[D-G] My body and Rights are being violated and abused

[hwenk]

Hello list,
did anyone something about that?


greetings Harald Wenk

-----Original Message-----
From: deleuze-guattari-bounces at lists.driftline.org
[mailto:deleuze-guattari-bounces at lists.driftline.org]On Behalf Of nadeem
hameed
Sent: Donnerstag, 12. Juli 2007 21:12
To: deleuze-guattari at lists.driftline.org
Subject: Re: [D-G] My body and Rights are being violated and abused


To whomever it may concern
Sub: My body and Rights are being violated and abused
Dear,
Day before yesterday, while I was working on a table, reading and
taking notes for a research problématique: some persons, all of a
sudden, appeared and ordered me to go with them, an employee's
official card hanged at the pocket of one of them (just caught sight
of logo no farther details) and their authoritarian manners remind me
an "Institute of Mental Health", because I know a bit how and what was
the taste of it's hospitality before! I asked them, why you come now,
why not sit and talk why ever I ought to go with you, that seems to be
more than enough for them, I think they minded that possibly mind
-boggling gesture; and begins to use force, two of them caught my
hands, pulled me up from the chair, turned my arms round and later
backwards, I felt impulsive waves of strains and pains in my body
especially joints of my shoulders, forearms and at the back;  for a
while, I tried to resist but it seems to me, there was no getting away
from their grip and force, at the same time, I was asking, even if
they want to bring me back in that "institution", whatever reason
there was/is (if any) that authorize this act, let my body free, and I
could go with them; even if neither I want it, nor feel any need of
it, also have to do some work, so don't interested to waste my time!
However, neither they had been interested to listen these idiocies of
a lunatic fringe, nor let those arms and a body free, even if, to go
there, just otherwise then the way they was acting, probably they
thought the only appropriate way to do such act was the way they was
doing;  they intensified the pressure on the arms and dragged the body
to another place , given without giving there efforts over to idiot's
yapping -- like I could go with you if my body could be freed
sandals could be again on my feet, as some dare to ask for such stupid
things!--instead of that they demanded a rope, without more ado got it
too, and tied the hands behind the back of the body, dragged the body
out of a house in bare feet, hand-coughed at the back and forced the
body into a vehicle they called ambulance: there, everybody at its
place, inside the ambulance, feel relaxed and chatting with a sense of
accomplishment visible on the face of smiling ones; again and again,
on the way to destined place, irksome irks by reminding, there is an
untimely thirst of water, wherever that seems available, if they would
like to provide it, that untimely need had to be defer with excuses of
one kind or other; at last ambulance reached there, renowned
"Institute of Mental Health", in front of so called out-patient block,
the body had been taken out of the ambulance and brought in, inside
the place of Out-Patient!
In short, Someway it was being happened to escape from a place called
Out-Patient, and now in a social-psychological state of terror-one
sign of it is that, all the time, all the possible ways to come in a
place, where I came back are being locked-- and shock, thinking that
what could be done in such a situation!
Therefore, I would like to know, you or the organization-- at least
those who are working for the Rights, in general, or for the Consumer,
in particular-have any-way-out for such impasses! I don't know, still
sharing these words with you; though don't have the ability to do it
in a proper way! May be, out there, somewhere, some think it valuable;
at least to read it and think over it, there may be a way -out!
Just a victim!
Who's body
 and rights
 are being
 violated
 and
 abused
Nadeem hameed

P.S.: Presently, neither I have Internet access nor bucks, energy and
strength to come to a cyber-café, and checks emails: Only way seems
plausible, if any want and think of it, to contact me is by a way of
phoning at: 5112142 or-and reaching at: 219-6-A2 Township, Lahore; if
and only if, the phone is working or-and someway a letter or a person
may reached there, and it could be received by me! Sorry for bothering
your patience for such yaps, don't mind, if it reached you unwanted,
just do your bit, bits- it- away- with- recycle-bin!
Below/beneath is some stanzas taken from some poems of Baudelaire, P.
Charles (1857) Fleurs du Mal. (tr.) F. P. Sturm

The temptation
…
"The harmony is far too great,
  That governs all her body fair,
For Impotence to analyze
And say which note is sweetest there.
…
The Owls
…
>From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest.
…
Correspondences
In Nature's temple living pillars rise,
 And Words are murmured none have understood,
And man must wonder through a tangled wood
Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.

