion of Lebanon was not in retaliation for the terrorist attack on Tel-Aviv (eleven terrorists against thirty thousand soldiers); on the contrary, it represents the culmination of a plan, one in a whole series of operations to be initiated at Israel’s discretion. For a "final solution" to the Palestinian question, Israel can count on the almost unanimous complicity of other States (with various nuances and restrictions). A people without land, and without a State, the Palestinians are the spoilers of peace for everyone involved. If they have received economic and military aid from certain countries, it has been in vain. The Palestinians know what they are talking about when they say they are alone.

Palestinian militants are also saying that they have managed to pull off a kind of victory. Left behind in southern Lebanon were only resistance groups, which seem to have held up quite will under attack. The Israeli invasion, on the other hand, struck blindly at Palestinian refugees and Lebanese farmers, a poor population that lives off the land. Destruction of villages and cities, and the massacre of innocent civilians have been confirmed. Several sources indicate that cluster bombs were used. This population of Southern Lebanon, in perpetual exile, keeps leaving and coming back under Israeli military strikes that one is hard-pressed to distinguish from acts of terrorism. The latest hostilities have ousted more than 200,000 from their homes, now refugees wandering the roads. The State of Israel is using in southern Lebanon the method which proved so effective in Galilee and elsewhere in 1948: it is "Palestinizing" Southern Lebanon.

Palestinian militants for the most part come from this population of refugees. Israel thinks it will defeat the militants by creating more refugees, thereby surely creating more terrorists.

It is not merely because we have a relationship with Lebanon that we say: Israel is massacring a fragile and complex country. There is something else. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a model that will determine how problems of terrorism will be dealt with elsewhere, even in Europe. The worldwide cooperation of States, and the worldwide organization of police and criminal proceedings, will necessarily lead to a classification extending to more and more people who will be considered virtual "terrorists." This situation is analogous to the Spanish Civil War, when Spain sereved as an experimental laboratory for a far more terrible future.

Today Israel is conducitng an experiment. It has invented a model of repression that, once adapted, will profit other countries. There is great continuity in Israeli politics. Israel believes that the U.N. resolutions verbally condemning Israel in fact put it in the right. Israel has transformed the invitation to leave the occupied territories into the right to establish colonies there. It thinks sending an international peace-keeping force into Southern Lebanon is an excellent idea… provided that this force, in the place of Israeli forces, transforms the region into a police zone, a desert of security. This conflict is a curious kind of blackmail, from which the whole world will never escape unless we lobby for the Palestinians to be recognized for what they are: "genuine partners" in peace talks. They are indeed at war, in a war they did not choose.

(Gilles Deleuze, The text originally appeared in Le Monde, April 7, 1978, and is reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness [Semiotexte, 2006])

via http://lapointe.blogsome.com

"What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?"

"For this reason philosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, 'Let's discuss this.' Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes to early or to late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as 'communicative rationality,' or as 'universal democratic conversation.' Nothing is less exact, and when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves when they set empty generalizations against one another. Philosophy has a horror of discussions. It always has something else to do. Debate is unbearable to it, but not because it is to sure of itself. On the contrary, it is its uncertainties that take it down other more solitary paths. But in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among friends? Is it not, as the conversation of free men, the summit of Greek sociability? In fact, Socrates constantly made all discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry between discourses. He turned the friend into the friend of the single concept, and the concept into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rivals one by one."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

Problems and Solutions

"We are wrong to believe that the true and the false can only be brought to bear on solutions, that they only begin with solutions. This prejudice is social (for society, and the language that transmits its order-words, 'set up' ready-made problems, as if they were drawn out of the city's administrative filing cabinets, and force us to 'solve' them, leaving us only a thin margin of freedom). Moreover this prejudice goes back to childhood, to the classroom: It is the school teacher who 'poses' the problems; the pupils task is to discover the solutions. In a way we are kept in a kind of slavery. True freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves. And this "semi-divine" power entails the disappearance of false problems as much as the creative upsurge of true ones. 'The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. By that I mean that its solution exists then, although it may remain hidden and, so to speak, covered up: The only thing left to do is uncover it. But stating the problem is not simply uncovering, it is inventing. Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists, actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened. Already in mathematics and still more in metaphysics, the effort of invention consists most often in raising the problem, in creating the terms in which it will be stated. The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent: The truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved.'

