the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them,

I am not sure I understand your account of Harvey’s lecture correctly.
It may be concluded that instead of this appearance - ‘the totality of the process appears as an objective interrelation,’- it is indeed generated by ‘the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another and by their own collisions with one another.’ And yet, there is also ‘an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.’ So, aren’t there two mutually controversial generative processes? On the one side, you mention ‘collusions and interactions of ‘conscious individuals’; on the other, you write that precisely these interactions are produced by ‘an alien social power standing above them.’ Marx himself evaluated the process of social production as the important notion of his work: “The guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’).
Will Harvey talk again about the production of social relations of production? In ‘Fragment on the machines’, Marx briefly outlined the production process as a whole.

From the vantage of poststructuralist thinking, which deconstructs subjectivity, the problem of the alienated capitalist subject vanishes and in its place emerges a pluralism of strategies for ensuring that new openings or ‘lines of flight’ are created within discursive structures (economic, social, technological). — Joshs

Deconstruction of subjectivity as a way of existence and the production of the new was inherited by Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida from Nietzcshe. I discussed one of its modes in my previous post. Are these strategies still in effect? Have the leading postmodernist thinkers' conceptual frameworks and practices remained relevant in our situation? Today, it looks like the problem of the construction of an autonomous self–affirming subjectivity, the resistant self-positioning existence, has not been rigorously articulated and resolved yet. As Deleuze put it in 'Postscript on the societies of control': "Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated,' they re-request apprenticeship and permanent training. It is up to them to discover what they are being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill."

Mark the singularity of events. . . . Grasp their return. . . . Define their lacuna point, the moment they did not take place. (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’). Through the figure of Baudelaire, Foucault re-affirms the reality of the Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic existence.
— Number2018

So then it is the eternal return of the same. — Joshs

No, it is not. The figures of Nietzsche’s Dionisius, Foucault’s Baudelaire, and Deleuze’s Proust and Kafka have not returned the identity of the same. On the contrary, their subject of return has been becoming. The author himself, a figure of a character, literary, conceptual, and aesthetic components of the work compose a singular multiplicity. The work and the producer have simultaneously become and effaced; they have acquired the temporary, fragile, self-sufficient modus of existence. “Eternal return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by intermediary of metamorphosis. However, it causes neither condition nor agent to return on the contrary it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product. It is repetition by excess which leaves nothing of the becoming-equal”. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 90).

I hypothesize that , of the many readings of Deleuze , you resonate with those that I find in writers like Massumi , Protevi and Delanda. — Joshs

Do you agree with Protevi that this analysis of the ‘above’ into the political and the ‘below’ into the biological is compatible with Deleuze? — Joshs

I used to read Massumi’s books. He is interested in the problem of our autonomy and subjectivity that we deal with in this thread. But, as far as I know, he has not solved it yet.” The call to go beyond ideology is a call to attend to the novelty of the situation, and to find ways of conceptualizing the current mode of operation of the capitalist process, and the new kinds of spin-off effects it produces, that can grasp its novelty and complexity. How can a relational approach give us a new understanding of capitalism as a self-proliferating What are the new figures of that relation? Is the figuring still a question of personification? If so, is identification still at the basis of the figures of capital? What does it mean to ‘personify’ a derivative? A credit default swap?” (Massumi, ‘Politics of affect’, p 90)
Regarding DeLanda, I think that Ian Buchanan’s critique of his ‘assemblage theory’ is entirely appropriate.
Also, I looked through Protevi’s book. His themes, style, and vocabulary are very close to Deleuze and Guattari’s. Yet, it seems that he cannot grasp the singularity of our current situation. He analyzes limited domains and cuts off a few essential dimensions of the Deleuzian conceptual framework. I will clarify my position by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s perspectives on writing. “Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted, write at n -1 dimensions, in the middle of things… A system of this kind can be called a rhizome… There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). One cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside”. (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘A thousand plateaus’, p 23). Thus, Protevi does not write at n – 1 dimensions. To add one more dimension of the unique, higher principle of writing means to follow a pre-given, pre-calculated hermeneutic, interpretative, scientific or transcendental method or paradigm. It results in the return of the same, of the identity of the supreme instance. Indeed, D& G’s view on writing ensues from Deleuze’s interpretation of internal return. For them, to write means to deconstruct themselves to achieve the production of the new.

↪Number2018
For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.'…At the heart of the present is an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity.
— Number2018

This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same
— Joshs

No, it is not.

This is Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same, which Heidegger depicted thusly:

“The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its supreme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal recurrence of the same.” — Joshs

Heidegger asserts the rollback of Nietzsche's thought to metaphysics. He misrepresents the doctrine of the will to power and identifies Nietzsche as an ally of Descartes.

"Recurrence" thinks the permanentizing of what becomes, thinks it to the point where the becoming of what becomes is secured in the duration of its becoming. The "eternal" thinks the permanentizing of such constancy in the direction of its circling back into itself and forward toward itself. What becomes is the same itself, and that means the one and selfsame (the identical) that in each case is within the difference of the other. The presence of the one identical element, a presence that comes to be, is thought in the same. Nietzsche's thought thinks the constant permanentizing of the becoming of whatever becomes into the only kind of presence there is-the self-recapitulation of the identical. (Heidegger, ’Lectures on Nietzsche’, p165)

Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s eternal return is entirely different from Foucault and Deleuze’s interpretations.


“What will to power brought to light? A reality that has being freed from (immutable, eternal, true) being: becoming. And the knowledge that unveils it does not unveil being” (Foucault,’ Lectures on the will to know’, p319)

For Foucault, there is no returning of the identity of the same.

“Mark the singularity of events. . . . Grasp their return. . . . Define their lacuna point, the moment they did not take place.” (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’)

So, what is returning is the singularity of events, the difference itself. The eternal operates in the lacuna points, where the perceiver does not distinguish himself from the perceived. Through the figure of Baudelaire, Foucault re-affirms the reality of the Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic existence, the construction of a singular subjectivity. The processes of self–affirmation, the resistant self-positioning cannot be merely achieved by applying psychological, cognitive, or informational methods and paradigms. One must traverse the unnamable lacuna points of the rupture with dominant social realities.

