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Notes on Dark Deleuze, Andrew Culp
(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.