"It is not just the whole history of mathematics that supports Bergson. We might compare that last sentence of this extract from Bergson with Marx's formulation, which is valid for practice itself: 'Humanity only sets itself problems that it is capable of solving.' In neither example is it a case of saying that problems are like the shadow of pre-existing solutions (the whole context suggests the contrary). Nor is it a case of saying that only the problems count. On the contrary, it is the solution that counts, but the problem always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated (i.e., the conditions under which it is determined as problem), and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it. In this sense, the history of man, from a theoretical as much as from the practical point of view is that of the construction of problems. It is here that humanity makes its own history, and the becoming conscious of that activity is like the conquest of freedom. (It is true that, in Bergson, the very notion of problem has its roots beyond history, in life itself or in the vital impetus: Life is essentially determined in the act of avoiding obstacles, stating and solving a problem. The construction of the organism is both the stating of a problem and a solution.)"

(Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism)

"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."

(Mao Tse-Tung, "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan")

"They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and peo­ple's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable."

(Gilles Deleuze, Control and Becoming)

"...is not the reproduction of the illusion in a certain sense also its correction? Can we conclude that the result is artificial because the means are artificial?"

(Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image)

Notes Towards a Most Compelling Thought

"A traveller who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere; and he answered: men are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice: they are all timorous. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality: he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience why? From fear of his neighbour who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbour, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia - in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he despises: for it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him: 'Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you.'"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Challenge of Every Great Philosophy)

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. ... the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue."

(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

"It is by History which is created, lived, and really remembered as 'tradition' that Man realized himself or 'appears' as a dialectical totality, instead of annihilating himself and 'disappearing' by 'pure' or 'abstract' negation of every given whatsoever, real or thought. It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the moral danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radical 'nonconformist' Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all (even the 'sublimated' given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into active anarchy and disappearing. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a 'permanent revolution' that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"'The truth will not run away from us' – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past that threatens to disappear with every present that does not recognize itself as meant in it."

(Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

"It may be that continuity of tradition is mere semblance. But then precisely the persistence of this semblance of persistence provides it with continuity."

(Walter Benjamin, "Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress", The Arcades Project)

"How could something come from history? Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical."

"...becoming is the concept itself. It is born in History, and falls back into it, but is not of it. In itself it has neither beginning nor end but only a milieu."

"History is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history. Without history experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. It is philosophical."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

Architectonic and Nomadology

"Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game's form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function:'It' makes a move. 'It' could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary's pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The 'smooth' space of Go, as against the 'striated' space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere...). Another justice, another movement, another space-time."

(Felix Guattari & Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus)

Eternal Return: Taking the Point of View of Reproduction

"Everything begins with reproduction."

(Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing", Writing and Difference)

"Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

"The tenacious obviousnesses (ideological obviousnesses of an empiricist type) of the point of view of production alone, or even of that of mere productive practice (itself abstract in relation to the process of production) are so integrated into our everyday 'consciousness' that it is extremely hard, not to say almost impossible, to raise oneself to the point of view of reproduction. Nevertheless, everything outside this point of view remains abstract (worse than one-sided: distorted) -- even at the level of production, and, a fortiori, at that of mere practice."

(Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)

"For the real truth of the matter -- the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium -- is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; production of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties and of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced."

(Gillies Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Œdipus)

"My doctrine says that the task is to live in such a way that you have to wish to live again -- you will do so in any case."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Manuscripts)

"The thought of eternal return thinks being in such a way that being as whole summons us without cease. It asks us whether we merely want to drift with the tide of things or whether we would be creators. Prior to that, it asks us whether we desire the means and the conditions by which we might again become creators."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume 2)

"The new philosopher can arise only in conjunction with a ruling caste, as its highest spiritualization."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power Manuscripts)

"Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy."

(Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

"Only those who hold their existence to be capable of eternal repetition will remain: and with such people a condition is possible to which no utopian has ever attained."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Manuscripts)

Making the Modern American Proletariat

"Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers."

