McKenzie Wark writes in his current contribution to the new text of the Invisible Committee “To Our Friends” that the state has produced the anarchist Black Block as the negative subject of the state itself. If we assume that today capital launches subjectivities as the auto industry launches new collections of automobiles, then we must indeed assume that capital/state produces decals of the revolutionary subject on a continuous basis. The Black Block’s policy to date has all too often accommodated this by trying to confront the opponent and occupy his abstractions.
The transition from Occupy to Blockupy marks the replacement of the policies of occupation by those of blockades, namely the blockades of infrastructures. All too often, however, blockades still take place where the opponent exactly expects or even wishes them to, and at the same time the emphasis is not placed on the infrastructure itself, which is inextricably linked to abstraction. It is essential to recognize that from the middle of the 20th century capital has established a new relationship between networks and infrastructures that has become dominant around the year 2000.
The question of infrastructure is always also that of its logistics. The history of logistics begins with containerisation, which was planted in the global value chains in order to make them more effective. It is no coincidence that the blockades in the port of Oakland were among the most radical actions of the Occupy movement. Logistics is linear, like capital itself processes it in spirals and cybernetic feedback loops, whose non-linearity and vectoriality processes differentially, alinear, lines that go in all directions. As Alexander Galloway suspected, cybernetization, in which digital technology is entirely focused on the input/output relation (black box) and the interface, would have to correspond to a (non)policy of the Black Block that concentrates on the question of appearance and disappearance. The politicization of the problems of presence and absence requires a very special rhythmology that cannot be grasped as mere acceleration.
To a certain extent, the logistics of capital function rhizomatically. This refers to two things. First, global capitalism and its logistics cannot be revolutionized, they can only be transformed. On the other hand, the generic insufficiency of the networks and their logistics (not everything is network-shaped) has to be discovered by resorting to the real of laruelle.
The question of rebellion/revolution situates laruelle like Deleuze/Guattari (in a certain sense also the Invisible Committee) on the level of the construction of the political subject, the nonproletariat. Ultimately, this subject is no longer that of the class, but that which unilaterally relates itself to every class whose symptom used to be the proletariat.
It is now necessary to ask about the connection between the politics of blockades and (non)-subjectivation. McKenzie Wark asks the right questions here: “The assumption is that by blocking the flows, a situation can arise for something else? But for what? Is this really something that can scale for 7 billion people? Or are those not forging their own being through insurrection not even actually people? We are no longer in a language here that takes its stand on proletarian internationalism and the weapon of the strike, but rather of the blockage that creates a whoever (non)subjectivity. But that’s a dangerous ideological landscape to navigate.”
We are less concerned here with the question of scaling, what blockade policies could mean in view of the complexity of world capital, than with the relationship of these policies to the transcendental construction of a rebellious (non)subjectivity. It does not take too much effort to realize that Deleuze/Guattari and Francois Laruelle have worked on these questions most precisely to date.
Let’s start with Deleuze/Guattari, and move on to the minefield that McKenzie Wark speaks of.
Let’s illustrate the problem with the example of film. How does the transition from seeing to not seeing work in film? What happens between when you see a picture and when you no longer see it? Integral logic/film: What happens between image1 and image2, in an interval where the human perceptual apparatus fails to locate?
The integral calculus breaks up a continuous analog development into discrete, digital steps. Cantor Dedekind’s axiom states that the continuum is composed of the set of all real numbers. The actual infinity in Dedekind can be explained as follows: a continuous line can be divided into infinitely many numbers (real, rational, irrational), into
by dividing the line in the middle and repeating this process infinitely. As David Foster Wallace rightly says, the precise property of the continuity of the line is not its density, but its divisibility, i.e. the point on the line is to the right of all smaller points and to the left of all larger points, so that the line can be intersected at any point. Here it should suffice that the secret of the (infinite) continuum is involved, that every number can serve as a cut, as a cut into the initial continuity, in order to strengthen the discontinuity, which in turn results in the (infinitesimal) approach to a now measurable continuity, the continuity of infinitely many measurable cuts. Continuity from infinitely discontinuous sections (mathematical proof, see David Foster Wallace, Die Entdeckung des Infendlichen, 263 ff.).
The clou of the logic of the actual infinity now lies in the fact that the interval between two points becomes smaller and smaller the more numbers one inserts, but this interval will never disappear. In mathematics there is the infinite of higher power, numbers which are infinitely often contained in even the smallest interval of numbers. First small objection to Tiqqun: The Invisible Committee can never be completely invisible, it can only disappear in the process of becoming imperceptible, until its existence is infinitesimally small because of me. The semantics of presence and absence are overused by Tiqqun, the relationship between transparency and anonymity shifted in favor of a politics of illegibility that paradoxically articulates itself in a romanticizing dramatization of legibility.
