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State of Control

  
 
multitude.tv
15:44 / 11.12.05
I am currently looking into contemporary continental political philosophy, specifically the discourses of Delueze/Guattari, Derrida, Agamben, Zizek, Laclau, Badiou. My principle concern is in the model of the camp introduced by Agamben in Homo Sacer and the Control Society that Delueze talks about (it is in Negotiations). Hardt & Negri take up some of these concerns and propose the Multitude to counter the dominance described by Agamben and Deleuze; however, the conception of multitute somehow rings as ultra-utopian while simultaneously running counter to Deleuzian notions of mutation; that is, the multitude seems to me to be a simple reformulation of the "Masses" which is the concern of disciplinary biopolitics in Foucault. The Deluzian-Guattarian notions of micropolitics seems to me, at least initially, to be a more sensible strategy to announce, and to work towards than a globalized multitude to counter Empire (and is Empire really a co-relate to the Control Society, the State of Exception, or the Camp). Though I can't help but think of Nancy Frazier's introduction of counter-publics in the Habermassian Liberal discourse (which I find to be horribly insufficient to describe the complexities of political power and relations of force in the 21st century). Is there a way to think about these movements in power, these mutations of relations, without falling back on the neo-neo-marxisms of Hardt &Negri, without a New International Multitude Party, without idolizing the internet (which though I think will be a site of contention, will certainly not be THE site of contention). How can we think of bodies (real corporealites) in this Control Society, and is there a place for communication outside of the constitutively entrenched notions relations of force that exist in the Control Society? That is, in the end, assuming that Agamben is correct in "State of Exception" and that we are in a global concentration camp, in what way will we be able to resist?
 
 
sdv (non-human)
12:59 / 12.12.05
That Deleuze and Guattari were marxists or if your prefer post-marxists is something that should be taken as read. Often reading the work of anti-marxists like DeLanda one temporarily despairs, not because of the work itself, but rather because anti-marxists simply avoid the issue of the leftist politics that permeates all of Deleueze and Deleueze/Guattari's work. I'd suggest that you are severely misreading and restricting the work of D&G - they like Negri/Hardt are leftists within the Spinoza/Nietzsche variant of communists - which is to say that they are non-Hegelian Marxists. Agamben emerges out of; on one hand the sub-variant of situationists, a much more hegelian line of thought and more importantly the misreading of the crisis of philosophy that the holocaust caused.

Whichever way you read Agamben and Deleuze; it is a much harder process to maintain a simple relationship between them that you attempt in your introduction - and more importantly it is much easier to understand and accept the relations between the works of Deleuze/Guattari and Negri/Hardt - indeed I'd argue that the strength of 'Empire' is precisely that it attempts to construct a politics that is both a continuation of the capitalism and schzophrenia project and a post-marxist critique of global capital.

Whilst the logic of 'the control society' works, developed as it is by Deleuze out of Foucault's recognition that the disciplinary society had been superceded. Given this change the idea that capitalist society can be considered as being a "global concentration camp" doesn't work. This is because the majority , perhaps even all, concentration camps have been instruments of direct political power - perhaps we might even go as far as to suggest that they represent 'masters and slaves', something terribly imperial and more industrial ? (At least as the holocaust showed...). Doesn't the control society represent a different form of social organization than this ?

In the final lines of the Control Society text - Deleuze asks what kind of resistance and revolt might develop - in part you answer your own question - of course it is and will be micro-political but it also will have to be marxist and communist. And of course none of the male names that you mention would deny this...

i suppose i should have written about the control society - but i wouldn't want anyone to think the deleuze/guattari and co were anti-marxists...
 
 
multitude.tv
18:25 / 20.12.05
Sdv,

Thanks for the reply. I do think there is a connection to be drawn between Agamben’s Camp and Deleuze’s “control society.” Even if it in such a way to use the apparatuses of the control society to describe the manner in which all are made homo sacer in the camp. That is, the use of mechanisms of control to maintain a global state of exception (which I may predicate with “virtual” with its historic and potential connotations immanent to the state of exception as is).