(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"A 2006 study by the department’s National Center for Education Statistics followed federal loan borrowers for 10 years, ending in 2003-4, and found that nearly 10 percent defaulted. (The average debt among the two-thirds of 2003-4 college graduates who use loans is about $20,000, according to the College Board.) And with more students borrowing, more students are potentially at risk."
"Garrett Mockler filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2004, after months of struggling to make payments on credit cards as well as on $40,000 in student loans. He was working multiple jobs as a teacher, dancer and choreographer in Los Angeles after earning a Master of Fine Arts in 2003."
"His lenders wanted more than $400 a month on top of credit card debt, Mr. Mockler said. 'All my bills started piling up,' he said. 'It was either pay one bill or pay another or not eat or not have a roof over my head.'"

(From "That Student Loan, So Hard to Shake", NY Times 8/24/08)

"...the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

(Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program)

"...[a] Slave without a Master, [a] Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner."

"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only for himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital."

"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)"

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all."

(Gilles Deleuze, "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium")

"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture..."

(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)

Deleuze on Foucault: The perils of thought and the 'death of man'

"Paul Veyne paints a portrait of Foucault as a warrior. Foucault always evokes the dust and murmur of battle, and he saw thought itself as a sort of war machine. Because once one steps outside what's been thought before, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, a 'perilous act,' a violence whose first victim is oneself. The objections people make, even the questions they pose, always come from safe ashore and they're like lumps of mud flung at you to knock you down and stop you getting anywhere rather than any help: objections always come from lazy, mediocre people, as Foucault knew better than anyone. Melville said: 'For the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool,--then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.--I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more ... Thought divers ... have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.' People will readily agree that intense physical pursuits are dangerous, but thought too is an intense and wayward pursuit. Once you start thinking you're bound to enter a line of thought where life and death, reason and madness, are at stake, and the line draws you on. You can think only on this witches' line, assuming you're not bound to lose, not bound to end up mad or dead."

"... there's the relation between forces and form: any form is a combination of forces. This already comes out in Foucault's great descriptive tableaux. But more particularly in all the stuff about the 'death of man' and the way he relates it to Nietzsche's superman. The point is that human forces aren't on their own enough to establish a dominant form in which man can install himself. Human forces (having an understanding, a will, an imagination, and so on) have to combine with other forces: an overall form arises from this combination, but everything depends on the nature of the other forces with which the human forces become linked. So the resulting form won't necessarily be a human form, it might be an animal form of which man is only an avatar, a divine form he mirrors, the form of a single God of which man is just a limitation (thus, in the seventeenth century, human understanding appears as the limitation of an infinite understanding). A Man-form then appears only in very special and precarious conditions: that's what Foucault analyses in The Order of Things as the nineteenth century's project, in terms of the new forces with which man was then combining. Now, everyone says man's coming into relation these days with still other forces (the cosmos in space, the particles in matter, the silicon in machines...): a new form is coming out of this, and it's already ceased to be human ... Nothing excites so many stupid reactions as this simple, precise, and grand theme in Nietzsche and Foucault."

(Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations)

Notes on the World Historical Individual: Fragments from Marx, Freud, and Deleuze

"Modern Industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually causing changes not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the functions of the labourer, and in the social combinations of the labour-process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionises the division of labour within the society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production to another. But if Modern Industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer, on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularisations. We have seen how this absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail-function, to make him superfluous, We have seen, too, how this antagonism vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital; in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working-class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand, variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with resistance at all points, Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

"Long ago [Man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To those gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him. One may say, therefore that those gods were cultural ideals. Today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which ideals are attained according to the general judgment of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he his truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times."

(Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents)

"What does Foucault mean when he says there is no point in crying over the death of man? In fact, has this form been a good one? Has it helped to enrich or even preserve the forces within man, those of living, speaking, or working? Has it saved living men from a violent death? The question that continually returns is therefore the following: if the forces within man compose a form only by entering into a relation with forms from the outside, with what new forms do they now risk entering into a relation, and what new form will emerge that is neither God nor Man? This is the correct place for the problem which Nietzsche called 'the superman'."

