Skip to main content

B4 W6: Marxism and Feminism - A User's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia

Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze
and Guattari. MIT Press, 1992.

For Deleuze and Guattari, "the clinical schizophrenic's debilitating detachment from the world is a quelled attempt to engage it in unimagined ways... It's twoness is a relay to multiplicity." p.1

"A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written over a seven-year period is less a critique than a sustained, constructive experiment in schizophrenic or "nomad", thought." p.4

"State philosophy is grounded in a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy." p.4

"The collusion between philosphy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model for higher learning throughout Europe and the U.S. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt... was the "spiritual and moral training of the nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" (truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice", and by "unifying this principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State)." p.4

One point from A Thousand Plateaus "nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Better, that it is a kind of philosophy that comes in many forms." p.6

"For Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax leading to a state of rest. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist." p.7


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

B2 W5: Theory and Critical Research - Queerness as Horizon

José Esteban Muñoz (2009). “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Pragmatism” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York/London: New York University Press, 19-32. Do not dismiss the "we" of utopian visions and demands as "merely identitarian logic", but rather "The "we" speaks to a "we" that is "not yet conscious," the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment." p.20 Links to Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and the way she addressed the queer future - where people of all races and sexualities are able to relate to each other equally - it is not naive, it is optimistic. "The particularities... are not things in and of themselves that format this "we"; indeed the statement's "we" is "regardless" of these markers, which is not to say that is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences, but, instead, that...

Thesis reading: Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy

Pateman, Carole "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy" in  The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory . Stanford University Press: California. 1989 118-133 "Benn and Gaus’s account assumes that the reality of our social life is more or less adequately captured in liberal conceptions. They do not recognize that ‘liberalism’ is patriarchal-liberalism and that the separation and opposition of the public and private spheres is an unequal opposition between women and men." p.120 "One reason why the exclusion [of women] goes unnoticed is that the separation of the private and public is presented in liberal theory as if it applied to all individuals in the same way. It is often claimed - by anti-feminists today, but by feminists in the nineteenth century, most of whom accepted the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’- that the two spheres are separate, but equally important and valuable. The way in which women and men are differentiall...

B2 W3: Somatechnics - Imagined futures

Alison Kafer: “Introduction: Imagined Futures”, in: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 1-24. Upon seeing Alison Kafer uses a wheelchair and has been physically scarred by a fire, people imagine a bleak future of isolation and sadness for her. However other disabled people imagine a future for her where ableism, not disability, is the obstacle she must overcome. "What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present." p.2 "If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future." p.2 "the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident" p.3...