Sara Imari Walker on Assembly Theory

Electro-Magnetic Planet Factories?

Samuel Beckett: Quadrat I & II

 A Play in 2 Parts with an Intermission of 100,000 years.

Quadrat - German for "Square"

Object Assemblies in Time are Contingent

"Life is merely the amount of selection going on per unit volume"

Natural Selection = Shortest Assembly Theory Path

Welcome to My Star Factory

...and Start-of-Life Factory?

Zizek: "Trump is a Liberal fetish"

Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication

...direct from the Schizoid M.I.T. 'department' of "none of the above".

FabLabs portend the birth of the Tofflerian Prosumer!

Excerpt from video above:

...So there's so much potential for good, so much capacity for good that FabLabs and the ability and the tools of creation really unlock that potential.

- I don't say that as sort of dewy-eyed naive. I say that empirically from just years of seeing how this plays out in communities.

- I wonder if it's the early days of personal computers though, before we get spam.

- In the end, most fundamentally, literally the mother of all problems is who designed us? So assume success in that we're gonna transition to the machines making machines and all of these new sort of social systems we're describing will help manage them and curate them and democratize them. If we close the gap I just led off with of 10 to the 10 to 10 to the 18 between chip fab and you, we're ultimately, in marrying communication, computation, and fabrication, gonna be able to create unimaginable complexity. And how do you design that? And so I'd say the deepest of all questions that I've been working on goes back to the oldest part of our genome.

So in our genome what are called HOX gene, and these are morphogenes, and nowhere in your genome is the number five. It doesn't store the fact that you have five fingers. What it stores is what's called a developmental program. It's a series of steps. And the steps have the character of like grow up a gradient or break symmetry. And at the end of that developmental program, you have five fingers. So you are stored not as a body plan, but as a growth plan. And there's two reasons for that. One reason is just compression. Billions of genes can place trillions of cells. But the much deeper one is evolution doesn't randomly perturb. Almost anything you did randomly in the genome would be fatal or inconsequential, but not interesting. But when you modify things in these developmental programs, you go from like webs for swimming to fingers or you go from walking to wings for flying. It's a space in which search is interesting.

So this is the heart of the success of AI. In part, it was the scaling we talked about a while ago. And in part, it was the representations for which search is effective. AI has found good representations. It hasn't found new ways to search, but it's found good representations of search.

- And you're saying that's what biology, that's what evolution has done, is created representations, structures, biological structures through which search is effective.

- And so the developmental programs in the genome beautifully encapsulate the lessons of AI. And it's embodied, it's molecular intelligence. It's AI embodied in our genome. It's every bit as profound as the cognition in our brain. But now this is sort of thinking in molecular thinking in how you design. And so I'd say the most fundamental problem we're working on is it's kind of tautological that when you design a phone, you design the phone, you represent the design of the phone. But that actually fails when you get to the sort of complexity that we're talking about. And so there's this profound transition to come. Once I can have self-reducing assemblers placing 10 to the 18 parts, you need to, not sort of metaphorically, but create life in that you need to learn how to evolve.

But evolutionary design has a really misleading, trivial meaning. It's not as simple as you randomly mutate things. It's as much more deep embodiment of AI and morphogenesis.

- Is there a way for us to continue the kind of evolutionary design that led us to this place from the early days of bacteria, single cell organism to ribosomes and the 20 amino acids?

- You mean for human augmentation? - For life- what would you call assemblers that are self-replicating and placing parts? What is the dynamic complex things built with digital fabrication? What is that? That's life.

- So ultimately, absolutely, if you add everything I'm talking about, it's building up to creating life in non-living materials. I don't view this as copying life. I view it as driving life. I didn't start from how does biology work and then I'm gonna copy it. I start from how to solve problems and then it leads me to, in a sense, rediscover biology. So if you go back to Valentina in Ghana making her circuit board, she still needs a chip fab very far away to make the processor in her circuit board. For her to make the processor locally, for all the reasons we described, you actually need the deep things we were just talking about. And so it really does lead you.

There's a wonderful series of books by Gingery. Book one is how to make a charcoal furnace. And at the end of book seven, you have a machine shop. It's sort of how you do your own personal industrial revolution. ISRU is what NASA calls in situ resource utilization. And that's how do you go to a planet and create a civilization. ISRU has essentially assumed Gingery. You go through the industrial revolution and you create the inventory of 100,00 resistors.

What we're finding is the minimum building blocks for a civilization is roughly 20 parts. So what's interesting about the amino acids is they're not interesting. They're hydrophobic or hydrophilic, basic or acidic. They have typical but not extremal properties. But they're good enough you can combine them to make you.

So what this is leading towards is technology doesn't need enormous global supply chains. It just needs about 20 properties you can compose to create all technology as the minimum building blocks for a technological civilization. - So there's going to be 20 basic building blocks based on which the self-replicating assemblers can work?

- Right. And I say that not philosophically, just empirically, that's where it's heading. And I like thinking about how you bootstrap a civilization on Mars, that problem. There's a fun video on bonus material for the movie where with a neat group of people we talk about it because it has really profound implications back here on Earth about how we live sustainably.

- What does that civilization on Mars look like that's using ISRU, that's using these 20 building blocks and does self-assembly.

- Go through primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary. You extract properties like conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric, flexural. These are the kind of roughly 20 properties. With those, those are enough for us to assemble logic and they're enough for us to assemble actuation. With logic and actuation, we can make microrobots. The microrobots can build bigger robots. The bigger robots can then take the building block materials and make the structural elements that you then do to make construction. And then you boot up through the stages of a technological civilization.

- By the way, where in the span of logic and actuation did the sensing come in?

- Oh, I skipped over that. But my favorite sensor is a step response. So if you just make a step and measure the response to the electric field, that ranges from user interfaces to positioning to material properties. And if you do it at higher frequencies, you get chemistry. And you can get all of that just from a step in an electric field. So for example, once you have time resolution in logic, something as simple as two electrodes let you do amazingly capable sensing. So we've been talking about all the work I do, there's a story about how it happens, where do ideas come from?

