SHITTING

THIS IS IT this is the last thing

“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

… the language-system is a virtual structure, from which speech-acts emerge; each speech-act expresses or actualizes a certain potential within the language-system, yet without ever exhausting the system’s total potential. These speech-acts are conditioned (in a structuralist sense) by the language-system, but are not caused (in any mechanistic, linear sense) by it. Like language, the cosmos is an open (non-linear) system, and so there is never just one Solution to a given Problem: the virtual field of becoming is always richer than the solutions that get actualized. But even if the virtual field of the chaosmos is infinite, it is not indeterminate, for if it were, both science and philosophy would be impossible: there is infinite potential for becoming to actualize itself in different beings, but only and always within the parameters immanent to this universe as we know it, with its specific constants such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and so on. (In a similar way, the number of potential grammatical sentences in English is infinite, but not indeterminate: sentences are grammatical only and always within the parameters set by the rules of English grammar, and there is a whole set of word combinations that are thereby excluded.) Operating with these constants or constraints, matter can “solve”its Problems by self-organizing in an infinite number of ways, but always in determinate forms or modes. We can see here the sense in which Deleuze’s ontology relies on science to furnish some of the determinations of becoming that give rise to the self-organization of being.

Yvonne Myers (b. circa 1936) was an English judoka who practiced at the Budokwai in London in the 1950s. 

With this in mind, I want to suggest that it is in our apparent impasse that Marx becomes even more important in exploring Deleuze’s politics. This is not because of the centrality of an analysis of capitalism per se (though the contemporary re-emergence of interest in capitalist dynamics is certainly timely), but because Marx remains the pre-eminent thinker of the impossibility of any easy or given political escape from the infernal capitalist machine, whilst simultaneously positing such possibility and potential on relations formed within and particular to capitalism itself. This condition is what Marx calls ‘communism’.  To foreground Marx’s communism is not to turn to a different set of Marx’s texts (for example, the early works, as against Capital). For Marx, communism is the immanent potential that haunts, and emerges in and through, capitalism. It is thus a perspective for interpreting capitalism and developing politics, and is hence found throughout Marx’s works.8 Marx does present some general aspects of what a post-capitalist mode of life might involve – as a milieu of becoming which overcomes the strictures of identity, abolishes work, forms a non-fetishized relation with Nature or the world, and, if we are to follow Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, sets the desiring machines loose from their anthropomorphic sexuality.9 Generally, however, the communist perspective is not an elaboration of a different ‘communist society’, and it is certainly not, to use Nietzschean terms, a reactive denial of current life in a postponement for the beautiful tomorrow. It is, rather, a process of continual engagement with the flows and constraints of the capitalist socius toward its overcoming, as is evident in Marx and Engels’ necessarily ambiguous definition: Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. (Marx and Engels 1974: 56–7)

