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)

From Specters of Marx

Let us name that which could risk making the euphoria of liberal-democrat capitalism resemble the blindest and most delirious of hallucinations, or even an increasingly glaring hypocrisy in its formal or juridicist rhetoric of human rights. It will not be a matter of merely accumulating, as Fukuyama might say, "empirical evidence," it will not suffice to point one's finger at the mass of undeniable facts that this picture could describe or denounce. The question posed too briefly would not even be that of the analysis with which one could then have to proceed in all these directions, but of the double interpretation, the concurrent readings that the picture seems to call for and to oblige us to associate. If one were permitted to name these plagues of the "new world order" in a ten-word telegram, one might perhaps choose the following ten words.

1. Unemployment, that more or less well-calculated deregulation of a new market, new technologies, new worldwide competitiveness, would no doubt like labor or production deserve another name today. All the more so in that tele-work inscribes there a new set of givens that perturbs both the methods of traditional calculation and the conceptual opposition between work and non-work, activity, employment and their contrary. This regular deregulation is at once mastered, calculated, "socialized" (that is, most often disavowed), and irreducible to prediction -- like suffering itself, a suffering that suffers still more, and more obscurely, for having lost its habitual models and language once it no longer recognizes itself in the old word unemployment and in the scene that word named for so long. The function of social inactivity, of non-work or underemployment is entering into a new era. It calls for another politics. And another concept. The "new unemployment" no more resembles unemployment, in the very forms of its experience and its calculation, than what in France is called the "new poverty" resembles poverty.
2. The massive exclusion of homeless citizens from any participation in the democratic life of States, the expulsion or deportation of so many exiles, stateless persons, and immigrants from a so-called national territory already herald a new experience of frontiers and identity--whether national or civil.
3. The ruthless economic war among the countries of the European Community themselves, between them and Eastern European countries, between Europe, the United States, and Japan [we can also include here Russia, China, and India, as well as the oil producing nations of the world]. This war controls everything, beginning with other wars, because in controls the practical interpretation and an inconsistent and unequal application of international law. There have been too many examples in the last decade or more [We can look at Iraq and the much more recent and ongoing conflict in Georgia].
4. The inability to master the contradictions in the concept, norms, and reality of the free market (the barriers of a protectionism and the interventionist bidding wars of capitalist States seeking to protect their nationals, or even Westerners or Europeans in general, from cheap labor, which often has no comparable social protection). How is one to save one's own interests in the global market while claiming to protect one's "social advantages" and so forth?
5. The aggravation of the foreign debt and other connected mechanisms are starving or driving to despair a large potion of humanity. They tend thus to exclude it simultaneously from the very market that this logic nevertheless seeks to extend. This type of contradiction works through many geopolitical fluctuations even when they appear to be dictated by the discourse of democratization and human rights.
6. The arms industry and trade (whether it be "conventional" arms or at the cutting edge of tele-technological sophistication) are inscribed in the normal regulation of scientific research, economy, and socialization of labor in Western democracies. Short of an unimaginable revolution they cannot be suspended or even cut back without running major risks, beginning with the worsening of said unemployment. As for arms trafficking, to the (limited) degree that it can still be distinguished from "normal" commerce, it remains the largest in the world, larger that the drug traffic, from which it is not always dissociated.
7. The spread ("dissemination") of nuclear weapons maintained by the very countries that say they want to protect themselves from it, is no longer even controllable, as was the case for a long time, by statist structures. It exceeds no only statist control but every declared market.
8. Inter-ethnic wars (have there ever been another kind?) are proliferating, driven by an archaic phantasm and concept , by a primitive conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil, and blood. Archaism is not a bad thing in itself, it doubtless keeps some irreducible resource. But how can one deny that this conceptual phantasm is, so to speak, made more outdated than ever, in the very ontopology it supposes, by tele-technic dis-location? (By ontopology we mean axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general). For having spread in unheard-of fashion, which is more and more differentiated and more and more accelerated (it is acceleration itself, beyond the norms of speed that have until now informed human culture), the process of dislocation is no less arch-originary, that is, just as "archaic" as the archaism that it has always dislodged. This process is, moreover, the positive condition of the stabilization that it constantly relaunches. All stability in a place being but a stabilization or a sedentarization, it will have to have have been necessary that the local differance, the spacing of displacement gives the movement its start. And gives place and gives rise [donne lieu]. All national rootedness, for example, is rooted first of all in the memory or the anxiety of a displaced -- or displaceable -- population. It is not only time that is "out of joint," but space, space in time, spacing.
9. How can one ignore the growing and undelimitable, that is, world wide power of those super-efficient and properly capitalist phantom-States that are the mafia and drug cartels on every continent, including the former so-called socialist States of Eastern Europe? These phantom-States have infiltrated and banalized themselves everywhere, to the point that they can no longer be strictly identified. Nor even sometimes clearly dissociated from the process of democratization (think -- for example -- of the schema, telegraphically simplified here, that would associate them with the "history of a Sicilian mafia harassed by the fascism of the Mussolinian State thus intimately and symbiotically allied to the Allies as well as in the reconstruction of the Italian Christian democratic State which has today entered into a new configuration of capital", about which the least one can say is that we will understand nothing of what is happening there if we do not take account of its genealogy.) All these infiltrations are going through a "critical" phase, as one says, which is no doubt what allows us to talk about them or to begin their analysis. These phantom-States invade not only the socio-economic fabric, the general circulation of capital, but also statist or inter-statist institutions.
10. For above all, above all, one would have to analyze the present state of international law and its institutions. Despite a fortunate perfectibility, despite an undeniable progress, these international institution suffer from at least two limits. The first and most radical of the two stems from the fact that their norms, their charter, the definition of their mission depend on a certain historical culture. They cannot be dissociated from certain European philosophical concepts, and notably from a concept of State or national sovereignty whose genealogical closure is more and more evident, not only in a theoretico-juridical or speculative fashion, but concretely, practically, and practically quotidian. Another limit is strictly linked to the first: This supposedly universal international law remains, in its application, largely dominated by particular nation-States. Almost always their techno-economic and military power prepares and applies, in other words, carries the decision. As one says in English makes the decision Countless examples, recent or not so recent would amply demonstrate this, whether it is a question of deliberations and resolutions of the United Nations or of the putting into practice or the "enforcement" of these decisions: incoherence, discontinuity, inequality of States before the law, the hegemony of certain states over military power in the service of international law, this is what, year after year, day after day, we are forced to acknowledge.
    These facts do not suffice to disqualify international institutions. Justice demands, on the contrary, that one pay tribute to a certain of those who are working within them in the direction of the perfectibility and emancipation of institutions that must never be renounced. However insufficient, confused, or equivocal such signs may still be, we should salute what is heralded today in the reflection on the right to interference or intervention in the name of what is obscurely and sometimes hypocritically called the humanitarian, thereby limiting the sovereignty of the State in certain conditions. Let us salute such signs even as one remains vigilantly on guard against the manipulations or appropriations to which these novelties can be subjected.

(Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx)

Welfare to Work and the Gotha Program

"Asked to name an instance in which his thinking had changed over the past 10 years, Mr. Obama cited the 1996 welfare reform bill signed by former President Clinton. He said he opposed the measure at the time because he believed it would have 'disastrous results,' denying millions of women economic support without providing them with job training, child care or health benefits. He said he now believes the law has been largely successful."
"'It worked a lot better than a lot of people anticipated,' he said. He then added, speaking more broadly, 'I am absolutely convinced that we have to have work as the centerpiece of any social policy.'"

("The Obama-McCain Faith Forum", NY Times 8/16/2008)

"In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to 'end welfare as we know it.' Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance."

("From Welfare Shift in ’96, a Reminder for Clinton", NY Times 4/11/2008)

"The conformism which has dwelt within social democracy from the very beginning rests not merely on its political tactics, but also on its economic conceptions. ... The Gotha Program [dating from the 1875 Gotha Congress] already bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as 'the source of all wealth and all culture'. Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, 'must be the slave of other human beings, who… have made themselves into property-owners.'"

(Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that 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)

"The worker appears to sell his 'labour' in exchange for a wage. The capitalist 'combines' that labour with machines, raw material and the labour of other men to produce finished products. As the capitalist owns the machines and raw material, as well as the money to pay the wages, is it no 'natural' that he should also own the finished products which result from the 'combination of these factors'?

"This is what appears to occur under capitalism. However, probing beneath the surface, Marx comes up with a series of striking observations which can only be denied if one deliberately refuses to examine the unique social conditions which create the very peculiar and exceptional 'exchange' between labour and capital. In the first place, there is an institutional inequality of conditions between the capitaists and workers. The capitalist is not forced to buy labour-power on a continuous basis. He does it only if it is profitable to him. If not, he prefers to wait, to lay off workers, or even to close his plant down till better times. The worker, on the other hand (the word is used here in the social meaning made clear precisely by this sentence, and not necessarily in the stricter sense of manual labourer), is under economic compulsion to sell his labour-power. As he has no access to the means of production, including land, as he has no access to any large-scale free stock of food, and as he has no reserves of money which enable him to survive for any length of time while doing nothing, he must sell his labour power to the capitalist on a continuous basis and at the current rate. Without such institutionalized compulsion, a fully developed capitalist society would be impossible. ... If people are living under conditions where ther is no economic compulsion to sell their labour-power, then the repressive juridical and political compulsion has to deliver the necessary manpower to the entrepreneurs; otherwise capitalism could not survive under these circumstances."

