 |
| hyperreal reflective grids fade into color cascades |
entry 01
memory or premonition (fever to shiver)
trip to China was brief
slightly over 2 week
i got on the plane with many things but only one book
i got on the plane back with many things but now with three books
the flights melted me to the seat
my body a car wreck of flesh wrapped around calcium rebar.
reading antioedipus in recycled air cabins like a fever dream
(this trio of books acted as a strange hyperstitional frame for my time there but we will come back to this...)
...
the dream melts into another dream and the fever turns to shivers
cold. Not a regular cold but a cold that - as the cliche goes - gets into your bones.
gets beneath your clothes.
we clutch one another in the fog. she's never been prettier, angular yet smooth
slightly over 2 week
geolocale limited
i got on the plane with many things but only one book
i got on the plane back with many things but now with three books
- anti oedipus, a collection c.g. jung's works, and an ancient copy of marx's grundrise (the last two taken from a free bookcase in a university).
the flights melted me to the seat
my body a car wreck of flesh wrapped around calcium rebar.
reading antioedipus in recycled air cabins like a fever dream
 |
| fog |
...
the dream melts into another dream and the fever turns to shivers
cold. Not a regular cold but a cold that - as the cliche goes - gets into your bones.
gets beneath your clothes.
we clutch one another in the fog. she's never been prettier, angular yet smooth
“They all love you here, they stare at you. For some of them, you are the first and maybe the only westerner they have seen” she said, remarking on the fact that most Chinese people, whether they are infants, toddlers, school-year, working-age, or elderly, would stop, stare, and at times try to communicate with me. “I like them, not just because they are interested in me, but because they seem so friendly – to me as a foreigner, but also to each other – there’s just something authentic about them,” I replied, and it was here that an ancient memory darted across my field of mind like some scurrying critter through a field of grain.
I remembered that when I was very young, maybe six or seven,
my grandmother took me to an event were Chinese people who had recently come to
America and spoke very little English were present. An event coordinator or some authority
figure arranged for and purchased a mass amount of McDonald’s fast food (what better entree into American cuisine and culture). I was brought to this place by my grandmother
to welcome these kids and their parents to America, and to play and eat with
them so that they felt comfortable and welcomed. I liken the most vivid image of this event to
an old reel of film in my mind – it only contains a few panels of discernible
images, flickering slowly (what Freud called a screen memory): My new Chinese friends and I were eating French fries,
and because we couldn’t communicate verbally in the same language, we began to
stick the crispier and thus hardened end of the French fries between our front
teeth, so that it was stick there between the teeth comically. We laughed and played and ate and formed a
sort of unspoken bond.
...
 |
| memory forest |
entry 02
production or waste (fecal-hegel)
the west thinks in terms of production and waste
there's what we mean to make and the stuff we can't use or won't use that we make in the process of making what we mean to make.
what a left over relic of theocratic thought-imperialism.
there is no waste. at best waste it is an ethical or moral term. a wish. the Freudian notion of separating the shit from the nonshit; the Kleinian notion of separating the good and bad breast
at worst (a good kind of worst) it is, as Land shows with Bataille, a ruthless expenditure of libidinal flow. Freudian perversion but because there is no status quo in the land of flux it is simply a flow. piss and shit integrated into the everyday.
the west, anally retentive, thinks in terms of production separate to waste.
investment over spending.
waste is production. (there is only production). if hegel is worth anything - or has ever been put to any use other than being brain cancer - its the way i am about to apply him to shit. Fecal-Hegel: waste is the concept of production at once becoming more than itself and then negating itself.
social transgression is an excess of the social.
waste is an excess of the produce.
the body produces shit and piss. acne produces puss.
yes, feces and urine require an input. puss, snot, etc. do not.
snot does not require a slot.