- That's an interesting story. Where do ideas come from?

- So I had mentioned Vannevar Bush and he wrote a really influential thing called the Endless Frontier. So science won World War II. The more known story is nuclear bombs. The less well known story is the RAD lab. So at MIT, an amazing group of people invented radar, which is really credited as winning the war. So after the war, grand old man from MIT was charged with science won the war, how do we maintain that edge? And the report he wrote led to the National Science Foundation and the modern notion we take for granted but didn't really exist before then of public funding of research, of research agencies. In it, he made what I consider an important mistake, which is he described basic research leads to applied research leads to applications leads to commercialization leads to impact. And so we need to invest in that pipeline.

The reason I consider it a mistake is almost all of the examples we've been talking about in my lab went backwards. That the basic research came from applications. And further, almost all of the examples we've been talking about came fundamentally from mistakes. Essentially everything I've ever worked on has failed, but in failing, something better happened. So the way I like to describe it is ready, aim, fire is you do your homework, you aim carefully at something, a target you wanna accomplish, and if everything goes right, you then hit the target and succeed. What I do you can think of is ready, fire, aim. So you do a lot of work to get ready, then you close your eyes and you don't really think about where you're aiming, but you look very carefully at where you did aim, you aim after you fire. And the reason that's so important is if you do ready, aim, fire, the best you can hope is hit what you aim at.

More about MIT's FabLabs 

Quilting with Deleuze and Guattari

On the Movement between Modern and Meta-Modern Societies

Which Prophet's Prophecy Foretells the Future?

...the moment you wake up inside someone else's dream, you discover "The Nightmare"!

Henri Fuseli, "The Nightmare" (1781)

You are trapped in an inescapable time bubble with No Exit.  Everything is already determined.  You have no free will anymore!  The infinite possibilities of the future foreclosed and reduced to a single nightmare by the collapse of Time's wave function of the present moment... the singular experimental result revealed to the horrified Observer.  Art-ificial Limits to my Own Desire (which will Brook NO Limits)

...but if only it were your dream.

I wonder why George Soros' "Open Society" hides behind so many closed National and Globalist Society Secrets?

Meet Me on the Dark Side...

...for the Eclipse!

Damien Hirst: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable

Lee Cronin On Why AI Doesn't Stand a Chance..

Excerpt:

What Burgson said...actually I like it a lot because Instinct going into cognition gives you intuition. Intuition is the thing that you can't yet put into language very well, you haven't got there, but you've got this thing right?

On Becoming Thoughtless...

...thinking without the organizing structures of Language

@ the lower? (or higher?) levels in Hierarchies of Desiring Machine  IIT Assembly Identities?

Fading Communication Channels between Desiring Machines

Melancholia: Mourning in Advance without the Cure

...on Breaking off the Channels

Humans Begin Invading Asgard!

Hans-Georg Moeller: Religion and the Masses' Opiums

On Profilicity: The Secular Individual's Opium (...or better, Digital Ecstasy):

...Curating Our 'True' Online Self-Profiles with Profilicity  @@

...and altering the structures and flows of repression and desire within ourselves

Pondering the Post-Modern Self: On Cracking the Code!

...Where not even the real You can live up to Your Online Profile (the Advert for You the "Product"), because it's more real than real!  It's HYPER-real!

We're ALL Becoming Visceral!

Somehow, I don't think that this was what Nietzsche was going for when he described the emergence of UberMensch or  a 'G-d that could Dance'!  It's more like the post-Last Man!

The Late-Capitalist Discourse has progressed from issuing an imperative "injunction to Enjoy" to an imperative "injunction to experience perpetual Ecstasy"!

No wonder we're all so FOMO!  No wonder so many wish we could Sever our real Working Selves from Our Hyper-real Non-Working Lives

No Wonder Our Real Working Selves Burn-Out Supporting Our Non-Working Hyper-real Lives!

One of Elvira's Forbidden Stories...

...and an excerpt from the Jowett summary of  Plato's "Cratylus":

“Well, but I have just given up Protagoras, and I should be inconsistent in going to learn of him.” Then if you reject him you may learn of the poets, and in particular of Homer, who distinguishes the names given by Gods and men to the same things, as in the verse about the river God who fought with Hephaestus, “whom the Gods call Xanthus, and men call Scamander;” or in the lines in which he mentions the bird which the Gods call “Chalcis,” and men “Cymindis;” or the hill which men call “Batieia,” and the Gods “Myrinna’s Tomb.” Here is an important lesson; for the Gods must of course be right in their use of names. And this is not the only truth about philology which may be learnt from Homer. Does he not say that Hector’s son had two names—

“Hector called him Scamandrius, but the others Astyanax”?

Now, if the men called him Astyanax, is it not probable that the other name was conferred by the women? And which are more likely to be right—the wiser or the less wise, the men or the women? Homer evidently agreed with the men: and of the name given by them he offers an explanation;—the boy was called Astyanax (“king of the city”), because his father saved the city. The names Astyanax and Hector, moreover, are really the same,—the one means a king, and the other is “a holder or possessor.” For as the lion’s whelp may be called a lion, or the horse’s foal a foal, so the son of a king may be called a king. But if the horse had produced a calf, then that would be called a calf. Whether the syllables of a name are the same or not makes no difference, provided the meaning is retained. For example; the names of letters, whether vowels or consonants, do not correspond to their sounds, with the exception of epsilon, upsilon, omicron, omega. The name Beta has three letters added to the sound—and yet this does not alter the sense of the word, or prevent the whole name having the value which the legislator intended. And the same may be said of a king and the son of a king, who like other animals resemble each other in the course of nature; the words by which they are signified may be disguised, and yet amid differences of sound the etymologist may recognise the same notion, just as the physician recognises the power of the same drugs under different disguises of colour and smell. Hector and Astyanax have only one letter alike, but they have the same meaning; and Agis (leader) is altogether different in sound from Polemarchus (chief in war), or Eupolemus (good warrior); but the two words present the same idea of leader or general, like the words Iatrocles and Acesimbrotus, which equally denote a physician. The son succeeds the father as the foal succeeds the horse, but when, out of the course of nature, a prodigy occurs, and the offspring no longer resembles the parent, then the names no longer agree.