↪Number2018

According to Heidegger, the Being of entities can only be grasped in the present through the awareness that something appearing 'here and now' has the temporal structure of a 'making present' of something. So, it is only through temporality the meaning of Being can become articulated. Yet, in our current environment, the totality of pre-calculated and pre-programmed situations precisely targets the moment of 'here and now'.
There is no more future; it has already arrived as an overwhelming aggregate of pre-formed retentions. There is no past because it is separated from individual memory and "settled" in the collective digitalized network. Only the present remains, that is, the continuing time of perception, in which the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived.
— Number2018

Is this from Baudrillard? Doesn’t sound like Deleuze. — Joshs

This image of time ensues from Benjamin and Foucault's perspectives on Baudelaire's attitude to modernity.
For Foucault, Baudelaire aspires to overcome "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent' character of modernity and recapture 'something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.' The task compels him to produce himself in a particular aesthetic mode. On the other hand, Benjamin's Baudelaire reveals
that the era he called modernity (modernité) expresses itself in various figures of shock. The inevitable contact of the poet with the crowd and the new content of sensual cause the anesthesia effects. Therefore, the shock becomes a remedy and a condition for the possibility of perception as such. You can't be modern without being shocked. Foucault and Benjamin agree on a necessarily aesthetic mode of our existence in the present. It is the time of perception in which the perceiver does not distinguish himself from the perceived. At the heart of the present strikes an instant of the intensive novelty. The newest replaces the new so that the endless repetition re-establishes the ongoing eternity.

as Heidegger argues, events always mater to us, are relevant and significant. This is because a pre-understanding operates to make the world familiar to us at some level. This pre-understanding is that frame , that totality of relevance, that makes the world
recognizable to us — Joshs

Undoubtedly, Heidegger's philosophy of time significantly supports your affirmation of an individual's capacities to maintain autonomy and adaptability. I would argue that phenomenology cannot provide
a relevant framework for understanding our current conditions. According to Heidegger, the Being of entities can only be grasped in the present through the awareness that something appearing 'here and now' has the temporal structure of a 'making present' of something. So, it is only through temporality the meaning of Being can become articulated. Yet, in our current environment, the totality of pre-calculated and pre-programmed situations precisely targets the moment of 'here and now'.
What is attacked would be space and time as forms of the given of what happens. The retreat of the given causes the phenomenological pre-understanding temporal structures not to operate 'here and now' anymore. Therefore, we no longer have a dominant temporal horizon for the event, framing and shaping our 'here and now'. There is no more future; it has already arrived as an overwhelming aggregate of pre-formed retentions. There is no past because it is separated from individual memory and "settled" in the collective digitalized network. Only the present remains, that is, the continuing time of perception, in which the perceiver cannot distinguish himself from the perceived.

Our personal identities are concerned more with general psychological character and our social identities more with occupation, career, status etc.—not that these don’t overlap or aren’t located on the same spectrum, but that personal identity tends to reflect ideologies of “individuality” (which in so far as they remain within the social sphere [in so far as we are “sane”, i.e. recognizably social actors] are just more social narratives) and social identity tends towards ideologies of the collective. — Baden

This distinction exists just on the fabulation level. It allows one to register the event, translate it into results, accumulate its consequences, and conceive strategies of extensive use of time. Yet, it does not allow us to construct a critical ontology of ourselves. Because on a more fundamental, grounding level, our ‘personal’ and ‘social’ identities are penetrated and constituted by the forces of the entire field of intensive operations. They incessantly contract and determine our present.

I would argue that we always know implicitly what that overarching framework is that guides our motives and understandings, even if not at a level we can verbalize. We mustn’t confuse our inability to articulate in words the contrast poles of our core constructs with their being invisible or unconscious to us. — Joshs

You stress out our freedom to adopt and reconstruct ‘that overarching framework that guides our motives and understandings.’ Yet, this account implies a particular conceptualization of what ‘is being invisible or unconscious to us.’ In principle, it is assumed that it can become visible and articulable. And this premise misses what Benjamin and Adorno have in common with postmodernist thinkers. They agree that we are impacted by the sublime that has always remained unthought and unrepresentable.
“This time without diachrony where the present is the past and where the past is always
presence (but these terms are obviously inappropriate), is the time of the unconscious affect. Ungraspable by consciousness, this time threatens it. It threatens it permanently. And permanence is the name for what happens in the lexicon of the consciousness of time. The decision to analyze, to write, to historicize is made according to different stakes, to be sure, but it is taken, in each case, against this formless mass, and in order to lend it form, a place in space, a moment in temporal succession, a quality in the spectrum of qualifications, representation on the scene of the various imaginaries and sentences.” (Lyotard, ‘Heidegger and “the Jews” p 17).

all issues which have been banned in one way or another from discussion or dissemination on these platforms. None of which are anything to do with politeness or civility, racism, sexism or any other 'ism. They are to do with powerful people constraining the public discourse to promote their interests. — Isaac

Let's assume that you are right, and we are indeed in a situation where the space of allowed
public discourse on social platforms was intentionally constrained so that 'powerful people could promote their interests'. Nevertheless, do people who debate with you here, in this OP, want to help 'the powerful people'? As well as many others, they do not like what Mask is doing now for entirely different reasons. It is difficult to say why, but they likely reject your arguments without considering them seriously or view them as negligible and insignificant.
Further, it would be reasonable to assume that even 'powerful people' and those fired recently by Mask have not simply acted 'to promote their interests'. We do not deal here with pure cynical or ideological schemes or calculations. Is there an effect of the desire to remove obstacles and act without hindrances?

What's happening on those platforms is that ideas about what is the case are being censored for no other reason that that they do not agree with what a particular group of people think is the case. — Isaac

Here, you offer the different explanation. It is better than the previous one. Yet, what is going on is not completely understandable.

Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage.
— Number2018

But is Protevi’s reading doing justice to Deleuze? He argues that “a sophisticated approach to phenomenology does not see it as reducing experience to what appears to a subject but rather as proceeding from that appearance to an understanding of what must underlie it.
Taken that way, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which seeks the conditions of real rather than possible experience, lies at not nearly as far a remove from say, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, as many have thought.”

When we look at the way that Protevi wants to rethink enactivist, embodied cognition, however , we find his brand of Deleuzianism to be merely a more reductionist form of embodied cognition. For instance , his understanding of Deleuzian affect incorporates cognitive and neuroscientific approaches like Lisa Barrett, Griffiths, Panksepp and LeDoux, and he associates the anthropological work of James Scott with Deleuzian thought. I see these approaches as not particularly compatible with Deleuze. — Joshs

I want to get back to my previous post. It may be my fault that I could not articulate my central point clearly; it is about the question of the ineffable. For me, your, Protevi or even Deleuze's position regarding phenomenology is less critical than resolving or clarifying the issue. I believe that Deleuze is right, and we live and act within our assemblage; when Deleuze wrote it, that was his one, and right now, we have a different one. Its essential characteristics, according to
Deleuze and Guattari is that "There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. "(D & G, 'Anti-Oedipus, p 29). Later, in 'What is dispositif?' Deleuse introduces the third dimension of self.
Massumi develops this assertion: "There are the nonconscious presuppositions implanted in the field as you brace into it, making the coming event nonoptional. This is the aspect of perceptual judgement: conclusions about the situation that pre-make themselves as the premises of the event and as an energizer of the movements composing it.
The affective intensity of the situation powers it's playing out. Effectively, all this is about desire occurring, not on the individual level… The rational aspects of the event – judgment, hypothesis, decision -were mutually included in the event along with all the other cooperating factors." (Massumi, 2015, p 47) Where is our conscious personal autonomy here? In what way our self emerges and immediately disappears in this gap? An instantaneous translation, reduction, and transformation of the event endlessly occur at a level of our conscious engagement. Since we must act here and now, in a brief moment of time, just a little complexity can be envisaged and processed. We rely on
our reduced cooperative behavioural patterns and apply ready-made, adopted narrations and self-esteem. Our perceptional, cognitive, and social incentives are directly embedded into our environment. The ineffable is that we continue to believe in our conscious, individual autonomy.
How do you see this assessment from the position of embodied cognition? Is there another way to conceive the place and the function of self between the affective and social registers?

Deleuze's(1994) concept of intensive magnitude succeeds in deconstructing the quantity-quality binary by establishing a ‘ground' (as metamorphosis) in difference that is neither qualitative nor quantitative, and thus a basis of number that does not measure.

“Let us take seriously the famous question: is there a difference in kind, or of degree, between differences of degree and differences in kind? Neither.” “In its own nature, difference is no more qualitative than extensive” — Joshs

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). ... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (Ibid, p.8) — Joshs

It is unclear how this ‘the most radical aspect of Deleuze’ that you embrace is compatible with your
perspective on phenomenology and the ineffable. As you wrote before:

“Phenomenology as it was begun by Husserl was about finding our way past preconceptions to the formal conditions of possibility of experience, to what is irreducible, indubitable and universal in experience and thus is communicable and intersubjective . For instance, time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically. This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others in the sense that it doesn’t hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it”

Deleuze’s concept of intensive magnitude implies that only difference returns and is never the same. Anything identified as the same, as something that can be the same, can never return. The differentiating return transforms the return circuit into a departure from the self so that a sense of self only emerges in this gup. Therefore, what is rejected here is not just the anthropomorphism of any discourse that thinks a time in general for man in general, but also the prevalence of the internal, that is valid in all times and all places. Referring to singularity, to the event of becoming, is ultimately incompatible with the phenomenological approach. By contrast, a multiplicity, an assemblage, implies that “Untangling the lines of apparatus means, in each case, preparing a map, a cartography, a survey of unexplored lands…One has to be positioned on the lines themselves…We belong to these apparatuses and act in them. The newness of an apparatus for those preceding it is what we call currency, our currency. The new is the current. The current is not what we are but rather what we become.” (Deleuze, 2007, ‘What is a Dispositif’?) Our self (our subjectivity) is one of the lines of our current assemblage. Together with other lines, that of knowledge (epistemological) and power (ethical), we are not, but we become. What holds an assemblage, an apparatus, together? What makes it a multilinear, opened whole? The ineffable is the relation of what we experience to our assemblage. We need to grasp the dimensions of its processual creativity. Likely, the most radical aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy are notions of the machine, the abstract machine, and the machinic unconscious as ways of explaining the operational unity of assemblages.

time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically.

This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others, in the sense that it doesnt hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it. This does’t mean that we can’t communicate our experiences to ourselves , only that in doing so what we are communicating is something similar rather than identical to what we experience in it’s never-to-be repeated immediacy. So self-reflection is as imperfect as communication with others. The phenomenological method reveals to us the structural patterns that intentional synthesis consists in, such as the constitution of higher level phenomena like persisting spatial objects out of the changing flow of perceptual data.

In short, the content-in-itself of the contingent , relative, ineffable ‘now’ is not useful or meaningful via its role in the formal , communicable aspects of experience . — Joshs

Your account of the ineffable refers to the formal phenomenological structures and our conscious experience. It is a correct but incomplete presentation of our time consciousness and discursive performances. Thus, it lacks ontological heterogeneity and uniformizes diverse regions of being. In our social and cognitive environment, we instantaneously take part in various intensive apparatuses whose principles of organization and processes evade our control and recognition. Varela defines a machine as "the set of inter-relations of its components independent of the components themselves." 'A higher level of phenomena' is constituted by a relational machinic complex, effectuated before and alongside intentionality, discursive, and subject-object relations.

Rather than starting from symbolic structures of power that must be resisted, Deleuze begins from change, becoming and resistance.