In “Negotiations” Deleuze make reference to Burroughs concerning the origin of the notion of the control society; are you familiar with this? Do you know in what corner of Burroughs’s work can be found such a notion? In a broad sense I am fascinated with the co-emergence of the work of Burroughs (and the folks surrounding him) and that of the 20th century French philosophy, if you know of anyone that explore a historical connection between the two I would be interested as well, but Deleuze’s reference to Burroughs is my principle concern on this matter.

That all being said, I’d like to get back to the post.
sdv: I'd suggest that you are severely misreading and restricting the work of D&G - they like Negri/Hardt are leftists within the Spinoza/Nietzsche variant of communists - which is to say that they are non-Hegelian Marxists. Agamben emerges out of; on one hand the sub-variant of situationists, a much more hegelian line of thought and more importantly the misreading of the crisis of philosophy that the holocaust caused.

I am still unclear what is meant by non-hegelian Marxist; it, I would imagine, has to do with the dialectic, but if the dialectic (or the dialectical reversal) is taken out of Marx, what is left? On this point I am not sure; Deleuze does say hat some point that he and Guattari remain Marxist in different ways, but I am unsure in what way they mean…

Second: I just encountered Agamben, and am looking at him more or less simply following Foucault, or at least the biopolitical project of Foucault. However, given what Agamben does to the notion of sovereignty and biopolitics in Homo Sacer, I really wonder how much fidelity he has with Foucault’s notions of biopolitics and disciplinary society; that is, is Agamben merely couching his own work in terms of biopolitics so as to gain a certain kind of audience.

Lastly, the place and importance of Arendt in Agamben, it seems to me that Agamben wants to bring Arendt closer to Foucault, however I have tended to read Arendt closer to Habermas, most notably the private vs public sphere… It seems to me that Hadot tries a similar move that Agamben does, that is, to cast the thought of Foucault back onto the Greeks, or rather to look to the Greeks for a solution to issues today (though Foucault explicitly rejects this as anachronistic).

Perhaps I am discounting Hardt & Negri too fast; I think their project is a good one; and I think some of the “solutions” that are presented by H&N are beautiful. But I am trying to maintain a distance, mostly in order to formulate a project that is similar to theirs, rooted in some of the same sources; but not so tied to the geo-political situation of the late 90s. I do think that their articulations of the “control society” are useful on this point; and will be revisiting them, along with other writings after Deleuze, such as Massumi’s writing concerning the Control Society.

Sdv: Whilst the logic of 'the control society' works, developed as it is by Deleuze out of Foucault's recognition that the disciplinary society had been superceded. Given this change the idea that capitalist society can be considered as being a "global concentration camp" doesn't work. This is because the majority , perhaps even all, concentration camps have been instruments of direct political power - perhaps we might even go as far as to suggest that they represent 'masters and slaves', something terribly imperial and more industrial ? (At least as the holocaust showed...). Doesn't the control society represent a different form of social organization than this ?

“direct political power” I take this to be the notion of sovereignty that Agamben insists is co-existent with Biopower. Are you saying that the concentration camp “only” functions from direct political power? In my own understanding, the concentration camp emerges from a specific biopolitical power relation, though the meeting at Wansee was of particular people that decided the Holocost, it was a specific kind of relation of power to life that allowed for the concentration camp to emerge.

Control vs. Camp. I am not so sure that the Control Society is a different social organization from the Camp; like I said before I think the technologies of the control society whence combined with the legal mechanism of the state of exception allow for the possibility of the globe to become concentration camp. In fact, is not one of the principle mechanisms of the Control Society the ability to determine who and what can move when and where though a process of passwords and gateways? In fact it may be through mechanisms of the State of Exception (perhaps even with a tinge of biopower) that the Society of Control becomes global; I am thinking here of universal identification documents; the US department of Homeland Security “green card” is one such example, it takes a massive background/physical examination to obtain this document that then can allow for access to other institutional power arrangements (such as work or school). So can we take the camp and the control society apart from one another, or perhaps are they describing the same elephant? I am not so sure there are “masters” in charge of the slaves (I have a difficulty buying into Agamben’s articulation of Sovereignty, and think much more in terms of Foucault’s articulation of power), nor even institutions, but rather mechanism that determine what codes are viable when/where; that is there doesn’t have to be anything approximating a human consciousness in charge, rather a simple arrangement of mechanisms that are taken as necessary to being in the world… does that make sense?


