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.

Gilles Deleuze - Foucault
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari - Kafka

And from there onwards it has been an absolute disaster. American foreign policy deciders came punch drunk of the easiness of doing whatever and absolute idiots full of hubris as the neocons erased away everything what was left of a rational and cautious foreign policy. Nothing did matter anymore. What were the actual political situation on the ground in these countries? How would other nations react? That was totally meaningless. The US could do whatever it wanted and it went on into this crazy binge of being a bully. — ssu

Moronic stupidity overwhelmed everything. Because, why not? Nobody cared. There were no backlashes. War on Terror, war against a method. And once Bush the younger made it so, no President couldn't escape the trap as everything was already FUBAR. — ssu

The neocons are not in the current administration. But, it looks like you are right and even now American foreign (and others) policies are shaped by the logic of phantasmic and imagenary achievements. What makes it possible and even necessary? Likely, in the US there is no
place for a neutral and independent position that allows to make weighted and qualified judgements. That is why the narative of building a self-sustainable Afghan government
and military has been so persistent.

The fall of Afghanistan would have serious consequences. It could be well the end of the US as a Superpower and the beginning of it being just the Largest Great Power. — ssu

About 12 years ago, The International Institute for Strategic Studies
in London has developed a cynical strategy of withdrawal from Afghanistan. It could be divided into
tribal and religious fractions. Then, the US could choose one of the sides and benefit from managing
a controlled civil war and anarchy. So, what is going on there can become an invitation ( a lure) for the next
Power (China) to get involved.

in truth I don't think there is a highly controlled and organized fighting force as "The Taliban". How many of them are local militias, smugglers, groups controlled by some warlord that has been deemed to part of the Taliban? — ssu

If there is not 'a highly controlled and organized fighting force as "The Taliban"', how can you explain
their success? And why is the current Afghan government's military so demoralized and helpless?

Yet, he asserts that “Leaving behind the End of History, we have arrived at something like History as End.”
— Number2018

I wonder what that's supposed to mean. Must I read the damn essay to understand? — Ciceronianus the White

No, you do not need to read the essay. Matthew Karp means that we deal now with a new, extremely politicized function of history.

I think it's more likely other factors played a part, and that it's as certain as it can be American institutional slavery would have come into being even if instead of the 20 enslaved persons, Jesus Christ himself, his mother, the apostles and all the saints had been brought to the shores of British colonial America in 1619. — Ciceronianus the White

You are right, the event of 1619 has no importance. Karp, a historian, knows it well. However, his essay is not historical; it is about the politics of the past. It is a protest against the newest role of history.

And the interesting thing is that regardless of what the film maker shows, all of it will be factual, but the myth that is advanced would be purposeful and subject to the intention of the historian. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but I do disagree with those who claim that really Thomas Jefferson was not all he's been said to be. Those people aren't correcting history and myth busting. They're just replacing the old myth with their new one. If they are able to do that, that signals only a shift in politics, not an evolution toward more accurate truth. — Hanover

In our situation, ‘an evolution toward more accurate truth’ is left just for professional historians who can stay protected by relatively stable rules of their academic game. For non-historians, there is the choice between the two incompatible versions of history. Both are ideologically and politically motivated constructions.

Like Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Castro, totalitarian governments abide by the dictum: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

This is exactly what the Biden Administration, using the cover of the issue of Covid vaccination, is seeking to accomplish right now in the USA in intimate cooperation with the leadership and censorship activities of Facebook, Twitter, etc. — charles ferraro

It could be interesting to compare the level of concentration of power of the US government
with what the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century possessed. Likely, the task is not workable. Yet, despite the enormous increase of the means of social control, neither most people perceive the Biden administration as totalitarian or authoritarian, nor are these views accepted in academia.

What is history? Lacking an answer to that, teaching it is the blind leading the eyeless. That is, what is it? What is its purpose and goal as history? How is it done? And to what end? — tim wood

I think that history is one of the ways society recognizes and understands itself. It is a kind of social construction. If the politics of the past had become shaped by a predominant metanarrative, it would mean a dramatic societal transformation.

For Benjamin, the differences between languages are, at base, differences between how words mean — StreetlightX

‘The Task of the Translator' central theme is the relation between the original and a copy, or the origin and its outcome. Benjamin asserts that the connection between any two languages is primarily based on 'the ideal pre-language' (the origin). Later, he reconsidered this approach. In 'The Work of aAt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, there is no origin anymore. Since 'the aura as the unique phenomenon of a distance' has been completely lost, the origin appears deceptive and illusory. Therefore, Benjamin started rethinking the relation between seeable and sayable (meaning and words).

In the article, incivility is firstly defined as anger, as an act of outrage. https://socialtextjournal.org/eleven-theses-on-civility/
"Incivility is anger directed at unjust civil ordering.
— Number2018

Where do you think blame and moralism fit into this act of ‘outrage’ against ‘ injustice’?

Specifically , do you think it is what Ken Gergen is critiquing as the moralistic blamefulness and indignation of identity politics? Would anger, outrage and condemnation apply if one throughly rejects the ethical foundationalism on which rightness and justice are grounded? — Joshs

In principle, our perception of the social and political realities, and the facts used in acute political debates are not directly related to our first-handed communal experience. We identify ourselves with images that in-form our reality and that simulate what is true or right. The images (in Bergson’s sense) are not primarily representative or informative. They exist in-themselves and for-themselves in the digital medium and generate what we perceive as politics. They contract, integrate, and simulate ‘all what we ever believed, valued, or fought for’; their semantic and semiotic levels are enacted and amplified by the redundancies of our affective involvements. The evolving event of the images self - regeneration and enactment is the system that continuously actualizes the construction of our social reality. As Gerden noted, identity politics contains opposite forms and dichotomy figures: incorporation and repulsion (marginalization), a victim and a persecutor, and so on. They are coexisting and working together through the synthesizing image of a savior, rescuer, expressing the primary Western ( Christian) archetype. In fact, before appearing as an anger, an act of outrage, or rhetoric of blame and moralism, the incivility is the system of images, operating the core regime of construction and re-construction of our social reality. We affectively invest images that simulate outrage based on the ethical fundamentalism. That is why identity politics is so effective and successful: it fits perfectly to the digital medium of social control.Therefore, I do not think that Ken Gerden's critique is effective. One can throughly reject the ethical foundationalism on which rightness and justice are grounded, and simultaneously and unconsciously enact identity politics on a micro-level..

Why can’t we follow Gergen’s lead and jettison the outrage in favor of a throughly relativistic approach to societal transformation? — Joshs

20 years ago, Gerden wrote: “As many propose, identity politics is reaching an impasse. No longer does it seem an effective means of securing voice, dignity and equality. More positively, however, I see significant signs of transformation in both identity politics and in social constructionism.” He wrote it 20 years ago, but identity politics is now doing better than ever, being interwoven with the processes of contemporary societal transformation.