As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
Mingle to one deep sound and fade away:
Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
Color and sound and perfume speak to him.
…



On 7/5/07, Matteo Pasquinelli <matml at gmx.it> wrote:
> A PDF file and future updates always here:
> http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/LibidinalParasites.pdf
> Feedbacks welcome M
>
>
> ---
>
> Libidinal Parasites and the Machinic Excess:
> On the Dystopian  Biosphere of Networks
>
> Matteo Pasquinelli
>
> [Version 26.06.2007]
>
>
>
>
>        A widespread taste for pornography means that
>        nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
>        — J.G. Ballard, "New from the Sun"[1]
>
>        Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind
>        of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort
>        device for throwing a wild joker into the game?
>        — J.G. Ballard, Myths of the Near Future[2]
>
>
>
>
> 1. Porn on Diazepam and the technopathology of immaterial labour
>
> Many western intellectuals reassured us that pornography is nothing
> but the ultimate embodiment of the society of spectacle and late
> capitalism commodification (Baudrillard[3], Agamben[4], Zizek[5],
> Shaviro[6], to name only few). They say that it is nothing
> politically liberating, and at the same time nothing dangerous. In
> the intellectual world there is clearly an attempt to sanitise
> pornography, whereas we witness the rise of a politically-correct
> pornography (the so-called indie porn or alt porn) and a spectrum of
> subcultural indie flavours that neutralise its obscenity potential[7]
> (an inflationary process of the mediasphere quite similar to that
> "nihilistic impulse"[8] that Geert Lovink detects as the very nature
> behind the disseminations of blogs). However we have to admit that
> today porn is no more that porn. Interestingly there is no genealogic
> attempt to understand why today we talk so much about pornography and
> why we observe a pervasive "pornification" of  the collective imagery
> (what it has been ironically defined as the "rise of the netporn
> society"[9]). Today we have gathered around porn respectively: moral
> complains, fervent subcultures, minimizing theorists. Talking about
> the last mentioned, we still smell a lot of postmodernist Diazepam
> (aka Valium) in the air, being Post-modernism a sort of cultural
> therapy (or cultural alibi) for western anxiety. Ballard – once again
> a novelist – grasps western psychosphere better than a PoMo
> philosopher and provides a less comfortable scenario when he says: "A
> widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to
> some threat of extinction"[10]. Ballard's warning recalls the
> libidinal breakdown that he depicts in all his novels – the breakdown
> of an Empire at its sunset. But what is the reason of such a
> bankruptcy of desire? In the last half century pornography has become
> a mass and cheap commodity (and a public utility, why not), almost
> free in the age of the internet. Pornography is the ultimate by-
> product of an exhausted technological Empire – an everyday life
> "affective commodity" absorbing many social energies. The Gnostic
> utopia of media culture has left behind the dark sides of digital
> networks and did not track such a by-product. Indeed the internet
> managed to map point-to-point and express all the shadows of the
> collective unconscious – "technopathology" we could define this under-
> investigated field of research, a crucial buy yet young discipline,
> today carried on by few pioneers like Mark Dery[11] for instance (a
> modern Virgilio of the internet Inferno).
> 	Ballard reminds us that  our ancestral reproductive instinct has not
> been suffocated by a stratification of layers and layers of
> technology: it finds anyhow its path through the channels of a
> pervasive mediascape and devours pornography. Ballard keeps his
> antennas well tuned up on the frequencies of the collective
> unconscious but he has no insight of the genealogy of such a global
> mood. Less ancestral but not less dystopian, another
> technopathologist like Franco 'Bifo' Berardi connects clearly the
> proliferation of pornography to the digital revolution that has
> absorbed our bodies in a completely virtualised communication where
> natural sensuality is missing. "In the saturated infosphere the
> immediate way of perception of the body is pornography"[12], Berardi
> says.
>
> "The electronic excitation conveyed through the entire Mediascape
> puts the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.
> Time for linguistic elaboration of  a single input is reduced as the
> number of inputs increase, and the speed of the input gets higher.
> Sex is not speaking anymore. It is rather babbling, and faltering,
> and it is also suffering of for it. Too few words, too little time to
> talk. Too little time to feel. Porn is an essay in emotional
> automation and uniformity of emotional time of response. Don't miss
> the implication between permanent electrocution, shortening of
> linguistic attentive elaboration, atrophy of emotional response.
> Pornography is just the VISIBLE surface of this neuro short-circuit.