"It is a problem where we have to content ourselves with very tentative indications if we are not to descend to the level of cartoons. Foucault, like Nietzsche, can only sketch in something embryonic and not yet functional. Nietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but the superman is what frees life within man himself, to the benefit of another form, and so on. Foucault proffers a very peculiar piece of information: if it is true that nineteenth-century humanist linguistics was based on the dissemination of languages, as the condition for a 'demotion of language' as an object, one repercussion was none the less that literature took on a completely different function that consisted, on the contrary, in 'regrouping' language and emphasizing a 'being of language' beyond whatever it designates and signifies, beyond even the sounds. The peculiar thing is that Foucault, in his acute analysis of modern literature, here gives language a privilege which he refuses to grant to life or labour: he believes that life and labour, despite a dispersion concomitant with that of language, did not lose the regrouping of their being. It seems to us, though, that when dispersed labour and life were each able to unify themselves only by somehow breaking free from economics or biology, just as language managed to regroup itself only when literature broke free from linguistics."

"Biology had to take a leap into molecular biology, or dispersed life regroup in the genetic code. Dispersed work had to regroup in third-generation machines, cybernetics and information technology. What would be the forces in play, with which the forces within man would then enter into a relation? It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but an unlimited finity, thereby evoking every situation of force in which a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations. It would be neither the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism, but something like the Superfold, as borne out by the foldings proper to the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature 'merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity'. "

"This modern literature uncovers a 'strange language within language' and, through an unlimited number of superimposed grammatical constructions, tends towards an atypical form of expression that marks the end of language as such (here we may cite such examples as Mallarme's book, Peguy's repetitions, Artaud's breaths, the agrammaticality of Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as well as Roussel's proliferations, Brisset's derivations, Dada collage, and so on). And is this unlimited finity or superfold not what Nietzsche had already designated with the name of eternal return?"

"The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. In each case we must study the operations of the superfold, of which the 'double helix' is the best- known example. What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and these new forces. It is the form that results from a new relation between forces. Man tends to free life, labour and language within himself. The superman, in accordance with Rimbaud's formula, is the man who is even in charge of the animals (a code that can capture fragments from other codes, as in the new schemata of lateral or retrograde). It is man in charge of the very rocks, or inorganic matter (the domain of silicon). It is man in charge of the being of language (that formless, 'mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom' even from whatever it has to say). As Foucault would say, the superman is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a change of concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms."

(Gilles Deleuze, Foucault)

On Revolutionary Becoming

"It is fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable."

(Gilles Deleuze, Negotiatons)

The Meritocrats: A Composite Sketch of the 21st Century Capitalist Class

"In the 1990s, the incomes of the richest 1% of taxpayers went up 10% a year in real terms, while those of the other 99% grew at an average annual rate of 2.4%. Between 2002 and 2006 the richest 1% saw 11% annual real income growth: everyone else got less than 1%. Three-quarters of the gains from the Bush expansion went to 1% of taxpayers, who now receive a larger share of overall income than at any time since the 1920s."

(The Economist, "Workingman's Blues", 7/24/08)

"For all his supposed concern about regular folks, Obama’s sympathy for the beleaguered people who still do manual labor remains suspect, while his willingness to appease the wealthy elites who preach the benefits of “free markets,” low taxes and job-destroying trade bills appears entirely sincere. "

"Granted, Obama has made a few gestures toward reducing the vast gap between the lower-middle class and the richest 1 percent of Americans, who now possess about 22 percent of the nation’s wealth (the top 10 percent control 48.5 percent)."

(John R. MacArthur, "Money Over Morals: Obama’s the candidate of the hedge-fund partners", Harper's Magazine Blog 08/05/08)

"The real core of [Obama's] financial support is something else, the rising class of information age analysts. Once, the wealthy were solidly Republican. But the information age rewards education with money. There are many smart high achievers who grew up in liberal suburbs around San Francisco, L.A. and New York, went to left-leaning universities like Harvard and Berkeley and took their values with them when they became investment bankers, doctors and litigators."

"The Democratic Party (not just Obama) has huge fund-raising advantages among people who work in electronics, communications, law and the catchall category of finance, insurance and real estate."