Disappearance occurs in (curved) space-time constellations, an interval that converges towards zero but never becomes zero. Within the framework of the infinitesimal calculus, the question can be posed as to whether one only encounters discontinuities in the realm of the infinitely small, so that in approaching zero one does not have to deal with nothing, but with breaks, boundaries and shifts. The mysticism of a Tiqqun stratagem consists in the fact that one somehow wants to take up zero (absolute nebulisation), but zero is not nothing, but a relation to something, i.e. there is always a slow motion, which extends the point, the momentary point in time, into a period of time, i.e. disappearance is a process. Conclusion: NOTHER THE PLUSTLY SPEED IS A FADING IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS (see Deleuze/Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 283 ff).
In cinematic terms, one could say that the infinitely small interval between two images, in which everything and nothing can happen, includes disappearance. BECOMING REVOLUTIONARY IS ALWAYS A FILM OF WRONG CUTS. THE MINORITARY MOVING Makes IT INVISIBLE FOR THE SCHEINBARLESS HIGHER LEVEL, in other words, the disappearing (the finer the intervals, the more difficult the perception becomes for the higher level, or vice versa, the faster the perception, the narrower the intervals) feeds on the fact that the molar level of perception repeatedly loses intervals. At the same time, it will be possible to distinguish further and further intervals by cuts until the smaller perceptions guarantee a continuous or discontinuous transition of more or less below an identity of 1. These are not extensive, but intensive quantities whose difference in intensity tends towards zero, but does not reach it.
Intensity is a quality that has an intense degree. In this context, the mortal danger of infinite acceleration lies precisely in producing an ever faster perception, so that ultimately the film would have to run ever faster to produce the effect of continuous movement – THE PARANOIA OF THE MEDIAL REAL TIME REGIMES, IN WHICH THE BODY DIDDEN: but this is never 100% possible: While disappearance is a continuous / analogous process, perception / cognition is discrete / digital. (Perception is always that of a body, and everything that flows into the body also flows into the intellect, which grasps the ideas of the physical affections and not these themselves. Because of the body’s affections, ideas are formed about the body and the outer world.)
The apathy of David Foster Wallace and the revolutionary becoming of Deleuze/Guattari have the following in common: It is becoming anonymous that lies under the radar screens of power or the radar of the official perception apparatuses in order to follow another world-making (conversely, the powers cut off bodies and senses from their capacity to act): both optically (imperceptibility), categorically (indistinguishability; indistinguishability), and categorically (the power of the human being).
- one always forms new worlds with things, with rocks, stones, people or for example with video apparatuses, in order to become imperceptible oneself; we always have a tendency towards inorganic, towards asubjective and asignificant forms of life. To constantly undermine this tendency is the business of a police and state binarism that seeks to eliminate tendencies that cannot be digitally split. (The tendencies, because they want to strengthen themselves, tend towards mergers rather than divisions, insofar as they remain uni-laterally related to the real. This in turn means not only striving for mergers, but also forcing separations. It is not a matter of reproducing what exists, but of cancelling what exists. )
Deleuze and Guattari write:” [There] is no longer any distinction between man and nature: the human being of nature and the natural being of man become identical in nature as production or industry …. … Man and nature do not face each other like two distinct concepts, not even in a causal relationship or a relationship of knowledge or expression (cause-effect, subject-object, etc.), but rather form the common essential reality of producer and product.” (Anti-Ödipus, 10) All of these are processes of and within the unconscious, but the unconscious must be constructed. The politically unconscious is the imperceptible that must be constructed. With Deleuze/Guattari, the unconscious generates differences, it is situated in micro-intervals, it takes place in the intervals of perception, it is about making the thresholds of perception as fine as possible. “There is always a perception that is finer than yours, a perception of your imperceptibility, a perception of what is in your black box. So another practice springs from a stranger who is practically non-existent, and this subtractive stranger is most difficult to capture by the powers. Foreign subjects are not simply given, but are produced and produce themselves in the manifold and differentiated processes of the actualization of becoming imperceptible, processes which, according to Deleuze, are those of subjectivation without subject. This includes a self-transference into judgments that never become real and thus always holds back in a certain virtuality. Radical subjectivation is postponed by suspending the possible and the real in equal measure and at the same time exposing itself to a restlessness that undermines the calculation. This impossible, virtually remaining problematization encloses those who were before our time and will come after us in an inconfinable structure. This is about an opening towards virtuality, beyond the capital that on the one hand cements the presence metaphysics, on the other remains in Futur 2. (Virtuality as the richness of every set of cases in and with which a (imperceptible) becoming can be generated, which is not dependent on an already constituted totality of possibilities – on the contrary, this becoming arises quasi out of nothing, since it contains no structure as potentiality (of all possible cases) before it happens; the break from nothing generates its own temporality.)