> The connective generation is showing signs of an epidemic of
> emotional atrophy. The disconnection between language and sexuality
> is striking. Pornography is the ultimate form of this disconnection."
>
> Berardi seems sceptical about the adaptability of humankind to a new
> technological environment. Ballard, on the contrary, suggests that
> pornography (or any violent phenomenon like that) might be precisely
> a "wild joker" thrown into the genetic game to trigger a different
> destiny. However, we may not exclude that a new generation of human
> beings will develop cognitive and physical skills to adapt their
> sexual life even to an over-stimulating mediascape. For now we have
> to admit that internet pornography is the dark side (or grey side) of
> the computer-based production, a side effect of the cognitive
> energies co-opted by the revolution of digital machines. Statistics
> [13] on hand, we should not talk anymore about network society and
> immaterial labour without mentioning netporn.
>
>
> 2. Thermodynamics of pornography
>
> Usually we defend pornography just on the basis of  a free expression
> and free speech paradigm – we say, we don't need theory to deal with
> our bodies. On the contrary the pornography debate applies
> unconsciously different models of pleasure and desire. Even when we
> are defending a free expression scheme with the typical liberal
> detachment, we are using each time a specific model of pleasure.
> Generally speaking we can introduce two distinct schools: those who
> believe that libido is a limited energy and those who believe that
> libido is an endless flux. Deleuze – following Nietzsche against
> Freud – introduced desire as an affirmative repetition in his book on
> masochism, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch[14] (whereas Freud on the
> opposite considered obsessive repetition as a manifestation of the
> death drive in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle[15] – and obsession
> repeatedly returns even in any discourse around netporn). In the
> following works with Félix Guattari Deleuze's notion of desire
> embraces an ever-expanding schizo-machinic Spinozism (starting from
> Anti-Oedipus). Berardi criticises Deleuze and Guattari precisely
> because they did not foresee depression as a possible natural
> consequence of their schizo enthusiasm[16], even if somehow Deleuze
> and Guattari covered depression in the chapter "How do you make
> yourself a body without organs?"[17], where different kind of bodies
> are introduced (hypochondriac body, paranoid body, schizo body,
> drugged body, masochist body, etc.). The basic assumption behind
> Berardi's position is that libidinal energy is limited and that we
> cannot party all the time.
> 	There is no reason why a "flux" should be strictly framed as a
> physical or biological flow of matter (and therefore "measured" as
> limited). However it could be interesting to re-design a
> thermodynamics of desire after Deleuze and Guattari and their
> hydraulics of feelings and machines and flows. If we put an eye on
> the human being, we are inclined to translate the First Law of
> Thermodynamics in "In any process, the total desire remains constant"
> and the Second Law (more interestingly) in "The entropy of desire
> constantly increases" – that means in other words that our energy
> goes senile. Pornography is unconsciously framed by its detractors as
> an assault on the whole energy capital of an individual or society.
> There is a sort of thermodynamic parsimony applied by right-wing
> censors or left-wing sceptics to the consumerism of pornography. But
> even porn producers and heavy downloaders know that porn can not be
> consumed under unlimited conditions. Curiously porn imagery is the
> only imagery whose "meaning" is directly connected to our degree of
> physical excitement: have you ever tried to watch a porn movie at
> breakfast or in any unusual situation? The libidinal "significance"
> vanishes for the most. Porn images are quite peculiar, they talk to
> our animal scopophilia, a sort of ancestral cinema for our reptile
> nervous system. It is impossible to judge a porn picture because each
> of us has a completely different quality of libidinal desire – and we
> should be tolerant of pansexuality as well as asexuality, of high
> degrees as well as low degrees of libidinal excitement.
> 	Pornographic images consume our flows of desire and at the same time
> they are produced by those. How to deal with this libidinal economy?