(David Brooks, "Obama’s Money Class", NY Times 07/01/08)

"The FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector’s power grew unchecked as the old manufacturing economy declined. The root of the 1920s bubble, it was believed, had been the conflicts of interest among banks and securities firms, but in the 1990s, under the leadership of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve, banking and securities markets were deregulated. In 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which regulated banks and markets, was repealed, while a servile federal interest-rate policy helped move things along. As FIRE rose in power, so did a new generation of politicians, bankers, economists, and journalists willing to invent creative justifications for the system, as well as for the projects— ranging from the housing bubble to the Iraq war— that it financed. The high-water mark of such truckling might be the publication of the Cato Institute report 'America’s Record Trade Deficit: A Symbol of Strength.' Freedom had become slavery; persistent deficits had become economic power."

(Eric Janzen, "The Next Bubble: Priming the Markets for tomorrow's big crash", Harper's Magazine, February 2008)

"What all this means is that the urgent task of the economic analysis today is, again, to repeat Marx's critique of political economy, without succeeding on to the temptation of the ideologies of 'postindustrial' societies... the key change concerns the status of private property: the ultimate element of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or individual who 'really owns' the means of production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money, 'really owning' nothing--even indebted, but nonetheless controlling things. A corporation is owned by another corporation, who is again borrowing money from banks, who ultimately manipulates money owned by ordinary people like ourselves."

(Slavoj Žižek, Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto For the Twenty-First Century?)

"The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters."

(Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control)

"Myriads of people make their living out of this condition, which follows the liquidation of occupations. These are the nice people, the popular ones, who are friends with all, the just ones, who excuse every sort of meanness as 'human' and incorruptibly defame every non-normalized impulse as 'sentimental'. They are indispensable thanks to their knowledge of all the channels and back doors of power, they guess its most secret judgements and live off the dextrous communication of such. They are to be found in all political camps, even there, where the rejection of the system is taken for granted and for that reason a lax and cunning conformism of its own has developed. Often they win over people through a certain benevolence, through the sympathetic sharing of the life of others: selflessness as speculation. They are clever, witty, sensible and flexible; they have polished the old trader-spirit with the achievements of the day-before-yesterday’s psychology. They are ready for anything, even love, yet always faithlessly. They betray not from instinctual drives, but from principle: they value even themselves as a profit, which they do not wish to share with anyone else. They are bound to the Spirit with affinity and hate: they are a temptation for the thoughtful, but also their worst enemies. For they are the ones who subtly apprehend and despoil the last hiding-places of resistance, the hours which remain free from the demands of the machinery. Their belated individualism poisons what still remains of the individuated [Individuum: individual, the individuated]."

(Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)

"If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama’s age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware."

(David Brooks, "Where is the Landslide?", NY Times 8/6/08)

"...to struggle against the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois world outlook ... the general form of this world outlook: Economism (today 'technocracy') and its 'spiritual complement' Ethical Idealism (today 'Humanism'). Economism and Ethical Idealism have constituted the basic opposition in the bourgeois world outlook since the origins of the bourgeoisie."

(Louis Althusser,

Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon)

“Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks.”

I know as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population.”

“My own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways.”

(Barack Obama in reference to his 2004 US Senate campaign, The Audacity of Hope)

"...I believe I have good reasons for thinking that behind the scenes of its political Ideological State Apparatus, which occupies the front of the stage, what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e. as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational apparatus..."

"It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most 'vulnerable', squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of 'know-how' wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy). Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of children are ejected 'into production': these are the workers or small peasants. Another portion of scholastically adapted youth carries on: and, for better or worse, it goes somewhat further, until it falls by the wayside and fills the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar workers, small and middle executives, petty bourgeois of all kinds. A last portion reaches the summit, either to fall into intellectual semi-employment, or to provide, as well as the 'intellectuals of the collective labourer', the agents of exploitation (capitalists, managers), the agents of repression (soldiers, policemen, politicians, administrators, etc.) and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of whom are convinced 'laymen')."

(Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)

"...the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of 'salary according to merit' has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation."

"Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated'; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill."

(Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control)

Science and Philosophy

"Philosophical communications are altogether different from scholarly publications. We have to make the distinction between these two perfectly clear, because we are all to inclined to measure philosophical communications against the standard of publications in the learned disciplines. In the course of the nineteenth century these disciplines began to operate like industries. The point was to get the product that had been manufactured out onto the market as quickly as possible, so that it could be of use to others, but also so that others could not pinch our discoveries or duplicate our own work. This has especially become the case in the natural sciences, where large-scale, expensive series of experiments have to be conducted. It is therefore altogether appropriate that we at long last have research facilities where we can gain a complete overview of dissertations and reports on experimental results that have already clarified this or that question in this or that direction."

"Today the major branches of industry and our military Chiefs of Staff have a great deal more 'savvy' concerning 'scientific' exigencies than do the 'universities'; they also have at their disposal the larger share of ways and means, the better resources, because they are indeed closer to what is 'actual.'"

"What we call Geisteswissenschaft [the so-called 'human' or 'historical' or 'cultural'sciences, such as economy, law, art, and religion] will not regress, however, into the status of what were formerly called the "fine arts." It will be transmogrified into a pedagogical tool for inculcating a 'political worldview.' Only the blind and hopelessly romantic among us can believe that the erstwhile structure and divisions and of scientific endeavor generally during the decade 1890-1900 can be preserved forever with all the congenial facades. Nor will the technical style of modern science, prefigured in its very beginnings, be altered if we choose new goals for such technology. That style will only be firmly embedded and absolutely validated by such new choices. Without the technology of the huge laboratories, without the technology of vast libraries and archives, and without the technology of a perfected machinery for publication, fruitful scientific work and the impact such work must have are alike inconceivable today. Every attempt to diminish or hamper this state of affairs is nothing short of reactionary."

"In contrast to 'science,' the state of affairs in philosophy is altogether different, When we say 'philosophy' here, we mean only the creative work of the great thinkers. In the very way it is communicated such work arrives in its own time, knows its own laws. The haste to 'get it out' and the anxiety of 'being too late' do not apply here, if only because it belongs to the essence of every genuine philosophy that its contemporaries invariably misunderstand it. It is also the case that the philosopher must cease to be a contemporary to himself. The more essential and revolutionary a philosophical doctrine is, the more it needs to educate those men and women, those generations, who are to adopt it. Thus, for example it still requires a great deal of effort for us to day to grasp Kant's philosophy in its essential import and to liberate it from the misinterpretations of its contemporaries and advocates."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 2: Eternal Recurrence of the Same)

"Closer to our own time, philosophy has encountered many new rivals. To start with, the human sciences and especially sociology wanted to replace it. But because philosophy, taking refuge in universals, increasingly misunderstood its vocation for creating concepts, it was no longer clear what was at stake. Was it a matter of giving up the creation of concepts in favor of a rigorous human science or, alternatively, of transforming the nature of concepts by turning them into collective representations or world views created by the vital, historical and spiritual forces of different peoples? Then it was the turn of epistemology, of linguistics, or even of psychoanalysis and logical analysis. In successive challenges, philosophy confronted increasingly insolent and calamitous rivals that Plato himself would have never imagined in his most comic moments. Finally the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said, "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers." Information and creativity, concept and enterprise: there is already an abundant bibliography. Marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the concept and the event. But here the concept has become the set of product displays (historical, scientific, artistic, sexual, pragmatic) and the event has become the exhibition that sets up various displays and the "exchange of ideas" it is supposed to promote. The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold. Philosophy has not remained unaffected by the general movement that replaced critique with sales promotion. The simulacrum, the simulation of a packet of noodles, has become the concept; and the one who packages the product, commodity, or work of art has become the philosopher, conceptual persona, or artist. How could philosophy, an old person, compete against young executives in a race of the universals of communication for determining the marketable form of the concept, Merz? Certainly, it is painful to learn that the Concept indicates a society of information services and engineering. But the more philosophy comes up against shameless and inane rivals and encounters them at its very core, the more it feels driven to fulfill the task of creating concepts that are aerolites rather than commercial products. It gets the giggles, which wipe away its tears. So the question of philosophy is the singular point where concepts and creation are related to each other."

(Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?)

"... the sciences do presuppose determinations such as becoming, space, time, sameness, and recurrence--in fact, must of necessity presuppose them as elements that remain eternally barred from their realm of inquiry and their manner of demonstration."