On the Death of "The Capitalist Discourse" Under "Late Capitalism"

....more on Capitalism's Tale of Unrequited Desire from the Physician

ps - the video author says that there are 2 sides in the battle.  There are WAY MORE than two.  She also doesn't seem to realize the nature of the "lawless" advancement of technology, that Technology typically precedes the Legal System and opens up new frontiers to be subsequently codified.  Law is a "lagging" indicator of social "progress".  And the division of labour long ago created a division of learning.  What else are college degree's and commercial/ professional licenses?  The question is more one of Intellectual Property and Proprietary Practices.

On Felix Guattari's "Cinema of Desire"

How do we Control and Contextualize Desire?

Selected video excerpt (starting @ 7:40)

:...Guattari believes that in order to understand a history of Desire one also has to understand a history of repression, because repression is necessary in order to structure desire into specific organizations. This is what he believes Cinema's main function is to be, to organize desire through structures of repression, created and mass produced through images. By mass producing these images that construct systems of representation and repression, machines can organize the desires of an entire Society.

So what are the consequences of mass producing these representations like a printer? Guattari believes that the production of representations through these Cinemas is a function that is both a consequence and a means to maintain power in societies. Think about in the example of Plato's Cave, the people looking at the Shadows are completely subject to what representations they produce. This controls their behavior, activities and actions, and most importantly, keeps them in the cave continuing to watch the machine that produces the representations in the shadows.

Guattari cites Oswald Ducrot pointing out that language is not just a means of communication, but also a means of executing power. But how can words have such strong power? Guattari didn't think that words themselves were what had power over material things. That would be kind of like saying if you said words, then you could materialize anything, and obviously, this is not how the real world works. Rather he believed that the words were part of a larger machine that produced many other things that altogether produced a structure that directs flows of power. That is, it isn't language that writes out the law, but rather law is what assembles the language. Instead of saying things and having them materialize into Power, the speech is part of a larger system in which parts that are spoken and parts that have no signifying components all work together to organize power. So since everything we understand is organized and arranged by these structures of power, where things like language are a result of its' actions rather than the reason for it, this means that reality and pleasure can't just be understood in a broad sense, because both our understanding of reality and pleasure are both structured by these organizations of power.

Instead, Guattari states that we have to analyze what he calls "a principle of dominant reality" and "a principle of licit pleasure." The dominant reality organizes everything we understand into a particular paradigm. And licit pleasure is what kinds of pleasure we are allowed to extract from that kind of reality. Desire is forced through these structures created, between this dominant reality and incit pleasures through various authoritarian forces in our lives, ranging from schools, to the workplace, hospitals, and Guattari's emphasis (of course), the movies.

Now remember what I said about how these structures repress desire so that it's shoved into the proper places? It's through this intense repression that desire is forced into an obsession with the boundary between what is allowed, and what is taboo. It keeps hyper-fixating on things that disgust it, but it can't look away, because it continues to extract pleasure from its boundaries by identifying these new kinds of pleasures and subjecting it back to the dominant reality in a manner similar to asceticism and other self- denialist practices. This way, all these new experiences are submitted to the codes of the dominant reality. This is how Guattari believed what he called "Capitalist Eros" worked.

Ah, great, now he's dropping another term, "Capitalist Eros." It might help us to better understand what Capitalist Eros means in the context of psychoanalysis. See, according to Freudian Theory there are these things called drives, which can be kind of thought of as a general tendency for desire to go in One Direction or another. Eros is another name for the "Life Drive", which is associated with a desire for constructive activity such as socialization or reproduction. Its' counterpart is Thanatos, the "Death Drive", which is associated with desire for self-destruction, such as risky behavior.

Capitalist Eros then is the Eros that is applied to the economy, a libidinal economy where we can analyze the transactions of Desire within the context of Capitalist mechanisms. Essentially Guattari is explaining how Capitalism desires to reproduce itself. See, you can't just make people go to work for you to build a massive Society by telling them to do so, nobody's going to do that willingly. So what do you do? You make them want to work for you!

Desire is always trying to escape this repression, so Society needs to continue to adapt to capture these escapes through new, more detailed repressions. This means that in order for Capitalism to reproduce itself, it needs to reproduce the Capitalist Subject in the heart of every person. To make each and every one of us the ideal agent that so many Capitalist economists speak of.

To do this, Capitalism reproduces models of organizing our desire, constructing relations to how we want to position ourselves in society, what we want to consume, and how we want to love. These models are launched into viral circulation through media. Guattari states, "Capitalist Eros launches these models in the same way the automobile industry launches a new line of cars. And the essential function being embedded in every subjectivity? In order to love something, you must own it. The fundamental equation is, 'enjoyment equals possession'." This limits the way that people can express their desire through pleasure, by conceptualizing it through the hierarchy produced by ownership, and a love for productivity for the sake of productivity.

Essentially capitalism doesn't want workers to think they're workers. It wants workers to think that they're little individualist Bourgeoisie, too. It wants them to think that every little interaction is a transaction to extract value in, to screw someone else over. Instead of valuing the work of a trade, such as one that may have been passed down generation to generation, laborers are deterritorialized. Having their subject broken apart so that they are reterritorialized into a new form. They become a commodity directed by their careers, and the continuous development of Technology, on the automation of work. The relationship that workers have to labor adapts and evolves to adapt to the continuous leaks of Desire, by breaking apart the laborer into a multiplicity of new pressures, directed by their relations to production and reproduction. As a result a lot of emphasis is placed on how subjectivity is shaped to various social relations, such as those to work, school, play, and love. This way, Capitalism can produce subjectivities that direct and control the development of all facets of life. Specifically, Guattari emphasizes that Capitalism migrates subjectivities that are grounded in material circumstances towards more abstract, artificial forms. Which I suspect might be because of the continuous increased alienation produced by this continuous deterritorialization between the modes of production and consumption.

