Notes on Dark Deleuze, Andrew Culp
My ultimate purpose is to convince readers to completely abandon all the joyous paths for their dark alternatives. The best scenario would be that these contraries fade into irrelevance after Dark Deleuze achieves its ostensible goal: the end of this world, the final defeat of the state, and full communism. It is far more likely that various aspects of darkness will be captured along the way. Like any other war machine, a dark term is defeated when it isomorphically takes on relations or forms of its joyous counterpart. So it is worth uttering a cautionary note from A Thousand Plateaus: even when contrary, never believe that darkness will suffice to save us.
…………………………………Joyous……………………………………Dark
The Task…………………..Create Conceptions………………Destroy Worlds
Subject…………………….Assemblages………………………….Un-becoming
Existence…………………Genesis…………………………………..Transformation
Ontology………………….Realism…………………………………..Materialism
Difference………………..Inclusive Disjunction………………Exclusive Disjunction
Diagram……………………Complexity…………………………….Asymmetry
Organisation…………….Rhizome…………………………………Unfolding
Ethics……………………….Processural Democracy…………Conspiratorial Communism
Affect……………………….Intensity…………………………………Cruelty
Speed……………………….Acceleration…………………………..Escape
Flows………………………..Production……………………………..Interruption
Substance…………………Techno-Science……………………..Political Anthropology
Nomadism………………..Pastoral………………………………….Barbarian
Distribution……………….Nomos……………………………………The Outside
Politics………………………Molecular………………………………Cataclysmic
Cinema………………………The Forces of Bodies…………….The Powers of the False
The Sensible……………..Experience…………………………….Indiscernibility
(p. 1)
a “worthwhile book” performs at least three functions: polemics, recovery, and creativity. In writing the book, the author must reveal that (1) other scholarship commits an error; (2) an essential insight has been missed; and (3) a new concept can be created.
(p. 5)
“We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it… We lack resistance to the present” (What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari)
(p. 6)
The “mad scientist” criticism of technology misses the mark. The trouble is not that myopic technicians have relentlessly pursued technical breakthroughs without considering the consequences (“forgive them, for they know not what they do”; Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28). The antidote for such ignorance would be a small dose of ideology critique. Alternatively, technology has not exceeded humanity's capacity to manage it–if anything, Foucault's insights (the analytic of finitude, bio power) suggest that humanity influences its own future more that ever before (Desert Islands, Deleuze, 90-93). The problem is, they know perfectly well what they are doing, but they continue doing it anyway!
“technology is social before it is technical” (Foucault, Deleuze, 17)
(p. 12)
critique is not effective in its own right, no matter how loudly it proclaims its own right. The only adequate knowledge is activity.
[art=] impressions that have congealed enough to become their own mobile army of sensations.(What is Philosophy, 163-64)
(p. 13)
the punk ethos of “no future”, which paradoxically recognizes that the only future we have comes when stop reproducing the conditions of the present (Edelman, No Future)
(p. 38)
We know better that to think that a rhizome is enough to save us. Even something as rhizomatic as the internet is still governed by a set of decentralised protocols that helps it maintain its consistency–the drawback being that these forms of control are diffuse, not immidiately apparent, and difficult to resist (Galloway, Protocol, 61-72).
(p. 51)
In posing better problems, instead of trying to solve them, (nomad) science invites a range of potential solutions.
(p. 63)
The Sensible: Indiscernibility, Not Experience
The senses think when the boundary between the imaginary and the real collapses. This is what happens whenever the suspension of disbelief continues outside the frame (C2, 169). But the suspension carries on only as long as it is not whittled down to a narrow proposition through “infinite specification” (DR, 306). It expands by establishing a “distinct yet indiscernible” proximity (TP, 279–80, 286). In this strange zone of indiscernibility, figuration recedes—it is right before our eyes, but we lose our ability to clarify the difference between a human body, a beast, and meat (FB, 22–27). There is no mystical outside, just the unrelenting intrusion of “the fact that we are not yet thinking” (C2, 167). This is because experience is itself not thought but merely the provocation to think—a reminder of the insufferable, the impossibility of continuing the same, and the necessity of change.
“Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting,” says Foucault (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 88). Neither is sense. The best sense is a sensation, a provocation, that introduces insufficiency (L, 50–58). So instead of adequate conceptions, we spread insufficient sensations. This insufficiency does not carry the weight of inevitability. It may begin with a petulant indecisiveness, such as Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” but it must not end there. The greatest danger is that indecision consumes us and we become satisfied for one reason or another, withering like Bartleby in jail cells of our own making. Our communism demands that we actively conspire under the cover of the secret; for there is nothing more active than the Death of the World. Our hatred propels us. Just as “an adventure that erupts in sedentary groups” through “the call of the outside,” our sense that the world is intolerable is what compels us to build our own barbarian siege engines to attack the new Metropolis that stands in Judgment like a Heaven on Earth (DI, 259).
(p. 69)
The lesson to be taken is that “we all must live double lives”: one full of the compromises we make with the present, and the other in which we plot to undo them. The struggle is to keep one’s cover identity from taking over. There are those whose daily drudgery makes it difficult to contribute to the conspiracy, though people in this position are far more likely to have secret dealings on the side. Others are given ample opportunities but still fail to grow the secret, the most extreme example being those who live their lives “with nothing to hide,” often declaring that they are “an open book.” Some treat the conspiracy as a form of hobbyism, working to end the world only after everything else has been taken care of—the worst being liberal communists, who exploit so much in the morning that they can give half of it back as charity in the afternoon. And then there are those who escape. Crafting new weapons while withdrawing from the demands of the social, they know that cataclysm knows nothing of the productivist logic of accumulation or reproduction. Escape need not be dreary, even if they are negative. Escape is never more exciting than when it spills out into the streets, where trust in appearances, trust in words, trust in each other, and trust in this world all disintegrate in a mobile zone of indiscernibility (Fontaine, “Black Bloc”). It is in these moments of opacity, insufficiency, and breakdown that darkness most threatens the ties that bind us to this world.