As Dan Smith writes:

“If resistance becomes a question in Foucault, it is because he begins with the question of knowledge (what is articu­lable and what is visible), finds the conditions of knowledge in power, but then has to ask about the ways one can resist power, even if resistance is primary in relation to power. It is Foucault’s starting point in constituted knowledges that leads him to pose the problem of resistance.

Deleuze’s ontology, by contrast, operates in an almost exactly inverse manner. Put crudely, if one begins with a status quo – knowledge or the symbolic – one must look for a break or rupture in the status quo to account for change. Deleuze instead begins with change, with becoming, with events. ” — Joshs

Based on Deleuze's text 'Desire and Pleasure,' it is not difficult to oppose Deleuze and Foucault's ontologies. Yet, in 'Foucault,' Deleuze entirely changed his position. The question of resistance
should not be reduced to a tenuous epistemological scheme: "he begins with the question of knowledge (what is articulable and what is visible), finds the conditions of knowledge in power, but then has to ask about the ways one can resist power." "There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture."
(Deleuze, ‘Foucault”, p 37). Starting from "The History of Madness," Foucault became the leading figure between philosophers of his generation not because he 'began with the question of knowledge.’ By contrast, it happened due to his relation to the outside, his discovery of 'certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance,' embedded into the whole social field. Therefore, it is incorrect to assert that 'Foucault begins with a status quo – knowledge or the symbolic,' while 'Deleuze instead begins with change, with becoming, with events.’ “Foucault writes a history, but a history of thought as such. To think means to experiment and to problematize. Knowledge, power, and self are the triple root of a problematization of thought… In Foucault, everything is subject to variables and variation" (Deleuze, 'Foucault,' p 95).

“Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience – so unsettling – of a proximity or a near total affinity in the “theses” – if one may say this – through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, “gesture,” “strategy,” “manner”: of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the “theses” (but the word doesn’t fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference “more profound” than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation (“yes, yes”), the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this “generation.” I never felt the slightest “objection” arise in me, not even a virtual one, against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or that proposition in Anti-Oedipus…” — Joshs

I guess this quote is from Derrida's memorial note, written after Deleuze's death. Is it from 'I have to wander All Alone? The text's tone is understandable but does not shed light on their remoteness from each other, primarily due to their different perspectives on immanence and transcendence.

irreducible gesture of difference has proximities to Derridean differance — Joshs

“The concepts of difference that Deleuze develops in ‘Difference and Repetition’ –“difference in intensity, disparity in the phantasm, dissemblance in the form of time, the differential in thought”
( DR, p 145) – have a very different status than a notion of differance Derrida develops in his essay
“ Differance”. For Derrida, differance is a relation that transcends ontology, that differs from ontology…Deleuze aim, by contrast, is to show that ontology itself is constituted by a principle of difference” (Smith, Essays on Deleuze, p 275).

In what way Deleuze was close to Derrida's approach? Could you relate Derrida's perspective on power to your quote from 'Desire and Pleasure'?
— Number2018 — Joshs

I will reconstruct Deleuze's disagreement with Derrida using the question of power and desire, using their reading of Kafka.
"The law as such should never give rise to any story. To be invested with its categorical authority, the law must be without history, genesis, or any possible derivation. That would be the law of the law. One does not know what kind of law is at issue—moral, judicial, political, natural, etc. What remains concealed and invisible in each law is thus presumably that which makes laws of these laws, the being-law of these laws. The question and the quest are ineluctable, rendering irresistible the journey toward the place and the origin of law. To enter into relations with the law which says "you must" and "you must not" is to act as if it had no history or at any rate as if it no longer depended on its historical presentation." (Derrida, 'Acts of literature. Before the Law' p 192)
Derrida's account of 'The law as such', differance, has an apparent affinity with Kant's moral imperative. 'To enter into relations with the law,' one must obey and to act without any critical distance, following exclusively practical reasons. It is precisely the Law with a necessary, unconditional authority, without being true. The truth of the Law cannot be theoretically demonstrated, but its unconditional validity should be nevertheless presupposed. In Derrida’s interpretation, Kafka's scene of 'Before the Law, operates similarly to the Althusser’s scene of interpellation. The submission to the law through an acceptance of its demand for conformity should be awarded by the acquirement of a sense of "I" and social identity.
Differently, Deleuze and Guattari ultimately rejected any use of Kantian law: "Where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone…An unlimited field of immanence instead of an infinite transcendence...The transcendence of the law was an image, but the law exists only in the immanence of the machinic assemblage." (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Kafka’, p 51.)
Here, desire is not conceived as an irresistible drive to enter the ineffable space behind "Before the Law'. By contrast, it animates the productive immanent field, coextensive with the singular social organizations. Machinic assemblages of desire exercise their power operating several syntheses inherent to both the mind and the social.

I think Deleuze was closer to Derrida’s approach to the relation between strategies of power than he was to Foucault’s. — Joshs

Could you expand this? In what way Deleuze was close to Derrida's approach? Could you relate Derrida's perspective on power to your quote from 'Desire and Pleasure'? By the way, Deleuze entirely changed his position and reformulated the disagreement with Foucault in 'Foucault'.

it is important to remember that the ‘social’ here refers to the exposure to absolute alterity that temporal repetition implies. Such alterity can be the voice of another or one’s own outer or inner voice, the written words of another or my exposure to the perceptual features of my room — Joshs

So, ‘the social” here is significantly reduced to what can be expressed by either discursive or the
apparent perceptual features of ’my room.’ Such reduction omits various social situations that directly affect my sense of identity without my conscious engagement.