This brings us back to the discussion of Cinema. Remember how Guattari said that there were a bunch of different kinds of Cinema? Well all sorts of types of Cinema produced by different kinds of media and social interactions like television, the movies, the press, and now video games and social media act as physical machines that mass-produce subjectivity through each and every consumer collectively producing a dominant reality. Media isn't just a means to communicate, to Guattari they are instruments of power. This can be clearly seen in the current postmodern era where the influence of repressive semiotic regimes, such as reactionary meme culture, Mass micro advertising campaigns with Precision targeting, and the propaganda embedded in video games and movies of the 2000s and 2010s on the internet influences the flows of modern politics, perhaps too too frightening of an extent.

And because these machines direct the flows of power, they direct libido, or the directional flows of Desire. Media in information influences what we want to be, and exists as a mean to assert power. Not just from the raw profits of mass media, but more importantly, through the production of the mass-produced models of subjectivity.

Back when Guattari wrote this, and even now 50 years later in the postmodern era, Media acts as a repressive Force embedding the right ways to enjoy pleasure. It normalizes certain ways of life and makes us collectively think, "this is the way to live". When it's mass-produced in big studios funded with millions of dollars, mass-produced images really can't afford to risk revolutionary imagery that would dismantle its own sources of power. However, Technologies were being introduced in the 1960s that completely changed this situation. The Super8 camera was a consumer grade video camera that could be used to film short movies. Typically used for home video Guattari marks that it has fantastic potential to portray political messages. Instead of forcing a political message into a block of text which may be hard to convey, it can convey ideas much more precisely and directly, through non-linguistic relations displayed on the screen. Being produced on such a small scale allows for micropolitical narratives to be produced and potentially become viral. Something that grows even more possible within the era of social media.

In the current Day, cell phone footage has remarkably important political implications, such as when police brutality is captured on camera. To counteract this deterritorialized media, the State reacts by trying to suppress the recording of such incidents, whether legally or Not, by the officers trying to force people to delete the evidence to maintain media narratives. However, as with any repressive cop there are still means of Escape. When a cell phone camera is carefully propped to look like it is not conspicuously recording, as if one is playing a video game, it may not attract the attention of police officers who may otherwise request to delete it. As a result, the way that we understand the real world is not etched in stone. It can be changed.

And reality is not just a universality, but is situated in a time place and social awareness. This means that, as Guattari puts it, the order of the real has nothing to do with Destiny, one can change it. We are not beholden to one particular way of observing reality.

To demonstrate his point, he is interested in analyzing the structure of three signifying systems systems that organize the order of the real. These are totalitarian systems, psychoanalysis, and structuralism. These systems in particular are chosen because Guattari believes that they are sequential developments of each other, with each being a more deterritorialized form than the last.

What do I mean by this? Well first, let's look at totalitarian systems. These are systems where you have a strict relationship with an authoritarian figure, such as a God, the church, or the State. What's important here is that power is focused around a particularly centralizing Force. This creates a specific signifying regime that focuses around that specific figure, where all of reality converges around it like a giant black hole, and all desire must try to be captured within its' structural boundaries.

However Guattari believed that at the time of his own writing, this isn't how the libidinal economy of the world actually worked anymore. It had developed past this point. Instead, it worked more around a flexible network of signifying nodes, like what we see in psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis, these nodes are the mother, the father, and the child. The relationships between these three construct all possible relations through the development of the Oedipus complex, which Freudian psychoanalysis believe produces a wide range of neurosis and sexual deviancy. Essentially all relations are now reduced to the relationships, between the self and the family.

The example that Guattari uses is the "Little Hans Case" that Freud brings up. Little Hans was a little boy who was afraid of horses. His dad, who was a fan of Freud's theories, discussed with Freud what could possibly be the issue.

Hmmm, so uh how do I explain this without being demonetized?

Okay, basically Freud concluded that the reason why Hans was scared of horses is because the horse represented Hans's father. "Why" you might ask? Well, because Hans secretly wanted to sleep with his mother but he was afraid of being castrated by his father. As a result, he was scared of the horse because the horse has a huge ..., just like his dad, and appeared to have a mustache, just like his dad. So clearly, the solution was to make Hans have a big ... and sleep with his mother, so that he could just be like his dad and resolve the Oedipus complex.

Yes, I am serious. I am not making this [ __ ] up. I know it's extremely weird.

Guattari, like many of you watching this, objects to this conclusion. He points out the Absurd conclusion is a result of trying to force the situation into the perspective of the Oedipus complex, which clearly favors the interpretation of the father who was already biased towards Freud's theories. What about the experiences of the mother and the child? The mother's narratives are completely submitted to the father's interpretation of the situation, a clear assertion of phallocratic power. And the child is assigned a narrative about wanting to sleep with his mother and kill his father just to make sense of his fear of horses in the context of the Oedipus complex.

Guattari argues that it's not something fundamental to the structure of psychoanalysis that creates the Oedipus complex, but rather social and historical factors that lead to the production of the complex. And he emphasizes how it is produced this way to create artificial consistency in the concept of the family within capitalism. the Screwed Up thing is is because the edus complex our relationship with childhood is completely different than in more traditional Societies. in the past children were essentially free to do whatever they wanted until social initiation. however the reinforcement of the edus complex socially means that child are being initiated at birth, with having every aspect of the child and mother's development under close surveillance through psychology, education, and other social apparatuses. Everything about growing up is now under an analytic microscope.