In it, the resistance of the non-subject against his production as sample, number and identity card is indicated by proving his stubborn inability to recognize that his coding is natural. This non-subject is based on the certainty that man, and this is to be understood as an axiom, as man-in-person ever determines a foreign subject. The non-subject is constantly alienated at the front (Ernst Bloch), it is ever already subject in struggle. In contrast to Deleuze, Laruelle does not focus on the virtual, but on the real. Laruelle emphasizes the a prioi real of man, which is closed to thinking and to which Laruelle can refer only by means of an axiomatic first name.
Let us take the definition of the secret in Laruelle: the secret is the veritas transcendentalis as finite. There is nothing and receives nothing except the modality in which it is given. The univoke of non-ommunicability expresses itself in the (imperceptible) indivisible, it never appears in the light of the logo. As pre-dialectic and pre-differential real it never reaches the status of consciousness. The secret requires no communication whatsoever with respect to what it is, for example, to be recognized or to be an object of philosophy or science, while communication, conversely, always requires the secret to constitute itself. According to the postmen of philosophy, communication as information should be as real as truth and its meaning.
But the secret and the invisible, more precisely the imperceptible, are never interpretable. (A Non-Nietzsche and a Non-Deleuze, both resisting the art of interpretation.)
According to Deleuze, communication today is completely permeated by money. “Perhaps the important thing will be to create empty spaces of non-communication, disruptive interruptions. A new typology of events must be invented: Events “that escape control, even if they are small, or bring new time-spaces into the world, even with small surfaces and reduced volumes.
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE FINE, OR YOU WILL NOT BE (Nietzsche). But only if at the same time one forces the exit, breaks through continuity. It is precisely this kind of subtlety, which cannot be separated from the brutality of non-ontological politics, that guarantees that autonomy can be achieved in the practices of resistance and the movements of flight, but that this autonomy must be wrested from capital and the state as a grossly grating machine. The process of subjugation and subjugation of the subjects to the capitalist machinery, which encompasses both their bodies and their intellects, is that of the realization of the conditions of exploitation of capital itself. In addition, the state mistrusts every autonomous articulation that cannot be monitored through its channels of information and filtered through its grids – thus it names this articulation as unrepresentative or recognizes it only as an object of evaluations, interrogations and opinions.
Apathetic or partial, i.e. participatory subjectivation, takes place today in a supervising and supervised puppet cage, whereby it is fractally integrated into normality insofar as subjects always live in different infinitely recursive universes, there are bodies in bodies, as there are houses in houses (Leibniz), and the molar perceptual apparatuses sense the danger – hence also the paranoia of the increasingly subtle surveillance and control machines.
If perception and cognition are discreet, one can, in order to construct the unconscious and the continuous, only do this by diving below a respective threshold of perception, so that the imperceptible lies on a molecular level and one becomes increasingly imperceptible oneself. However, this is logically not possible: as the Cantor-Dedekind Axiom shows, a mathematical integration can take place with every fine cut, i.e. one is never 100% unconscious. Becoming a medium means dissolving the ever simulated individual, shifting the body into the relationship of rest and movement, slowing down and acceleration, and this under the emphasis of an almost insane mobilization of force-of-thinking, which, however, produces a different re-integration than previously thought.
Every imperceptibility remains perceptible, since we cannot live 100% unconsciously, although the perception itself will become molecular. Deleuze: “The first material moment of subjectivity subtracts.” In case of doubt, an atom experiences infinitely more of the world than we do, in case of doubt, the whole world. On the other hand, molecularization is politically nothing if it does not intervene transformatively in social institutions and economic relations, so that becoming imperceptible is always coupled with new composition. Ultimately, (non)-politics takes place in the in-between, in the transfers between becoming imperceptible (molecularization) and radical intervention against controlling and disciplining organizations. “The stronger the molar organization is, the more it itself produces a molecularization of its elements, its relationships and elementary apparatuses. (Mille Plateaux, 294) That is one side, the other side consists in the radical separation from the molar in order to create an undivided autonomy. The group/action must always be an open, multiplying and at the same time hiding movement. Here we can refer to the concept of Klossowski’s conspiracy, which aims at the death of God, of man and above all at the death of the world. The concept is against the world. Deleuze is not a metaphysical thinker of the continuous, as speculative materialism/realism claims. Thus the constellation of inclusive disjunction must also be replaced by that of exclusive disjunction, the radical drawing of boundaries. Asymmetries must be generated in order to cancel the previous capital world.
We have reached a point where only the axioms/theorems of (non)-politics can still help. But we will only come back to this when time has reached its overripeness. Start Making Sense.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)