What would allow two orders to be heterogeneous to each other, other than some structural unity or center within each , opposing one to the other? Doesn’t this invoke the problem of the condition of possibility of formal structures? We would have to recognize the heterogeneity that already inhabits an ‘order’ and keeps
it from being closed within itself and simply opposed to another order. — Joshs

The problem of the impasse of a formal structure should not be limited by a classical apparent
structuralist approach. Despite an innumerate variety of significant interpretations, Derrida's differance and 'what absolutely is not' can be referred to discovered by Foucault our comprehensive contemporary situation of 'the cogito and the unthought.' "Man cannot posit himself in the immediate and sovereign transparency of a cogito… man extends from pure apprehension to the empirical clutter, the chaotic accumulation of contents, the weight of experiences constantly eluding themselves, the whole silent horizon of what is posited in the sandy stretches of non-thought." (Foucault, ‘The order of things’, p 351) Hasn't Derrida, instead of openness to the immanence of 'the unthought', erected an enclosed formal transcendental structure of the ultimate negative theology? Foucault, as well as Simondon and Deleuse, chose a different way. That is 'what would allow two orders to be heterogeneous to each other: we are impacted not by 'what absolutely is not" but by 'the whole silent horizon of what is posited in the sandy stretches of non-thought.' Foucault distinguished between the order of powers to affect and to be affected and the order of knowledge as heterogeneous but immanent to each other. "Between technics of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority, even if they have their specific roles and are linked together on the basis of their difference" (Foucault, 'The History of Sexuality p 98). Similarly, answering to the situation of 'the cogito and the unthought,' Deleuze and Guattari asserted: "There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. "(D & G, ‘Anti-Oedipus, p29).

“…there is singularity but it does not collect itself, it "consists" in not collecting itself. Perhaps you will say that there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a `style' “(Derrida 1995, p.354) — Joshs

How can the singularity become ungraspable, but recognizable?
“We are before this text that, saying nothing definite and presenting no identifiable content beyond the story itself, except for an endless diffèrance, till death, nonetheless remains strictly intangible. Intangible: by this I understand inaccessible to contact, impregnable, and ultimately ungraspable, incomprehensible—but also that which we have not the right to touch. This is an "original" text, as we say; it is forbidden or illicit to change or disfigure it, or to touch its form. Despite the non-identity in itself of its sense or destination, despite its essential unreadability, its "form" presents and performs itself as a kind of personal identity entitled to absolute respect “(Derrida, ‘Acts of literature’, p 211) Yes, we are startled and bonded by the ‘ultimately inaccessible, ungraspable, and incomprehensible’ event. But are we staying still before 'the text', endlessly, ‘till death’ anticipating the ineffable termination and admittance? Can this endless differance, unlimited suspense and postponement become an impetus to renewing our experience?

My sense of my own identity is relentlessly, but subtly, formed and reformed through direct and indirect social engagement, — Joshs

Here, you consider a social engagement as an immanent cause of ‘my sense of my own identity’. How is that compatible with Derrida’s placing ‘what absolutely is not’ at the center of our temporality and the constitution of our being? “It is because of differance that the movement of signification is related to something other than itself, what absolutely is not… must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself; thereby also along with the present, everything that is thought, every being, and singular substance or the subject”. (Derrida, ‘Margins of philosophy’, p 13). Shouldn’t we substitute Derrida’s interval of an absolute absence, for example, with Simondon’s notion of the transindividual? “The transindividual is the unity of two relations, a relation interior to the individual (defining its psyche) and a relation exterior to the individual (defining the collective), a relation of relations” (Combes, ‘Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual’, p 26). The interval, an abyss of what absolutely is not could be transformed into the relation between the two heterogenetic orders. It could become possible to avoid the epistemological aporia while saving Derrida’s exposure to the unendurable loss of meaning.

We are affected by our sociopath-cultural situation as filtered and interpreted through our situated bodily organization of perception. The word red has as many senses as there are shared purposes and uses, but those purposes are always only partially shared, due to the fact that we are all situated differently within the ‘same’ culture. The meanings of words are negotiated , not introjected from culture to individual. — Joshs

Yes, there is no such introjection. But our use of language has no more autonomy than our socially situated organization of perception. As you wrote in your article ‘Where is the social’: “What I bring to a conversation with each word, gesture or bodily action is not a symbol whose referent is available as context-independent meaning but is instead radically indeterminate.” Following your reading Derrida, you conceived our body and language as equally grounded on what is “neither sensible nor intelligible” (‘Derrida and Negative Theology,’ p74). Accordingly, both are entirely determined/undetermined by the ineffable premise. Doesn’t it make the task of redefining the social unrealizable?

redness is the product of a complex constructive activity of perception, rather than some irreducible primitive sensation. — Joshs

Language is embodied, — Joshs

What is the relationship between "the product of a complex constructive activity of perception" (redness), and the embodiment of language here? When I say 'red', my utterance
is virtually accompanied by a complex perpetual activity. Yet, at a more profound level, both saying and seeing are ultimately affected by my socio-cultural situation.

https://youtu.be/qciVozNtCDM
Professor Mearsheimer has reiterated his known perspective on the Russo-Ukrainian war. After his presentation, an interesting discussion encompassed a spectrum of the most significant views and positions. In the end, to defend the narrative of blaming NATO and the US actions as the primary cause of the war, Mearsheimer was forced to lean on his academic
competence and reputation. Yet, remarkably, no one tried to dispute the professor’s concluding remarks regarding the possible devastating scenarios and the affiliated risks.

Derrida’s notion of deconstruction is not a method but a way of understanding the basis of all methods. And it not an algorithm but a way of understanding how all algorithms deconstruct themselves. — Joshs

The structure of temporality is the basis of all methods , in that it throws us into a world that is already intelligible to us in some way. This familiarity with the world is the basis of method. — Joshs

"It is because of differance that the movement of signification is
possible only if each so-called "present" element, each element appearing on
the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping
within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated
by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less
to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what
is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it
absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present. An interval
must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself,
but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide
the present in and of itself; thereby also along with the present, everything
that is thought, every being, and singular substance or the subject.
In constituting I itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization)." (Derrida,'Margins of philosophy').

At the center of our temporality and the constitution of our being, Derrida places 'what absolutely is not.' As a result, our experience, oriented to revealing some presence, has always been determined by the differential movement from which it is affected. Any apparent presence, full givenness, or definite meaning has become impossible. How can this project become "a way of understanding the basis of all methods"?