> Before an aesthetics (of porn, in this case), there should be a
> materialist ethics of energies and forces. However this scenario is
> never simply binary. Between the school of "endless flux" on one side
> and the one of "limited libido" on the other, we encounter for
> example Bataille and the human drive for excess. In Bataille[18]
> sexual instincts constantly challenge and destroy our identity and
> are tied up in a double-bind with beauty and animality, unable to
> escape contradictions and impossible to be reduced to a quasi-
> thermodynamic paradigm. There is never equilibrium according to the
> second law of the thermodynamics of desire. Even when we defend
> pornography we deal with a desire that it is never definable and
> predictable. "Technical machines only work if they are not out of
> order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as
> they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning
> properly", Deleuze and Guattari say[19].  There is always a surplus
> of libido drifting around. Here I am trying to frame the
> materialistic forces behind desire and not to develop a "porn
> ethics" (an useful experiment, by the way). As Andrew Ross warn us,
> it is difficult to civilise desire:
>
> "Finally, we must take into account the possibility that a large part
> of pornography's popularity lies in its refusal to be educated; it
> therefore has a large stake in celebrating delinquency and wayward or
> unauthorized behavior, and in this respect is akin to cultural forms
> like heavy metal music, whose definitive, utopian theme, after all,
> is "school's out forever". To refuse to be educated: to refuse to
> taught lessons about maturity and adult responsibility, let alone
> about sexism and racism; to be naughty, even bad, but mostly naughty;
> to be on your worst behavior—all of this may be a ruse of patriarchy,
> a ruse of capitalism, but it also has something to do with a
> resistance to education, institutional or otherwise. It has something
> to do with a resistance to those whose patronizing power and
> missionary ardor are the privileges bestowed upon and instilled in
> them by a legitimate education. Surely there is a warning here for
> intellectuals who are committed today, as always, to "improving" the
> sentimental education of the populace."[20]
>
>
> 3. Libidinal parasites and the negentropy of machines
>
> Digital machines have always been framed as symmetrical devices,
> where energy gets in and gets out and input energetically equals to
> output, according to a widespread belief in the smooth, free and
> painless reproducibility of binary data. Media culture (but more
> brilliantly digital music[21]) tried to focus on the status of errors
> and glitches but only within the combinatory structure of the digital
> code – a claustrophobic perspective with no attention to the
> biological and analogue context that machines have to inhabit. At the
> beginning of "machine criticism" and dystopian literature, decades
> before the proliferation of Turing machines, Samuel Butler claimed a
> continuum between organic and machinic world in his novel Erewhon
> [22]. As McLuhan comments: "As early as 1872, Samuel Butler's Erewhon
> explored the curious ways in which machines were coming to resemble
> organisms not only in the way they obtained power by digestion of
> fuel but in their capacity to evolve ever new types of themselves
> with the help of the machine tenders. The organic character of the
> machines, he saw, was more than matched by the speed with which
> people who minded them were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless
> behaviourism of the machine".[23]
> 	I illustrated an entropic model around netporn to show how the
> dominant technoparadigm is partial in its fetishism of digital code
> and abstract spaces: there is always a dissipation of energy, a
> "nihilist impulse" affecting machines too. However there is an
> opposite process that is more interesting: the accumulation of living
> energy against natural entropy, what Erwin Schrödinger calls
> negentropy in his book What is Life?[24] and that makes a biological
> model more intriguing than a thermodynamic one. Machines like organic
> cells consume and dissipate energy but at the same time they are able
> to accumulate, condense and store energy. Material or immaterial
> objects produced by machines can be considered such concretions of
> energy. Machines are defined usually as devices that transmit or
> transform energy, and – we could add, more interestingly – that store
> energy. However I do not suggest that machines may belong to a
> separate autonomous realm as in a predictable sci-fi plot. Media and
> humans have been always interconnected in a collective system of
> communication that functions as a big condenser of information and
> attractor of attention. Networks can be seen as a massive device for
> accumulation, re-distribution and storage of energy. Networks grow
> everyday – continuously  bigger than the previous day. As soon as
> they reach a critical mass, as new biological species do, they
> trigger a new process. Internet itself has grown from BBS to Second
> Life and its form of organisation has passed through different stages
> of accumulation, condensation, hegemony and crisis.
> 	After the desiring capitalism depicted by the Anti-Oedipus, the
> affective dimension of contemporary production has been highlighted
> by Negri and Hardt in Empire and other works[25] on "affective
> labour" (ending up in the celebration of the power of joy in Saint
> Francis of Assis). What they call "biopolitical production"
> translates Deleuze and Guattari's "desiring production", but with the
> difference that Hardt and Negri push on the conflict of living labour
> to give a tensive arrow to an "immanent plane of desire" that
> otherwise would appear too indeterminate:
>
> "Deleuze and Guattari discover the productivity of social
> reproduction (creative production, production  of values, social
> relations, affects, becomings), but manage to articulate it only
> superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate  horizon
> marked by the ungraspable event."[26]
>
> However Hardt and Negri's ontology is not very specific about the
> spectrum of affective productions and it is not covering many
> perverted, contradicting and obscure feelings of contemporary
> psychosphere (including the so-called "dark side of the multitude"
> and its amphibious nature[27]). Anyhow even with respect to Deleuze
> and Guattari's intuitions, we should look more carefully at these
> dirty engines to grasp the extraction of libidinal surplus-value.
