JUSTIN BOWER

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Schizo-Genic

Embedded, 7x6ft. Oil on canvas, 2011

Architecture of Infection, 7x6ft. Oil on canvas, 2011

 The Instability of Infinite Origin, 7x6ft. Oil on canvas, 2011

Holographic Introjection, 7x6ft. oil on canvas, 2011

Metastasize, 5x4ft. Oil on canvas, 2011

Embedded Half Face, 5x4ft. oil on canvas, 2011

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Schizo-Genic

 

Schizo-Genic 

“For perhaps the flows are not deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to accelerate the process, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet (my emphasis).”1

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia


“Deleuzogauttarian schizoanalysis comes from the future… The fusion of military and the entertainment industry consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software consumption into neojungle and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let the security types take you to the stims.”2

               Nick Land

Fanged Noumena

“John Nash… the Noble Prize-winning American Mathematician and economist who did critical work on game theory in the 1940s and 1950s and gave us the Nash Equilibrium, believed that that he had been recruited by aliens to save the world, that they were assisting him by sending him mathematical equations, and they later tried to end his career: when asked how he could believe in such an outlandish scenario, Nash replied, ‘Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously’.”3

                                                                                         Jason Louv

John Dee and the Empire of Angels

The concept of the Schizo-Genic Gaze can refer to many different things when it comes to my most recent body of work. It is meant to be a reference to the debates about Genetic Intervention, Technological Prosthesis, and the possibility of Becoming-Posthuman, but it also refers to an overlooked legacy within Deleuzian Thought related the rise of Societies of Control and what I refer to in art, cinema, and literature as the Control-Image.

∞

In this regard, my engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari includes a commitment to the ‘Unfinished Project’ of Schizoanalysis, understanding how Dividuation has replaced the Process of Individuation, and what Becoming-a-Body-Without-Organs (BwO) means for the future of Techno-Homoand Transhumanism. But what has changed between Deleuze’s era and our own is the recognition that nearly all of his major concepts contain the idea of having to make a Forced Choice, or a Janus-Faceddecision, in a world of Impossible Compossibilities.4  This constitutes a New Fold in within the world of Deleuze studies, but what does it mean for the reception of Deleuze in the twenty-first century?

∞

The inversion of Rhizomatic Politics was central to Slavoj Zizek’s critique of D&G’s Corpus in Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, where he highlighted the complicity between Deleuze’sterms of engagement and the everyday experience of capitalism as the beating heart of Machinic-Desire.5The articulation of this impasse in D&G’s Project led to the Four Royal Roads of Neo-Deleuzian thought that we still traffic in today, only the last of these forking paths has been relatively unexplored until this decade. It is this disavowed Deleuze that connects with the principal concerns in my art practice, but let’s examine the divergent trajectories of Neo-Deleuzianism in order to understand what the potential of engaging with the Control-Image holds for the future of the Schizo-Analytic enterprise. 

∞

(1)  The Political Deleuze of the Left (OWS & XR).

The first real-world extension of D&G’s philosophy concerns its relevance for Revolutionary Politicsafter the turn of the century. The promise of the ‘Political Deleuze’ reached its apex following the work of Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri on the Empire trilogy and the Anti-Globalization protests that kicked off in Seattle in 1999. This same ethos still informs movements around the world like Extinction Rebellion (XR), Just Stop Oil, and the #LastGeneration. These same concerns also made a huge impact on Occupy Wall Street (OWS), Occupy Studies, and Protest Studies as well as many of the contemporary philosophers being published by Semiotext(e) today. This first trajectory in Neo-Deleuzian Politics is represented by the writings of authors like Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Gerald Raunig, et. al., which tend to trade in the Machinic-Critique of Capitalism.6

(2)  The Scientific “Realist” Deleuze (Speculative Realism / Materialism, OOO).

The second direction that sparked a Neo-Deleuzian Revival was the Deleuze of Science and Realism, which was kicked off by the work Manuel DeLanda. Levi R. Bryant, et. al.7 This ‘moment’ in the posthumous reception of Deleuze played a huge roll in the development of Speculative Realism / Speculative Materialism. Many other theorists, who would be too numerous to name here, have continued to carry this line of thinking forward by opening up more new avenues for Deleuzian thought than any other ‘new school’ of philosophy under the notion of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and all of its attending variations. 

(3)  The Political Deleuze of the Right (Accelerationists, Neo-Reaction, NRx).