Production and the waste created by the production exist in the same space in China. She had a repair man over to fix the water heater. Repairman takes apart the machine, fixes it, reassembles the machine, but leaves one of the tubes leaking and leaves dirty foot prints and some spare parts among spare or old parts from previous repairs. The job is done, the machine is fixed, but there is a collection of relics or artifices of old repairs; waste of previous completions.
this is a microcosm for the the macrocosm that is the Chinese construction site. Rather than one man fixing a machine with his tools or machines and leaving one man’s amount of waste in a room found in an apartment for one we have many, many men constructing machines or buildings with their tools or machines, leaving many, many man’s amount of waste in a very large plot of land.
production or waste (fecal-hegel)
the west thinks in terms of production and waste
there's what we mean to make and the stuff we can't use or won't use that we make in the process of making what we mean to make.
what a left over relic of theocratic thought-imperialism.
there is no waste. at best waste it is an ethical or moral term. a wish. the Freudian notion of separating the shit from the nonshit; the Kleinian notion of separating the good and bad breast
at worst (a good kind of worst) it is, as Land shows with Bataille, a ruthless expenditure of libidinal flow. Freudian perversion but because there is no status quo in the land of flux it is simply a flow. piss and shit integrated into the everyday.
the west, anally retentive, thinks in terms of production separate to waste.
investment over spending.
waste is production. (there is only production). if hegel is worth anything - or has ever been put to any use other than being brain cancer - its the way i am about to apply him to shit. Fecal-Hegel: waste is the concept of production at once becoming more than itself and then negating itself.
social transgression is an excess of the social.
waste is an excess of the produce.
(association: produce - supermarket - fruit and vegetables that are not purchased rot)
Xi produces 50 widgets. in producing 50 widgets Xi produces unusable fragments of widget material, accidental creation. surplus. not quite enough to make 50+1 widgets. more than 50 but less than 51 (xeno's false paradox).
the body produces shit and piss. acne produces puss.
i often think to myself 'is it not simply amazing that my body makes more than what it is everyday regardless of whether i put food or drink into it.'
snot does not require a slot.
the experience of production and waste and the recurring experience of mother and child peeing. in China it is not uncommon for the citizens to piss or spit right on the sidewalk. i am walking along and i capture the most interesting exchange. child with watergun hands watergun to mother. mother helps child undo pants. child begins to piss on a statue. mother playfully shoots watergun at child while child pisses.
Freudian translation: child hands in detachable part object phallus to mommy, i.e., child exchanges one water gun - the simulation - for another, the real deal. mother is pleased to have a phallus, even if it is the simulation, and partakes in the fraternal act of shooting her gun as well.
piss is the ultimate production of waste.
...
Freudian translation: child hands in detachable part object phallus to mommy, i.e., child exchanges one water gun - the simulation - for another, the real deal. mother is pleased to have a phallus, even if it is the simulation, and partakes in the fraternal act of shooting her gun as well.
piss is the ultimate production of waste.
...
Production and the waste created by the production exist in the same space in China. She had a repair man over to fix the water heater. Repairman takes apart the machine, fixes it, reassembles the machine, but leaves one of the tubes leaking and leaves dirty foot prints and some spare parts among spare or old parts from previous repairs. The job is done, the machine is fixed, but there is a collection of relics or artifices of old repairs; waste of previous completions.
this is a microcosm for the the macrocosm that is the Chinese construction site. Rather than one man fixing a machine with his tools or machines and leaving one man’s amount of waste in a room found in an apartment for one we have many, many men constructing machines or buildings with their tools or machines, leaving many, many man’s amount of waste in a very large plot of land.
There are two types of waste but only one type of
creation.
There is the waste of what once stood there - the relic or artifice. old brick and mortar sometimes still grouped together as a section of a wall, other times as single bricks and crumbled stones. old pieces of twisted and rusted sheet metal, rebar sticking out of aged cement and rotting wood. There are old sneakers, old clothes, and old forsaken toys.
Then there is the other type of waste. these are not relics or artifices but rather byproducts of current, modern construction: the materials that weren’t used or perhaps were damaged and can’t be used that sit in piles. edges, pieces, fragments of materials that were used such as wood and metal shavings, or template excess, or cores, and then the smaller things like the litter and cigarette butts the workers throw on the floor.
There is the waste of what once stood there - the relic or artifice. old brick and mortar sometimes still grouped together as a section of a wall, other times as single bricks and crumbled stones. old pieces of twisted and rusted sheet metal, rebar sticking out of aged cement and rotting wood. There are old sneakers, old clothes, and old forsaken toys.
