Thursday 6 June 2024

Deleuze's self-defenestration.

It is now more than five decades since Deleuze & Guattari wrote the following. Arguably, it is a funny now as it was then. 

Freud.. spoke of the link between his "discovery" of the death instinct and World War I, which remains the model of capitalist war.

It was a war between Imperial cousins. Henry Ford was a capitalist. He embarked on a quixotic Peace Mission to Europe which failed miserably. Still, it is true that Freud only discovered the death instinct after he noticed that lots of peeps were dying all over the place.  

More generally, the death instinct celebrates the wedding of psychoanalysis and capitalism; their engagement had been full of hesitation.

Freud was a charlatan who decided it paid better to treat people who weren't drooling nutjobs. This is because drooling nutjobs don't have any fucking money. Also they shit on your couch.  

What we have tried to show apropos of capitalism is how it inherited much from a transcendent death-carrying agency,

i.e. the agency possessed by living things. This is because living things die sooner or later.  

the despotic signifier,

 defined by Andrew Robinson as 'a particular signifier... elevated to the status of standing for the whole, and the other of this signifier (remembering that signification is necessarily differential) is defined as radically excluded.' The problem here is that a despot, speaking generally, has no strong objection to annexing more territory. Thus no despot will use a 'despotic signifier'. He wants to conquer alterity, not to permanently exclude it from his demesne. 

but also how it brought about this agency's effusion in the full immanence of its own system: the full body, having become that of capital-money,

Henry Ford bought my dick because it was ginormous. I then had to buy a real tiny dick on Ali Express.  

suppresses the distinction between production and anti-production;

You can be against producing stuff. But you can't erase the distinction between producing stuff and being against this happening. That's why if I protest against the production of cars, I don't get paid like the guys working on the assembly line.  

everywhere it mixes antiproduction with the productive forces in the immanent reproduction of its own always widened limits (the axiomatic).

Axioms are merely propositions believed to be true. You can limit the applicability of a particular axiom system. It has narrowing not widened limits.  

The death enterprise is one of the principal and specific forms of the absorption of surplus value in capitalism.

Nope. Profit absorbs surplus value. Because such profits can vest in a Trust or Limited Company which has an indefinite life-span, no 'death enterprise' or instinct can arise. It is a different matter that a guy can use the profits he makes by selling drugs to buy guns with which to shoot members of rival gangs. But then we are speaking of crime, not Capitalism which just means the use of financial markets to allocate investment funds.  

It is this itinerary that psychoanalysis rediscovers and retraces with the death instinct:

There is no itinerary here. This is just ignorant nonsense.  

the death instinct is now only pure silence in its transcendent distinction from life,

Fuck off! Freud was a garrulous nutter. He wouldn't shut up about Thanatos. 

but it effuses all the more, throughout all the immanent combinations it forms with this same life.

but only at the point when that life ends. Otherwise, it isn't immanent at all. It is merely potential.  

Absorbed, diffuse, immanent death is the condition formed by the signifier in capitalism,

Money is generally considered the master signifier in capitalism. But money can be held by a Corporation or a Trust which can be wound up but which can't die in the way living things die. Indeed, following Marx, it is usual to see Capital as existing in the manner of the undead vampire such that living proles are drained of surplus value by evil Count Dracula.  

the empty locus that is everywhere displaced in order to block the schizophrenic escapes and place restraints on the flights.

Maybe this sounds better in French. Schizophrenia is a disease which, for most people, can be considerably ameliorated by the right medication.  

The only modern myth is the myth of zombies—mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason.

The Haitian zombie may labor in the fields but can't 'reason'.  

In this sense the primitive and the barbarian, with their ways of coding death, are children in comparison to modern man and his axiomatic (so many unemployed are needed, so many deaths, the Algerian War doesn't kill more people than weekend automobile accidents, planned death in Bengal, etc.).

No such axioms exist. The Phillips curve had broken down by the time these two nutters wrote this. The French did do stupid shit in Algeria but there were no 'planned deaths' in Bengal though no doubt there was ethnic cleansing.  

Modern man "raves to a far greater extent. His delirium is a switchboard with thirteen telephones.

These guys would go bonkers if they saw an i-phone.  

He gives his orders to the world. He doesn't care for the ladies. He is brave, too. He is decorated like crazy. In man's game of chance the death instinct, the silent instinct is decidedly well placed, perhaps next to egoism.

D & G were misogynists. Women can't have a death instinct because they are too stupid. Also, they have to sit down to pee.  

It takes the place of zero in roulette. The house always wins. So too does death. The law of large numbers works for death."

Nope. It works for the Condorcet Jury theorem which says that we can safely ignore nutters talking bollocks of some extreme Right or Left wing stripe.  

It is now or never that we must take up a problem we had left hanging. Once it is said that capitalism works on the basis of decoded flows as such,

No. It works on the basis of arbitrage or market making. You don't have to decode money. Counting it is sufficient unless your Bank does that for you.  

how is it that it is infinitely further removed from desiring-production than were the primitive or even the barbarian systems, which nonetheless code and overcode the flows?

D&G were primitive and barbaric in their thinking. They couldn't decode shit.  

Once it is said that desiring-production is itself a decoded and deterritorialized production,

which it isn't. Stuff which is desired and produced is desired and produced in a particular place.  

how do we explain that capitalism, with its axiomatic, its statistics, performs an infinitely vaster repression of this production than do the preceding regimes, which nonetheless did not lack the necessary repressive means?

This like saying 'once we admit all cats are dogs how do we explain that cats use mind-rays to control the moon?'  

We have seen that the molar statistical aggregates of social production were in a variable relationship of affinity with the molecular formations of desiring-production.

Only if we have also seen cats commanding the moon to turn into an alligator.  

What must be explained is that the capitalist aggregate is the least affinal, at the very moment it decodes and deterritorializes with all its might.

We must explain why the moon becomes the least avuncular alligator which ever tried to bite us in the deterritorialized locus of our absence. 

The answer is the death instinct,

Henry Ford is dead. This is because of the un-avuncular alligator of his own absence from the deterritorialized locus of his instinct to just fucking die already.  

if we call instinct in general the conditions of life that are historically and socially determined by the relations of production and antiproduction in a system.

That is what we call the effect of upbringing not the effect of instinct.  

We know that molar social production and molecular desiring-production must be evaluated both from the viewpoint of their identity in nature and from the viewpoint of their difference in regime.

No we don't. What we know is these two nutters couldn't evaluate shit.  

But it could be that these two aspects, nature and regime, are in a sense potential and are actualized only in inverse proportion.

Sadly, we don't know what is 'natural'. Some peeps think it has to do with being celibate and not eating meat. Others think it means sodomizing six year olds while eating a hamburger. Most of us agree that it is natural to kick such people to death.  

Which means that where the regimes are the closest, the identity in nature is on the contrary at its minimum; and where the identity in nature appears to be at its maximum, the regimes differ to the highest degree.

There is no 'naturality'. What the fitness landscape picks is arbitrary.  

If we examine the primitive or the barbarian constellations, we see

vast differences in regime which is why some places stopped being so fucking primitive or barbaric.  

that the subjective essence of desire as production is referred to large objectities, to the territorial or the despotic body, which act as natural or divine preconditions that thus ensure the coding or the overcoding of the flows of desire by introducing them into systems of representation that are themselves objective.

By the end of the Sixties, math had realized that 'naturality' was far to seek. What these nutters were talking about was impossible unless, like Liebniz, they believed God was the only efficient cause and for some reason of His own, he wanted us to believe in Darwin not Deuteronomy.  