> What defines a machine (or a network) is always a relation to a
> surplus. Media like biological organisms function in an unclean an
> viscous way – eating and defecating, but there is always an
> unforeseen tension towards accumulation of new energy. Actually
> Deleuze and Guattari introduced three kinds of desiring machines and
> not simply one: desiring machines that produce, cut or consume – but
> it seems that only a generic type met success. Their mecanosphere
> frames capitalism in quite a complex scenario, crossed by a chaotic
> interlacement of flows, on the basis of an continuous energy
> streaming above. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is an infinite flux.
>
> "[
> ] every machine is a machine of a machine. The machine produces an
> interruption of the flow only insofar as it is connected to another
> machine that supposedly produces this flow. And doubtless this second
> machine in turn is really an interruption or break, too. But is such
> only in relationship to a third machine that is ideally – that is to
> say, relatively – produces a continuous, infinite flux: for example,
> the anus-machine and the intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and
> the stomach-machine, the stomach-machine and the mouth machine, the
> mouth machine and the flow of milk of a herd of dairy cattle ("and
> then, and then, and then
> "). In a word, every machine functions as a
> break in the flow in relation to the machine in which it is
> connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the
> production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it.
> This is the law of the production of production."[28]
>
> Deleuze and Guattari highlighted here more the assemblage of machines
> and production rather than the accumulation of energy. The libidinal
> "accumulation" – in the form of collective investment – happens
> around paranoid poles (the Father, the Family, the State, etc.).
> Which function do media have in a scenario of widespread libidinal
> accumulation? Traditionally media have been described as information
> channels, body prostheses and mimetic devices. I try to frame them as
> libidinal organisms, more specifically symbionts or better libidinal
> parasites under the concept of the extraction and accumulation of
> libidinal surplus-value. Surplus-value is another way to name the
> excess of energy and its exploitation or enjoyment. Libidinal surplus-
> value is a way to name the tension that drives the media economy and
> evolution. As an example we can frame internet pornography videos as
> symbiotic organisms being a structural part of digital networks. The
> simulacra of pop stars are affective parasites as well. "Spectacular"
> machines indeed work as parasites because they channel our libido and
> accumulate it – in a very physical way. Media parasites absorb our
> libidinal energies as a surplus and condense it in the form of
> attention and fetishism towards brands, technology, material and
> immaterial commodities. By the word 'parasite' no moral judgement is
> implicit – perhaps libidinal parasites are just a new generation of
> old organisms (together with "emotional media" and "affective
> commodities") which we are just starting to get familiar with.
> 	Michel Serres in his book The Parasite[29] described human relations
> as a never-ending parasitic chain – "the parasite parasites the
> parasite". Each organism is a parasite of another. Human beings
> themselves are parasites of the whole nature. The global
> communication system itself is a parasitic system. What is missing in
> this picture of the parasite is the accumulation and extraction of a
> surplus, that are typical of any form of life (and organisation). I
> suggest here to introduce the concept of parasite as an engine of
> accumulation rather than an element of "pure mediality".[30]
>
>
> 4. Vortices accumulating crystals of time
>
> What has to be clarified about the critical discourse around
> communication machines (i.e. media culture and activism) is that they
> are never a neutral tool for free speech, free culture and free
> cooperation – not such a serene and peaceful scenario, they
> incessantly accumulate energy below the surface. The accumulation of
> the surplus-value in any form (libido, attention, information, data,
> even electricity) and its breaking-point should be the political
> focus of a critical media culture, as much as the discourse about
> free cooperation[31] and free culture.[32] For sure all the forms of
> collective intelligence and creative commons driven by technology may
> represent a real hazard against capitalistic accumulation of surplus-
> value, but beside or underneath the immaterial layer there is always
> a material by-parasite that is never seriously confronted. The
> interesting part of the movie The Matrix (indulging in a plot that
> everybody knows) is less the virtual reality game than the parasitic
> role of the digital world above the human bodies: in the year 2199
> intelligent machines have taken control on human beings and exploit
> them as energy source, growing countless people in pods and
> harvesting their bioelectrical energy and body heat. Beside and
> thanks to any digital commonism, accumulation still runs.
