I was never a member of the cult of Debord. I had read Society of the Spectacle in college, and even watched a few of Guy Debord’s films on my own. I mostly associated Debord with a certain kind of downer avant-garde, all bile and bilge, albeit frequently fun and exhilarating. Later in 2011, now working as a teacher, I assigned Society of the Spectacle in a graduate seminar, mostly for old time’s sake. It bombed. Or maybe the lessons of the book had become so commonplace by then that many younger students didn’t see the point. Why call for a revolution of everyday life, when contemporary life is in constant chaotic rotation? Why call for a form of aesthetic hijacking, when much contemporary art—from memes to games to fine art—is sampled, riffed, and repeated endlessly? Had the work of Debord, that notorious French author and filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International, finally run its course? Had Debord been done in because he won out?

Continue reading at ROMchip

Recently I've been thinking a lot about diagonal lines and processes of diagonalization. Inherently formal and spatial, if not also graphical, the diagonal or oblique line has played any number of important roles: from the diagonal of the unit square (which nearly destroyed Pythagoreanism and, later, played an important role in Plato’s Meno), to the modern intervention of Georg Cantor’s “diagonal argument” (where in 1891 he demonstrated that the real numbers are uncountable), to the structuralism of A.J. Greimas and Jacques Lacan, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s postmodern “machine,” defined as a diagonal that cuts through an assemblage. The diagonal is a dynamic force that grants access to several important domains, namely relation, contradiction, and the irrational. Continue reading →

There's an amazing post at Destratified about the connections between Deleuze and Marx, focusing on Deleuze's proposed but unfortunately unrealized book Grandeur de Marx. After reading the post, I remembered an article in Le Nouvel Observateur with some revealing quotations from Deleuze about Marx, including a reference to the "Grandeur" book. (I briefly referenced this in my book on Laruelle, pp. 96-97.) The article didn't seem to be digitized anywhere, but luckily I was able to find the original article again on microfilm in the library, and sent it to Matthew for inclusion in his bibliography. I'm posting the article below for anyone interested, with a rough translation of the final section where Deleuze describes his relation to Marx. Deleuze died only a few days before this article was published.

Gilles Deleuze:

I never had any special loyalty to the Communist Party. (I was never psychoanalyzed either -- I escaped all that.) And I had never been a Marxist prior to the 1960s. What made me hesitate was to see the kinds of things the communists made their intellectuals do.

I should also add that I wasn't a Marxist then for the simple fact that I hadn't really read much Marx in those years.

I read Marx at the same time I read Nietzsche. This was a nice pairing for me. And I still find validity in many of those concepts. There's a critique there, a radical critique. You will find references to Marx and marxism all throughout Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Today, I can say that I feel completely marxist. For example, the article that I published on the "Society of Control" [reprinted in Negotiations] is completely marxist, even though I discuss things that Marx knew nothing about.

I don't understand it when people try to say that Marx was wrong. And even less when they claim that Marx is dead. There are so many urgent tasks today: we need to try to understand the global market, what it is and how it moves. To do that, one must turn to Marx.

My next book will be titled "Greatness of Marx." It will be my final book. Although these days I no longer have the desire to write. After my book on Marx I think I'm going to quit writing. At which point I will spend the rest of my time painting.

[Source: "Le ‘Je me souviens’ de Gilles Deleuze," Le Nouvel Observateur (Nov 16–22, 1995), 50-51.]

Nobody knows, not really. I've said in the past that no one has yet patented a Meaning Machine. And when it comes to the digital and the analog I'm mostly in the dark about the question of meaning. My intuition is that meaning is not exclusively subsumed by either digital or analog phenomena. Meaning seems to be one of those things that spans both the digital and the analog, even if it might need to be thought differently in both contexts. (And here I'm continuing some thoughts that emerged from recent conversations with Beatrice Fazi.) Continue reading →

I've been talking recently with Beatrice Fazi about a structuralist theory of the digital. In my experience, the majority of digital theory today is essentially empirical in that it tries to understand words like "digital" and "analog" by looking at the world and writing descriptions of what one sees there. At the same time there's a small contingent of folks -- I count myself among them -- who want to do it a bit differently. Instead of relying on empirical methods like observation and description, we might also turn to theories of language, ideology, representation, and even metaphysics. Following that path, a number of quickly questions arise. For instance, if digital code is a kind of language, does that put digitality under the heading of rationalization, logical structure, symbolic representation, and the symbolic order more generally? And likewise, since the analog tends to resist symbolization, does that mean analogicity is somehow extra- or sub-rational? Is the analog the natural domain of contingency, randomness, impossibility? Does the analog resist representation? Is the analog a synonym for the real?