Then there is the other type of waste. these are not relics or artifices but rather byproducts of current, modern construction: the materials that weren’t used or perhaps were damaged and can’t be used that sit in piles. edges, pieces, fragments of materials that were used such as wood and metal shavings, or template excess, or cores, and then the smaller things like the litter and cigarette butts the workers throw on the floor.
In fact, throwing your trash on the ground is not frowned
upon, and seems to be the norm. There are many workers whose sole
job is seemingly to brush the litter into dustpans that are ironically fashioned and
constructed out of old plastic jugs (this is why its incorrect to say capitalism re appropriates or integrates its waste into its production process. this presupposes two distinct forces instead of one distinct creative force).
two temporal layers impaled on one creative line
stereoscopic cultural flow
entry 03
red star country or lone star state (headchinecheese)
let me ask you - what is the link between the following?
1:texas and china
2:headcheese and sausage
the west parses out waste and production
the east, as shown above, does not
this extends to the culinary domain.
no part of the animal goes to waste in China. brain, knuckle, organs, i'll spare you the details, you get the idea
the claim is that capitalism does this. there is no capitalist crisis, capitalism is never threatened by the weight of its own excess, it always reterritorializes, re-engineers its weaknesses as strengths, etc. its waste is recuperated as production
we see this nicely in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
The first is a straight forward Lovecraftian horror game
the second is a straight forward Lovecraftian horror game that riffs on capitalism
in 1899 London a small time butcher gone big time industrial capitalist mogul transforms his mansion into part bourgeoisie home and part production line for his product - slaughtered pig.
in a beautiful scene the narrator shows/describes a process where in every part bit of 'waste' is fed back into the machine and used as fuel to increase production. the pig is broken down into its parts, the blood is caught in a large tray and drained into a heated vat where it is turned into steam to power the machine, etc. etc.
capitalism does this, but behind closed doors. its tabooed. in the culinary world - most of the US and much of Europe (i paint with broad brushes, leave me alone) separates the bones, gristle, gross shit from the good flanks of meat. soldiers need meat, not gunk.
but what part of the west does what the east does? the south. the deep south.
think headcheese (below)
waste and production, two articulations of the same stuff, consumed for production
texas chinesaw massacre /
entry 04(.1)
mandarin instantiation rituals (pt. 4.1)
1: books, hyperstition, and china
Are we to assume it merely coincidence that I get on the plane to China with Anti-Oedipus, a book commonly associated with Marx's work in Grundrise, only to find a 1970s copy of Grundrise on a 'free book shelf' in China? You should know by now there are no coincidences, only feedback resonances, fictions that make themselves real.
I recall traveling at high speeds across the Chinese countryside clutching AO and Grundrise, the train cutting through the striated earth [synthesizing] cauterizing the two books in my hand [land] into the dirt. An instantiation ritual. text becomes real, not reality that is textualized [Derrida always had it kind of backwards...].
The idea here of a map or survey should illicit a reference to Baudrillard and the hyperreal - the map is now the model - or, as Guattari puts it in his Schizoanalytic Cartographies, when dealing with daigrammatics writing does not refer 'back to' something (endo reference) as much as it refers 'forwards' to something (exo reference).
To this effect, D and G write in ATP:
2: neochina arrives to and from the free bookshelf
For me, I believe China really did come from the future to grant me Anti-Oedipus so that I may stumble upon Grundrise and therefore better understand AO in the country of China, the territory being mapped by these texts...
How do I stumble upon AO? How did China reach from the the future into the past and grant it to me?
Indie occult psychohorror masterpiece Beyond the Black Rainbow arrives on the scene in 2010. I am immediately enthralled by the advertisements. Sometime around 2011 or 2012 it goes live on Netflix. I immediately watch it over and over again. I research the film and end up on Wiki where I follow other Wiki links - something, to something, to a blog post, to something killed arborescent, to Deleuze, to Anti-Oedipus. 'What an absolutely strange book this seems.' Days later I check the 'free books' bookshelf (recall I also find Grundrise on a free book shelf in China) in my graduate institute only to find that someone - a professor - has placed AO there. I immediately snatch it and begin to read. This is weeks before my trip to china.
the free bookshelves are portals connecting texts and territories.
mandarin instantiation rituals (pt. 4.1)
words cut
divide the body of the earth
Are we to assume it merely coincidence that I get on the plane to China with Anti-Oedipus, a book commonly associated with Marx's work in Grundrise, only to find a 1970s copy of Grundrise on a 'free book shelf' in China? You should know by now there are no coincidences, only feedback resonances, fictions that make themselves real.
