Yang and Guattari: Yang's Molecular Revolution

In an interview in Japan of 1980 Guattari had the following to say:

"...the mass media can move in two directions: it can become self-unified, crushing, translatable over the entire world into the same languages and sentiments...or, on the contrary, it can help to make sense of what language is, what behavior is, what the desire of a particular group is..." (pg. 30)

That is, media networks can be used to

• A: to reterritorialize / overcode - make things similar, singular, unified, homogenized, etc. - and in doing so strengthen superficial connections between molar (or macro) entities, what Guattari elsewhere referred to as Integrated World Capitalism (a friend and I were just discussing Facebook's IWC global take over as well as Nick Land's discussion with Justin Murphy where he remarks how interesting it is that the cyber[schiz]punk culture of the 80s and 90s gets reterritorialized by 'face' book -i.e. D and G's facialization...). 

• or B: to deterritorialize / scramble codes, that is, employ the reterritorialized media structure as a stimuli to induce deterritorialization (in Guattari's case, he uses the radio, a centralized media organ, to 'amplify' or 'give voice to' - to use somewhat cringey contemporary terminology - . the very notions of decentralization, that is, its decentralized content (radio program) and decentralized form (the radio itself being a re purposed tool...).

Part of what this means, as Guattari emphsizes by saying 'make sense of what something is,' is getting at the underlying ontological nature of all this stuff - the absolute deterritoliazed strata, a sort of prebiotic soup of possibilities that exists in a raw and virtual state before being articulated and reduced into binary strata later on. This manifests as what people really want, and the possible combinations of things that can happen when people are in touch with what they really want (I speak somewhat clinically and ultimately very briefly on these matters in terms that are not intended to be taken as strictly technically). Or, in other words, acceleration (or at least one possible conceptualization of it...).

Guattari goes on

"We should not...be satisfied with the Marxist division of exchange value and use value...we must introduce two additional forms of value; 'value of desire' as well as...'machinic values.' And exchange values should reflect these values of desire and machinic values."

So, the typical Marxist concepts - the actual use of a thing (in touch w/ the real material conditions) and then its bastardized decoded and relative relation to other things in lieu of its use (CMC) - don't get us far enough. We need to posit a creative base material desire beneath these. I won't use more theory or Guattari ultimately, to show why this is case, but will shortly refer to something else as an example... For now, back to Guattari.

He continues

"Machinic values are values of creation...a technological innovation or scientific equation will take its value from the register of exchange values if it can be found useful in the immediate process of production. But there are also values of aesthetic and scientific creation that do not have an immediate effect on exchange values and which, for this reason, actually deserve to be financed. Machinic values and values of desire are things that should be aligned with exchange value in the same way as any other use values [my italics]. For example, the work of women at home or the work of children at school....machinic values and values of desire do not depend upon the scarcity of goods...what I call the perspective of a 'molecular revolution' " (pg. 31).

What matters here (at least for now) are not the particular ins and outs of these theoretical moves, but the general idea that Marxism does not bring us far enough because it doesn't grasp desire in the least, and that in order to maintain any sort of 'revolutionary' 'change' desire needs to be linked up in a very real material way to the mechanisms that will achieve the so called revolution (an is over an ought).

It's like I said in my Yanged Noumena: Why Andrew Yang is an Accelerationist and Why It Matters -
Yang "engineers environments that will create organic relations conducive to the kind of relationships that will ignite desire; he aligns interests, connects excitements, attaches flowers of desire to one another, all through money as a third party connector."

This is no mere coincidence. Look again. Everything Guattari says in this last passage reads like the rhetoric in Andrew Yang's campaign.

• Tech, like automation, locks into capitalist efficiency loops thus reorganizing production such as regular middle class work ("a technological innovation or scientific equation will take its value from the register of exchange values if it can be found useful in the immediate process of production").

• Yet there are things that, lying neglected outside of the values or incentives of capitalist efficiency, can, if attached to the capitalist engine or desire, be integrated into capitalism in a way that can generate new ideas and ways of existing with others out of old structures, i.e. the sort of left accelerationist rhetoric ("there are also values of aesthetic and scientific creation that do not have an immediate effect on exchange values and which, for this reason, actually deserve to be financed").

• This is of course done by using capitalism to incentivize revolutionary or anti-capitalist things or in the least things which were neglected by capitalism ("Machinic values and values of desire are things that should be aligned with exchange value in the same way as any other use values") such as - and Yang and Guattari unanimously agree here - the work of woman, the experiences of children, and sort of health family relations. 

I.e., what if we connected desire to politics in a meaningful way and created a capital loop that takes desire into consideration? Molecular Revolution!

...

If the reader takes anything from this piece its that Yang in 2020 is embodying Guattari from 1980 (and lets remember that Guattari died in 1992, the same year Nick Land publishes his first book... It is interesting to remind one's self that Nick Land and D and G were alive and producing thought at the same time for a short period...). I think it really is an interesting time to be alive where such an interesting candidate (whether or not we fully agree with him or think he will win) seems to unconsciously embody strange theoretical and practical notions from polarized and weird thinkers of the present and past.