Perhaps I am asking you to write on the “control society” if you can spare the time; I am also thinking about the notions of micro-politics vs. the Multitude; and what kind of Marxist/communist politics can emerge (and in a final aside, is anything like Badiou’s “fidelity to the event” and other political notions applicable to this vision of the world and political action)?
 
 
Disco is My Class War
00:19 / 21.12.05
To begin with, can I address the notion of 'global camp' as theorised by Agamben and suggest another way to read that, which might resonate with the society of control stuff more? It would really help here if I knew what bit of State of Exception you're thinking of: is it that sentence, "The state of exception has reached its maximum worldwide deployment" (87 of the English paperback translation)? If so, there's a huge difference between that claim -- which seems pretty valid to me -- and the claim that Agamben says we've entered a 'global camp'. The state of exception is not the camp itself. The state of exception is the state of 'global democracy', however it's policed, whether by the US in an imperial form, or by an international ruling body (in the sense that Hardt and Negri would call global citizenship.)

It seems really important here to anchor the state of excception stuff in Agamben's influences -- Schmiit and Benjamin, primarily -- and to insist on its relationship both to the current situation, in which 'exceptional measures' have been declared by all governments, and also to democracy itself, which is always and forever vulnerable to the state of emergency/exception being declared, which makes the law through force, through the police, and thus is not 'really' democratic -- the sovereignty of 'the people' is an empty space.

But I also think Agamben is relating somehow to a pretty new development, gestured towards by Deleuze, in which the means of differentiating between 'ciziten' and 'non-citizen', legitimate and illegitimate, no longer necessarily takes place through a controlled succession of spaces wherein violence is exercised, but that the violence of the police is exercised in a roving, randomised, virtual fashion -- and differentiation proceeeds that way too. Angela Mitropoulos calls this a 'just in time' fashion: the way in which laws or methods of control are modulated and mutated 'on spec', strategically, to deal with particular moments. It's about modulating flows (of people, of labour, of capital, or investment, of social capital) rather than modulating specific spaces in which one kind of law-making violence will take place. Balibar also has some interesting things to say on this (if unfortunately couched in his radical democratic spin) in the essay "What is a Border?"

the multitude seems to me to be a simple reformulation of the "Masses" which is the concern of disciplinary biopolitics in Foucault. The Deluzian-Guattarian notions of micropolitics seems to me, at least initially, to be a more sensible strategy to announce, and to work towards than a globalized multitude to counter Empire

I think you're spot on with that analysis of Hardt and Negri. The multitude, no matter how much it's dressed up in fashionable Deleuzian threads, is Hardt and Negri's idea of a new revolutionary subject position. The world has already moved on: the multitudes were proved irrelevant when the anti-capitalist or 'counter-capitalis globalization movements' forgot the connections between war, capital and local struggle, and started calling for mass protests against the war in Iraq. The mass protests did fuck-all -- and where is the multitude now?

That said, I have no idea, least of all at the moment, what the answer is, or what strategies work best. My guess is to take a cue from deconstruciton and also Deleuze/ Guattari -- it's random. It always has been. There is no plan, no vision, no guaranteed way of fighting all the shit we have to fight. Apart from trying to trace the connections between it all -- and, most importantly, understanding the connections between how we think/feel and how capital/states/law works.

Quickly, on the subject of micropolitics: have either of you read Jason Read's The Micropolitics of Capital? There's a good review by Mitropoulos here: it comes at this question, too, but in a roundabout way....
 
 
sdv (non-human)
09:12 / 21.12.05
I'll respond properly later... but this ? how should one respond to this...? "...a new revolutionary subject position. The world has already moved on: the multitudes were proved irrelevant when the anti-capitalist or 'counter-capitalis globalization movements' forgot the connections between war, capital and local struggle, and started calling for mass protests against the war in Iraq. The mass protests did fuck-all -- and where is the multitude now?..."