(Ernest Mandel, Introduction to Capital: Volume 1)

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)

Notes on the World Historical Individual: Cartesian Subjects / Proletariat / Overmen

"Yet where arises the urgent cry for the overman? Why does prior humanity no longer suffice? Because Nietzsche recognizes the historic moment in which man takes it on himself to assume dominion over the earth as a whole. Nietzsche is the first thinker [ignoring Marx's entire critical project] to pose the decisive question concerning the phase of world history that is emerging only now, the first to think the question through in its metaphysical implications. The question asks: is man in his essence heretofore prepared to assume dominion over the earth? If not, what must happen with prior humanity in order that it may 'subjugate' the earth and thus fulfill the prophecy of an old testament. Must not prior man be conducted beyond himself, over his prior self, in order to meet this challenge? If so, then the 'over-man' properly thought, cannot be the product of an unbridled and degenerate fantasy that is plunging head long into the void. We can just as little uncover the nature of the over-man historically by virtue of the modern age. We do not seek the essential figure of the over-man in those personalities who, as major functionaries of a shallow, misguided will to power are swept to the pinnacles of that will's sundry organizational forms."

(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: volume 2)

"I teach you the over-man. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?"

"All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the over-man: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

"... Man was born and History began with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of Master and Slave. That is to say that Man -- at his origin -- is always either Master or Slave; and that true Man can only exist where there is Master and Slave."

"...[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)

"...Capital, though organizing the world can never go beyond its own limit."

(Kojin Karatani, Transcritique)

"The thesis [Man] and antitheses [Capital] and their proofs therefore represent nothing but the opposite assertions, that a limit is, and that the limit is equally only a sublated one; that the limit has a beyond with which however it stands in relation, and beyond which it must pass, but in doing so there arises another limit, which is no limit. The solution of these antinomies ... is transcendental, that is."

(Hegel, Science of Logic)

"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, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a 'world-historical' existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.'

(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)

"Marx’s definition of the proletariat as Subjektivitaet (substanceless subjectivity) recovers, as many present day thinkers do not, the meaning of the subject in the Greek term hypokeimenon. ... Marx doesn’t mean that the subject is ‘substanceless’ in the same way that idealist notions of the ‘self’ are substanceless (i.e. cut off from the original greek meaning of the term and based upon reflection), nor that the subject is foundationless per se (as anti-Aristotelian notions of the subject would have it). It plays instead on a double meaning of the word as not only ‘substanceless’ in the political sense (i.e. the proletariat is united in a set of egalitarian economic aims and not selfish individual ‘interests’) but also in the sense of without (possessing) substance, i.e. without property..."

(Nina Power, Philosophy's Subjects)

"The workers shall live one day as the bourgeoisie do now -- but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: thus poorer and simpler but in possession of power."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

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

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)

The City

"...it is in the urban environment--in a world that man himself has made--that mankind first achieved an intellectual life and acquired those characteristics which most distinguish him from the lower animals and from primitive man. For the city and the urban environment represent man's most consistent, and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more to his heart's desire. But if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city he has remade himself."

(Robert Park)

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)

Number and Numbers

0.1. A paradox: we live in the era of the despotism of number, thought is submitted to the law of denumerable multiplicities, and yet (or rather precisely in so far as this default, this failure, is nothing but the obscure obverse of a submission without concept) we have at our disposal no recent, active idea of what number is. The question has been the subject of immense intellectual effort, but for the most part the significant achievements of this labour belong to the beginning of the twentieth century: they are those of Dedekind, Frege, Cantor, and Peano. The factual impact of number brings with it only a silence of the concept. How can we understand today Dedekind’s question, posed in his 1888 treatise, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen [“The Nature and Meaning of Numbers”]? What purpose numbers serve, we know very well: they serve, strictly speaking, for everything, they provide the norm for everything. But what they are we don’t know, or we repeat what the great thinkers of the end of the nineteenth century – no doubt anticipating the extent of their future domain – said they were.