"True, the sciences must make use of a particular notion of force motion, space, and time; but they cannot ask what such things are as long as they remain sciences, and avoid trespassing into the realm of philosophy. The fact that every science as such, being the specific science it is, gains no access to its fundamental concepts and to what those concepts grasp, goes hand and hand with the fact that no science can assert something about itself with the help of its own scientific resources. What mathematics is can never be determined mathematically; what philology is can never be discussed philologically; what biology is can never be uttered biologically. To ask what a science is, is to ask a question that is no longer a scientific question. The moment he or she poses a question with regard to science in general, and that always means a question concerning specific possible sciences, the inquirer steps into a new realm, a realm with evidentiary claims and forms of proof quite different from those that are customary in the sciences. This is the realm of philosophy. It is not affixed to the sciences or piled on top of them. It lies hidden in the innermost domain of science, so much so that it would be true to say that mere science is only scientific -- that is to say, partaking of genuine knowledge, above and beyond being a repertory of certain techniques -- to the extent that it is philosophical. From this we can gather the alarming proportions of nonsense and absurdity in all ostensible efforts to renew the 'sciences' and abolish philosophy."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 2: Eternal Recurrence of the Same)

Primer: American Debt and Global Capitalism

"The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit.... Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt."

(Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control)

"the self-movement of Capital is far from the circular self-movement of the Hegelian Notion: the point of Marx is that this movement never catches up with itself, that it never recovers its credit, that its resolution is postponed forever, that the crisis is its inner most constituent, which is why the movement is one of the 'spurious infinity,' forever reproducing itself."

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View)

'Das Kapital reveals the fact that capital, though organizing the world can never go beyond its own limit. It is a Kantian critique of the ill contained drive of capital/reason to self-realize beyond its limit."

(Kojin Karatani, Transcritique)

"What all this means is that the urgent task of the economic analysis today is, again, to repeat Marx's critique of political economy, without succeeding on to the temptation of the ideologies of 'postindustrial' societies... the key change concerns the status of private property: the ultimate element of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or individual who 'really owns' the means of production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money, 'really owning' nothing--even indebted, but nonetheless controlling things. A corporation is owned by another corporation, who is again borrowing money from banks, who ultimately manipulates money owned by ordinary people like ourselves."

(Slavoj Žižek, Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto For the Twenty-First Century?)

"To be sure, the increased availability of credit has contributed mightily to the American economy and has allowed consumers to make big-ticket purchases like homes, cars and college educations.

"But behind the big increase in consumer debt is a major shift in the way lenders approach their business. In earlier years, actually being repaid by borrowers was crucial to lenders. Now, because so much consumer debt is packaged into securities and sold to investors, repayment of the loans takes on less importance to those lenders than the fees and charges generated when loans are made."

(Gretchen Morgenson, "Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt", NY Times 07/20/2008)

"The American consumer has for decades served as the engine of world commerce, using borrowed cash to snap up the accoutrements of modern living — clothes and computers and cars now manufactured, in whole or in part, in factories from Asia to Latin America. Eliminate the American wherewithal to shop, and the pain would ripple out to multiple shores."

"Globalization, in other words, allowed China and Japan to amass the fortunes they have been lending to the United States."
"But globalization also emboldened American capitalists to take huge risks they might have otherwise avoided — like borrowing to erect forests of unsold homes from California to Florida, delivering the speculative disaster of the day. They were operating with bedrock confidence that money would never run out. Someone would always buy American debt, delivering more cash for the next go."
"And this same interconnectedness appears to have reassured regulators in Washington about the health of the American financial system, as they declined to intervene against highly speculative lending during the real estate boom. Mortgages were being distributed to investors around the globe, and so were the risks, the regulators reasoned. Anyone who bought into that risk would have a strong interest in seeing that the American financial system stayed upright."
"In other words, in the estimation of people in control of money, the United States cannot be allowed to collapse, just as Fannie and Freddie cannot be allowed to fail. Too much is riding on their survival."
"The central truth of that logic still seems to be apparent as the Treasury keeps finding takers for American debt."

(Peter S. Goodman, "Too Big to Fail?", NY Times 07/20/2008)

"A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare..."

"Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours."