Is wrong on all counts. The change in capitalist organization from neo-liberalism towards primative accumulation, is as a direct consequence of mounting struggles against neo-liberal social and economic policies, latin-america (just when you need help it appears over the hill....) But then perhaps you really believe that leftist latin american governments are really micro-political ? (That is a question and not irony or an insult...)

The Multitude is not a new revolutionary subject - but the groundwork on which the old industrial/proletarian on was constructed. As even a passing glance at Spinoza and Hobbes will tell you - micro-political activity is a subset of the activity of the multitude. Nobody forgot the rules of primative accumulation - it is a sign of the crisis of neo-liberalism that it has returned...

later....
 
 
sdv (non-human)
10:34 / 21.12.05
ammonius

The two Burroughs questions I should be able to indirectly help you with, the colleague who can probably help with this is unavailable until early Jan...
 
 
Disco is My Class War
11:48 / 21.12.05
The change in capitalist organization from neo-liberalism towards primative accumulation

Can you enlarge on what you mean by this? ZMy understanding of primitive accumulation (or what I can garner) makes that claim slightly nonsensical, so what am I missing? Do you mean the return of feudalism, bonded labour, slavery?
 
 
Disco is My Class War
12:04 / 21.12.05
Is wrong on all counts. The change in capitalist organization from neo-liberalism towards primative accumulation, is as a direct consequence of mounting struggles against neo-liberal social and economic policies, latin-america (just when you need help it appears over the hill....) But then perhaps you really believe that leftist latin american governments are really micro-political?

I think that capitalism and nationalism collude even in leftist-nationalist moments that seem really positive, like Latin America, and that there is no real destruction of capitalism without bringing down the borders as well. That said, my knowledge of Latin American political events is pretty lame. To me, the re-appearance of primitive accumulation signals that Negri is wrong, not right. The 'multitude' as Negri defines it is definitely not the subject of primitive accumulation... whatever happens to abstract labour in that formulation? I think the Spinozan multitude and the Hardt/Negri multitude are two very different beasts: sure, Negri is riffing off Spinoza (and in a nice way) but Hardt and Negri are pretty attached to the 'virtualisation' and abstraction of labour as a key phenomenon in contemporary forms of primitive accumulation. Negri and Hardt just define 'primitive accumulation' as proletarianisation, in various forms and in various contexts -- including, and centrally, the 'informational economy' now. Surely that fits in just fine with neoliberalism, rather than resisting it?

I'd also like to explore and define 'micropolitical' a little bit more. sdv, your thoughts?
 
 
sdv (non-human)
13:14 / 24.12.05
"...I am not so sure that the Control Society is a different social organization from the Camp...." Initially you implied acceptance of the problematic assertion that is made in the 'State of Exeception' that the world is a Global Concentration Camp - which is to say that the state of being for the majority of humans has been reduced to a state of 'bare life' with a bare minimum of rights. This fails because it requires the acceptance of the idea that the holocaust was itself an exceptional event. Whereas of course it was not - indeed imperialistic and genocidal events are the social and historical norm. Perhaps the greatest error of Agamben's work is the continuation of the phantasy that Auschwitz was in some sense a unique event, sadly it was not.

Deleuze developed the concept of the control society in the late 20th C, following on from Michel Foucault's work within which he demonstrated how a disciplinary society had evolved that was based on new strategies of confinement and imposed disciplines. What Deleuze insisted on was that waht was interesting was what we had inherited from the disciplinary society - the critical point being that we in the central capitalist societies were no longer living in disciplinary societies. What Deleuze states is that we are now living in Control Societies (CS), (aka self-disciplinary societies). A CS model appears to be based on business in which it is the task of the 'human' individual to be involved in endless competition, in self-directed education in order to function within the society. There is a continuous variation in salary, status and value which can only be maintained through engaging in self-disciplinary activity. What happens is that the mass, the collective is being broken apart, the individual is being reconstituted as a 'dividual' and the masses are reconstituted as data and markets.