The third image of Deleuze, which has been taken up by the ‘Outer’ Right, is the Dark Deleuze of Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Sadie Plant, and the much larger camp of ‘Dissident’ Accelerationists that extend from the Archeo-Futurists to the work of Theory Underground.8 Born in the crucible of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, this line of Neo-Deleuzians has only grown over time to include the philosophers of the Dark Enlightenment, many of whom engage with D&G in the negative. This group of far-right thinkers includes Alexander Dugin, Jason Reza Jorjoni, etc., not to mention the more academically oriented ‘Dark Deleuzians’ like Andrew Culp, Eleanor Kaufman, Justin Murphy, etc. This group of dissident Deleuzians is referred to as Neo-Reaction or NRx.

(4)  The Control-Image of Deleuze (The “Conspiratorial Deleuze).

None of the camps of critical thought listed above represent the image of Deleuze that my work engages with explicitly or even implicitly. For that we will need to understand the Schizo-Genic Condition, the Molecular Gaze,9 and the User Unconscious10 in relation to the Deleuze who was a critic of Control Societies.11 This ‘other’ history of Deleuzian thought can be found in the work of Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism,12 Matthew Potolsky on the National Security Sublime,13 and Tony Godfrey’s new version of The Story of Contemporary Art,14 all of which connect with Deleuze’s infamous postscript in a number of unexpected and original ways. The big difference between these thinkers and the names listed above is that theorists of the Control-Image were considered to be working outside of the discipline of philosophy proper, even though this is the image of Deleuze that has probably had the most impact on popular culture over the last few decades.15

∞

Beyond this Fourth Position sounding a bit too ‘Conspiratorial’ for most philosophers to engage with in a serious manner, or a handful of dedicated voices in surveillance studies and security studies for whom Deleuze’s Postscript has been treated as prophecy, there is a far more troubling reason why most academics and artists have avoided addressing it all, much less engaging with it critically. It’s not that most people don’t believe that an integrated apparatus of Security and Surveillance is spreading across western civilization and the east too; and no one is denying that the marriage of Capitalism and Commerce has already taken place; or that Bio-Politics is now synonymous with the growing mechanisms of Social Control in every aspect of daily life. The real problem is that this state of affairs is simply taken for granted, making it feel invisible, normative, and even necessary in the age of terrorism and data-theft. We have all come to accept that contemporary life exists within an Electronic Pan-Acousticon,16 and very few political commentors seem to have anything to say about it of real substance, unless they are willing to live as exiles like Julian Assangeand Edward Snowden.

4 WAVES OF NEO-DELEUZAIN THOUGHT

Political Deleuze: Anti-Globalization Protests, Occupy Wall Street, etc. 

Major thinkers: Micheal Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Micah White.

Dark Deleuze: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Neo-Reaction, NRx. 

Major thinkers: Nick Land, Mark Fischer, Andrew Culp, and Eleanor Kaufman.

Science and Realism: Speculative Realism, Speculative Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology. Major thinkers:Manuel DeLanda, Levi R. Bryant, and Jane Bennett.

Control Societies: Surveillance studies, Security Studies, and Social Control. 

Major thinkers: Shoshana Zuboff, Matthew Potolsky, and Tony Godfrey.

∞

In other words, Deleuzian’s don’t like mentioning the Postscript on Societies of Control because we have already failed to prevent Deleuze’s darkest predictions from coming true, which means that the Asymmetry of Governmental Power can now be defined as a Rhizomatic-Power, while revolutionary politics appears to be compromised from within. In fact, the politics of Deleuze now appear to be so problematic that XR, OWS,OOO, and NRx may go down as some of the the worst examples of Real-Politik in recent history. Afterall, what real strategies did these three movements propose to mobilize to defeat the Rise of Control Societies? Becoming Crab-Grass (D&G)?17 Becoming Swarm- Intelligence (H&N)?18 Becoming Network-Analysts (ANT / OOO)? Becoming-Reactionaries (NRx)? The far more important question we should all be asking ourselves today is how the history of techno-scientific development could have gone in another direction than what we see in the world around us, and can we still avoid the foreclosure of the future and the rise of Techno-Totalitarianism?

∞

Our best starting point to create a Politics-of-the-Future is to understand that the real reason that the Fourth Position on Deleuze hasn’t been explored to the same degree as the other three is that it represents an instance of Game Theory, or “Nashian Equilibrium”, with regard to optimizing the process of decision-making in relation to the future of the species, the environment, the economy, etc. This means that the major error in Deleuze’s thought was not with the ideas put forth by his followers, but with Deleuze himself, who relied on the diaries of Daniel Paul Schreber to understand the political potential of Schizo-Intensities,Becomings, etc. The problem with D&G that Zizek missed is that the real revolutionary figure of Schizo-Analysis and the philosophy of the Control-Image would have to be John Nash, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1959 and still won the John von Neuman Prize in 1978, the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1994, and the Abel Prize in 2015.