The Oedipus complex is pervasive, but Guattari points out that all the details are too static to really capture everything. So Capitalism must keep going and continue to deterritorialize the model. This time, instead of having relations between static objects, the development is more towards an abstract relation of "signs" found in structuralist analysis, such as those seen in the work of Guattari's former teacher, Jacques Lacan, whom I will admit, I'm still quite challenged by.

Now, some of you might be thinking, "Lacan, that guy? Isn't he that guy who said something about the Tourist being like a neurotic or something?"

Well yes, but no, but yes, but actually no. See Lacan was complicated as a theorist, but the problem with his work, according to Guattari, wasn't necessarily that he used mathematical terms wrong. In fact, it really doesn't make much of a difference because Guattari is more interested in the very concept of trying to represent the world through an abstract signifying regime.

This approach to analysis broke apart the symbols in psychoanalysis even further to attempt to be complete abstractions that relate to each other based on completely artificial forms. Structuralism thought it was creating a generic language to be able to analyze anything. But according to it, really only moved psychoanalysis from the couch to the screen in the form of film analysis. He doesn't really discuss an indepth criticism of Structuralism here, he's already written enough on that elsewhere, but he does remind everyone of how natural codes can't be reduced to these Structuralist forms. As any geneticist will tell you, genetic code is definitely not like a language. In fact, natural codes also come embedded with parts that are not signified at all, which Guattari calls asignifying, such as visual spatial relationships in art, auditory relations in music, speech, and sound, and the complex logical relations expressed in mathematics, where relationships extend beyond abstract objects.

Another example that he uses to critique this Structuralism, is that there are pre- signifying semiologies, such as pre-Capital societies and the subjectivity of insane people and children, who do not necessarily organize themselves around language-based relationships but can construct meaningful relationships through everything from their bodily movements to sound, gesture, and dance. In comparison, Capitalist expression is reduced into acceptable outputs expressed by dominant meanings. A psychotic person moving their body erratically is not seen as an expression of Desire, but as a threat that needs to be suppressed by the police.

Structuralist analysis pretends to be neutral in its' analysis, but it's very privileging of linguistic objects limits any ability to do so, by again subjecting all activity into a particular Paradigm of relationships.

Currently, the machines of Cinema are used to reinforce the current dominant reality of Capitalism and a cult of possession. In this state they aren't capable of producing much outside of continuing to replicate the dominant reality. However, the power of Cinema is not based merely on the fact that is repeating this dominant reality, but really, that the various aspects of the film such as the framing, actors, camera lenses, and every other choice made in pre-production, production, and post-production, all come together and produce special kinds of Semiotic machines without having a language in particular at all. Instead of being like a language, it is the barrage of sensory experiences produced by the particular arrangement of complex components interacting with each other that ultimately produces the experience of watching a film, and what kind of influence it is capable of producing in the viewer. Cinema in particular, beyond just Languages by itself, has a unique ability to continuously evolve new forms of expression which allows it to adapt to the continuous deterritorialization of pleasure in societies, as mentioned earlier.

Capitalism is able to use these developments to capture and develop evenfurther, more refined and calculated cinematic machines to continue consumer engagement, such as the development of mass-produced media in the 2010s about various minorities. While the production of these films did give employment to minorities and secured both useful roles on their resumés and access to higher classes in society, they exist ultimately to reinforce the dominant reality is a Capitalism, allowing only for the most minimally subversive critiques.

For a particularly in-depth example, Erudite Critic released an excellent video titled, "Why Pixar's Elemental gets Racism Wrong", where they explain how Elemental's exploration of racism can never go beyond a surface level analysis. Where the impact of colonialism and immigration are never truly analyzed in a material context. It's not through the script of the film that produces these repeated constructs, but rather relationships between the characters, their designs, and the way that the art is designed to reinforce symbols seen in real life, correlated with various racial themes.

To better understand what capacities are possible, Guattari cites the film critic Christian Mintz, who states:

"The breadth of the semiotic fabric is a consequence of two distinct causes whose effects are cumulative. On one hand, Cinema encompasses a code language in the Talkies, whose presence itself would be enough to authorize semantic information in the most varied type. Second, other elements of the filmic text, for example, images are themselves languages, whose matter of content has no precise boundaries."

What's important here too, is that film can express content in all sorts of ways beyond just language. With specific examples he cites here, as such as the tonal quality of speech, Instruments, music and Melody, painting and scene construction, the highlights and shadows of black and white photography, and the movements and gestures of the human body.

Guattari then turns to semiotician Umberto Ecco, who points out that Cinema could not be reduced to a system of double articulation, a binary split. See, Cinema doesn't produce meaning because the intersection of two binary axis' between syntax and grammar, and paradigms and representations. Rather, the complex semiotic relationships are produced secondarily, by the processes that produce the film itself. To Guattari, the reason why silent films may feel like they can express a wide range of Desire is not because they are capable of less expression, but because their expression is not modeled into a structure of dominant significations yet.

Think about how as both movies and video games gained more technological power, more Fidelity in their graphics and special effects, that they were able to more cleanly and accurately produce the Capitalist representations, to produce its' dominant reality. Which may be why many in-game developers and film directors deliberately try to use alternative means of expression, especially reaching out to more primitive imagery and user interface design.

Likewise, the mass distribution molecularization of Cinema in the form of Television, a development rapidly accelerating in the time of this piece's writing, subjected cinematic images to the formula of commercial film. Here Guattari makes an interesting point through all of this regarding the freedom of expression. To Guattari, the freedom of speech that Libertarians advocate so heavily for is missing a big part of the equation. After all, just freely opening the gates means that one will continue to repeat the same repressions that they were taught previously, merely deterritorialized and unconscious. Rather, he believes that what is more important is what redirection of flows of desire in the libidinal economy of Cinema can produce.

