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For the conflicts that wrack capitalism have time as their essential stake, the workers, the minorities struggling for ends of amelioration, faster changes than the powers want: here is the root of the 'contradictions', a struggle for time. A ten percent raise in salary, now, not in six months; free abortion, retirement at sixty, right now, not in five years' time; but also on the international scale: in one go the price of raw materials is doubled. [...]
Consequently, 'revolutionary' actions are not those which aim to overthrow the system of Capital, which. as opposed to Marxist analyses, has never ceased to be revolutionary, but those which complete its rhythm in all its radicality-that is to say, actions which accelerate the metamorphic processes of bodies. [...]
We know very well that as soon as they are destroyed, a new apparatus of power, with a new terror, will replace the old one; but on this occasion unbearable reactions are deactivated, other unprecedented, sometimes delicious ones become possible, pending the unforeseeable moment when they too join the sorrow of the old ones. So that all there is for us to do, to hope for, is to cut short the reign of powers and their repression, and to do so endlessly, since the combat against powers has no end. It's not much, yet it's enormous. Such is the meaning of permanent revolution, which we now identify with the multiple movements of acceleration in their desire for a saving of time.
[...] To have done with alienation is not to arrange a well-conducted and collaborative discussion of the dialectic or to be hung on the rope of hermeneutics not merely to sit oneself down and write not only to hurl paving stones It will be to take sides with desire this side is imperishable it is already the victor and always will be Phoenix we have only to recognize not organise it [...] We have nothing to lose we will never have anything to lose but our works
holy shit
They are progressives like capitalism They are materialists but as capitalism is They are rational with capitalist reason They want to abolish capital's private property by capitalist means They pass off as socialism the collective availability of capital according to their hierarchy Recalling from Marx that labour force is the whole secret of surplus value they have made the proletariat their business They are the truth of capitalism Changing how we live is a sick childish idea to them Their poorhouses resonate with Lenin In their priestly hands Lenin sounds like catechism Put Trotsky Mao Rosa into the kettledrum the same thump same sound issues Revolutionaries' commodities The disgrace of politicians is the transformation of the past into the truth of the present the predominance of the done over the doing the dictatorship of the dead over the living = capitalisation The politician is then the means of silencing anxiety and the desire for something else As if the way were marked out As if what is to be done were written in his legible name on condition of having read the Marx or Bakunin recognisable to experts But this was the very essence of history the void into which we throw our stones the absence of a reference the dark night in which we grope [...]
[...]
there will be a slight jolt as we cross over
thank you for flying with transnational commodification
we shall shortly be arriving in mayhem
if there is anybody on board who can impersonate a pilot
it would be of comfort to the other passengers
kinda weird and contextless but i like it
Transcendental philosophy is the consummation of philosophy construed as the doctrine of judgment, a mode of thinking that finds its zenith in Kant and its senile dementia in Hegel. [...]
just made me laugh
Strategists of the postmodern confirm that gods, like the other big stories promising eventual but deferred freedom through the labour of the negative, are moribund. With the death or disappearance of god, therefore, the standard of Being and the Same, the ends of man and machine, become contested, 'freeing' the machines into the community of their alterity, the politics of their dissimilitude? This understanding of postmodernity is an error; after all, what could be so dreadful about the end of big stories? The facile evocation of the new gods of alterity and the abyssal reflexivity of linguistic determination merely sustains ideation within a formal world, anxiously preserving its ignorance of matter. The ruling ideas never reflected, as Marx desired that they should, the ruling classes; the rule of the Idea itself is an index of a degrading species. the 'heat-death of the intellect', as Schopenhauer insisted against every Hegelian preservative. Postmodernity has nothing to do with the demise of narrativity: the 'post' of postmodernity refers not to the historicity of the present age, but to the posts in a 'second, and infinitely more complex cortex' to which the speaking animal is harnessed. What Marx only thought as 'fantasy' recodes and reassembles reality: as capital becomes the DNA of determinant technology, living Jabour is retrofitted as mere 'conscious linkages', reacting to digital stimuli, in 'an automated system of machinery ... set in motion by an automaton. a moving power that moves itself'. Capital, inheritor of the 'infinite will' and perpetrator of the romanticism of permanent revolution, the divine automaton.
kind of an amazing second paragraph for a review of Blade Runner
Hence Deckard-Descartes's self-misrecognition, a machine that thinks but thinks it is what it is not, certain that it is not what it is, ironically answering his own question, 'how can it [i.e., Rachel] not know what it is?' All the games of Cartesian dualism are played out in the Voigt-Kampf duel, implanted memories vitiating the content of certainty, but not its axiomatic form. The Voigt-Kampf is a struggle between artificial intelligence and synthetic viscera, cephalization versus the acephalization of the machine, Deckard-Descartes (synthetic humanity) inevitably losing out in the Voigt-Kampf with Batty-Bataille (the replicant Ubermensch driven by commerce) as, bizarrely, the latter enters into an animalization of the machine, howling like an artificial wolf in his acephalic, quadrupedal pursuit of his hunter.
[...] While there remained the option of being a spectator, then, Zhora's death is aestheticized in the dual sense of being exploited for its spectacular qualities and being the object of disinterested pleasure: Zhora appears to us as an expendable incident, a marginal action in the wings of the main field, consumed solely in her death. But for this very reason, we fail the VK-empathy test the film presents us with through her graphic, sacrificial consummation. [...]
whoa
[...] Hands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry. Hands up, that is to say, all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities. families and villages. Hands up, furthermore. those who really believe that these desires for a restored organic wholeness are extrinsic to late capitalist culture. rather than fully incorporated components of the capitalist libidinal infrastructure. Hollywood itself tells us that we may appear to be always-on techno-addicts. hooked on cyberspace, but inside, in our true selves, we are primitives organically linked to the mother/ planet, and victimised by the military-industrial complex. James Cameron's Avatar is significant because it highlights the disavowal that is constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity, even as it shows how this disavowal is undercut. We can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.