Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 09:51:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Crosby <crosby_m-AT-rocketmail.com>
Subject: Re: art/capital


---Daniel Haines <daniel-AT-tw2.com> wrote:
> Mark Crosby wrote:
> > (substituting 'matter' for 'capital' in the first
sentences you cite makes them more sensible for me)
[CUT] 
> on the other hand it [_The Matrix_] didn't seem to
me to really go anywhere with it [baudrillard-style
vision of the hyperreal] it created a powerful
metaphor which in couldn't connect to the everyday
(which had to remain a metaphor); it was too much of
a spectacle... [CUT]

Well, the 'everyday' WAS the Matrix and the world
'outside' was simply plugged-in bodies (bodies as
organs) - what we have now if you strip away
'culture'..

> it didn't offer us any humanist consolations, no
nostlagic returns - but it also stopped it from
making more serious inroads into consensus reality! 

Consensus reality IS the illusory matrix of hopes and
fears overlaid on, or contortions of, the underlying
desire. The 'trick' is being able to recognize this
-- the Oracle's motto: "Know Thyself".

> having said all this, i thought it was a great
action film!!  
 
And so it was; but, for me, I just blinked at the
cascades of bullets and billowing explosions; the
'real' action was concealed within Neo and the others
at "that blind, acephalic, aphasic and aleatory
original point which designates 'the impossibility of
thinking that is thought' ... This is precisely what
Nietzsche meant by will to power: that imperative
transmutation which takes powerlessness itself as an
object ... those imperatives which dedicate us to the
problems they launch" (_Difference & Repetition_
199-200).

> re the above quoteback, i wondered about why you
wanted to substitute "matter" for "capital"? isn't it
exactly the reverse substitution (of capital for
matter) that capitalist economic regimes produce?
where although we are supposedly "materialist" we are
in fact alienated from matter to an unprecedented
degree? and all matter is taken as potential or
manifest capital?

Dan, I see "a slippage of two senses here" and a
"crucial ambiguity". (I must have been schizo when i
wrote that ;) So (making substitutions again), let me
twist some sediments from the "Geophilosophy" portion
of _What is Philosophy?_: "[Capital] today still
designates only the set of conditions, however recent
they may be, from which one turns away in order to
[matter], that is to say, in order to create
something new... Without [capital], [matter] would
remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but [what
matters is not capital]" (96).

To put it parenthetically (from "the other who speaks
in me" ;) "perhaps [capital] is not the best word"
(_WiP_ 100). I doubt this will satisfy you, but
that's now-here and no-where: "As for us, we possess
[capital] ... but we hardly know [what to do with it]
because we lack a genuine plane, misled as we are by
[Socialist] transcendence" (101). My suspicion is
that G might call this perversion an "absolute
disaster", whereas D would merely give an evil grin
and select a new weapon..

In _A Thousand Plateaus_, on "Apparatus of Capture",
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the "tempting 3-part
hypothesis" (426) of political and "economic
evolutionism"; BUT, rather, it is always "a
phenomenon of transport, of transfer, and not one of
evolution. The nomad exists only in becoming, and in
interaction; the same goes for the primitive" (430).

So, there is always an overcoming of existing
regimes, but it happens on the level of cumulative
'singularities', rarely in a totalizing or
apocalyptic way: "societies simultaneously have
vectors moving in the direction of the State,
mechanisms warding it off, and a point of convergence
that is repelled, set outside, as fast as it is
approached" (431).

For me, this sense of "transfer" between discretely
entangled realities, floating between regimes, is
nicely expressed by the ambiguous outcome of _The
Matrix_ and Neo's soaring, question-mark somersault
into the unknown at 'the end'. The point is that YOU
are THE ONE, so just do what you can..

See the last paragraph of "Apparatus of Capture" on
how "Every struggle is a function of all these
undecidable propositions and constructs
*revolutionary connections* in opposition to the
*conjugations of the axiomatic*" (473).  This is so
because "Politics is by no means an apodictic
science. It proceeds by experimentation, groping in
the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, retreats"
(461). I think the writers of _The Matrix_ captured
this. - Mark

P.S. I wonder if anyone else noticed this in the
movie: on the cover of the hollowed-out book where
Neo hid his bootleg software it said "Simulacra and
[something]", and the header at the top of the inside
page said "[something] Nihilism".
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