Look at an example like South Park. South Park became popular because of its raw obscenity and offensiveness, something that audiences have never seen before and desired for desperately. But is South Park's commentary on society really truly subversive? In most cases it appears to reinforce the liberal centralist "we're all stupid" mentality, and resorts to falling back to the status quo. Rarely does South Park actually make commentary that challenges its' audience to produce new lines of thinking+.

The development of the Capitalist Eros and its' influences on the libidinal economy, the bubbling new Pleasures that form on the border of dominant representations in licit pleasure is key to understanding the core problem Guattari is trying to get at. How this Eros creates new forms of pleasure to continue to capture all desire within its boundaries. It tries to codify all desires into abstract forms that can be controlled through binary Flows. In This sense, Desiring production can't be separated from social production, because capitalism will try to convert free roaming desire back into its' paradigms to extract free work and possible Surplus Value. Repeating a politics that both re encloses on itself, reinforcing the position of the self in the relation to hierarchies, as well as repeating an attitude of acceptance of the status quo that somehow these developments are destined and natural.

But desire, unlike Eros, is not structured by codes and laws. Remember, desire is like the state of the game before it's converted into all those structuralist paradigms that determine where the desire ends up. It exists before it's cut and divided up by structures of sex, the family, and Society. It just wants to do what it wants to do, and desire comes first. All structures that are seemingly imposed by it are a product of Desiring production, similar to how when you start a video game abstract structures in memory form representing different aspects of the game. Desire exists before love, psychology, language, and even the laws of nature as we understand them. Guattari then points to children and psychotic people to demonstrate how desire can look without being heavily codified by Society yet, the free association with any kind of love with any other kind of love. Completely unbound by the relationship between the Sexes, or family. Guattari States: 

"It does not respect the ritual games of the war between the Sexes. It is not sexual, it is transsexual."

He doesn't mean that all love is transgender. Rather, he means something more broad. All love goes beyond the Sexes. That love can be something that goes beyond CIS heteronormative expectations like what you see in a Disney movie.

Guattari continues, "Nothing essential leads to the subjugation of the child, the woman, or the homosexual." In a word, it is not centered on dominant significations and values. It participates in open, as signifying semiotics available for better or worse. Nothing depends here on Destiny, but on Collective Arrangements in action.

In conclusion, Cinema has the power to repress desire, to reinforce the Capitalist Eros and libidinal economy. Or, it has the power to potentially liberate it. This Liberation goes beyond just allowing for the offensive. It's about a deliberate influence on the flows of Desire through Cinema, whether it be at the movies, or nowadays in video games, or on social media. There is no real structure that separates social and sexual themes. There is no politics without eroticism, or the other way around, it's all interconnected. Cinema is always political, because whenever it produces and analyzes the figure of a man, woman, child, animal, or any other subject, it produces a set of relations that carry out political implications with it. Something particularly obvious in racist propaganda films, such as "a Birth of a Nation". Repression in films is not about trying to suppress erotic or offensive imagery, but rather repressing images that challenge the status quo of the production of Capitalist Eros.

Guattari wraps it all up with the following:

"In every production, in every sequence, in every frame, a choice is made between a conservative economy of desire and a revolutionary breakthrough. The more a film is conceived and produced according to the relations of production or modeled on capitalist Enterprise, the more chance there is of participating in the libidinal economy of the system. Yet no Theory can furnish the keys to a correct orientation in this domain. One can make a film having life in a Convent as its theme that puts the Revolutionary libido in motion. One can make a film in defense of Revolution that is fascist from the point of view of the economy of desire. In The Last Resort, what will be determinant in the political and aesthetic plane is not the words and the contents of ideas, but essentially asignifying messages that escape dominant semiology."

Rewritten as "The Lion King" and released in 1994...

What's Buried UNDER the Pyramids at Giza?

 ...Beats me!

Quantum Chewiness: Does Quantum Entropy Explain Gravity?

Grab a Bowl of Popcorn, or some Euclidean Instantons to find out!

I wonder if they sell Foamy Cubits in this Theatre's concession stand?

Quantum Genesis: One (or Two) More of Many?

Are Euclidean Instantons the "Big Pop"?

In Medias Res! The Deleuzian Universe!

The Physics Community Reacts to Kumar's Proposal...

Welcome to the Pathocracy

Digital & Social Media - The Pathocratic Medium

By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)!

Enjoy your freedom!

Deleuze on Leibnitz

Voltaire on the "best possible world" of Leibnitz (for parallax):

In Voltaire's "Candide" (1759), the concept of "the best of all possible worlds" is satirized and challenged through the character of Pangloss, who stubbornly clings to the idea despite witnessing immense suffering and injustice, ultimately leading Candide to reject such naive optimism

The Bio-Chemical Self-Assembly Space Race

Fragmented Narratives: Anti-Oedipal (& Lacanian "Lack") Schizo-Analysis (Deleuze & Guattari)...

Salvador Dalí, "Metamorphosis of Narcissus" (1937)

from Wikipedia:

Deleuze uses the preface to relate the work (Difference and Repetition) to other texts. He describes his philosophical motivation as "a generalized anti-Hegelianism" (xix) and notes that the forces of difference and repetition can serve as conceptual substitutes for identity and negation in Hegel. The importance of this terminological change is that difference and repetition are both positive forces with unpredictable effects. Deleuze suggests that, unlike Hegel, he creates concepts out of a joyful and creative logic that resists the dualism of dialectic: "I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them" (xxi).

Salvador Dali

Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the egg (ab ovo), but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things (In medias res)...

- Horace, "Ars Poetica" (On Homer's "Iliad")

---

Once Upon a Time...as media-driven Profilicity and 2nd Order Self-Observation  came into its' own and Technofeudalism  conquered and replaced Corporate Capitalism..

