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What Buzzfeed Learned from Deleuze and Guattari

May 30, 2014 / Klint Finley

Gilles Deleuze mural

Dylan Matthews on Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti’s background as a critical theorist:

“Nobody wants to be a shill for your brand,” former Buzzfeed chief creative officer Jeff Greenspan once told New York Magazine for a profile of the company’s founder, Jonah Peretti. “But they are happy to share information and content that helps them promote their own identity.”

So where did Peretti get that idea? Peretti’s academic writings offer one clue. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1996, Peretti published an article in the cultural theory journal Negations entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution.” After the paper was mentioned in New York’s Peretti profile, Critical-Theory.com’s Eugene Wolters read through it, and found that it more or less lays out (and critiques) Buzzfeed’s entire business model—a full decade before the company was founded.

In brief, the paper argues that, going forward, capitalism will need to be constantly producing identities for people to adopt at an ever-increasing rate. And now Peretti’s at the helm of a firm that’s doing exactly that.

Full Story: Vox: Buzzfeed’s founder used to write Marxist theory and it explains Buzzfeed perfectly

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Biography

December 21, 2012 / Klint Finley

Lengthy review of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives by written by François Dosse and translated by Deborah Glassman:

Deleuze and Guattari were hardly alone in thinking that the unconscious might have something to add to left-wing politics, and that it might even speed the revolution. Attempts to fuse Marx and Freud were very much in vogue. But Anti-Oedipus had little in common with Freudo-Marxism, with its lyrical dream of a revolution that would, in a single stroke, free individual desire from bourgeois repression and the proletariat from capitalism. The individual was of no interest to Deleuze and Guattari, and though they referred to the proletariat the mention seemed dutiful. Their goal wasn’t to liberate human beings, but rather the current of desire that happened to flow through them. […]

Guattari, at La Borde, had tried to enable subjugated groups to become subject groups, and he and Deleuze had come to believe it was patronising, authoritarian, even fascist, to speak on anyone else’s behalf, which is what intellectuals in France had always done. As Foucault noted in his introduction to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus, their true adversary was not so much capitalism as ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.

Full Story: London Review of Books: Desire Was Everywhere

(via Abe Burmeister)

The Majority, Including Occupy and the Tea Party, Agree On Top Issues

November 25, 2011 / Klint Finley

Zero Hedge sums up the ways in which the majority of the U.S., including both Occupy and the Tea Party, agree on the most important issues:

No more bailouts
End crony capitalism
Prosecute Wall Street fraud
End, or at least rein in, the Federal Reserve
Respect the constitution and our liberty
End perpetual war
Make elections fair
Keep poison out of our food and water

A Majority of Americans (Including Both OWS and the Tea Party) AGREE on the Most Important Issues … We Just Don’t Realize It

This isn’t to say that health care reform, reproductive rights, immigration reform, and civil liberties for women and ethnic and sexual minorities aren’t important. But with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve issue, these are issues that affect everyone, and both liberals and conservatives can mostly agree on.

I’ve been hoping for some sort of left-alliance with the Tea Party for a long time (and I’ve made my own proposal for a left/libertarian alliance, but given the debt-ceiling debate, it’s not one I think would actually go over well). It may finally be happening. But it’s not an easy proposition, there’s a big clash of cultures.

This is not a trivial challenge. A few years ago Slavoj Zizek wrote in a somewhat meandering critique of both Alexander Bard’s and Jan Soderqvist’s Netocracy and Michael Hardt’ and Antonio Negri’s Empire:

Is it then true that these tendencies (these lignes de fuite, as Deleuze would have put it) can coexist in a non-antagonistic way, as parts of the same global network of resistance? One is tempted to answer this claim by applying to it Laclau’s notion of the chain of equivalences: of course this logic of multitude functions – because we are still dealing with RESISTANCE. However, what about when – if this really is the desire and will of these movements – “we take it over”? What would the “multitude in power” look like? There was the same constellation in the last years of the decaying Really-Existing Socialism: the non-antagonistic coexistence, within the oppositional field, of a multitude of ideologico-political tendencies, from liberal human-rights groups to “liberal” business-oriented groups, conservative religious groups and leftist workers’ demands. This multitude functioned well as long as it was united in the opposition to “them,” the Party hegemony; once they found THEMSELVES in power, the game was over.

This is not, I don’t think, an insurmountable problem, but it must be kept in mind. These conflicts could destroy a coalition.

Illustrations for A Thousand Plateaus

December 22, 2009 / Klint Finley

1000platos-intro-06b

1000platos-intro-06

More here

(Thanks Abe)

IDF read Deleuze and Guattari for urban warfare insights

December 24, 2008 / Klint Finley

I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’5 When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem. […] Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.’6

Full Story: The Art of War

(via Blustr)

Manuel DeLanda – The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

June 22, 2008 / Klint Finley

Richard Phantastica has a blog

February 3, 2008 / Klint Finley

My friend Richard Phantastica has a blog, with posts about EsoTech, Grant Morrison, Gilles Deleuze, and William S. Burroughs. Check it out.

Shaviro on DeLanda’s new book, A New Philosophy of Society

January 18, 2007 / Klint Finley

As DeLanda explains it, an entity is never fully defined by its relations; it is always possible to detach an entity from one particular set of relations, and insert it instead in a different set of relations, with different other entities. For every entity has certain ‘properties’ that are not defined by the set of relations it finds itself in at a given moment; rather than being merely an empty signifier, the entity can take these properties with it, as it were, when it moves from one context (or one set of relations) to another. At the same time, an entity is never devoid of (some sort of) relations: the world is a plenum, indeed it is over-full, and solipsism or atomistic isolation is impossible.

Put differently, no entity can be absolutely isolated, because it is always involved in multiple relations of one sort or another, and these relations affect the entity, cause it to change. But this is not to say that the entity is entirely determined by these relations.

Full Story: The Pinocchio Theory.

PLURALISM=MONISM

December 22, 2006 / Klint Finley

“If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes and rhizomatic offhoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overtuns the model and outlines a map, even if it constiutes its own heirarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable… We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we all seek-PLURALISM=MONISM-via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.” (A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (20-1)

Introduction to Deleuze and Guattari part one

November 14, 2006 / Klint Finley

Fenris 23 has undertaken the daunting task, at the request of Doloras LaPicho at Chaos Marxism of explaining Deleuze and Guattari “in terms a factory worker would not only understand but would be interested in.” Daunting in part because I’m not sure how one can approximate what “a factory worker” is interested in or what they are capable of understanding. I’m not sure if being a college educated tech worker puts me in a better or worse position in terms of understanding D&G, but I think Fenris does a good job at introducing these concepts I’ve been spending the past few months trying to wrap my brain around. Here is the rough draft for the first part:

Their project for Capitalism and Schizophrenia was psychological emancipation of the individual and cooperative social organization so they are very compatable with both Marxism and Occult practice.

Deleuze and Guattari, however, are not a totalized whole that can be understood and explained. Rather their work is many things subject to many understandings. One purpose of studying Deleuze and Guattari is to change how you think. It is an initiation. Their concepts are not a system to be understood but rather tools we can apply or put to work.

Full Story: Isle of Lyngvi.

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