thinks is learning to resist

Where can we situate, in our present, a “cause” capable of resisting the accusation of compromise and able to teach us to resist, along with it; a cause that we can acknowledge to be free of complicity, having resisted not through some historical contingency predicated on “not yet”, but through its own resources, the dynamics of capitalist redefinition? If learning to think is learning to resist a future that presents itself as obvious, plausible, and normal, we cannot do so either by evoking an abstract future, from which everything subject to our disapproval has been swept aside, or by referring to a distant cause that we should inagine to be free of any compromise. To resist a likely future in the present is to gamble that the present still provides substance for resistance, that it is populated by practices that remain vital even if none of them has escaped the generalized parasitism that implicates then all.

Stengers, I(2010) Cosmopolitics I, University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. p. 09-10

Connect, Conjugate, Continue

"You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying... If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata with out taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow of conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small pot of new land at all times. it is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram', as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs"

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F (1987) A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum, London p.160-161

Postscript on the Societies of Control

Gilles Deleuze died 15 years ago today

"The event is always that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening."

"The event is a synthesis of past and future. In reality, the expression of the One in becomings is the eternal identity of the future as a dimension of the past. The ontology of time, for Deleuze as for Bergson, admits no figure of separation. Consequently, the event would not be what takes place 'between' a past and a future, between the end of a world and the beginning of another. It is rather encroachment and connection: it realises the indivisible continuity of Virtuality. It exposes the unity of passage which fuses the one-just-after and the one-just-before. It is not 'that which happens', but that which, in what happens, has become and will become. The event as event of time, or time as the continued and eternal procedure of being, introduces no division into time, no intervallic void between two times. 'Event' repudiates the present understood as either passage or separation; it is the operative paradox of becoming. This thesis can thus be expressed in two ways: there is no present (the event is re-represented, it is active immanence which co-presents the past and the future); or, everything is present (the event is living or chaotic eternity, as the essence of time)". Alain Badiou The Event in Deleuze

"He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say." J.-F. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 194.

Additional Text:

Derrida on Deleuze's death

a Trojan horse without any Soldier

"I think the technology serves as a Trojan horse all right, but in the real story of the Trojan horse, it wasn't the horse that was effective, it was the soldiers inside the horse. And the technology is only going to be effective in changing education if you put an army inside it which is determined to make that change once it gets through the barrier.

Unfortunately, the easier way to get the technology to the school, if you're a vendor, for example, is to open it up and say, "Look, there's no army inside here. It's fine. It suits your purpose. It's not going to be subversive, and so it's a Trojan horse without any soldiers, and that's not a very effective way of doing it.""

Seymour Papert