∞

The only example of Nash’s Theory of Equilibrium being applied to a real-life situation in the film A Beautiful Mind involves his explanation of Dating Strategies in the bar scene. This instance of Real-Politik in romance relies on resolving the following premise: a group of men who have entered a bar prefer to date a blond, but if they approach her at the same time she will turn them down as a group for the simple fact that it would be overwhelming to be approached by so many men simultaneously, or even in secession in a single night. The second point to take note of is that the men will also be insulting all of the brunettes in the bar by approaching the only blonde, creating a lose-lose situation for everyone in this version of a ‘dating game’. 

∞

But, if the men Make a Deal with each other before approaching any of the women, which could involve flipping a coin, adopting a strategy of divide-and-conquer, and so on and so forth, then there is a chance that everyone can go home happy if a Nashian Equilibrium exists where none of the players of the game can do better than the real options that they have before them. In other words, John Nash’s Theory of Equilibrium involves transforming the Ideal into the Real, which is just another name for how we understand the relationship between Theory and Praxis.


You can work out what moves are really on the table in this situation for yourself related to gauging attractiveness, wealth, charisma, deal-making, and so on and so forth, but the point is that the Schizo-Genic Gaze comes into play at the very moment when we enter into the Conditions of ‘Play-Making’. In such a situation, the types of (Machinic) Desire that permeate the body and the Romantic Revolutions that we all feel at the Molecular Level are fully incorporated into a series of Game Theoretical Conditions which can only be understood using the Schizo-Analytical insights of John Nash, and not Daniel Paul Scheber. In other words, Deleuze’s Error was following the insights of a judge rather than a theory of how one judges.

∞

The same kind of considerations that Nash applied to ‘dating games’ can also be used to understand the problematic of Becoming Trans/Posthumanism, which is a condition of Intensive-Thinking that the first three camps of Neo-Deleuzian’s remain silent about, especially when it comes to theorizing the conditions of Real-Politik, or a Real-Posthuman-Politik. In other words, Real-Politik is always already a form of Game Theory first, and a Revolutionary Enterprise second. This is because Real-Politik is based on the experience of Concrete Realities, or what C.S. Pierce called ‘Live’ Decisions, and not the romantic defense of utopia, revolution, or other forms of socio-economic-politico ‘escapism’. In this regard, there is a wonderful sense of complementarity between Nash’s Game Theory and Piece’s Pragmatism, but the problem is that we have moved from thinking about ‘Live’ Decisions to making decisions about the nature of ‘Life’ Itself. This means that Real-Politik is being transformed by real Practices-of-Becoming, which is why Deleuze’s Philosophy is more relevant than ever.

∞

The extremes states depicted in my Schizo-Genic Portraits were an attempt to paint a series of images that exemplified the conditions of Subjective Manipulation set against a marked rise in Endemic Paranoia, Schizo-Behaviorism, and the Machinations of Technological Control. There is a nod to Nash’s Schizophrenia and even Pierce’s Mania in these portraits, but this is represented by the Frenetic Quality of the faces in this series as well as the Piercing Lines that seem to dissect the figure from the outside. Taking this approach to the genre of portraiture allowed me to understand how the Schizo-Genic Gaze has emerged as a Shared Cultural Condition whenever a State of Equilibrium can’t be reached, or when you don’t want to play a certain type of personal, social, legal, or economic game anymore, but you have to continue to play anyway. In other words, I wasn’t trying to capture the image of a subject as much as I was painting a picture ofControl-Image during the rise of Biometric Analysis, Data-Scrims, and Electro-Psychological Dissections gone awry. 

∞

Taken together, this series of portraits represents the gestalt impact of the Control-Image on society-at-large as well as the yearning to be free from the Rules of the Game. Afterall, Game Theory is what is deployed to manage almost any crisis in a Control Society, which means the Last Deleuzian Politic that can challenge the Logic of Control has to take a Symmetrical Approach to eroding the Molar Forces of Technocracy rather than deploying a Rhizomatic Set of Strategies, which are all-too-easy to recoup. We must begin to examine the conditioning of the body socius by Pavlovian Technologies and stop giving into the flights of fancy associated with the three previous programs of Political, Speculative and Reactionary Deleuzianism, or we will never overcome the imposition of the Schizo-Genic Condition on the individual, the family, a peoples, and the global population. Afterall, the problem that has haunted Deleuzianism is the need to identify which game Deleuze was actually playing with his philosophy as well as what potential Schizo-Analysis holds for how we understand the Control-Image today. This is why the Schizo-Genic Portraits are both a warning and an admonition about the fights that we have ahead of us, as well as the ones we must leave behind.

