Re: How do you have a revolution without a subject?

i sent this yesterday but it doesn't seem to have made any reappearance, so
i'm sending it again! apologies if it now arrives twice! - dan

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dear paul, chris, david, robert, gordon, and all,

thank you all for your posts on this thread.  I'm finding it very
interesting and useful, and it's good to get such engaged feedback.

i feel like i am failing to express some of the most important dimensions of
what i was originally intending (without really saying it, perhaps!) and
wires are getting crossed a little. which is inevitable and good, but i just
want to try and make some aspects of what i'm saying a bit clearer because
i'd like to hear what you all have to say about it, if you care to comment!

recently i have come to the conclusion that the concept of "alienation" is
deeply flawed and a huge obstruction to thinking about ourselves, society,
freedom and revolution, in a productive way. yet, in one way or another, it
dominates this whole debate.  basically, i see the concept of alienation as
incompatible with ways of thinking which give primacy to becoming.  when i
say incompatible, i mean not that the two ideas contradict, but that between
them there is what lyotard calls a "differend".  "alienation" assumes modes
of being and excludes becomings.  it identifies change with loss, illusion,
and carries a moral charge against becoming in general. to alienate means
"to cut off".  a state of alienation is one in which you are "cut off" from
a previous -- and in marxism, somehow better, truer, or more real -- state
of being. it's not very surprising to realise how christian a conception
this is, pointing straight back to the garden of eden and the fall.  cut off
from the full presence of god.

does marx tell a significantly different story?  the worker is alienated
from their labour -- and from this originary fall proceed all their ills.
this aspect of marx's theory is entirely moral: capitalism has changed
things, change creates suffering, change (if produced by capitalism) is bad.
the organisation of production "cuts people off" from the free state they
would otherwise enjoy. of course, i'm oversimplifying.  but, nonetheless,
the concept of alienation depends on contrasting one state of being to
another, even if the latter is not conceived as "older" or "proper" (as a
nostalgic projection) but as a state to come (after the revolution...).  by
making the human ability to produce its own environment, its own means of
production, etc. the fundamental differentiating aspect of the human, Marx
contrasts an original or natural state of productivity (at the inception of
human history as such) with it's contemporary state.  i cannot see how it is
possible to come to the conclusion that modern man is alienated without
treating existence in terms of more or less static modes of being, and
contrasting the current state of being to another (imaginary or orignary)
state of being.  even if it requires a theory of change between states of
being (between historically determinant socio-economic formations),
conceptualizing this change in a way that gives the concept of alienation a
place -- it seems to me -- depends upon excluding absolutely the possibility
of a continuous flux or becoming as the foundation or essence of human
experience.

in many ways i find Baudrillard's work reactionary, nostalgic and myopic.
it shares a similar hysteria about change to the one i am suggesting Marx
displays.  but where it seems to me razor-sharp is in the way it critiques
d&g and lyotard's use of production as a primary category, suggesting this
is idealistic, nostalgic, and reproduces marx's failure to escape from the
image of thought of capital itself (i'm thinking of The Mirror of
Production).  and it seems to me that it is no coincidence that Baudrillard,
being so astute on this issue, also rejects the idea of alienation.  quite
simply, if we see our "selves" as in a continuous process of becoming,
alienation is not a meaningful notion.  there is only an open series of
intensive changes.  alienation belongs with lack and unity: as part of a
series of laments of loss.

in other words, it has no objective valency. there is no objective
revolutionary work to be done to overcome alienation, to fill lack, or to
restore unity.  of course, each describes a subjective feeling,  but those
subjective feelings have no referents except in our own conceptual universe,
within the image of thought we have been taught to think inside.  you are
never other than yourself, never lacking anything, never a unity. even at
the limit. even in radical encounters with the Other, the unknown; even in
states of non-ordinary consciousness or ego-loss: it's still part of the
open series of intensive changes which is the only meaningful referent for
the word "you".  never cut off from itself, but prone to extreme variation,
modulation, to passing through thresholds; never lacking, but always
completely co-extensive with itself and full; never a unity, because it
remains an open system, a process in time which changes continually. [a
totality only inasmuch as it could never be perceived, known, or disclosed
?]

this series also goes through processes of stratification: it is
disciplined, it aquires habits. yes.  but why shouldn't it?  in what way are
these not as absolutely contingent and "proper" as experiences at the
limit??  and, most importantly, how can they possibly be conceived as
negative (in a non-energetic sense), that is, as an "alienation" ?  an
alienation from what? from the series? but they are part of the series!!
without such processes of stratification, these disciplinary processes, i
could not walk, speak or write, my body would not have any functional
coherence.  and there's no "reason" why i _should_ be able to do these
things, of course (they are not, contrary to a popular delusion, my
"right"). but i, personally, am glad that i can.  matter passes across a
threshold where it can maintain functional coherence through negative
feedback loops, or it perishes, rapidly.  why do we continue to see this in
negative terms, as restriction, confinement, imprisonment?  matter is not a
prison, and neither is culture, or language.  energy has no "proper" ends.
it becomes, in every direction at once (not, the opposite, which would be
aimlessly).

i don't mean by this to suggest that "everything is how it should be" and
that there is nothing i wish to change in the world.  but everything in the
world is already changing, at different speeds.  seeing that other processes
change at different speeds is not the same as seeing that they are
repressive.  that is, simply, a hideous anthropomorphism.  if we believe
that the strata "imprison" energy, we are still treating the universe as a
_moral fable_.  we still have not thrown off the "judgement of god".  the
organisation of physical matter does not present us with a revolutionary
agenda.  to believe so is still to project our own will onto the universe,
to believe, somehow, in god; or at least, to keep thinking after his image.

societies are organised in a way that is unequal.  advantage and
disadvantage exist and make life a miserable, brutish affair for many, for
most.  but we can't read off a moral justification for our misery from the
movement of the rocks. to do so is to create a slave morality, based on
resentment. and it is to take the moral high ground over a basically selfish
question: how do i get what i want? - even if what you want are the most
selfless of goals.

now, when i ask "how do you have a revolution without a subject?" this is
the context in which i am thinking.  if the subject is understood as i have
suggested above, as an open series of intensive becomings, then the whole
idea of "the revolution" seems to have been superseded.  this is why i have
said that its persistance as a concern seems like a reterritorialization, or
as an idea moving at a slower speed within d&g's thought.  and, perhaps
confusingly, what i'm calling "romanticism" this use of a somewhat
anthropomorphic reading of the nature of material processes as a sort of
moral imperative. (of course, it is possible to reverse this relationship:
it is not an anthropomorphisation of matter but a de-anthropomorphising of
human subjectivity: but if we read it that way, don't we have to let go of
the subject and, by extension, of the revolution?). put another way, if we
can't use the being-related concept of alienation alongside this view of
human subjectivity as becoming, what the hell would a revolution be for??
there are no longer any "shackles" to throw off!!

well, i have no doubt i've probably just muddied the waters further, but i
think that is sort of what i meant to say when i started this email, so i'll
leave it there!!

all the best,

dan
---
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to
remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats
and our police to see that our papers are in
order.  At least spare us their morality when
we write." - Michel Foucault