Whilst up to this moment it might appear that there are connections between these two concepts of 'Bare Life' and 'Control Society/self-disciplinary society ' it should also be clear that the difference is that where the genocidal and imperialist core of the 'Bare Life' is as old as the first industrial revolution, (10000 years, perhaps even older -the ghosts of the exterminated Homo Neanthandal haunt this). It simply will not do to think that because the fascists brought back what had been commonplace colonial techniques of mass murder and used them on mainland Europe that we can forget the 100s of millions of people who died as a consequence of similar techniques elsewhere. Not then a biopolitical relation, but a pure Hegelian master/slave relationship...

The difference then is that the concept of the Control Society is something new - post the end of the disciplinary society, entirely new models of social control appear - and most importantly of all "...new forms of resistance, capable of standing up to marketings blandishments..." What else can stand up to the fact that the society "...no longer operates by confining people but though continuous control and instantanuous communication..." The CS is a new concept for a new form of social organization, which requires new forms of revolt and resistance.

Finally then - it's worth remembering that within the Deleuzian line of thought, the notion of soveriegnty predates the disciplinary society as this predates the control society. The traditional notion of soveriegnty is in a sense as redundent as the notion of discipline. I personally really like to add this thought into the notion of universal history...

later
 
 
sdv (non-human)
14:17 / 24.12.05
I wasn't using the term 'primative accumulation' in a serial historical sense but rather as a reference towards a particular form of capitalist accumulation. Pure Marxism...

The past few years have shown an extraordianry shift in the ways in which the dominant economic forces have begun to function in the current round of globalization. Until the immediate present there had been an assumption that the ongoing rebuilding of the world sociol and economy would probable take place as a result of agreements, trade and otherwise. Such things as the democratically supported trade inbalances, the particularly brutal appropriation of human and non-human labour and so on. During the last 10 years there has been an increasing use of traditional imperialist and colonial tactics - for which I think that the reference to Marx's use of the term primative accumulation is rather useful. Where Marx was thinking about the enclosure of the commons - (think of the forced immigrations that this refers to, and which incidentally we are reliving these days...) i suspect that it was apparant that the entire capitalist system was still dependent on the recycling of primative accumulation, but for a while it was not not so apparant, after all for a while the concept of 'primative accumulation' was consigned to the dustbin of redundent concepts. (Perhaps this time round we'll manage to remember why Marx is so important...)

"and this history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of fire and blood..." Marx.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
14:48 / 24.12.05
micropolitical - i tend towards the straight deleuze/guattari understanding of this - machinaries of desire and complex socio-historical structures....

Which is also to recognize that at a micro-political level it i's necessary to recognize that events are to be evaluated against more universal notions of difference and emancipation. The point being that absolutely supportable micro-political events and related actions do not necessarily result in human emancipation. In other words micro-politics can be as fascist as anything else, if it does not contain the universalist dreams of emancipation then if you are lucky you get Condi Rice, if you are unlucky you get millions of human bodies socially inscribed by knives...

Micropolitics attempts to explain the complex socio-historical structures in terms of operations of power (power as understood both/either foucaldian and hegelian) that control the social sphere at every level. Guattari put it like this refusing the purely structuralist approach and maintaining something close to his fundamental leftism... "It's not a matter of producing a universal formalism as such, but of the way a system of power comes to use the means of a signifying formalism to unify all the various modes of expression, and centre them around 'fundamental values'....property,persons, ranks,sexual, race, for the right of the ruling class to to seize the means of production etc..."

I out it like this to try an demonstrate that as Guattari/Deleuze use the term there is no seperation between the micro and the molar...

i've run out of time - christmass eve work
 
 
Disco is My Class War
02:56 / 25.12.05
sdv, if you read my post properly you would realise that I never said I 'accepted' the supposed equation of the world with the Camp. I actually queried the reference, because in my copy of "State of Exception" Agamben says nothing of the kind. He says, instead, that we are at the 'global limit of the state of exception'. The state of exceptiopn is not the camp. The camp is a site in which the state of exception takes palce. Maybe it would help if you didn't interpret so literally? Or, perhaps ammonius is working from a different language edition, in which case he can explain further.