Geller gets paid pretty well to demonize Muslims. I’m talking to the tune of $200,000 a year. True, that might be walking around money for Donald Trump (who actually bashed Geller this week for her draw the Prophet Mohamed cartoon contest), but that puts her in the top 5 percent of all Americans in terms of annual income. Now, $200,000 doesn’t make a person rich these days (although the $9 million in combined divorce settlement and life-insurance payments she reportedly got certainly qualifies her). But for what she does, it’s handsome pay. In fact, many of the people identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Center for American Progress (CAP) as the leaders of the anti-Muslim industry in America are paid well for their efforts. I’m talking so much money I almost want to start hating on Muslims—and I’m Muslim. In Geller’s case, her salary is paid from her organization the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a group listed by the SPLC as an active “anti-Muslim organization.” In 2013, the AFDI reported $958,800 in gross receipts and paid Geller a base salary of $192,500, plus $18,750 in other income (PDF). Not bad for a group created, per AFDI’s tax returns, to act “against the treason being committed by the national, state and local government officials, the mainstream media and others in their capitulation to the global jihad and Islamic Supremacism.” This is truly one step removed from tin foil hats and claims that the government has bugged your cheese. But Geller, who has also been denounced by the ADL for vilifying Muslims, is just one of many profiting from hate (PDF). As Matt Duss, a former policy analyst for the Center for American Progress and now president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, noted, “It’s certainly been a lucrative industry for leading anti-Muslim bigots. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into this.” Duss is truly an expert in this field, having co-authored a report released in February titled “Fear, Inc. 2.0” (PDF) that investigated the Islamophobia network in America and traced the funds used to support its key players. For example, the report notes that Frank Gaffney, Fox News regular (of course), is one of the leaders of the anti-Muslim movement and is the primary engineer of the claim that Muslims want to impose Islamic law across America. Gaffney has even argued that giving Muslim Americans a day off from work for Muslim holidays is a form of imposing sharia law. Well, Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP) in 2012 reported $3.2 million in revenue. And Gaffney, as president, paid himself $300,000 a year for his work in demonizing Muslims. Then there’s David Horowitz, a man described by the SPLC as “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.” He has also been denounced by the ADL for his work that “promotes anti-Muslim views and features events with anti-Muslim activists.” (PDF) For example, Horowitz has tried to bully and marginalize [American Muslim] college students by claiming that the Muslim Student Associations are “associated with terrorist organizations”… Being “the godfather” of anti-Muslim hate appears to pay well. Horowitz’s Freedom Center in 2013 saw over $7.2 million in gross receipts and Horowitz was paid $525,000 in salary (PDF). And Horowitz even bankrolls Robert Spencer, another well-known Muslim-basher, with a $167,000-a-year salary. Now in Horowitz’s defense, he doesn’t focus just on demonizing Muslims. He has also made other hateful comments like “There’s no community that’s more racist in America than the black community.” This guy is making a lot, but he is really earning his money. And who can forget Brigitte Gabriel, another Fox News staple who demonizes Muslims at every turn.  Gabriel runs Act for America!, which the SPLC has noted is part of the “anti-Muslim inner circle.” Gabriel has given us such anti-Muslim classics as “America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America. They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department.” How much does Gabriel get paid to offer that type of garbage? Per Act for America’s 2012 tax returns, she was paid a $132,000 base salary and $84,090 as a bonus (PDF). I wonder if she earns that bonus by dishing out such off-the-wall claims as “tens of thousands of Islamic militants now reside in America…attending our colleges and universities, even infiltrating our government.” So who funds these organizations? Well that’s more challenging to determine. It’s like trying to figure the names of the people who fund the Klan or neo-Nazis—not too many people advertise their support for them. But the Fear, Inc. report found that certain key foundations have donated close to $60 million in recent years to these anti-Muslim advocates. The most notable are the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Scaife Foundation, which each have donated over $5 million (PDF) to David Horowitz’s Freedom Center. The Scaife Foundation also donated over $3 million to Frank Gaffney’s CSP. Why do they fund these groups is a big question. Duss explained that in his view it’s “because a group of hawkish conservative funders clearly see a political benefit to stoking Americans’ fears and suspicions of their fellow citizens who are Muslims.” This means we may see even more money flowing to these anti-Muslim advocates in the 2016 presidential race. The bottom line is that the anti-Muslim industry is lucrative and not going anywhere soon. But at least now we can understand why some of these people engage in such hateful activities: It’s a living. And a nice one.

Depth means to refuse resolutely to remain satisfied with the surface, and to insist on breaking through the facade. This means refusing to accept a preordained idea, however profound it claims to be; it means moreover that we should not accept one’s own ticket, one’s own slogan, one’s own membership of a group as the guarantee of truth, but should place one’s trust only in the ruthless power of reflection, without deciding that the truth is now fixed and that you have got hold of it once and for all. Where such attitudes survive, particularly in the tendency to identify with groups, I would say that they bear the marks of totalitarianism, however opposed to totalitarianism they may seem to be in their publicly declared views. Resistance means refusing to allow the law governing your own behaviour to be prescribed by the ostensible or actual facts. In that sense resistance transcends the objects while remaining closely in touch with them.

so this guy has been coming to our dojo who is an American expat that lives in Taiwan (he’s only in bmore short term) and has a background in Yang taijiquan

The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and slowness on a plane of immanence. In the same way, a musical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slowness of sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.