The line going from Marx's Manuscripts (and concepts such as abstract work, alienation, the triumph of movement over immobility) to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (and concepts such as desiring machines and schizo limits) always intrigued me. If we understand what there is in terms of what is being produced (at work, en-ergo, energeia), there could be units and assemblages of producing machines that divide what there is in small, coordinated and yet independent bits. Marx believes abstract work is somehow the route to the emancipation of the proletarian that is forced into working with machines and like them. The machinic transformation is what produces abstract work and the proletarian class. The idea of desiring machines producing an immanent excess mimics the producing couplings of producing units. Marx holds that machines are communal, they bring a lot of people together in a producing assemblage. Because of that, they are part of the emancipation that capitalism has in store for proletarians after their appropriate upheaval. Their emancipation is also the emancipation of the machines they work. They get out of the boss's hands. They become free of their chains - nothing transcendent determine what they produce. Their production becomes immanent - as in fact it has always been. They are made to work for a transcendent goal, but they harbor desire within them; not lack, just something at work. Freed automatons, desiring machines. (Desiring machines are workers, work like proletarians and with proletarians - they expand humanity just in the way inhumanists believe norm-driven devices do. In the limit, desiring machines have the speed of the schizo; finally free they just produce, they are like bodies without organs.)
Indexicalism is out: l https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-indexicalism.html The book symposium took place two weeks ago with talks by Sofya Gevorkyan/Carlos Segovia, Paul Livingston, Gerson Brea, Steven Shaviro, Chris RayAlexander, Janina Moninska, Germán Prosperi, Gabriela Lafetá, Andrea Vidal, Elzahrã Osman, Graham Harman, Charles Johns, Jon Cogburn, Otavio Maciel, Aha Else, JP Caron, Michel Weber and John Bova. My very preliminary response to some of their talks about the book follows. (Texts will appear in a special issue of Cosmos & History soon). RESPONSES : ON SAYING PARADOXICAL THINGS Hilan Bensusan First of all, I want to thank everyone for their contributions. You all created a network of discussions that made the book worth publishing. Thanks. Response to Shaviro: To engage in a general account of how things are is to risk paradox. Totality, with its different figures including the impersonal one that enables a symmetrical view from nowhere
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