"Philosophy is the translation of Eros into Logos" 

- Byung-Chul Han 

"...and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called, 'Love'"

 - Plato "Symposium" (Aristophanes' Speech)

"If One IS Not, then Nothing IS"

- Plato, "Parmenides"

SOCRATES: Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that there is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world is a man who has a running at the nose. This may be true, Cratylus, but is also very likely to be untrue; and therefore I would not have you be too easily persuaded of it. Reflect well and like a man, and do not easily accept such a doctrine; for you are young and of an age to learn. And when you have found the truth, come and tell me.

CRATYLUS: I will do as you say, though I can assure you, Socrates, that I have been considering the matter already, and the result of a great deal of trouble and consideration is that I incline to Heracleitus.

SOCRATES: Then, another day, my friend, when you come back, you shall give me a lesson; but at present, go into the country, as you are intending, and Hermogenes shall set you on your way.

CRATYLUS: Very good, Socrates; I hope, however, that you will continue to think about these things yourself.

-Plato, "Cratylus" 

William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer"

"Who ails tongue coddeau, aspace of dumbillsilly? And they fell upong one another: and themselves have fallen. And still nowanights and by nights of yore do all bold floras of the field to their shyfaun lover say only: Cull me ere I wilt to thee!: and, but a little later: Pluck me whilst I blush! Well may they wilt, marry, and profusedly blush, be troth! For that saying is as old as howitts. Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow (isn't it the truath I'm tallin ye?) to have fins and flippers that shimmy and shake. Tim Timmyccan timped hir, tampting Tam. Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow!

Hop!"

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"  

---

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decoded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occassioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman's tale posterwise.

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake" 

In Medias Res!

Slavoj Zizek, "The Logic of Courtly Love & Feminine Subjectivity"

Zizekian Moments

Slavoj Zizek, "The Parallax of Lack and Surplus in Politics"

Excerpt from Slavoj Zizek video above:

Marx's vision of Communism remains all too much a vision of Capitalism without Capital, without Capitalism. Marx always speaks as if we have this incredible dynamic in Capitalism, but then at a certain stage of development, you drop the form of Capital, search for profit, and so on; and you will get uh self-propelled, even more crazy, wild expansion reproduction. I think precisely, and here I'm entering your topic of lack and access, I think that precisely, leaps as we are experiencing today, this will not happen. 

The greatest Hegelian Insight that we get is that something that may appear to be an obstacle to full development of a field is its' condition of possibility. So you take away the obstacle, and you lose, at the same time, what this was an obstacle to. 

Now we take an example, I apologize myself sincerely but I just don't have a better example, if it will sound slightly male chauvinist, no? It's an old story that I repeat again all the time. I was flirting, years ago with a lady. I will not tell you "where, who said, "The last lover who saw me naked told me that my body is perfect... just, it was "almost perfect", it would have been just better, if I were to lose just two pounds. And I told her immediately, "just don't do that." Because you need this imperfection to give birth to the fantasy, "My god, without that you would be perfect!" But if you take away the obstacle, she would just be bland, average, you lose it.

So, I will not lose time here, something along this, I think, happens with Marx, when he all the time says that "the form of Capital is the obstacle." Yes, but only in the form of this obstacle can the expanded self reproduction function.

...and What Am I For the Others?  

a consumer,  a footsoldier,  a voter, a taxpaying revenue source, an entrepreneur...?

Che Vuoi? 

...a free-entrepreneur of the self?

...the commodification of the Self!

Got a better idea (ie- LIMITED Commerce, NOT Capitalism) that doesn't lead to technofeudalism?

Speak Now or Forever Remain a Cloud-Serf!

On Byung-Chul Han's "The Spirit of Hope" in Cormack McCarthy's "The Road"; Existence Between Wonder and Fear

Doomscrolling refers to the act of compulsively consuming negative or distressing news and information online, often for extended periods. It is characterized by:

Excessive scrolling: Spending a significant amount of time scrolling through negative content.

Negative focus: Seeking out and consuming primarily negative news and stories.

Emotional distress: Experiencing anxiety, depression, or other negative emotions as a result of the content consumed.

Neglecting other activities: Spending so much time doomscrolling that other important activities are neglected.

Doomscrolling can have detrimental effects on mental health, leading to increased anxiety, depression, and feelings of hopelessness. It can also create a sense of helplessness and reinforce negative beliefs

On the Need for Radical Hope, for carrying the fire of Prometheus inside Pandora's box, her "body".

"Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its' Horizons."

- Václav Havel

It is a sweet thing to draw out

a long, long life in cheerful hopes,

and feed the spirit in the bright

benignity of happiness:

but I shiver when I see you

wasted with ten thousand pains,

all because you did not tremble

at the name of Zeus…

— Aeschylus, "Prometheus Bound"

Acting with Faith in the Absence of Certain or Scientific Knowledge.

A Life acting with not only 'Certainty'... but also supplemented with Wonder and Mystery and especially a transcendent HOPE to bridge them with Certainty and overcome and prevent submission to what otherwise might result in the numbness of a fear induced apathy! Especially when there is no post-apocalyptal Rescue Mission coming to save you and/ or us... and you need a Holy Spirit to help bridge and transcend the Father and the Son  A 'surplus value' of Spirit to draw upon and use to face your fears and near despair... and persevere...

...or better, overcome our circumstances past, present, and future.

Soviet Cybernetics

Stop Being Such a Fascist!

An Analysis of Felix Guattari's Totalitarian Chemistry on "Why Everyone Wants to be a Fascist"

Selected excerpts from video above:

...There are many ways that these problems can be explored. He suggests that the modern origins can be traced to "the repression against the Communards of 1871", explaining that modern forms have evolved different ways of seizing collective desire based on local relations and transformations to production. Their history is inseparable from their social transversality. Effectively, the machines that fascism has deployed in the past are continuing to proliferate into new forms - he describes it as a "totalitarian chemistry" that proliferates across social and individual structures, even including guilt and neurosis. As the social division of labor evolves, it has necessitated larger and larger organizations of productive groupings, but this has resulted in increasing molecularization of the human element "of industry, of the economy, of education, of information, etc.".