I recall traveling at high speeds across the Chinese countryside clutching AO and Grundrise, the train cutting through the striated earth [
[x makes z]
[[x making z] is called y]
[[[y] makes more x]
[therefore x makes more of itself while z intensifies in the process]
(bastardized surplus value of code)
X: Across their own pages, D and G reterritorialize Marx's Grundrise which itself reterritorializes on its own pages the abstractions of China (Z); Y: China (Z) reterritorializes in its fields what have above been called X, D and G's Marx's Grundrise's China.
Feedback loops emerge.As D and G explore in their follow up to AO, A Thousand Plateaus, a book is not a simple static collection of inscriptions that signify an already-there outside, it is an assemblage, a machine for interacting with the outside through acts of creating, or what we call 'writing,' and "Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come."
The idea here of a map or survey should illicit a reference to Baudrillard and the hyperreal - the map is now the model - or, as Guattari puts it in his Schizoanalytic Cartographies, when dealing with daigrammatics writing does not refer 'back to' something (endo reference) as much as it refers 'forwards' to something (exo reference).
To this effect, D and G write in ATP:
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders…In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification,no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world” (pg. 23);
That is, writing creates (not unlike magic where the utterance of a series of words does not represent something it creates a real effect). Smash hyperreal and diagrammatics together and you get Hyperstition, a fiction that makes itself real through cybernetic feedback processes and templexive loops of ancient magic and future tech.2: neochina arrives to and from the free bookshelf
For me, I believe China really did come from the future to grant me Anti-Oedipus so that I may stumble upon Grundrise and therefore better understand AO in the country of China, the territory being mapped by these texts...
How do I stumble upon AO? How did China reach from the the future into the past and grant it to me?
Indie occult psychohorror masterpiece Beyond the Black Rainbow arrives on the scene in 2010. I am immediately enthralled by the advertisements. Sometime around 2011 or 2012 it goes live on Netflix. I immediately watch it over and over again. I research the film and end up on Wiki where I follow other Wiki links - something, to something, to a blog post, to something killed arborescent, to Deleuze, to Anti-Oedipus. 'What an absolutely strange book this seems.' Days later I check the 'free books' bookshelf (recall I also find Grundrise on a free book shelf in China) in my graduate institute only to find that someone - a professor - has placed AO there. I immediately snatch it and begin to read. This is weeks before my trip to china.
the free bookshelves are portals connecting texts and territories.
entry 4(.2)
old orders haunt new ones
old orders haunt new ones
3: asiatic production
Let's reterritorialize the above entries into one final entry before the end.
Here's some excerpts I've pulled from AO and rearranged as I see fit (read them if you want, skip them if you don't):
As D and G put it, the old barbarous ways "haunt" the new (unintentionally anticipating Fisher's hauntology of lost futures). The old is broken down into parts wherein new relationships are made between the part and the new entity organizing the parts into a whole, with the new whole appropriating the surplus produced by the parts (a precursor to Nick Land's work on templexive loops - what came first, the chicken [the state] or the egg [the BwO]).
This is not a simple Marxian surplus, but a 'surplus value of code' which derives from the fact that, like in vitalism, the whole is never reducible to its parts. That is, per assemblage theory, the assembling of disparate entities creates something that has 'emergent qualities,' (qualities that are not in the individual parts themselves and that only come into being when certain parts are connected).
As mentioned earlier, production and the waste created by the production exist in the same space in China (put vulgarly, old and new coexist disjunctively). Old brick and mortar sometimes left over from a previous build and new discarded bricks, the excess of a current build, exist along side more obviously identified acts of creation. Piss and water, shit and food.
Here's what I saw while traveling (in my limited capacity) across China onn a more geological level:
This of course all confirms the vulgar pop take prevalent on the web (see a bunch of dumb articles you shouldn't read but might want to skim as a reference) that China is a 'Communist' country that allows pockets of capitalism to benefit its culture and economy (the glaring example, consistent with the language D and G use, being the 'semi autonomous' zone of Hong Kong that remains - kind of - under Chinese rule despite being territorially separate and heavily in contact with the West...).
4: Mining and the disjunctive, uncastrated monster (phallus-wound) of china
I remember being utterly shook by the fact that China could complete such an amazing smooth, fast, and technically proficient train system in the time that they did...
Or that its more mundane infrastructure (apartments, schools, hospitals) could be built at the speed they were. As D and G put it, the state appropriates the power of the villagers, the small rural communities, and supercharges itself with an alien force of production.
[trains and big tall buildings...]
Two more excerpts from D and G's AO:
In Rage and Time Peter Sloterdijk writes
Let us go a step further, a step towards annihilation. In his Thirst for Annihilation, Land writes (and I've synthesized this from all over the book):
It's not that China wastes its production trying to reach some unattainable goal and in doing so plays into the Capitalist game it attempts to deny with its erection of Communism, nor that Communism allows for a previously unheard of level of production, but that China has - within its huge land mass and beneath its overcoding government - perfected the art of disavowal. It's not that China lacks a penis and because of its femininity can be flexible but that China lacks castration altogether (which is precisely the Schizo flow D and G talk about...). It produces and consumes in the same motion. It encapsulates all the typically thought of dialectical negations and lays them side by side. China says 'I have a part like daddy AND a part like mommy' and it somehow makes both work (West and East - Hong Kong - Attached but apart - Hong Kong and Taiwan - Capitalism and Communism, piss and water, shit and food, old parts and new construction and the 'old-parts-to-be' excess rubble of the new construction, borders and competition and communalism, etc. etc.) .
As Land points out, Bataille conceptualizes expenditure as a wound, and
...
entry 5
[the train cut through the striated earth synthesizing - first, into mounds of soil then later flattening into sheets of rock - the two books in my hand. geos cut up by two tomes, two hands, two claws, double articulation]
- tl;dr: my experience in china is perfectly mapped out by D and G's explication in AO of Marx from Grundrise:
Here's some excerpts I've pulled from AO and rearranged as I see fit (read them if you want, skip them if you don't):
A:"...Marx defines Asiatic production: a higher unity of the State establishes itself on the foundations of the primitive rural communities, which keep their ownership of the soil, while the State becomes the true owner...[of] the surplus product to the State...."
B:"...rural communities subsist, and continue to produce, inscribe, and consume...but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the State machine...[they] retain at least a part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the former regime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that appropriates surplus value. The old inscription remains, but is bricked over by and in the inscription of the State. The blocks subsist, but have become encasted and embedded bricks, having only a controlled mobility. The territorial alliances are not replaced, but are merely allied with the new alliance..It is the entire primitive system that finds itself mobilized, requisitioned by a superior power, subjugated by new exterior forces, put in the service of other ends..."
C:"The despotic State, such as it appears in the purest conditions of "Asiatic" production, has two correlative aspects: on the one hand it replaces the territorial machine, it forms a new deterritoiialized full body; on the other hand it maintains the old territorialities, integrates them as parts or organs of production in the new machine. It is perfected all at once because it functions on the basis of dispersed rural communities, which are like pre-existing autonomous or semiautonomous machines from the viewpoint of production; but from this same viewpoint, it reacts on them in producing the conditions for major work projects that exceed the capacities of the separate communities. What is produced on the body of the despot is a connective synthesis of the old alliances with the new, and a disjunctive synthesis that entails an overflowing of the old filiations into the direct filiation, gathering all the subjects into the new machine...the State...appropriates all the forces and agents of production; but...allows the old territorial inscriptions to subsist, as "bricks" on the new surface. And finally, from this appropriation there results the way in which the conjunction of the two parts is implemented and the respective portions are distributed to the higher proprietary unity and to the propertied communities, to the overcoding process and to the intrinsic codes, to the appropriated surplus value...As in Kafka's 'The Great Wall of China,' the State is the transcendent higher unity that integrates relatively isolated subaggregates, functioning separately, to which it assigns a development in bricks and a labor of construction by fragments. Scattered partial objects hanging on the body without organs."In short, when an old system of social organization is 'replaced' by a new one, it's not really replaced (at least not totally), negated, consumed, (as in vulgar dialectics via negation) etc., but rather the two (or more) modes coexist in a synthetic and conjunctive fashion that produces something new (disjunctive synthesis).