It's a challenging question, one that doesn't have a simple answer. I've been scolded in the past for suggesting that the analog has a relation to the real. And while it's easy to fall into a romantic trap where the analog comes to mean pure nature or some kind of purely authentic presence, I also think it's wrong to discard the real entirely. (In fact this "romantic trap" can be leveraged for use by digital tools, as in the example of random number generators using trigonometry to tap into the pseudo-chaotic nature of continuous values.) Because of these challenges, it's best to address the question through different registers rather than offer a single pat answer. (tl;dr: yes I do think the analog is on the side of the real.) Continue reading →

The following short translation is from Catherine Malabou's new book, Au voleur! : Anarchism et philosophie which deals with the often troubled relationship between anarchism and philosophy. A hefty volume, with chapters on Aristotle, Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, and Rancière, the book explores why some thinkers are willing to profess a kind of ontological anarchism, while at the same time avoiding anarchism in their own politics. This page comes toward the end of the book and offers a nice overview of some of the various positions discussed by Malabou. Let me know if you notice any mistakes in translation.

"I am an anarchist" -- For philosophers, this is an impossible claim, now and forever.

One can not be an anarchist. The phenomenon of the anarchy of being, in an age when principles wither away, resists reduction to any ontic determination. Being is no longer understood in such and such a way, and thus being ceases to fulfill its function as a predictive or determining agent (Schürmann).

One can not be an anarchist. In reality, anarchy reveals itself to be more fundamental than ontology, exceeding ontological difference itself (Levinas). Its "saying" exceeds its "said," and hence endlessly overflows the propositional form itself, by carrying the responsibility of obligation beyond the question of essence.

One can not be an anarchist. As soon as we associate anarchy and power -- "the power to be an anarchist" -- we recognize, in one way or another, how anarchism participates in the drive toward mastery (Derrida).

One can not be an anarchist. It's not the predicate "anarchist" that transforms the subject and makes the subject anarchist by determining its qualities. No, the subject must first elaborate its own anarchic dimension, must first cultivate its own propensity for transformation, in order to constitute itself as an anarchic subject prior to "being" it and predicating it (Foucault).

One can not be an anarchist. This term is a signifier so inflated with the emptiness of its own signified that it has become a fetish, made sacred, and hence announces a new kind of idolatry (Agamben).

One can not be an anarchist. The negativity at work in politics, the basic structure of misunderstanding and miscalculation, means it cannot be localized. Political expressions are rare and intermittent, appearing sometimes but only in eclipse. Negativity puts things in play and never comes to rest (Rancière).

"I am an anarchist" -- Each word in this sentence poses an insurmountable obstacle to all the others, an echo of the untenable political character of anarchism itself.

(Source: Catherine Malabou, Au voleur!: Anarchism et philosophie [Paris: PUF, 2022].)

Recently I spoke with game designer Frédéric Serval about war games and Guy Debord. It was a fun,  far-ranging conversation with Fred, who is a real expert on games of this type, and being French knows a lot about the history and context. This is part 1, with part 2 forthcoming.

Announcing my doctoral seminar for Fall 2022.

Deleuze and Guattari's "Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

Special Topics in Critical Theory -- Thursdays 9:30am - 12:20pm

This doctoral seminar is on two books, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both subtitled "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," the two books describe and sometimes anticipate changes in the nature of society and the subject. Spanning the pivotal decade of the 1970s, these texts will provide a lens through which to understand psychoanalysis, Marxism, aesthetics, technology, and several other topics. The course will consist of close readings of the two books, with minimal secondary material. Open to doctoral students and approved master's students.

The first term in Euclid’s Elements came as a surprise to me. The first term in Euclid’s hefty treatise on geometry is not number or line, not triangle or sphere, not mathematics, and not even geometry itself. The first term in Euclid’s elements is point: “A point is that which has no part.”

Is this the origin of geometry, this the first term in the first major omnibus of geometry? The question has been posed before, by Jacques Derrida famously. But he was upstaging another voice, that of Edmund Husserl writing just prior to the onset of World War II. Why not upstage them both, as Michel Serres did, first in his sketches on the “Origin of Geometry,” then later shifting the frame slightly, not “Origin” but Origins.

Who would not be a little disappointed by Husserl’s text, that tedious appendix, forever dancing around the topic of geometry but never addressing it head on? The general attitude--voiced by Derrida with his characteristic condescension--has been to discount the question itself, to invert Husserl, and to investigate not the origin of geometry but the geometry of origin, origin now having been recast as the cardinal sin of all philosophy. But was that not just another distraction? In trying to unseat origin, one risks naturalizing geometry, a new structure to replace the old, even if that structure is, in some sense, deconstructed. So instead of discarding the question, let us retain it. Let us return to Husserl’s investigation and try to look for a different answer. Let us ask the question again. What is the origin of geometry?

(Continue reading at Grey Room.)

For my friends in Paris and elsewhere -- I'll be delivering a lecture at IRCAM / Centre Pompidou on March 10th at 2:30pm CET (8:30am EST). The event will be webcast.

Lecture title: "Read, Write, Execute: What are the Machines that Determine Thinking?"

(Update: Watch the lecture in English, which was also translated into French.)