> 	Squeezing the usual Foucauldian paradigm, we may say that such
> molecular and pervasive parasites embody a biopolitical function
> previously performed by old media and institutions on a broader
> scale. Lazzarato is more precise and accurate in his book
> Videofilosofia when he writes that electronic technologies freeze
> "crystals of time" out of the living time of their users – those
> "crystals" are but moving images that become parts of the immaterial
> assembly line of Post-Fordism.
>
> "The central hypothesis around which our work is organized is that
> electronic and digital machines, as well as intellectual labour,
> «crystallise time».[33] [
> ] Image is never something that works upon
> lack, absence, negativity. Image  is not something added to the real
> to represent it, but it is the texture itself of the being."[34]
>
> Here Lazzarato frames video-electronic media as autonomous engines
> able to produce and accumulate time in the same way that as memory
> and imagination do. The accumulation of "crystals of time" through
> moving images is a crucial intuition that Lazzarato clarifies in the
> same years of the book Lavoro immateriale, but only an abstract
> understanding of the concept of immaterial labour has been well
> received. Following Bergson and Deleuze, Lazzarato develops a
> sophisticated notion of moving image that is no more the flat
> simulation of postmodernists but a device screwed into flesh and
> reality. I take the intuition of video technologies as engines of
> time accumulation to introduce them as parasites of libidinal
> accumulation as well – where Lazzarato put duration and time we can
> put desire and libidinal energy.
>
> "Electronic and digital technologies (but even the cinema) are
> «mechanics» that autonomously produce image. Retaking one of
> Simondon's intuitions, instead of defining them as simply external
> extensions of the senses of the human being (as a lens in respect to
> an eye), they should be understood as "engines" capable of a
> "relative autonomy" in respect to the man. Different from mechanical
> and thermodynamic engines «that take a [kinetic and potential] energy
> > from the outside», they are indeed engines that accumulate duration
> and time. And if memory and imagination can be defined as «organic
> engines» that accumulate and produce time, video technology and
> computers may be defines as non-organic engines that work upon the
> same principle."[35]
>
> Out of any virtual reality dream, back to the analogue world, each
> media assemblage becomes a small or big vortex of accumulation, each
> device an energy parasite. Time and desire are attracted and
> crystallised, and then transformed and condensed in other forms. What
> has to be clearly pointed out is that parasites are never
> "immaterial" – they transform always our fluxes in something really
> tangible. Neptorn convert libidinal flows into money flows and siphon
> daily a huge bandwidth on a global scale. Netporn transforms love in
> pure electricity. File-sharing networks reincarnate as an army of MP3
> players. Free Software helps to sell more IBM hardware. Second Life
> "avatars consume as much electricity than Brazilians". The libidinal
> surplus is extracted and channelled across the technological
> infrastructure and invested into the infrastructure itself, the
> imagery carried by that or other devices connected and depending upon
> that network. Accumulation of libidinal surplus turns easily into
> money, attention, visibility, spectacle, material and immaterial
> commodities.
>
>
> 5. Hunting for surplus
>
> This overview tries to wrap some concepts around the notions of
> energy surplus and desire, investigating entropy and negentropy
> within the media "biosphere". Moving from Marx's accumulation of
> surplus-value to Bataille's excess, and from Deleuze and Guattari's
> desiring production to Schrödinger's negentropy, I have tried to
> condense a nodal point in the theoretical figure of the libidinal
> parasite. To escape the impasses of the current media theory, I have
> suggested to defines a machine (or a network) as something always in
> relation to an external surplus and not as a virtual system apart.
> Following Michel Serres we can describe the whole mediascape as a
> parasitic chain. The field is vast and we need a more detailed
> cartography to investigate in a proper way different intuitions such
> as Ballard's visions about media and ancestral instincts, Berardi's
> "pathologies of hyper-expressivity" and Lovink's "nihilist impulse" –
> all affecting the contemporary mediascape. Personally I focused on
> internet pornography as it represents a radical case study about the
> extraction of libidinal surplus-value by the society of the spectacle.