Finally then - it's worth remembering that within the Deleuzian line of thought, the notion of soveriegnty predates the disciplinary society as this predates the control society. The traditional notion of soveriegnty is in a sense as redundent as the notion of discipline. I personally really like to add this thought into the notion of universal history...


Actually, if you reread the Foucault essay on which Deleuze bases his idea of 'the societies of control', it seems clear, to me anyhow, that for Foucault, there is no consistent chronological transition from sovereignty to discipline (and thus, as Deleuze argues, on towards control.) There are moments at which one supersedes the others as techniques of power, but the others continue working under the surface, or invisibly, and recur at moments when they become necessary. Hence the re-appearance of sovereignty (and why Agamben is still relevant, whether or not he fantasises that Auschwitz is the experience of modernity par excellence.) Foucault carefully avoids being so historiographically simplistic.

I have no idea what the hell you're doing with ideas about universal history if you're reading Deleuze or Foucault.... Then again, I try never to be surpriused at the uses people to which people put theorists. The differend, and all that.

(Also, 'micropolitics' is an idea Deleuze rips off from Foucault without acknowledging it. I don't have the Foucault reference offhand, but I'll find it. I'm still not sure what you meant by 'are latin american countries micropolitical'. And I definitely interpret 'micropolitics' difnferently, but that will have to wait until I have some books and some more time.)
 
 
sdv (non-human)
12:59 / 25.12.05
Mister D.

If you read what I'd written you'd also understand that I was not addressing you in the paragraph. It is bizarre how people on this list get so uptight about issues of address. The initial quote was from Ammonius and I was writing in a direct comment on that quote.

The quotes were not from Deleuze but from Guattari... 1974 - from the molecular revolution.

Universal History - for goodness sake go and do some work on deleuze... on the basis of you single comment on deleuze and UH you have demonstrated that you haven't.

enough of this nonsense.
 
 
multitude.tv
00:42 / 26.12.05
I hope it is simple holiday stress that has resulted in the tone presented here as of late. I find both of your posts, in this and other discussions to be rather insightful.

My initial question was not meant to offend any sensibilities, be they Deleuzian/Marxist/Foucaultian or not; as far as my argument in my paper that I just turned in, I did make more of an assertion than a detailed argument for the juridical implementation of the “State of Exception” (which I understand corresponds to the Camp in a manner akin to Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power relations corresponds to the prison/panopticon) as a (not determinably THE) mechanism that is utilized by the Control Society (as a social organization) that results in, or may lead to (no notion of necessity) the Global Camp. Furthermore, the possibility for political action that Agamben presents in the final pages of his text State of Exception seems to present a strategy not unlike the micropolitics of Deleuze.

I understand that the textual trajectories of the two (Agamben and Deleuze) are distinct, however, part of my initial interest in this particular question is the fact that both the Hommo Sacer and The Postscript on the Control Society take as their starting point the final chapter of The History of Sexuality Vol.1 and both texts present a world that is more confined than the Disciplinary society of Foucault; that our discussion has been peppered heavily with Foucault, I take as a good sign.

On Soverigenty. As far as I understand for Foucault Disciplinary Power follows Sovereignty (and that the notion of Soveriengty in question has at its heart Schmitt’s notion, though Battaile is not out of mind), and that biopolitics is the strategy of power that arises within disciplinary apparatuses. This move is, I think, not ever entirely made (that is Sovereign power remains operative but not dominant?). For Agamben, Sovereignty is co-existent with biopower (which Agamben casts back to at least Aristotle), that is for Agamben biopower has always existed with Sovereignty.

For Foucault the term Power is operative in all of these instances, while for Agamben Sovereignty, Power, biopolitcs all co-exists (if not co-inside, and are as SDV says, I think, redundant) all the time. I am not sure where Deleuze falls on this, but if I were to wager, I would say that he is envisioning something closer to Foucault, given the text on the Control Society. For example, the mechanisms of the Control Society are in many ways (at least internally) Disciplinary; one need only think of the training and em/de-ployment of those who go into communications technologies to fathom how the Control Society is entwined with Disciplinary Society. Furthermore, the Control Society is for Deleuze, like Disciplinary Society is for Foucault, a deployment of power that is notably distinct from previous organizations of power.

