In the interests of accumulating resources, I think it is worthwhile reproducing the key passages from Anti-Oedipus on capitalism, fictional quantities and the Thing.
'The segmentary territorial machine makes uses of scission to exorcise fusion, and impedes the concentration of power by maintaining the organs of chieftanry in a relationship of impotence with the group; as though the savages themselves sensed the rise of the imperial Barbarian, who will come nonetheless from without and will overcode all their codes.
But the greatest danger would be yet another dispersion, a scission such that all the possibilities of coding would be supressed: decoded flows, flowing on a blind, mute, deterritorialized socius - such is the nightmare that the primitive social machine exorcises with all its forces, and its segmetary articulations.
The primitive territorial machine is not ignorant of exchange, commerce, and industry; it exorcises them, localizes them, cordons them off, encastes them and maintains the merchant and the blacksmith in a subordinate position, so that the flows of exchange and the flows of production do not manage to break the codes in favour of their abstract or fictional quantities.
And isn't that also what Oedipus, the fear of incest, is all about? If capitalism is the universal truth, it is so in the sense that makes the capitalism the negative of all social formations, it is the thing, the unnamable, the generalized decoding of all flows that reveals a contrario the secret of these formations, coding the flows, and even overcoding them, rather than letting anything escape coding. Primitive societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at the end of history, it is capitalism that results from a long history of contingencies and accidents, and that brings on this end. It cannot be said that the previous formations did not see the Thing that only came from without by rising from within, and that at all costs had to be prevented from rising. Whence the possibility of a retrospective reading of all history in terms of capitalism.'
Anti-Oedipus, 152-153
Mark, another coincidence; I was going to post a very similar piece on D&G and The Thing (now the story’s climax: I selected the same picture for my post; the first one I mean).
Posted by: Reza at August 2, 2004 08:45 AMIs this the place to pick up the "petro-punk" discussion?
Mark - did you get Reza's ref. to the Koontz movie? (or book i guess, haven't read it). Sorry, name momentarily escapes me, but despite being fairly weak (!) as a film, the content is actually quite amazing - based on a tellurian petro-blob entity which has haunted human history since the dawn of time. Definitely interesting.
Posted by: Nick at August 3, 2004 01:49 AMOh yeah, it was called "Phantoms" (1998) directed by Joe Chappelle (gets 0% on Rottentomatoes.com - meaning no positive reviews could be found - but then they clearly don't 'get' petropunk)
Posted by: Nick at August 3, 2004 02:21 AMNo, didn't get the ref but will look out for the film --- loving the idea of petropunk!
Posted by: mark at August 3, 2004 04:19 AMNick:
saw the movie; 'CHEESY' as you once mentioned (Ben Affleck is a poor shithead as always) but like it very much. however, the novel is far more OILY. Maybe we should bring some of our old discussions on Petropunk / Petropuppets (Col. West, Jay, Wahhab, et al) to the Hyperstition archive.
Mark:
Yes there is no positive review on the movie; some critics have called it the worst possible SF movie (that means it should be intriguing) ... the novel too has been trashed into book cemeteries; however, check this out if you look for the book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425079937/qid=1091518696/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_11_7/026-9503799-1215653
just to stimulate: the petro-blob is called THE ANCIENT ENEMY throughout the book; in an exorcistic scenario, a former paleontologist and now an occult columnist named Flyte (called the professor of ancient epidemics) interferes and ...