"That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle."

"The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse... we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver 'energy security.' When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate), meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence."

(Eric Janzen, "The Next Bubble: Priming the Markets for tomorrow's big crash", Harper's Magazine, February 2008)

"In the 1990s, the incomes of the richest 1% of taxpayers went up 10% a year in real terms (see chart), while those of the other 99% grew at an average annual rate of 2.4%. Between 2002 and 2006 the richest 1% saw 11% annual real income growth: everyone else got less than 1%. Three-quarters of the gains from the Bush expansion went to 1% of taxpayers, who now receive a larger share of overall income than at any time since the 1920s."

(The Economist, "Workingman's Blues", 7/24/08)

"Borrowers who are in trouble on their mortgages have seen their government move slowly — or not all — to help them. But banks and the executives who ran them are quickly deemed worthy of taxpayer bailouts."

"On the ground, this translates into millions of troubled borrowers, left to work through their problems with understaffed, sometimes adversarial loan servicing companies. If they get nowhere, they lose their homes."

"Once again, this emergency action smacks of the regulatory responses of recent years: do nothing to curb the deal-making mania while it is occurring, but when the rout comes along, hurry up and rein it in."

(Gretchen Morgenson, "Borrowers and Bakers: A Great Divide", NY Times 07/20/2008)

"Almost four decades have passed since the United States scrapped its last currency ties to precious metals. Our copper and nickel coinage still retains some metallic value, but not nearly enough for the purpose of currency tampering—the historic temptation of inflation-plagued or otherwise wayward governments, including, at times, our own. Instead, since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed.If Washington’s harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is."

"As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the United States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering."

"Let me stipulate: the deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme. There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms."

"Transparency is the hallmark of democracy, but we now find ourselves with economic statistics every bit as opaque—and as vulnerable to double- dealing—as a subprime CDO."

"The credit markets are fearful, and the financial markets are nervous. If gloom continues, our humbugged nation may truly regret losing sight of history, risk, and common sense."

(Kevin P. Phillips, "Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know", Harper's Magazine May 2008)

"Recall the difference between the standard capitalist and the Marxist notion of economic crisis: for the standard capitalist view, crises are 'temporary, correctable glitches' in the functioning of the system, while from the Marxist point, they are its moment of truth, the 'exception' which only allows us to grasp the functioning of the system (in the same way that, for Freud, dreams and symptoms are not secondary malfunctionings of our psychic apparatus, but moments through while one can discern the repressed basic functioning of the psychic apparatus)."

(Slavoj Žižek, "On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes")

Denumerable Multiplicities and Virtual Multiplicities

"Therefore there are two types of multiplicity: one is called multiplicity of juxtaposition, numerical multiplicity, distinct multiplicity, actual multiplicity, material multiplicity, and for predicates it has, we will see, the following: the one and the multiple at once. The other: multiplicity of penetration, qualitative multiplicity, confused multiplicity, virtual multiplicity, organized multiplicity, and it rejects the predicate of the one as well as that of the same."

(Gilles Deleuze, Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson)

Piracy is Terrorism

Negri: In your book on Foucault, and then again in your TV interview at INA, you suggest we should look in more detail at three kinds of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and above all the control of "communication" that's on the way to becoming hegemonic. On the one hand this third scenario relates to the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and imagination, but on the other hand any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speak out and thereby recover a greater degree of freedom. In the Marxist Utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes precise­ly the form of a transversal organization of free individuals built on a tech­nology that makes it possible. Is communism still a viable option? Maybe in a communication society it's less Utopian than it used to be?

Deleuze: We're definitely moving toward "control" societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault's often taken as the theorist of discipli­nary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we're moving away from dis­ciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. We're moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. Bur­roughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they're breaking down because they're fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealth­ily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as anoth­er closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful con­tinual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it's really its dismantling. In a control-based system noth­ing's left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home, which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain any­thing, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harsh­est confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for "uni-versals of communication" ought to make us shudder. It's true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer pira­cy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nine­teenth century called "sabotage" ("clogging" the machinery) . You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resis­tance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals." Maybe, I don't know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly per­meated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something dif­ferent from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

("Control and Becoming", Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri)