So long, and thanks for all the Genocide denials

[Robin Landseadel]

On Mar 24, 2009, at 3:49 PM, Paul Mackin wrote:
>
> They should be deterritorialized with complete organ removal.
>
> P

Oh good, sounds like you have a clue. First off, this is from Michael  
Foucalt's introduction to Anti-Oedipus. Please excuse the length, but  
this summation comes to a point that requires the previous context.  
These are exit signs from the sorts of things that erupt into flame  
wars, particularly the politically irritated species of flamewar. This  
passage reads like a pep talk for activists stuck in one more blocked  
consensus meeting, and it's the same guy who always blocks at  
consensus meetings. It's a a fine comment on the flame war we all just  
went through:

	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.

	It could even be said that Deleuze and Guattari care so little for
	power that they have tried to neutralize the effects of power
	linked to their own discourse. Hence the games and snares
	scattered throughout the book, rendering its translation a feat of
	real prowess. But these are not the familiar traps of rhetoric; the
	latter work to sway the reader without his being aware of the
	manipulation, and ultimately win him over against his will. The
	traps of Anti-Oedipus are those of humor: so many invitations to
	let oneself be put out, to take one's leave of the text and slam
	the door shut. The book often leads one to believe it is all fun
	and games, when something essential is taking place,
	something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all
	varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and
	crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical
	bitterness of our everyday lives.

"The tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives"  is such a  
beautifully concise description of those impulses that emerge in flame  
wars. The infighting in 24fps, as well. This line strikes me as one of  
those exit signs, also an organizing principle in Pynchon as well:

	• 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 it as a jam session, don't get hung up on right/wrong battles, soak  
up more data, make more data available, be open to difference , be  
open to harmony, be open to serendipity.