A market is, first and foremost, a site of what might be called impersonal exchange. It is ‘impersonal’ insofar that those who participate do not, for the most part, have any pre-existing obligations, bonds, or relations to one another. This ‘impersonal’ aspect of markets is what makes it different to say, gift economies, where gifts might be exchanged in order to keep up good relations between tribes. Or else different to relations of patronage or villeange, in which labour or goods are exchanged for protection or use of land.

One might say that what defines the ideal market is the ‘spot exchange’. The exchange ‘on the spot’, of goods, money, or labour, after which the participants no longer have any social relation to one another at all..
if a market is defined by impersonal exchanges, what defines capitalism? Well, a few things. First, capitalism implies a generalization of impersonal exchange to all spheres of the economy. That is, impersonal exchange must begin to replace all kinds of regimes of personalised and social exchange...
the generalization of impersonal exchange involves an increase in commodification: making things commodities for the market. — Streetlight

This account of the birth of capitalism is significantly influenced by structuralist or classical liberal lines of thought: the market is an impersonal sphere of exchange, organized and regulated by a rationally constructed structure of norms and rules; there is a movement from chaotic and haphazard world to the managed and predictable system, and the progressive improvement aims to satisfy human needs more effectively and efficiently. Yet, the widespread image of how the market works is related to what Marx called commodity fetishism. Far from being the site of equilibrium and rationality, the capitalistic market and production are founded on excess, waste, transgression, and limitless expansion. Disguised by impersonal and beneficial exchange, there is a system of disequilibrium and anti-productive forces. "What is produced today is not produced for its use-value or its possible durability, but rather with an eye to its death, and the increase in the speed with which that death comes about is equalled only by the speed of price rises. This alone would be sufficient to throw into question the `rationalistic' postulates of the whole of economic science on exchange, utility, needs, etc. Now, we know that the order of production only survives by paying the price of this extermination, this perpetual calculated `suicide' of the mass of objects. This operation is based on technological `sabotage' or organized obsolescence under cover of fashion or innovation." (Jean Baudrillard, 'The consumer society')

It is at this point, where the general mode of production becomes geared towards the market, that capitalism proper can be said to come into being. And this, ultimately is the difference in kind between markets and capitalism. Markets bear upon issues of exchange: how goods move from one set of hands to another. Capitalism on the other hand, cannot be understood apart from issues of production: of who and what is it that stuff is produced for. — Streetlight

Before producing goods and commodities, there has been the production of the personal sphere itself. In parallel to the continuous process of decoding, destroying, and reconstructing archaic social, institutional, economic, and individual norms and relations, there has been the ongoing activity of producing economically effective consumers and subjects of interest.
The inmost dimensions of individual existence are linked to the market environment
and the economic field of life. Therefore, like founding the market, capitalism produces an individual’s self-relation to its determinant quasi-chaotic conditions.

To not lose the original-Marxist critical anti-capitalist perspective, it is worth to combine an expanded socio-economic approach with the notions of various surplus-values, apparatuses of capture, relations of power, and individuazation. As a result of the conjunction of these dimensions, on the personal level, articulating theoretical or historical perspectives on capitalism is also a matter of enacting a particular subjectivity, agency, or identity.
— Number2018

I think such discussions have their place, but are they ultimately consequences of capitalism. Yet people cannot even get their head around basic principles, and so confuse markets, interest, finance, and profit with the existence of capitalism. There is interest in talking about individuation and so on, but at some point this stuff is mystifying rather than clarifying if our basic concepts are not fixed. — Streetlight

It looked like the purpose of this thread is not just to fixate the basic concepts but also to show why the critique of capitalism is still productive and applicable. That is indeed mystifying! Likely, what keeps all discussions about capitalism alive is that our society operates the founding capitalistic principle of benefiting from the interplay of various heterogenic levels. Yes, there have been a variety of dominating economic and financial concepts. Still, the system has survived all crises and developed further due to its continuous grounding in a private, individual, and intimate field. The spheres of production and exchange have been mediated, maintained, and animated by the most individual desires. And that is what Marx meant when he said that the true difference is not the difference between the two sexes but the difference between the human sex and the ‘nonhuman’ sex. So, we invest in our economy not just when we work, bye goods, stocks, bitcoins, play games, or consume. Our deepest, intimate desires: to live a social life (and thus life), have an identity or realize our moral aspirations have been interconnected with the impersonal movements of the monetized neoliberal processes. The foremost task of critique today should be to explore this metamorphosis of exploitation. How can the system neutralize, appropriate, and utilize even the most potent protest movements and sentiments?

The birth of 'the individual' follows quite nicely from the birth of generalized market-society. It is no surprise that liberalism - whose unit of analysis is precisely the individual, upon whom rights and obligation accrue (and property rights above all!) - is born exactly at the end of feudalism at the point at which markets become ascendant. — Streetlight

The guiding light I follow in thinking about this is the exchange/production distinction. To the degree that capitalism ultimately makes a change at the level of production so that production becomes production-for-market, so long as this remains in place, I think what we have is still capitalism. A key notion here is that of market-dependency. If our social (and thus life) arrangements are dependent on markets to reproduce themselves, then, to put it bluntly, we're in trouble. — Streetlight

