On the Line
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On the Line gathers together two seminal texts that Deleuze and Guattari would later elaborate on in A Thousand Plateaus. “Rhizome,” first presented in person at the “Schizo-Culture” conference organized by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in 1975, introduced a new kind of thinking, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical, that turned out paradoxically to offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. “Rhizome” substitutes pragmatic, “crab grass,” free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree.
In “Politics,” superseding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze and Guattari envisage the social macrocosm as a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, they emphasize, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the “becoming revolutionary.” Throughout, the two writers keep dispelling the notion of capitalism as a repressive machine only meant to extract surplus value from exploited workers and suggest that it could be opposed from within by redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its flows....
Read more about: On the Line »Nomadology
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“The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus…. It is the invention of the nomads…. The very conditions that make the State possible…trace creative lines of escape.” In this daring essay inspired by Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and “schizophrenic lines of flight,” this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways.
Deleuze and Guattari propose a creative and resistant ethics of becoming-imperceptible, strategizing a continuous invention of weapons on the run. An anarchic bricolage of ideas uprooted from anthropology,...
Read more about: Nomadology »Fatal Strategies
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A major work offering “fatal alternatives” to postmodernity. Topics range from modes of political representationand strategies of refusal to aesthetic theory and commodification, situationist theory, seduction, gambling, andobesity. In this shimmering manifesto against dialectics, Jean Baudrillard constructs a condemnatory ethics of the “false problem.” One foot in social science, the other in speculation about the history of ideas, this text epitomizes the assault that Baudrillard has made on the history of Western philosophy. Posing such anti-questions as “Must we put information on a diet?” Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard’s continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s’ American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country’s artists and theorists.
... Read more about: Fatal Strategies »Looking Back on the End of the World
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“The ‘world’ was never more than a regulative idea, a normative concept for planning and implementing a global society. Because of its obvious relations to the institutions of political power, which know no limits in the use of force if necessary, this concept has begun to crumble.” First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have “surpassed history.” Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the “end of the world.” The idea of a “unified world,” they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the “gamble of thinking”...
Read more about: Looking Back on the End of the World »In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
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The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy reference, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses. A statistical crystal ball, the masses are ‘swirling with currents and flows’, in the image of matter and the natural elements. So at least they are represented to us.
Jean Baudrillard
... Read more about: In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities »Forget Foucault
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“Foucault’s writing is perfect. It invests and saturates the entire space it opens. The smallest qualifiers find their way into the slightest interstices of meaning; clauses and chapters wind into spirals. His discourse mirrors the powers it describes. Therein lies its seductive strength, its potential for generating an internal simulation of power.” First published by Semiotext(e) in 1987, this volume combines Jean Baudrillard’s short 1977 critique of Michel Foucault’s “collusion” with power with an-depth interview conducted by Sylvère Lotringer summarizing Baudrillard’s conception of history and the sociological roots of his work. “Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation,” proclaims Baudrillard. “Forget Baudrillard” is a re-evaluation, by Baudrillard in the present, of his lesser known early works as a post-Marxian thinker. How did he get here from there? In this conversation, Lotringer presses Baudrillard to explain how he arrived at the extrapolationist theories he is best known for from their bases in 19th and early 20th century social and anthropological works of Karl Marx,...
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