[CX-L] fw: wondering what you all thought of this

[Kevin Sanchez]

welcome any comments; sorry for any typos. .k (kevin.sanchez at gmail.com)

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I. THESIS : An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life


Rooting out all forms of fascism in everyday speech/acts is essential to 
ethics as an art of living.


Michel Foucault, writing in 1972. (Preface to, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia. pxiii-iv.)


Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism 
wheras Anti-Oedipus' opposition to the others is more of a tactical 
engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and 
Mussolini - which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so 
effectively - but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our 
everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the 
very thing that dominates and exploits us.

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of 
ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long 
time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular 
"readership" : being anti-oedipul has become a life style, a way of thinking 
and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when 
one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our 
speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we 
ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian 
moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. 
Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism 
in the body.

Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, * {*A seventeenth-century 
priest and Bishop of Geneva, known for his Introduction to the Devout Life} 
one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.


This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present 
or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which 
I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual 
or guide to everyday life:

Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and 
disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, 
castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as 
a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and 
multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile 
arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary 
but nomadic.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the 
thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to 
reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that 
possesses revolutionary force.

Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political 
action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political 
practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the 
forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as 
philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is 
needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, 
diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting 
hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

Do not become enamored of power.



II. LINKS : Oedipal Forms.


Current debating practices commodify literature and argument into cards and 
timed speeches, which neurotically fixate on the goal of winning and deaden 
the revolutionary potential of debate.


Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, writing in 1972. (Anti-Oedipus. p133-4.)


As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from 
seizing the relationship to the literary machine with a field of production, 
and the moment when the emitted sign breaks though this "form of content" 
that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. 
Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of 
Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from 
tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the 
catholic and despotic signifiers of his work, and that necessarily nourish a 
revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the 
absence of style - asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no 
longer defined by what is says, even less by what makes it a signifying 
thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode - desire. For 
literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and 
not an expression.

Here again, oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the 
reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the 
established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm. It is not a 
question here of the personal oedipalization of the author and his readers, 
but of the Oedipal form to which one attempts to enslave the work itself, to 
make of it this minor expressive activity that secretes ideology according 
to the dominant codes. The work of art is supposed to inscribe itself in 
this fashion between the two poles of Oedipus, problem and solution, 
neurosis and sublimation, desire and truth - the one regressive, where the 
work hashes out and redistributes the nonresolved conflicts of childhood, 
and the other progressive, by which the work invents the paths leading 
toward a new solution concerning the future of man. It is said that the work 
is constituted by a conversion interior to itself as "cultural object." From 
this point of view, there is no longer even any need for applying 
psychoanalysis to the work of art, since the work itself constitutes a 
successful psychoanalysis, a sublime "transference" with exemplary 
collective virtualities. The hypocritical warning resounds: a little 
neurosis is good for the work of art, good material, but not psychosis, 
especially not psychosis; we draw a line between the eventually creative 
neurotic aspect, and the psychotic aspect, alienating and destructive. As if 
the great voices, which were capable of performing a breakthrough in grammar 
and syntax, and of making all language a desire, were not speaking from the 
depths of psychosis, and as if they were not demonstrating for our benefit 
an eminently psychotic and revolutionary means of escape.

It is correct to measure established literature against an Oedipal 
psychoanalysis, for this literature deploys a form of superego proper to it, 
even more noxious than the nonwritten superego. Oedipus is in fact literary 
before being psychoanalytic. There will always be a Breton against Artaud, a 
Goethe against Lenz, a Schiller against Holderlin, in order to superegoize 
literature and tell us: Careful, go no further! No "errors for lack of 
tact"! Werther yes, Lenz no! The Oedipal form of literature is its commodity 
form. We are free to think that there is finally even less dishonesty in 
psychoanalysis than in established literature, since the neurotic pure and 
simple produces a solitary work, irresponsible, illegible, and 
nonmarketable, which on the contrary must pay not only to be read, but to be 
translated and reduced. He makes at least an economic error, an error in 
tact, and does not spread his values. Artaud puts it well: all writing is so 
much pig shit - that is to say, any literature that takes itself as an end 
or sets ends for itself, instead of being a process that "ploughs the crap 
of being and its language," transports the weak, the aphasiacs, the 
illiterate. At least spare us sublimation. Every writer is a sellout. The 
only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, 
fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of 
expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.