It can be more productive to expand the discussion of contemporary capitalism beyond the framework of “the exchange/production distinction so that production becomes production-for-market.”
Let’s consider, for example, the concept of immaterial labour, introduced by Maurizio Lazzarato:
” A new “mass intellectuality” has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of ‘self-valorization’…The worker’s personality and subjectivity have been made susceptible to organization and command…Workers are expected to become ‘active subjects’ in the coordination of the various functions of production…The capitalist needs to find an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of task transform into a prescription of subjectivities”. (Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial labour'). Before entering a market, a product’s particular marketing specifications have converted into a set of
a customer – a salesperson- producer relations. Further, exchange, communication, and cooperation have become transferred, internalized, concealed, and personalized. As a result, the collective and impersonal production conditions have become profoundly personal and individual. The radical expansion and mutual intensification of the spheres of production and exchange should not be limited to the world of work. In our lives, we are habitually enacting a variety of pre-given, constituted, and defined communicational and informational models and networks incorporated within the processes of capitalistic valorization. Likely, that is close to what you mean here: “our social (and thus life) arrangements are dependent on markets to reproduce themselves.” To not lose the original-Marxist critical anti-capitalist perspective, it is worth to combine an expanded socio-economic approach with the notions of various surplus-values, apparatuses of capture, relations of power, and individuazation.
As a result of the conjunction of these dimensions, on the personal level, articulating theoretical or historical perspectives on capitalism is also a matter of enacting a particular subjectivity, agency, or identity. And what is stated or declared can, in the long run, assist the reinforcement of the object of critique. It is another reason for the expansion of the theoretical anti-capitalist framework.

there has been the ongoing activity of creating and animating private life and personal interests.
The omnipresent deterritorization has been compensated, balanced, and concealed by the all-embracing territorization.
— Number2018

Examples? — Tom Storm

There are so many examples around. Take the US right now: every field of social, political, marital, and private life have been transformed into a zone of intensive experimentation and contestation. One cannot work, study, raze children or have a family the same way as it was for the previous generation. You could ask how all these radical changes are related to the notion of capitalism? One of the possible answers is what Streetlight wrote: “our social (and thus life) arrangements are dependent on markets to reproduce themselves.” The conjunction of our vital social and cultural conditions is inseparable from the most acute contemporary political and economic struggles.

Capitalism: Impersonal Production — Streetlight

It is the reproduction of the conditions of impersonal exchange that begins to make instances of ‘capital’ into capital-ism: a systematization of ‘capital’ in society. — Streetlight

once impersonal exchange becomes wide-spread enough, it brings with it a change in the ‘who’ or ‘what’ production is geared towards: no longer lords and family, but markets.
It is at this point, where the general mode of production becomes geared towards the market, that capitalism proper can be said to come into being.
Capitalism on the other hand, cannot be understood apart from issues of production: of who and what is it that stuff is produced for. — Streetlight

What should be added to this account of the birth of capitalism is the reciprocal interrelation between the impersonal production and reproduction and the emergence and development of the personal sphere itself. In parallel to the continuous process of decoding, destroying, and reconstructing archaic social, institutional, economic, and individual norms and relations, there has been the ongoing activity of creating and animating private life and personal interests.
The omnipresent deterritorization has been compensated, balanced, and concealed by the all-embracing re-territorization.

Would you agree that a desiring machine , with its aim and path , is already internally differentiated, so that this flow is never a matter of the repetition of the identical aim and path? — Joshs

Let's go back to the original quote: "the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie." A desiring machine is described here as "the unconscious libidinal investment." And, in principle, it cannot have "an aim and path." A machine cannot have an origin, identity, telos, or a concrete path; it is in the process of continuous becoming other than itself. So, it is internally differentiated. Yet, in the quote,
D & G mean that we can have "an aim and path" in our conscious spiritual life to a certain extent. They imply a vague and complicated relationship between our desire, which is a part of the unconscious and blind social machine, and our conscious intentions and aims. D & G, together and separately, on numerous occasions, had endeavoured to clarify their concept of the machinic unconscious. I found that it is essential but very challenging. What about you? Would you agree to replace, for example, the notion of individual sexual drives with the concept of the impersonal collective machinic desire?

As an ethics , intensive difference is also irreducibly violent, the basis of blame. — Joshs

Likely, what is implied here is the improper identification of drives and desire.
It does not matter whether drives are directly referred to as instincts or whether they are defined much more elaborate. “In any of these cases, we always return to the same idea: necessarily setting this raw world of desire against a universe of social order, a universe of reason, judgement, ego, and so on” (Guattari “Molecular revolution in Brazil”). Anti-Oedipus’s entire project was to overcome the negative connotations of the common notion of desire and to conceptualize it as not simply the expression of libido but primarily as a flow and one of the parts of social infrastructure. Therefore, for D & G the ethical task is to disclose and identify one’s desiring machines so that “we can fix our aims on a given path.”

"It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are not identical with this investment. Moreover, the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie." AO345 — Streetlight

For Deleuze and Guattari, there is not an I that produces but a process of production of which the I is a kind of product. Or, to put this in terms of Anti-Oedipus, there is no subject before the syntheses of the unconscious, there are no libidinal investments without desiring machines.
This perspective is from the ‘outside’ that comes before and indeed determines the subject of interests. The difficulty here is that we should access this outside through experimentation or just speculate about the productive unconscious process. For D & G, it is the crucial ethical point, the opportunity to find out "where our chances lie."

I'm sure Putin's got to be thinking about how the USSR's demise was related to its protracted war in Afghanistan.

Could Ukraine be his Afghanistan? — frank

It looks that right now, there are just two possible scenarios:
1)Putin swiftly changes the narrative, declares Martial Law, and transforms his regime into a Stalinist dictatorship.
2) The conflict will keep its primary military, ideological, and organizational parameters for a few more weeks. In this case, there will be more and more protests in Russia itself,
Russian resources will be depleted, and Putin will be defeated.

It's worth it to listen to professor Mearsheimer about the ongoing crisis:

https://youtu.be/ppD_bhWODDc

But sure, it absolutely is the case that Putin should take into account any response to his action; but no one is arguing - at least I hope no one is arguing - that he hasn't. That he innocently waltzed into war like a woopsie. By most accounts the speed and depth of the response have been a surprise, but I'd be happy to wager he didn't think he'd get a slap on the wrist either. — StreetlightX

Putin was surprised by the high level of Ukrainian resistance, resolution, as well as an extent of Western repelling reaction.
Thus, for the first few days, the Russian air force aimed primarily at military infrastructure objects. Putin even appealed to the Ukrainian troops to desert and topple its government. But recently, the rules of military engagement have dramatically changed. So far, the unprecedented avalanche of sanctions against Putin himself, his close aids, oligarchs, banks, and industries could not change the general course of Russian military actions. There are signs that in the greatest Russian cities population disapprove Putin and protest against the invasion. Inexplicably, despite the deterioration of living standards, there is also some evidence that Putin’s popularity and the war’s approval are augmenting in provinces and rural areas. Likely, to avoid being ousted, Putin won’t stop. He has not yet appealed to ancient Russian archetypes of patriotism. It could become an ultimate sign of a radical transformation of his regime into an openly totalitarian dictatorship.

