The Three Ecologies Felix Guattari

p.19-20  (o)nly an ethico-political articulation-- which I call ecosophy-- between the three ecological registers (the environment,  social relations and human subjectivity) would be like to clarify these questions.

p.21  Initially the class antagonisms that were inherited from the nineteenth century contributed to the creation of homogeneous, bipolarized fields of subjectivity. Then, during the second half of the twentieth century, the hardline worker subjectivity crumbled with the advent of the consumer society, the welfare system, the media, etc…. A vague sense of social belonging has deprived the old class consciousness of its tension… For their part, the so-called socialist countries have steadily introjected the "unidimensionalizing" value systems of the West. Therefore, in the communist world the old facade of egalitarianism is giving way to mass-media serialism (the same ideal standards of living, the same fashions and types of rock music, etc.).

p.23 If it is no longer a question-- as it was in previous periods of class struggle or the defense of the "fatherland of socialism"-- of creating an unequivocal ideology, it is conceivable, on the other hand, that the new ecosophical example indicates the lines of reconstruction of human praxis in the most varied domains. At every level, individual or collective, in everyday life as well as the reinvention of democracy (concerning town planning, artistic creation, sport, etc.), it is a question in each instance of looking into what would be the dispositives of the production of subjectivity, which tends towards an individual and/or collective resingularization, rather than that of mass-media manufacture, which is synonymous with distress and despair.

p.30 (t)he three ecologies are governed by a different logic to that of ordinary communication between speakers and listeners which has nothing to do with the intelligibility of discursive sets, or the indeterminate interlocking of fields of signification…. while the logic of discursive sets endeavors to completely delimit its objects, the logic of intensities, or eco-logic, is concerned only with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes. Process, which I oppose here to system or to structure, strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization. This process of "fixing-into-being" relates only to expressive subsets that have broken out of their totalizing frame and have begun to work on their own account, overcoming their referential sets and manifesting themselves as their own existential indices, processual lines of flight.
Ecological praxes strive to scout out the potential vectors of subjectification and singularization at each partial existential locus. They generally seek something that runs counter to  the "normal" order of things, a counter-repetition, an intensive given which invokes other intensities to form new existential configurations…. At the heart of all ecological praxes there is an a-signifying rupture, in which the catalysts of existential change are close at hand, but lack expressive support from the assemblage of enunciation.

Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (McKenzie Wark)

p. 65    Detournement

p.125 Ernst Mach   mediation--sensations-- not reducible to subjective senses /impressions
         What is the activity that chunks sensations into an index of some object, on the one hand, and as traces via which a subject might come to assert its own separateness, on the other?

p. 138         (Alexander Bogdanov) seemed to accept that bloom carries differences, but advocated the sharing of blood to overcome them. Rather than be prey to the vampire of capital, labor shares among its own, as if the brotherhood of man could be made physically so through blood exchanges.


p.144  The "mutation" of the private property form into strictly controlled "intellectual property" makes whole new classes of things available for commodification.
A patent defines what is nature and what is not…. Patent is a site of struggle over what counts as subject and what as object.

James Boyle,  The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

p.147  reading of Donna Haraway

Perhaps it would be possible to sense a web of human and nonhuman agents, more a mechanically and digitally reproducible compound eye than a single labor point of view.
Perhaps this point of view could be broader than that of labor, and not separate, out in advance, production from reproduction. Perhaps it could also include something a bit distant from either, a kind of activity that neither produces nor reproduces, but proposes other means of doing either, or neither,  or both. Could it even include the hacker class as a distinctive point of view not entirely reproducible to labor? One might start here with Bogdanov's notion of organization, rather than production, as a "basic" level of analysis, but look aslant at its unquestioned functionalism.

P. 150   Haraway  in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women p.176
  Humanistic Marxism was polluted at the source by its structuring ontological theory of the domination of nature in the self-construction of men and by its closely related impotence to historicize anything women did that didn't qualify for a wage.


p.151  for this is an era in which life itself has been disaggregated and brought under forms of molecular control. what makes that control possible is a whole series of technologies based on sciences whose object is not just on molecular but even the sub-atomic level. Rather than assert a claim to contemplate these transformations as if from the outside, what might actually be more useful is a way of accounting from the inside for the apparatus that produces us as cyborg beings in an Anthropocene time on a planet experiencing vast metabolic rifts.

p.152-55  Karen Barad      meet the University Halfway
diffraction    x-rays   as a method     non-representational

P. 162   What counts as agency? Agency is not something that humans or even nonhumans "have." It is not something that some possess and some do not. It's an effect of a situation, often a situation that includes an apparatus. For an agent to appear, there's a prior cut. The agent appears separate as an effect of a kind of "exteriority-within-phenomena."