III. IMPLICATIONS : Micro-Fascism


Focusing too much on the state blinds us to the micro-political groups and 
gestures that sustain fascism.


Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, writing in 1980. (A Thousand Plateaus. 
p214-5.)


Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there 
is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising: there are 
totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that 
are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the 
macrophysical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of 
totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a 
proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from point to 
point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist 
State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war 
veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of 
the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a 
micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, 
before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole. There is 
fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even 
after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms 
persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the "masses." Daniel 
Guerin is correct to say that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over 
the German State administration, it was because from the beginning he had at 
his disposal microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable 
ability to penetrate every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and 
supple segementarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. 
Conversely, if capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as 
catastrophic, if it preferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, 
which from its point of view was much more sensible and manageable, it was 
because the segementarity and centralization of the latter was more 
classical and less fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or 
micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather 
than a totalitarian organism. American film has often depicted these 
molecular focal point; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle 
fasisms spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global 
question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its 
own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor 
do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are 
they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex 
assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations 
already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic 
systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but 
itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in 
interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies 
and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations 
will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too easy to be 
antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the 
fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both 
personal and collective.



IV. ALTERNATIVES : Real Inorganization


We must push the forum toward its own self-critique, moving beyond theater 
to 'pure positive mulitiplicity'.


Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, writing in 1972. (Anti-Oedipus. p.309.)


This reverse side is the "real inorganization" of the molecular elements: 
partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since 
they are not partial in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial 
like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in 
varying degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus as degress of matter); pure 
positive mulitiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness 
or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections are 
transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, 
indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter that serves them 
precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or 
personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space 
each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire that compose a signifying 
chain but that are not themselves signifying, and do not answer to the rules 
of a linguistic game of chess, but instead to the lottery drawings that 
sometimes cause a word to be chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes a thing 
or a piece of a thing, depending on one another only by the order of the 
random drawings, and holding together only by the absence of a link 
(nonlocalizable connections), having no other statutory condition than that 
of being dispersed elements of desiring-machines that are themselves 
dispersed.



Experimenting with new articulations requires caution and patience - wild 
destruction is the worst option.


Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, writing in 1980. (A Thousand Plateaus. 
p160-1.)


You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you 
have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to 
turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when 
things, persons, even situations force you to; and you have to keep small 
rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to 
the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its 
plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered 
the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they 
had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point 
which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of 
organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching 
the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, 
but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This 
is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it 
and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, 
if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of 
drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even 
dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, 
subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is 
if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings 
them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge 
yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an 
advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, 
possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here 
and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a 
small plot of new land at all times. It is trough a meticulous relation with 
the strata that one suceeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated 
flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a 
BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still 
signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation; first see 
how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then 
descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; 
gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of 
consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: 
connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You 
have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged 
into other collective machines.


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i've also sketched out a few insertions/extensions here :


links -
debate as familial institution : AO, p319-20.
debate as state-function : ATP, p375-6; ATP, p385-7.
fear of losing : ATP, p227.
monomanical clarity : ATP, p228.
segregation : AO, p103-4.
ballot as emantiomorphosis : ATP, p107.
impotent power : ATP, p229.
(also debate as game-show : www.ndtceda.com/archives/200209/0158.html; 
www.ndtceda.com/archives/200209/0161.html.)



implications -
tribunals of guilt : AO, p269-71.
machinic enslavement : ATP, p458.
cruelty of signs : AO, p145.
state violence : ATP, p447-8.
being a cop : AO, p344-7.
war on unspecified enemy : ATP, p420-3.


alternatives -
becoming-minority : ATP, p471; ATP, p292.
singing : AO, p334.
atomic poetry : ATP, p344-6.
deoedipalization : AO, p112.
outside thought : ATP, p376-8.
rebel : ATP, p403.


answers to... -
performative contradiction : AO, p14-5. ATP, p78-9.
reformism : AO, p277.
performativity : ATP, p77-8.


random items -
'international' : ATP,p435.
treating people as numbers : ATP, p390.
mental health : AO, p320-1.
humanism : AO, p225.
gay liberation : AO, p350-1.
terror without precedent : AO, p192.
anti-drugs : ATP, 282-6.
racism : ATP, p178.
nation-state system : ATP, p453-6.
private property : AO, p303.
generation gap : AO, p350.
overcoding : AO, p199.
consumption as last word of oedipus : AO, p312-4.