Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 19:45:44 +0100
From: "Millay Hyatt" <millayh-AT-web.de>
Subject: Re: country cop


p {margin: 0px}

> 
> >d&g address this in mille plateaux, especially in the plateau "how to make 
> >yourself a body without organs" where they write about destratification and 
> >disarticulation requiring *prudence*. They write that in stead of 
> >overhastily trying to strip ourselves of all molarity, we need to keep a 
> >little bit of the organism, of signification, of interpretation, of 
> >subjectivity...and on page 199 of the french (my translation, apologies to 
> >brian massumi): "The worst is not to remain stratified - organized, 
> >signified, subjected - but to precipitate the stratifications in a suicidal 
> >or demented dissolution, making them tumble back down upon us, heavier than 
> >ever."
> 

> 
> >but isn't this beginning to sound a w!
 ee bit dialectical?
> 
> I don't care if it sounds dialectical, I don't even are if it is 
> dialectical.
> One problem with dialectics is that it imagines two forces where there are 
> really many.
> Another is that it maintains the truth of contradictory propositions (which 
> Wittgenstein would say was itself a contradiction and thus, dialectics must 
> always be false).
> Even so, Marx's idea of "cooption" (where an oppositional force is harnessed 
> by a dominant force and becomes a subsytem of the dominant force, altering 
> that force in so doing, if only slightly); this is essentially Hegel. 
> Personally, I see a lot of cooption going on, and so do H&N. An example 
> would be the cooption by Empire of charitable organizations like Amnesty 
> International (which is a laudable organization).

D&G care, as one of the main passions motivating them was the desire to be done!
  with dialectical thinking. for them, pushing something to its extreme
 is to accelerate it to the point of purity and sheer singularity, not to find that it has turned into its opposite, as is the claim of dialectics. but if the acceleration into molecularity in the passage quoted above turns out to produce the greatest molarity of all, we find ourselves in a dialectical structure, and this would seem to call a lot of d&g's claims into question. for hegel and marx, freedom cannot be produced without working through the unfreedom that haunts the heart of it (and it seems kind of facile to dismiss that idea as "false" because it "maintains the truth of contradictory propositions"). for d&g, freedom has nothing to do with working through any contradictions. that is, that's how i've always read them, but the passages on prudence seem to present another strain in their thinking.


> 
> >what do people think of the prudence passages, and do they indicate room 
> >for something like "policing"
> 
> It !
 matters *how* you police. Good government is not served by thuggery. 
> Goood givernment becomes bad government when it uses thuggery. So how does 
> good government police? It does so through dialogues, ideally equal 
> dialogues. At some point in the group - even a "subject group" per Felix G., 
> there comes the "executive moment" (where the group must decide). What does 
> the dissenter do?> Does she agree for the good of the group, accepting a 
> project or turn that is not, for her, ideal or even desired? Or does she 
> refuse to be a member of the group anymore. Will the group pnish her for 
> dissenting? For jumping ship, as it were? At this point the subject group 
> can easily turn microfascist. As yet, it seems to me, we need to do much 
> more thinking about how to make decisions in a manner that is not 
> totalitarian and would make excutive offices redundant. This, I believe, is 
> the !
 main game of D&G: how to make the boss redundant.

for hegel/
marx the dichotomy between "good of dissenter" and "good of the group" is a false one, one that is never as absolute as it presents itself anyway: the individual is not a discrete, isolated entity who can happen to agree with the group or not, but rather the individual is as shaped by the group as the group by the individual. any kind of apparently total disagreement between the two would have to be pushed until the agreement hidden within it could be made to emerge. it is always implicitly there. d&g on the other hand start out with discrete entities whose difference is always primary and sacred, and any conflict with a group would be read as insoluble, with the discrete entity advised to break out in a line of flight. 

 



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