Inter-actions       not agents exist before the actions

Alone Together Sherry Turkle

robot toys     such as Tamagotchi, Furby,  
Criteria for life P.27-28    animation animalism--- capacity to feel
p31  Tamagotchi turn children into caretakers
p.32  children became responsible parents   inability to turn off

p.150?--155   always on
           the new status of the self     tethered and marked absent

控制论和科学方法论 金观涛 华国凡著 谷风出版社 1983年1版 中华民国七十六年台一出版

p96-97   超稳定系统有一个重要特点，就是靠不稳定来维持稳定。⋯⋯ 因为系统本身的变化往往是一种不可抗拒的趋势。实际上要维持系统长期不变是做不到的，唯一的办法是当系统本身变化了，不稳定出现时，重新修复系统。⋯⋯这一超稳定是通过对不稳定的修复来实现的。⋯⋯因此，超稳定系统有种特殊的现象，那就是周期性地出现稳定——不稳定——稳定现象。不稳定时，新的机制发生作用，使系统回到原有地稳定结构，而不是新的稳定结构。－－说明中国封建社会长期停滞地原因。

p115-118  自组织系统   1） 先有一个组织核心 2）是个不稳定系统，或亚稳定系统
3）系统内部存在一条有因果关系的自动选择链 4）过程不可逆 5）核心细小差别可导致组织巨大差别
（国家组织取决于领导核心班子）

Coming to terms with chance : engaging rational discrimination and cumulative disadvantage Author: Oscar H Gandy Jr

other articles  by  Gandy     "Data Mining and Surveillance in the post -9/11 Environment"

Uncreative Writing Kenneth Goldsmith

P.25 (n)ever before has language had so much materiality--- fluidity, plasticity, malleability-- begging to be actively managed by the writer. Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How different today when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container: text typed into a Microsoft Word document can be parsed into a database, visually morphed in Photoshop, animated in Flash, pumped into online text-mangling engines, spammed to thousands of e-mail addresses, and imported into a sound editing program and spit out as music. The possibilities are endless.

Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark)

P. 80  excommunication is a double movement in which the communicational imperative is expressed, and expressed as the impossibility of communication.

p. 84-85 about Georges Méliès     "the machine that shows us more truth than we are prepared to see, the magic that calls up forces beyond human comprehension, or the everyday apprehension of an invisible nexus of causality, behind the veil of what can be seen and heard and felt. Méliès's 'horror' films are not only pedagogical moments of mediation, but they also point to the shadowy absence at the core of all mediation. In any given moment of mediation, there is always a minimal separation, a differential, a gap, lacuna, or fissure… a blind spot. "
"The fantastical element of Méliès's films is to be able to see what media and mediation usually don't make visible --- that is why Méliès's films are about film, and more broadly, about technological mediation. But it is, of course, only through the medium and its 'special effects' that one can gain a glimpse of what is not mediated."

p. 89 The pioneers of modern cybernetics and information theory.. presume some minimum ground of mediation as the basis for any possible communication. In the Shannon diagram, a starting presupposition is the interplay of identity and difference…. The individuation of "point A" is dependent on its separation from a "point B" with which it is communicating, and in fact the possibly of connecting points A and B relies on this notion of a prior separation--- the conditions of connection relying on a prior state of disconnection.

p.95  (after discussing J-horror)   Media shift from the connection of two points in a single reality, to an enigmatic and ambivalent connection with an unnamed "beyond."

p. 102   In the horror genre, what we witness is an evocative concept of the supernatural as itself mediated, often through objects that are at once overly familiar and highly technical, objects are everyday and opaque at the same time.

p115  for every object there is an inaccessible more-than-object.

object vs thing
p. 119  If objects are always objects for a subject, then things are like impossible objects, occult objects, or better, apophatic objects --- objects abosolutely withdrawn, leaving only a strange, fecund emptiness,  an inaccessibility that knows no limits.

p.131 with haunted media, the "divine object" establishes a connection between two different ontological orders (natural-supernatural, earthly-divine, life- afterlife). This is quite different in principle from the modern view of mediation given by cybernetics and information theory. There one has a mediation between two points within a single, shared, consensual reality.


Erik Davis    TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information ()1998

Tom Gunning    "To Scan a Ghost: An Ontology of Mediated Vision," Grey Room 26 (2007)

Joe Milutis     Ether: The nothing that connects everything

Siegfried Zieklinsk     Deep Time of he Media: Toward an Archaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means