Hence it can be said that the identity in nature between the two productions is completely hidden there:

like the hidden identity in nature between cats and dogs who control the Moon and turn it into an alligator  

as much by the difference between the objective socius and the subjective full body of desiring-production, as by the difference between the qualified codes and overcodings of social production and the chains of decoding or of deterritorialization

D & G use the word territory for a social relation and deterritorialization for a deformation or transformation of that relation. I suppose one could say 'Whites saw Australia as a 'terra nullis' though it was nothing of the sort for its indigenous people'. However, those indigenous people are still there and, where possible, retain whatever they can of their marvelous social heritage. In other words, D&G were unconscious White Male supremacists. Still, they must have noticed that families are 'social relations' and existed in 'primitive' societies just as much as they existed in 'advanced' Communist or Capitalist societies. Thus their 'deterritorialization' didn't actually exist though, no doubt, some societies or clans were displaced or rendered extinct by other societies or peoples. 

belonging to desiring-production, and by the entire repressive apparatus represented in the savage prohibitions, the barbarian law, and the rights of antiproduction.

The problem here is that this sort of 'coding' would only be possible in a time exponential to the age of the Universe. God could do it but why would he bother?  

And yet the difference in regime, far from being accentuated and deepened, is on the contrary reduced to a minimum, because desiring-production as an absolute limit remains an exterior limit, or else stays unoccupied as an internalized and displaced limit, with the result that the machines of desire operate on this side of their limit within the framework of the socius and its codes.

An 'absolute limit' includes itself- e.g. not less than three includes three. What these guys are thinking of is a geometric limit or the limit of an indefinite sequence.  

That is why the primitive codes and even the despotic overcodings testify to a polyvocity that functionally draws them nearer to a chain of decoding of desire:

We now know that any bunch of representational codes can be given univalent foundations for any specific purpose. But this should always have been obvious.  

the parts of the desiring-machine function

like the parts of the cat that is the dog which turns the moon into an alligator 

in the very workings of the social machine; the flows of desire enter and exit through

Deleuze's ass?  

the codes that continue, however, to inform the model and experience of death that are elaborated in the unity of the .sociodesiring-apparatus.

Nothing is 'elaborated' in an apparatus. Maybe these guys are thinking of an appendix.  

And it is even less a question of the death instinct to the extent that the model and the experience are better coded in a circuit that never stops grafting the desiring-machines onto the social machine and implanting the social machine in the desiring-machines.

Thus a guy whom we caught sodomizing a six year old might say 'I wanted to be caught and kicked to death. My analyst says I have an overmastering death instinct. I need therapy. The fact is Capitalism fucked me up and turned me into a pedo scumbag. Tell you what, why not sentence me to four years at the Sorbonne so I can get a PhD on Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and fucking kids in the ass?  

Death comes all the more from without as it is coded from within.

Only in the sense that the Sun only shines on us because inside our hearts is a very nice and sweet Sun.  

This is especially true of the system of cruelty, where death is inscribed in the primitive mechanism of surplus value as well as in the movement of the finite blocks of debt.

Fuck off! You can extract surplus value and recover debts from the Estates of those who are dead.  

But even in the system of despotic terror,

people have to eat. This means you have to pay guys to do the terrorizing on the despot's behalf.  

where debt becomes infinite

Fuck off! Any accountant will tell you that you must write off uncollectible debts or write down debts where you can only recover pennies on the pound.  

and where death experiences an elevation that tends to make of it a latent instinct,

Everybody dies. If there is a death instinct, everybody has it though, obviously, it is latent till the actual moment of death 

there nonetheless subsists a model in the overcoding law,

 A model can demonstrate the working of a bunch of laws but the model does not subsist in the law.  

and an experience for the overcoded subjects,

if they were truly 'overcoded', they would have no experience. This is because for D&G overcoding is textual. There need be no 'reception' for it.  

at the same time as antiproduction remains separate as the share owing to the overlord.

Cool! Our Galactic Overlords must be very happy with my antiproduction of anything useful. This is the reason they have not obliterated our planet even though everybody's cat is the dog which transforms the moon into an alligator. On the other hand, most people who know me would urge me to defenestrate myself like Deleuze- i.e. kill myself by jumping out of the window.  I suppose his 'Nomadology' endowed Liebniz's monads with windows for at least one good purpose. Come to think of it, Fanon's wife too jumped out of her window. Maybe it's a French thing. Why hit the streets with a bunch of fellow agitators when you can hit the street and explode leaving lots of blood and guts smeared over the pavement? 

 

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