Incredible how quickly cultural chauvinism immediately gets translated from geopolitical action: as if the actions of the American or European states have anything to do with any any sense of cultural identification. I guess this is how fascism takes root: when people look at state actions and think: that's 'us' — StreetlightX

Indeed, it is incredible. But this capacity to unite so quickly is different from the 'classic' fascist power potentials. Though we also deal here with an affective unconscious identification, this process does not include a few crustal pre - fascist instances.

Third, Putin will stay, and there will be a profound transformation of his regime and the world’s geopolitical order.
— Number2018

This is the most likely outcome. Putin is too stubborn and Kreml has spent years creating an image of him as a tough guy. So he will try and spin the narrative so that a loss is still a win in Ukraine and then because of the broken trade and probably some sanctions left as a punishment for his actions, he will isolate Russia more, going in the direction of North Korea's relation to the world.

Fourth: He will never surrender, never ever, ever. He will not go out without a bang and he orders nukes on big capitals in the west. Either people just accept his order and do it, or they refuse, as has happened during the cold war. He will then spin the narrative in some way, or shoot some of his staff to blow off steam. — Christoffer

I agree that it is the most likely outcome. Putin can appeal to
ancient Russian archetypes of 'saving the motherland’ from getting defeated. Further, the iron curtain would again isolate Russia from the rest of the world, with an unprecedented nuclear, military, and ideological confrontation level. Are western leaders, decision-makers , and strategists taking this scenario into account?

I would like to hear some practical solutions to Ukraine, how to deal with the nuclear threat, how to deal with Belarus getting nukes, how to deal with the fallout of economic sanctions, how to deal with China's relation to Russia, how to deal with Putin himself. — Christoffer

Likely, there are just three reasonable scenarios regarding the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
First, the compromise will be reached, and things will come to normal as it was before Russia invaded. Second, Putin will be ousted from power. Third, Putin will stay, and there will be a profound transformation of his regime and the world’s geopolitical order. If the first two scenarios are inseparable, what is at stake now is Putin’s defeat and surrender.

Good video. This article in Foreign Policy from a few days ago makes the same points:

Liberal Illusions Caused the Ukraine Crisis

It seems the most reasonable assessment, and this is from American academics. It goes back to what I was saying over a year ago here, that there's a basic disconnect between the (ostensibly, at least) ideologically-driven American foreign policy and the Russian realpolitik. — jamalrob

The article is good. Yet, it explained the current course
of Biden’s administration regarding the Ukraine crisis just by the decades of ‘liberal politics of hubris.’ The administration has demonstrated a priority of diplomacy and a willingness to compromise on different occasions. But here, the US discloses a harsh and uncompromising approach.

the democrats fundamentally share the same policy positions as Trump with minor rhetorical changes. — StreetlightX

On the contrary, there are substantial differences: in climate change and the energy sector (Trump’s withdrawal from Paris agreement), in foreign policies (termination of Iran Nuclear Deal, relations with allies), open vs. closed border policies (Trump’s construction of the wall, remain in Mexico programs), trade policies, and so on. Yet, likely, the discord between Trump and the elites is not entirely based on concrete policies. He has been met as a wholly alien and disastrous factor from the beginning. Thus, his presidency and popularity have been explained and displayed primarily through negative and affectively charged schemes. Trump’s populist strategies have been mirrored and used to accelerate the affective economy of resentment and rage, enacted with varying degrees of emotional and discursive brutality and violence. It has placed a bipolar ultimate distinction of superiority and inferiority, of true and false, good and evil, granting no space or legitimacy to the other side. In principle, both Trump and his enemies
operate the same dispositions of the contemporary political landscape.

There are plenty of reasons that Trump should hang from his neck until dead: — StreetlightX

an 6 is an effort to draw a pseudo-bright line in the sand because if anyone looks too closely, they'd recognize that there is little too distinguish these power hungry fucks whose existence is harmful no matter what stupid colors they wear. The reason for the disproportionate hysteria over a three-hour nothingburger is because without this shit there is nothing to distinguish them and Americans might be in danger of actually recognizing that fact. — StreetlightX

Jan 6 anniversary entirely enacts the dispositions of the current politics of affect. But to what extent your (supposedly critical) discourse here is different from the current dominant rhetoric? It also presupposes the existence of the ultimate truth behind the spectacle; it also aims at “the enemy” and appears as a decisive action.

It's apolitical politics with exactly zero stakes, — StreetlightX

Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic — StreetlightX

During the anniversary, Jan 6 has been represented as no less important than 9/11 or Pearl Harbour. It was not simply a stupid exaggeration or a misleading deception. On the contrary, it was an impressive demonstration and expression of an overwhelming mobilizing power achieved through spectacle. The prevailing narrative does not need ‘real facts’; the displayed effects entirely enact it. Further, the system would direct the accumulated force against Trump as its current real threat. Similar campaigns were organized before the appointment of Mueller as a special counsel, the two impeachments, and before the 2020 elections. Will Trump be indicted? Or, at least, will he be prevented from running in 2024? If Trump can launch his new social media platform, the struggle against him again will become the focus of US politics.

Judith Butler - The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection

Lawrence Grossberg - Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right

It is not bad. Yet, unfortunately, Finchelstein exposes fascist lies on the grounds of a common-sense concept of truth. Instead, if the notion of fascism is still relevant, it is needed to understand why ‘fascist lies’ made sense for so many people.

Federico Finchelstein - A Brief History of Fascist Lies.