Again, its important to understand that to Guattari, individuals do not communicate directly to other people but rather participate in a "a transhuman chain of organs is formed and enters into conjunction with semiotic chains and an intersection of material flows." This molecularization exploded to such a point that they are "capable of liberating the atomic energy of desire". As a result, both totalitarian modes of capitalist and socialist systems have "to continually perfect and miniuraturize their repressive machines".

Guattari thus concludes that in order to understand the machines that compose totalitarian powers, one has to focus on the micropolitical struggle. Without this focus, abstractions and generalizations form and one finds themselves back in the realm of totalitarianism, and repression regains its power. Guattari is basically interested in a theory that does not alienate the source of desire from its power. So, in order to fight back against this, one has to continually focus on the molecular because totalitarianism constantly is adapting to new social transformations and producing new generalizations.

As an example, Hitler as a unique individual here was not necessarily special but his form repeated itself through "dreams, deliriums, in the contorted behavior of policemen, and even on the leather jackets of some gangs who, without knowing anything about Nazism, reproduce the icons of Hitlerism." Even in the modern day, Hitlerism runs rampant, such as being embedded in popular conspiracy theories shared frequently online.

Guattari is concerned that analyzing fascism through social/ historical/ political/ psychoanalytic generalizations is not enough because fascism is crystalizing, or otherwise finding itself emerging through these processes in more and more microscopic formulations in all walks of life. "By pretending that the individual has a negligible role in history, they would like to make us believe that we can do nothing but stand with hands tied in the face of the hysterical gesticulations or paranoiac manipulations of local tyrants and bureaucrats of every kind. A micropolitics of desire means that henceforth we will refuse to allow any fascist formula to slip by, on whatever scale it may manifest itself, including within the scale of the family or even within the scale of our own personal economy."...

---

...Anyways, narratives persisting through society, especially through mass media, reinforce the idea at this time that fascism was a problem that came and went, and was defeated by a rosy image of the united forces of capitalism and socialism, which is a repainting of history that hides the reality that the bourgoisie tolerated fascism until it was a threat to itself. Guattari points out that while there was a group of bourgoisie who were external to fascism, critical of its instability and ability to stir desire in the masses, that international capitalism was willing to tolerate its presence until there were other means to control class struggle. The union was not to "save democracy" but to respond to a catastrophic political failure whose runaway libidinal spiral was so dangerous that "the planet was seized by a crisis that seemed like the end of the world".

He says that the reason why leftist alternatives in Italy and Germany failed was because they offered no alternative to this release of desire. In comparison, oftentimes the answer given is that fascist states are able to produce more immediate answers to political crisises in the short term, in contrast "with the powerlessness of the socio-democratic governments of the Weimar Republic". What these explanations fail to understand is the fact that fascism, through its ability to release the desire of the masses, was a huge threat to capitalism, even a bigger threat than the October revolution. The threat came from the fact that fascism triggered a mass "death instinct" in the masses. Basically, by reterritorializing onto a fascist leader, state and society, the masses removed themselves from a reality that they hated - they'd literally rather have a society that destroys itself than be forced into dominant meanings.

But through this process, fascism recaptures this desire back into a new set of dominant meanings through its theatre of hysteria, which results in its own internal instability. Guattari states that fascist meanings emerge from a "composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one". Nazi Germany was so obsessed with death that it was obsessed even with its own death - to the point that it continued to fight in the war for years after it effectively had been lost. In comparison, Stalinism was much more stable.

Capitalism, in comparison to fascism, tries to molecularize and alienate workers while tapping into their "potentiality for desire". It installs its program on all social stratifications in such a way that it entirely codes the individual's perspective of the world. Capitalism tries to avoid large scale social movements and regulates itself through the state, and tries to contain breakout conflicts by confining issues to economic and localized territories.

Stalinism in comparison placed the power of the party over the military/police ect. (in contrast to fascism, where they are relatively on the same level), overcoding the machines of power and placing the masses under control, including the international proletariat. The failure of Stalinism is a result of its inability to adapt to the "molecularization of the work force" - in other words, capitalism's ability to encroach more and more into more tight spaces. Essentially, over time, various failures in the party to control this repression allowed the other social machines to gain more power over time, destabilizing the power in the party. This forced the political question back down to the subject of the particular, which allowed capitalism to integrate into communist parties through its molecularization. This destabilized Stalinism and caused it to effectively collapse. Even though at the time of the writing it still existed in smaller organizations like parties and unions, it operates on the older socio-democratic model and doesn't account for revolutionary releases of desire like May 1968.

With the collapse of Stalinism as competition, the capitalist system needs to develop new forms of totalitarianism. It needs to deal with new problems like racism, sexual repression, the oppression of the mentally and physically disabled, prisons, immigration ect., and to deal with these problems it will repress everything that can't be contained into economic objectives. Guattari explains that fascism is trying to root itself in any structure that is trying to adapt desire for the profit economy.

To wrap it up, Guattari writes the following, which I think should just be preserved in its entireity for its importance:

"We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: "Fascism will not make it again." Fascism has already "made it," and it continues to "make it." It passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution, to the extent that it shares in a micropolitical economy of desire itself inseparable from the evolution of the productive forces. Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone's desire. We must stop, once and for all, being misled by the sinister buffooneries of those socio-democrats who are so astonished that their army, allegedly the most democratic in the world, launches, without notice, the worst of fascist repressions. A military machine as such crystallizes a fascist desire, no matter what the political regime may be. Trotsky's army, Mao's army, and Castro's army have been no exceptions: which in no way detracts from their respective merits.

 
Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak. And whether it is the former or the latter depends on the capacity of collective arrangements, subject-groups, to connect the social libido, on every level, with the whole range of revolutionary machines of desire."