0.2. That number reigns, that the imperative must be: "count!" – who doubts this today?

0.3. Firstly, number rules our political conceptions, with the currency (consensual, even if all politics of the thinkable is enfeebled) of suffrage, of opinion polls, of the majority. Every "political" assembly, general or local, municipal or international, voting-booth or public meeting, is settled with a count. And every opinion is measured by the standard of an incessant enumeration of its advocates (even if such an enumeration makes of every fidelity an infidelity). What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted. Inversely, everything that deals with numbers must be valued. "Political Science" finesses numbers within numbers, cross- references series of numbers, its only object being shifts in voting patterns – that is, changes – usually infinitesimal – in the tabulation of numbers. So political "thought" is a numerical exegesis.

0.4. Number rules over the quasi-totality of the "human sciences" (even if this ciphered alibi can scarcely hide the fact when we speak here of "science", what we have is a technical assemblage whose pragmatic basis is governmental). It is overrun by the statistical data of the entire domain of its disciplines. The bureaucratisation of knowledge is firstly an infinite excrescence of numbering.

0.5. Number governs cultural representation. Certainly, there is television, viewing figures, advertising. But that is not the most important thing. It is in its very essence that the cultural fabric is woven by number alone. A "cultural fact" is a numerical fact. And inversely, whatever produces number can be assigned a cultural place; that which has no number will not have a name either. Art, which has to do with number only insofar as there is a thinking of number, is a culturally unpronounceable word.

0.6. Obviously, number governs the economy, and it is there without doubt that we find what Louis Althusser called the "determination in the last instance" of its supremacy. The ideology of modern parliamentary societies, if they have one, is not humanism, the rights of the subject. It is number, the countable, countability. Every citizen is today expected to be cognizant of foreign trade figures, of the flexibility of the exchange rate, of the developments of the stock market. These figures are presented as the real through which other figures are processed: governmental figures, votes and opinion polls. What is called "the situation" is the intersection of economic numericality and the numericality of opinion.

0.7. Number informs our souls. What is it to exist, if not to assert oneself through a favourable account? In America, one starts by saying how much one earns, an identification that has the merit of honesty.

0.8. Marx: "the icy water of egoistic calculation". And how! To the point where the Ego of egoism is but a numerical web, so that the "egoistic calculation" becomes the cipher of a cipher.

0.9. But we don’t know what a number is, so we don’t know what we are.

0.10. Must we stick with Frege, Dedekind, Cantor or Peano? Hasn’t anything happened in the thinking of number? Is there only the exorbitant extent of its social and subjective reign? To what extent does their idea of number prefigure this anarchic reign? Did they think number, or the future of generalised numericality? Isn’t another idea of number necessary, in order for us to turn thought back against the despotism of number, in order to subtract the Subject from it? And has mathematics assisted only silently in the comprehensive socialisation of number, of which latter it had previously held a monopoly? This is what I wish to examine.

(Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers)

Nietzsche: On War

"No government admits any longer that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense.Moreover the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state does, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. Fundamentally, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor, and thus proves a hostile disposition and hostile tactics. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for foreign conquests."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Complete Works vol. 2)

"And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, 'We break the sword,' an will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of intense emotion--that is the means to real peace, which must rest on peace of mind; whereas so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and , half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared--this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth too."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Marx and McLuhan on Method

"Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialized forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality."

(Karl Marx, Capital volume I)

"...if a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent."

(Mashall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy)

...and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of whom are convinced ‘laymen’)

"What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating anti-totalitarian force of laughter, or ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of this underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally."

"...the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the consistency of the ideological form, the fact that we 'continue to walk as straight as we can in one direction'; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request -- to make us obey ideological form -- are only there to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus enjoyment proper to the ideological form as such."

(Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology)

Reading the Philosphical Text

"...the text functions as a writing machine in which a certain number of typed and systematically enmeshed propositions (one has to be able to recognize and isolate them) represent the 'conscious intention' of the author as reader of his 'own' text, in the sense we speak today of a mechanical reader....Here the lesson of the finite reader called the philosophical author is but one piece, occasionally and incidentally interesting, of the machine."

(Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy)

Empire

“The Era where all of humanity together will be a political reality still remains in the distant future. The period of national political realities is over. This is the epoch of Empires, which is to say of transnational political unities, but formed by affiliated nations.”

(Alexandre Kojève, from a memorandum of advice to Charles de Gaulle written in 1945 at the end of the Second World War)

'We should emphasize that we use ‘‘Empire’’ here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.'

(Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire)

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)