As D and G put it, the old barbarous ways "haunt" the new (unintentionally anticipating Fisher's hauntology of lost futures). The old is broken down into parts wherein new relationships are made between the part and the new entity organizing the parts into a whole, with the new whole appropriating the surplus produced by the parts (a precursor to Nick Land's work on templexive loops - what came first, the chicken [the state] or the egg [the BwO]).
This is not a simple Marxian surplus, but a 'surplus value of code' which derives from the fact that, like in vitalism, the whole is never reducible to its parts. That is, per assemblage theory, the assembling of disparate entities creates something that has 'emergent qualities,' (qualities that are not in the individual parts themselves and that only come into being when certain parts are connected).
As mentioned earlier, production and the waste created by the production exist in the same space in China (put vulgarly, old and new coexist disjunctively). Old brick and mortar sometimes left over from a previous build and new discarded bricks, the excess of a current build, exist along side more obviously identified acts of creation. Piss and water, shit and food.
Here's what I saw while traveling (in my limited capacity) across China onn a more geological level:
- Patchwork (pun intended) farms with borders clearly demarcated from nearby farms unified by the cultural values and philosophies of China. I overhear a conversation, she translates it for me: 'there was a dispute about a wandering goat. It's his goat, the other farmer returned it after milking it, or shearing it, or something.' But there is no conflict of ownership despite the clear ownership. Property exists (a non Communist concept) and boarders exist (something the progressive left simply refers to as fascist) yet sharing is conceptualized on a level unheard of in America (freely use my property / I am not offended by my neighbor trespassing on my property). The farmers coexist in their respective territories, giving a portion to the state, sharing their immediate materials among one another.
- In the small markets there are competing stands that sit within earshot of one another and offer unfixed prices lower than their neighbors. You can barter with one stand and say aloud for all to hear 'but that stand besides you will give it to me for cheaper.' She tells me after 'you know the different shops often know each other and pool funds.' That is, individual agent driven hypercapitalist free market economies that feedback directly on the consumer boom on the surface while communal thought that dismisses the consumer as a foolish tool prevail behind the scenes. Profit for the individual and the group (or at least it seems).
This of course all confirms the vulgar pop take prevalent on the web (see a bunch of dumb articles you shouldn't read but might want to skim as a reference) that China is a 'Communist' country that allows pockets of capitalism to benefit its culture and economy (the glaring example, consistent with the language D and G use, being the 'semi autonomous' zone of Hong Kong that remains - kind of - under Chinese rule despite being territorially separate and heavily in contact with the West...).
4: Mining and the disjunctive, uncastrated monster (phallus-wound) of china
The crude, racist stereotype is that Chinese people have small...
This is likely a strange Freudian displacement of the fact that China not only does not have a small phallus but in fact has a big dick and a welcoming vagina as well.
I remember being utterly shook by the fact that China could complete such an amazing smooth, fast, and technically proficient train system in the time that they did...
Or that its more mundane infrastructure (apartments, schools, hospitals) could be built at the speed they were. As D and G put it, the state appropriates the power of the villagers, the small rural communities, and supercharges itself with an alien force of production.
[trains and big tall buildings...]
[recall D and G's polemical explication of Melanie Klein's train interpretations to little Richard...]
Two more excerpts from D and G's AO:
D: "The despotic machine holds the following in common with the primitive machine, it confirms the latter in this respect: the dread of decoded flows—flows of production... that might escape the State monopoly, with its tight restrictions and its plugging of flows. When Etienne Balazs asks why capitalism wasn't born in China in the thirteenth century, when all the necessary scientific and technical conditions nevertheless seemed to be present, the answer lies in the State, which closed the mines as soon as the reserves of metal were judged sufficient..."
