Meeting Links: US Election Funding, Project Ideas, Machines Blog, Videos

Hey folks, here are some links relevant to our first meeting of 2008:

Let’s try and make this post an ongoing list for any other stuff people feel is relevant.

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Who’s Next?

Campaign Finance 2008 USA Election:

Here’s a website, I realize its cnn, but it’s an easy start for finding general numbers.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/money/dems.html

NYtimes is good also….
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/finances/index.html

Project Ideas:

Asian American Video Oral History Tutorial

http://thewhalehunt.org/

Michel Gondry’s Please Be Kind Rewind and “How to Swede”:

Machines and Movements: Deleuze and Guattari
Michael Hardt’s Reading notes on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus
My Blog: Desiring-Machines

Instead, it’s all about machines—desiring machines: “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections”. (AO 1)

“Everything is a machine” (AO 2):
In the first section of the first chapter process and desire are defined in relation to both production and machines.
“A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupres)…related to a continual flow (hyle) that it cuts into…like a ham slicing machine, removing portions [prelevement] from the associative flow: the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off, for instance” (AO 36).
Hyle: “designates the pure continuity that any one sort of matter ideally possess” (AO 36).
The break or interruption of flows is not a rejection of that continuity; instead, it is constitutive of it—“it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity” (AO 36). Thus with each machine there are other machines that are connected to it and the form of that connection is conditioned by how (and which) breaks-flows function in that relation. Also, there is always a “third machine” that perpetually produces an infinite flux. This scope of these processes are essentially the law of the production of production at work; machines connected to other machines, producing and encountering breaks-flows.

The notion of desire that emerges in the first chapter is still somewhat unclear. This has much to do with the fact that I continually find myself clinging to desire as something that emerges from a subject-object relationship: the individual who tries in his life to satisfy his desires by seeking, projecting, working towards, discovering the objects of desire. This also brings out my second confusion, what it means to displace subjects and objects—the implications of situating the subject adjacent to(/outside?) of and after desiring-machines…as products of production.

3 Key Elements of Process:

1.) “Hence everything is production” (AO 4): …of productions, of recording processes, of consumptions. With regards to machines, the term process incorporates recording and consumption(-consummation) into production—“making them productions of one and the same process”.

2.) For the authors, if everything is a machine and everything is production, then there is no distinction between man and nature—“they are one and the same essential reality: the producer-product” (AO 5).

3.) Desire, being an immanent principle (meaning that it is capable in itself to be productive, to produce) in production processes, is a critical component of the materialist psychiatry Deleuze and Guattari offer in contrast to psychoanalysis. In order to do so however, this depends on the third meaning of process: that “it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself” (AO 5).
Another way to look at PROCESS (metaphysical and historical):

“In the Schizo, the two aspects of process are conjoined: the metaphysical process that puts us into contact with the ‘demoniacal’ element in nature or within the heart of the earth, and the historical process of social production that restores the autonomy of desiring-machines in relation to the deterritorialized social machine…Between the two there is nothing but an ongoing process of becoming that is the becoming of reality” (AO 35).

“The Psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: ‘Tell me a little bit about your desiring machines, won’t you?’ Instead he screams: “Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!’” (AO 45).

Deleuze, reflecting on Anti-Oedipus in the preface for the Italian Edition of A Thousand Plateaus writes (from Gilles Deleuze: Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, pp. 308-9)

The three major claims of Anti-Oedipus were the following:

1) The unconscious functions like a factory and not like a theatre (a question of production, and not of representation);
2) Delirium, or the novel, is world-historical and not familial (delirium is about races, tribes, continents, cultures, social position, etc.);
3) Universal history indeed exists, but it is a history of contingency (the flows which are the object of History are canalized through primitive codes, the over-coding of the despot, and the decoding of capitalism which makes possible the conjunction of independent flows).