JOHN NASH & GILLES DELEUZE EQUILIBRIUM TABLE

Theory of Equilibrium

Boy 2: Picking a Reactionary Politic (Dark Deleuze)

Boy 2: Picking a Techno-Scientific Position (Control Societies)

Boy 1: Picking an Idealist Politic (Political Deleuze)

0:(Can’t be both Progressive and Reactionary) No Equilibrium

0: (Can’t be both Reactionary and Progressive) No Equilibrium

1: (Can be Progressive and against Control Societies) Equilibrium

2: (Can be Conservative or Progressive and against Control Societies) Equilibrium

Boy 1: Picking a Realist Position (Scientific Deleuze)

2: (Can be Reactionary and a Realist, i.e., can be two things at once without contradiction) Equilibrium

1: (Can be a Speculative Realist, i.e., can be one thing without contradiction) Equilibrium

1: (Can be a Realist against Techno-Science, but not a Scientist against Techno-science) No Equilibrium

1: (Can be a Scientist against Techno-Science, but not a Realist about Techno-Science) No Equilibrium

ENDNOTES.

1 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 239-240.

2 Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2003 (New York: Sequence Press, 2011) 442, 454-455.

3 Louv, Jason. John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2018) 5.

4 The notion of imcompossibilities existing was popularized by Deleuze’s text on The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, where Deleuze describes the logic of the neo-Baroque as the “unfurling of divergent series in the same world, [which] comes [with] the irruption of incompossibilities on the same stage, where Sextus with rape and not rape Lucretia, where Caesar crosses and does not cross the Rubicon, where Fang kills, is killed, and neither kills nor is killed”. I think it goes without saying that we have been folded into Deleuze’s text, where members on the Epstein flightlogs are supposed to have raped, but also did not rape; where Trump is elected but is also not elected; and where Epstein himself kills, is killed, and neither kills nor is killed. I could not have possibly foreseen these developments when I first wrote this statement in 2000-teens, but perhaps Nick Land was right, and Deleuzogauttarian schizoanalysis really does come from the future. Delueze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 82.

5 Zizek has noted that “There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism. Is the much celebrated Spinozan imitation afecti, the impersonal circulation of affects bypassing persons, not the very logic publicity, of video clips, and so forth in which what matters is not the message about the product by the intensity of transmitted affects and perceptions? Furthermore, recall again the hard-core pornography scenes in which the very unity of the bodily experience is magically dissolved, so the spectator perceives the bodies as a kind of vaguely coordinated agglomerate of partial objects. Is this logic in which we are no longer dealing with perons interacting but just with the multiplicities of intensities, of places of enjoyment, plus bodies as a collective/impersonal desiring machine not eminently Deleuzian? And to go a step further, is the practice of fist-fucking not the exemplary case of what Deleuze calls the ‘expansion of a concept’? The fist is put to a new use; the notion of penetration is expanded into the combination of the hand with sexual penetration, into the exploration of the inside of a body… And what about the so-called Transformer or anamorph toys, a car or a plane that be transformed into a human or a robot – is this not Deleuzian? There are no metaphorics here: the point is not that the machinic or animal form is revealed as a mask containing a human shape but, rather, as the ‘becoming-machine’ or the ‘becoming-animal’ of the human, the flow of continual morphing. What is blurred here is also the divide of the machine/living organism…”. Zizek has hit on what is essential consider within the first three camps of Neo-Deleuzian thought here, without really considering what the idea of confronting the control-image could mean for revolutionary politics todays. Zizek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004) 183-184.

6 Here I am referring to texts like Bifo’s Skizo-Mails and Percarious Rhaspsody: Semiocaptial and the pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation or Raunig’s A Thousand Machines and Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, but all of their respective texts follow a similar trajectory, which is developing the a critique of capitalism using schizo-analysis in the twenty-first century. 

7 See DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002) and _ Deleuze: History and Science (New York: Atropos Press, 2010) along with the writings of many of the philosphers working in the field of Speculative Realism / Speculative Materialism today like Paul L. Byrant, Jane Bennet, Timothy Morton, et. al. 

8 See Mackay, Robin & Avanessian, Armen. Ed. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (New York: Sequence Press, 2014) and McKerracher, David. Ed. Underground Theory (Boise: Theory Underground Publishing, 2023).