I find Mister Disco’s comment on the notions of co-existent/co-operative notions/organizations of Power to be close to my own understanding. AND I find SDV’s articulation of micro-politics to be insightful, though as I understand D/G it is the micro that corresponds to the molecular, with is distinct from the molar (micro:macro::molecular:molar), that is, not that they are separate as such, but that one is able to distinguish, as D/G show, between the modes (of history, politics, physics, etc) that are molar and molecular, macro and micro. F.ex. “That is why power centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zone of power. In short, the molecular, or microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by the smallness of its elements but by the nature of its “mass” – the quantum flow as opposed to the molar segmented line.” (p. 217, ATP) This section incidentally is where the note that references Foucault’s notion of micophysics appears (the note is on p.536-7), which may have been what Mister Disco was thinking of when he wrote that Deleuze ripped off (though not without note it seems) the notion of micropolitics from Foucault.

In distinguishing the molecular from the molar; “For in the end, the difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual or collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcoded by collective signifiers.” (219, ATP)

SDV, I don’t think that Foucault’s notion of power is exchangeable with Hegel’s (and I find the statement odd) but is closer to Neitzsche.

SDV, if you could bear to explain how you are using the notion of universal history (without saying I need to read my Deleuze, or at least pointing me to what Deleuze to read) in relation to Foucault and Deleuze I would be interested. History is, I think for Deleuze the purview of the State Apparatus, as is the notion of universality, I would venture to guess; that is molar/macro). As I am away from my library, I can’t sift thought all my D/G at the moment, however I would point to this:
“The difference between macrohistory and microhistory has nothing to do with the length of the durations envisioned, long or short, but rather concerns distinct systems of reference, depending on whether it is an overcoded segmented line that is under consideration or the mutant quantum flow.” (p. 221, ATP) That is, universal history is, as far as I understand it (and here I am thinking principally of Hegel but also Marx), is all about “overcoding” “segmentation” and molar apparatuses. However, this question of history, apart from the issue of succession/co-existence of organizational disbursements of power (Sovereignty/Disciplinary/Control) is, I think, not central to this discussion.

The Control Society/Camp (or Control Society or Camp) is there a relationship aside from the mutual foundation of the History of Sexuality Vol. 1 that can be made, or teased out. The reason is to envision a sensible “worst case scenario” for (mico)political action; in order to attempt to articulate a politics, a micropolitics that is not simply a (dialectical) reversal of Empire/Molarity/etc; which is what I think the Multitude is, at least as it is presented in Empire. That is, I find neo-republicanism of Adrent and Habermass to be first of all an inadequate articulation of the world as it appears, and the solutions this line of thought provides I find to be anachronistic. However, I find Hardt & Negri’s formulation in Empire to be nearly as anachronistic (read Enlightenment), and inssufient, (this isn’t to say that I would not support something like xborders or universal citizenship if it were actually manifest).

I am disappointed that the tone of the exchange here has become to some extent antagonistic, like I said, I find both of your posts in general and here (aside from the barbs) insightful. It is not helpful to simply state that the conversant is illiterate, stupid, or belligerently anxious; and frankly, I don’t think the discussion is nonsense. Thank you both for your posts, which threw me back to look at The Micropolitics of the Segmentary; which I had not looked at again, or planned to in the context of discussion, as I was initially more interested in the Control Society. I am trying to get a bibliography together on Control Society, if you have any suggestions on texts relevant, especially that Burroughs that would be very helpful; (though from the section on How Do you Make Yourself a Body without Organs D/G reference Naked Lunch quite a bit, though no mention of “Control Society”). It is in reference to the Control Society that I am interested in a possibility of a Micropolitics.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
20:16 / 30.12.05
sdv, perhaps people on this "list" would be less uptight about "issues of address" if you managed to avoid insulting people on a more regular basis?
 
  
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