> 	Pornography could be considered the ultimate commodity because the
> instinct of the Kind become itself the basis for the extraction of
> surplus-value by the mega-Machine – there is something truly
> apocalyptic in this. Paradoxically there is no alienation (and no
> subversion): in the context of softcore advertisement or hardcore
> pornography our sexual desire reinforces the new electronic
> superstructure of humankind. At the end pornography is concerned
> about the preservation and reproduction of humankind as much as any
> fundamentalist church, even if in the form of a wild joker as
> Ballard says.
>
>
> Berlin-Amsterdam, May-June 2007.
>
>
>
>
>
> [1] J.G. Ballard, "News From the Sun", 1981. In J.G. Ballard, The
> Complete Short Stories, London: Flamingo, 2001.
> [2] J.G. Ballard, Myths of the Near Future, London: Cape, 1982.
> [3] Jean Baudrillard, "What Are You Doing After the Orgy?",
> Traverses, October 1983, 29.
> [4] Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene, Torino: Einaudi, 1990.
> Trans.: The Coming Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
> Press, 1991. "To appropriate the historic transformations of human
> nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link
> together image and body in a space where they can no longer be
> separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose physis is
> resemblance—this is the good that humanity must learn how to wrest
> > from commodities in their decline. Advertising and pornography, which
> escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners, are the
> unknowing midwives of this new body of humanity."
> [5] Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997.  And
> "No Sex, Please, We're Digital!", in On Belief, Routledge: 2001.
> [6] Steven Shaviro, "Survey on pornography", Text Zur Kunst, 'Porno'
> issue (n. 64, December 2006).
> [7] See Florian Cramer, "Sodom Blogging: Alternative Porn and
> Aesthetic Sensibility", in K. Jacobs, M. Pasquinelli (eds), C'Lick
> Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network
> Cultures, 2007.
> [8] Geert Lovink, "Blogging, the nihilist impulse", in Zero Comments,
> New York: Routledge, 2007, www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-
> lovink-en.html
> [9] One of the topic of "The Art and Politics of Netporn" conference,
> Amsterdam, 2005 www.networkcultures.org/netporn
> [10] J.G. Ballard, "News From the Sun", cit.
> [11] Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
> Brink. New York: Grove, 1999. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the
> End of the Century. New York: Grove, 1996.
> [12] Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, "The Obsession of the (Vanishing) Body",
> in C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, cit.
> [13] See for instance: "Caslon Analytics: adult content industries",
> accessed June 2007, www.caslon.com.au/xcontentprofile.htm
> [14] Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch: le froid et le
> cruel, Paris: Minuit, 1967.
> [15] Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Leipzig:
> Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. 1920.
> [16] Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Félix, Roma: Luca Sossella Editore, 2001.
> [17] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris:
> Minuit, 1980.
> [18] Georges Batailles, L'érotisme, Paris: Minuit, 1967.
> [19] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Paris: Minuit,
> 1972.
> [20] Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, New
> York: Routledge, 1989
> [21] See: Kim Cascone, "The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-Digital
> Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music", in Computer Music
> Journal, Winter 2000, Vol. 24, No. 4, MIT Press.
> [22] Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or Over the Range, published
> anonymously, 1872.
> [23] Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial
> Man. New York: Vanguard Press, 1951.
> [24] Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the
> Living Cell, Cambridge: University Press, 1948.
> [25] Hardt, M. (1999) "Affective labour", in Boundary 2, vol. 26, no.
> 2, Summer. A. Negri, "Value and Affect", in boundary 2, 26, no. 2
> (Summer 1999)
> [26] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Cambridge MA: Harvard
> University Press, 2000.
> [27] Paolo Virno, "La multitud es ambivalente: es solidaria y es
> agresiva", interview, Pagina 12, Buenos Aires, 25/9/2006,
> www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/dialogos/21-73518-2006-09-25.html
> [28] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, cit.
> [29] Michel Serres, Le Parasite, Paris: Grasset, 1980. Translation:
> The Parasite, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
> [30] As "pure mediality" in: Stephen Crocker, "Noises and Exceptions:
> Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben", Ctheory, 3/28/2007,
> www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574
> [31] Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink (eds), The Art of Free
> Cooperation, NY: Autonomedia, 2007.
> [32] Lawrence Lessing, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology
> and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York:
> Penguin, 2004.
> [33] Maurizio Lazzarato, Videofilosofia. La percezione del tempo nel
> postfordismo. Roma: Manifestolibri, 1996, p. 14 [translation mine].
> [34] Ibid., p. 15.
> [35] Ibid., p. 83.
>
>
>
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