9 What is the molecular gaze? Suzanne Anker and Dorthy Nelkin have described it as “The appearance of genetic signs and symbols in the visual arts… Nucleotide sequences and double helices appear in art galleries and museums as well as in science illustrations. Mutants and monsters appear in art books as well as in comics. Genetics has become a spectacle, a new mythology, even a theology… The molecular gaze of artists reflects this ambivalence, replacing the modernist image of science as an unquestioned source of progress with an open set of questions and critical reflections about our genetic age.” Anker, Suzanne & Nelkin, Dorthy. The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003) 194.

10 The User-Unconscious is related to “the algorithmic production of big data [which] has no reference to human consciousness, or even the human behavior from which data arises, [which means] that the subject cannot be the conscious subject of modern thought… The self-appreciating subject is given over to practices at a distance from knowing the self or self-reflection in relation to a system; it is a nonrepresentational subject.” This non-representational subject is a schizo-subject inasmuch “critical sociology recognized a post-cybernetic logic of computation that desystmeitizes the methods of collating and analyzing statistical and demographic data while decentering the human subject; the observing / self-observing human subject collapses as the basis for a data-driven project of understanding sociality. The oppositions of individual and structure and micro and macor levels, as well as embodiement and information, nature and culture, the living and the inert, are called into question.” Clough, Patricia Tincineto. The User-Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018) 112, 114.

11 “We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication… People are of course talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they’re breaking down because they’re fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealthily introduced… In a control-based system nothings left alone for very long… One can see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine – with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermos-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, and cybernetic machines and computers to control societies… we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past.” Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 175.

12 Shoshana Zuboff has identified a process, where “Gradually, as surveillance capitalism’s imparatives and the material infrastructures that perform extraction-and-execution operations begin to function as a coherent whole, they produce a twenty-first century ‘means of behavior modification’. The aim of this undertaking is not to impose behaviorial norms, such as conformity or obedience, but rather to produce behaviors that reliably, definitively, and certainly leads to desired commercial results… The new apparatus is the material expression of the prediction imperative, and it represents a new kind of power animated by the economic compulsion toward certainty. Two vectors converge in this fact: the early ideals of ubiquitous computing and the economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism. This convergence signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing that we have to a thing that has us.” Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, The Hackett Book Group, 2019) 203, 204. 

13 Potolsky, Matthew. The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (New York: Routledge, 2020). 

14 In the final chapter of Tony Godfrey’s the story of contemporary art on Art in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism: 2015 Onwards, he makes the following observation: “In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) Shoshona Zuboff demonstrates how Goggle and Facebook extract private information on an unprecedented scale, and how they’ve become a part of what she calls ‘surveillance capitalism’, a rogue capitalism obsessed with control… For all of Google’s and Facebook’s utopian babble about freedom connecting us all, and ‘despite their claims of objectivity and neutrality, they are constantly making value-laden, controversial decisions. They help to create the world they claim to merely ‘show’ us. Surreptitiously, they are using mass behavior-modification techniques to work against ‘the existential project of the post-war philosophies that planted authenticity, free will, and autonomous action at the heart of second-modernity yearning.” Godfrey, Tony. The story of contemporary art (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020) 227-228.

15 Grant Vetter does a great job of covering this in The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses where he analyses everything from the J-Horror movies to Batman and beyond. Vetter, Grant. The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses (London: Zero Books, 2012). 

16_ Ibid. The Electronic Pan-Acousticon was theorized by Grant Vetter as “the fourfold diagram of observational Power / Knowledge in the audio-visual field as well as the possibility of naming the types of power relations that are operative in neo-panoptic regimes, i.e., their interlocking configurations, their geographic permutations, their judico-legal variations, their cartographic impositions, etc., etc.” Vetter, Grant. The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses (London: Zero Books, 2012) 102-103.

17 Of course, here I am referring to D&G’s famous proclamation: “We are tired of the tree. We must no longer put our faith in trees, roots, or radicels’ we have suffered enough from them. The whole arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology ot linguistics. On the contrary, only underground stems and ariel roots, the adventitious and the rhizome are truly beautiful, loving, or political.” Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. On the Line (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 33.

18 To quote Zizek about Hardt and Negri’s politics, “what would a ‘multitide in power’ (not only as resistance) be? How would it function? Hardt and Negri distinguish between two ways to oppose the global capitalist Empire: either the ‘protectionist’ advocacy of the return to the strong nation-state or the deployment of even more flexible forms of the multitude… today’s opposition to the global capital that seems to provide a kind of negative mirror-image in relation to Deleuze claim that the inherently antagonistic nature or capitalist dynamics (a strong machine of deterritorialization that generates new modes of reterritorialization): today’s capitalism reproduces the same antagonism”. Zizek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004)197-198.

 

Copyright © 2018 Justin Bower Art, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.


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