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.)
Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
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