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aThousandCateaus (bookwyrm)

athousandcateaus@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 2 months ago

| lgbtq | marxist | linux | furry | sometimes nsfw |

learning haskell & deleuze

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aThousandCateaus (bookwyrm)'s books

Currently Reading (View all 41)

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96% complete! aThousandCateaus (bookwyrm) has read 31 of 32 books.

Félix Guattari: The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) No rating

Notes and journal entries document Guattari and Deleuze's collaboration on their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus.

"The …

“Félix has always operated in multiple dimensions, in so many different psychiatric and political activities; he does a lot of group work. Or perhaps I should compare him to the sea: always apparently in motion, sparkling with light non-stop. He can jump from one activity to another, he doesnt sleep much, he travels, he never stops. He never relents. He has extraordinary speeds.” Deleuze says that he himself is “more like a hill: I don't move much, I can't manage two projects at once, I obsess over my ideas, and the few movements I do have are internal.” So it was a combat, but an original combat that did not set two combatants against one another, but where the opposition was at the very heart of a single combat: “Together, Félix and I would have made a good Sumo wrestler.”?

The Anti-Oedipus Papers by 

I love their relationship and the way Deleuze talks about Guattari. Is v cute :3

Ian Buchanan: Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-oedipus (Paperback, 2008, Continuum International Publishing Group) No rating

In this system the negative that has constantly to be negated is the apparent positive of ‘stock’, that is to say accumulated wealth that if allowed to grow would become capital and thereby begin to unleash flows of its own, flows that would escape codification. All the variations on the potlatch rituals, some of which include the deliberate destruction of surplus food by fire or dispatch into the sea, are structured to achieve this goal of eliminating ‘stock’. In doing so, the tribe puts itself in the debt of its neighbours and at the mercy of the elements, thereby ensuring by power of necessity that all members of the tribe work together to stave off starvation. Tribe members wear the signs of their tribe on their flesh in acknowledgement of this common cause and their individual indebtedness to the tribe for providing for them.

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-oedipus by 

One interesting thing about Anti-Oedipus is that D&G claim that earlier social formations operate in a way to stave off the logic of capitalism. Like, for instance, via rituals that eliminate surplus resources and don't allow the cyclical, self-sustaining processes of capital accumulation/growth to arise.

It's interesting. I think the only way that it's believable to me is that certain social formations attempt to perpetuate themselves and see certain developments as at odds with that perpetuation. I don't think they could specifically know that there is a certain politico-economic system that has specific dynamics called capitalism that they're fighting to stave off.

Another thing that the above section makes me think about. If people in tribal formations did rituals that were indulgent/destructive of resources to stave off the logic of capitalist accumulation, then what does the ritual that is Amazon mass-destroying electronics stave off?

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus (Paperback, 2009, Penguin Classics) 4 stars

But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a 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.

Anti-Oedipus by ,

I can see why people think they're left-wing accelerationists. Also, a lot of people think left-wing accelerationism is about accelerating the collapse of society through politics (g.e. violence, voting for destabilizing candidates, etc.), when it's actually about economics. The idea is that if you accelerate the processes of automation and dispossession that the capitalist system will cease to be able to function because of certain Marxist ideas (i.e. the labor theory of value and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). The Left Accelerationist perspective is the way out of capitalism is through it.

I don't really know how I feel about this idea or it's validity. But at another point in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari say, "No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way."

So, that seems very much in contradiction …

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus (Paperback, 2009, Penguin Classics) 4 stars

Let us consider the more striking example of a career à l’américaine, with abrupt mutations, just as we imagine such a career to be: Gregory Bateson begins by fleeing the civilized world, by becoming an ethnologist and following the primitive codes and the savage flows; then he turns in the direction of flows that are more and more decoded, those of schizophrenia, from which he extracts an interesting psychoanalytic theory; then, still in search of a beyond, of another wall to break through, he turns to dolphins, to the language of dolphins, to flows that are even stranger and more deterritorialized. But where does the dolphin flux end, if not with the basic research projects of the American army, which brings us back to preparations for war and to the absorption of surplus value.

Anti-Oedipus by ,

I didn't know Bateson got involved with dolphin stuff. The main person I know of/think of when Dolphins come to mind is John C. Lilly. He believed LSD would give us the means to communicate with dolphins and gave them acid. He also thought dolphins could learn human speech and did an experiment where he had a woman and a dolphin living together in a partially flooded house. I am leaving out details, but it was very strange and incredibly unethical.