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La Terre, cette schizo

 

si les oppressions sont si terribles, c'est parce qu'elles empêchent de mouvements et non parce qu'elle offensent l'eternel (Deleuze, Pourparler 166)

Carrying on from the previous post, addition is also production. Outside the sphere of physis turned into thesis, the artificialization of the world is not a replacement based on the extraction of what is intelligible about things, but rather an addition that disrupts everything else. Production, not representation. Poien and ergo and not realitas – or adequatio. In my last class about Marx, I spoke of the Marxist anastrophe as a fortune of a communism told by capital. The driving force is production – the forces of production force taking things out of the little treasure of my nature to transform them into links, relations that can dispense with the perculiar in me because what I had is invested in them. I become anyone. I can be replaced. Production is a scheme of deindividualization through communist connections – production uninterrupted by registration and distribution is what triggers the schizo, the proletarian that lives around an anonymous production. 

Production, and addition, is an industrial topic for thinking. 1972, the Anti-Oedipus year, was perhaps the peak of the general trust that industries will change the face of the Earth. Rachel Carlson first published her Silent Spring a decade before and the idea took over just after Deleuze and Guattari’s hyper-industrial aggiornamento of Marx and Engels. The intrusion of Gaia – who herself got into the picture through James Lovelock by the time Deleuze and Guattari were supplementing their message with their Thousand Plateaux. But the intrusion of Gaia is often met with calls for preservation. Is production – and addition – out of fashion if industries are taken to be overall more evil than good? 

We can get back to Deleuze’s formula in the epigraph and instantiate a variable: si les oppressions [de la Terre] sont si terribles, c'est parce qu'elles empêchent de mouvements et non parce qu'elle offensent l'eternel. The issue is not that the Earth is constrained to stop being what it was – or what it thought it was – but rather that it is restricted in its movements and suppressed in its capacity to forge productive alliances. Deleuze and Guattari then, by Thousand Plateaux, write: the Earth, the one who is deterritorialized. Maybe she is considered to be what it has always been to force her out of production and the forces of production that change things through – just like the pre-productive structures that capital has to keep in place. The non-human is left outside production and not brought in because the Earth is perhaps too productive and the inorganic body that the workers could produce with the Earth would be too intense, too anonymous, too indifferent to capital. If this is so, we can say: the Earth, the one who is schizo.

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