Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 08:27:04 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crosby <crosby_m-AT-rocketmail.com>
Subject: Old Man River just keeps flowing..


Gilles Deleuze is a bit crazy (like a fox, like a
shaman), relating the development of capitalism to
Freud's Oedipal fixations, as well as the history of
art, all in the same 711214 lecture on "The Nature of
Flows" (on Web Deleuze, www.imaginet.fr).

Economy is, as Deleuze notes, as Daniel Entier wrote,
about _Flows and Stocks_, the accounting system which
codes them, the finance system that makes them
circulate: producers implying consumers; the schizz
involved in being both: "this notion being that of
the break-flow" AND "this is the terror of society -
it is the flood, the deluge which is the flow that
breaks through the barrier of codes... decoding means
either to read a code, to penetrate the secret of a
code, or else it means to decode in an absolute
sense, ie, to destroy the codes in order to make the
flows flow freely ... you can no longer subtract
anything or break into them, no more than you can
detach segments from any codes in order to dominate,
orient or direct the flows... The strangest
phenomenon of world history is the formation of
capitalism because, in a certain sense, capitalism is
madness in its pure state, and in another sense, it
is likewise the opposite of madness. Capitalism is
the only social formation which presupposes, as a
condition of emergence, the breakdown of all
preceding codes... The intimate bond between
capitalism and schizophrenia consists in their common
basis and installation on decoded flows".

Deleuze goes on to recount how the emergence of
capitalism is mirrored by the "bizarre history" of
the break-flow of Byzantine painting, not only the
development of perspective, the lines of flight, but
also in that "there are scenes in the background and
the picture explodes in all directions so that
everyone starts possessing their own organs", no
longer simply clones of the Emperor. Even though it
is "a new kind of slavery ... capitalism is
essentially industrial", a new brand of clones
(Microsoft rather than IBM), still, "it is the great
historic moment when merchant capital declared war on
the leagues, ie, the associations of producers... But
it would take, as Marx declared, a second time..."

All of which is but a prelude to a 990104 George
Anders Wall St. Journal article: "Self-Made Mania: To
Find Out Why Internet Stocks Are So Hot, Just Log On:
The Medium Itself Has Bred A Culture That Values
High-Speed Speculation: Ominous Signals for 1999".

The story begins: "Herm Rosenman, who runs Bikers
Dream Inc, a Riverside, Calif, motorcycle maker ...
told a reporter for a financial Web site that the
company soon could sell cycle parts over the
Internet. Suddenly, Bikers Dream became the hottest
stock in America ... as frenzied day traders swapped
the stock back and forth ... in years to come, the
chat-and-click brigade could rock almost any market
sector". 

Nomads of the Net; a new War Machine. The WSJ article
snickers that "Most professional money managers, by
contrast, have watched the Internet boom with
befuddlement".

Thomas Evans, CEO of Geocities (a big web-site
provider), muses about the wild fluctuation in his
own company's stock price: "Day trading is becoming
pretty significant, and it's sort of frightening. It
suggests an ability to manipulate a stock. People can
go into chat rooms, start a rumor in the morning, and
then sell in the afternoon".

Says David Gardner, operator of the Motley Fool Web
site: "herdlike conventional wisdom is exactly what
enables rule-breaking fools like us to make good
money on the markets".

And this is only the bleeding edge, as the WSJ
article concludes: "Fields ranging from medicine to
the media have been shaken by the Internet's ability
to put huge amounts of up-to-the-minute knowledge
within reach of ordinary folks. Doctors, for example,
have lost their omniscience; they now must contend
with patients whose online research has made them
quasi-experts about their diseases".

All, somehow, right on cue for the millennium... But
as Gilles says elsewhere ("Postscript on the
Societies of Control"): "There is no need to fear or
hope, but only to look for new weapons".

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