E: "the 'megamachine' of the State, a functional pyramid that has the despot at its apex, an immobile motor, with the bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its transmission gear, and the villagers at its base, serving as its working parts. The stocks form the object of an accumulation...The entire surplus value of code is an object of appropriation. This conversion crosses through all the syntheses: the synthesis of production,with the hydraulic machine and the mining machine..."We end with someone different, someone who, as Zizek puts it, is a 'conservative, but not a dumb one' (I can't remember which Zizek lecture this is in, take my word for it...).
In Rage and Time Peter Sloterdijk writes
"A huge propaganda apparatus advertised for years the idea that China's welfare and the glorious revolution would succeed if - together with the forced collectivization of agriculture - the production of iron was relocated from the cities into the villages. Hundreds of millions of clueless, astonished, and reluctant farmers were forced together in unfamiliar cooperatives. As a result, their motivation and ability to work weakened abruptly. At the same time, they saw themselves confronted with the task of constructing primitive furnaces in order to increase steel production in the country overnight using only local methods. At the time, this was one of the most important indicators of economic ability. The officially proclaimed goal was to surpass the per capita production of England within fifteen years. The results of these frenetic activities, which quickly turned out to be useless, were put into remote lumps and piled in steel mountains..." (p. 172).Sloterdijk, a conservative, is arguing, in a way, against the progressive tendency to valorize the working class by forcing upon them impossible situations in the name of abstract revolution. This is a valid critique, but in a strange way it clings to an appeal to the liberal moralism Sloterdijk opposes.
Let us go a step further, a step towards annihilation. In his Thirst for Annihilation, Land writes (and I've synthesized this from all over the book):
"Belonging alongside 'sacrifice' in Bataille's work is the word 'expenditure,'...this word operates in a network of thought that he describes as general or solar economy: the economics of excess...the sun squanders itself...we [human life] are ultimately nothing but the effective of the sun...the primordial task of life is not to produce or survive, but to consume...the world is sick with wealth...[expenditure is] not an appeal, an exchange, or a negotiation, but an uninhibited wastage that returns energy to its solar trajectory, releasing it back into the movement of dissipation that the terrestrial system - culminating in restricted human economies - momentarily arrests...expenditure is the only end...expenditure which is the problem of economics...[and] The process of unbinding that is misleadingly named production takes place within a general field of expenditure, of which it is a specification."To live is to spend, to squander, to produce an excess and throw it away and in doing so enjoy (mine ore and store it in the earth forever to be untouched...).
It's not that China wastes its production trying to reach some unattainable goal and in doing so plays into the Capitalist game it attempts to deny with its erection of Communism, nor that Communism allows for a previously unheard of level of production, but that China has - within its huge land mass and beneath its overcoding government - perfected the art of disavowal. It's not that China lacks a penis and because of its femininity can be flexible but that China lacks castration altogether (which is precisely the Schizo flow D and G talk about...). It produces and consumes in the same motion. It encapsulates all the typically thought of dialectical negations and lays them side by side. China says 'I have a part like daddy AND a part like mommy' and it somehow makes both work (West and East - Hong Kong - Attached but apart - Hong Kong and Taiwan - Capitalism and Communism, piss and water, shit and food, old parts and new construction and the 'old-parts-to-be' excess rubble of the new construction, borders and competition and communalism, etc. etc.) .
As Land points out, Bataille conceptualizes expenditure as a wound, and
"There can be little doubt that Bataille imagines the vulva as a wound, but this is not because of a negative relation to castration. Far from being an excised penis, the vulva is a complex terrain of contact with death, of exactly the kind castration proscribes. Nor can the flowing wound that breaks open being into communication be one pole of a sexual relation - matched by a plenitude - since this vulvic opening would be sexuality itself, except there is no such thing as sexuality itself... The feudal aristocracy held open a wound in the social body, through which excess production was haemorrhaged into utter loss."China has its (headcheese) cake and eats it too...(with its Schreberian solar anus-mouth...)
...
entry 5
