Deleuze’s Communizing Currents: introducing Deleuze introducing communization theory

John Paetsch

In-person and Online

The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, Endnotes, Théorie Communiste, Troploin—these name a ghostly process at work today: communization. For all, this process would displace definitively the capitalist mode of production (along with its conception of “value”) with a communist mode of production and a novel conception of “value” (one more in accord with “material wealth”). Beyond that there is little agreement: whether the process is latent or active; whither it tends; which kinds of struggle or forms of life participate in it; whether it is a means to communism or already communism itself—these are the points of divergence. We will focus less on mapping these divergences, more on grasping them as conjugations of several “problematics” traced out by a philosopher who valorized always divergence over convergence, multiplicity over unity, complexity over simplicity: Gilles Deleuze. I say again: we will not be reducing the problems of communization theory to those of Deleuze! Grasping the former as conjugations of the latter preserves the irreducible differences between them even as it facilitates the mutual information of one by the other. Tracing the currents of communization theory from Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy is one way into the labyrinth of contemporary political life, if what we have presently can be called even “life” …. That Deleuze takes the struggle to the terrain of time vivifies anew the communizing responses to the contours of contemporary capitalist society. We’ll focus on Deleuze’s texts, but with an eye towards bringing into focus our present “historical conjuncture.” No prerequisites necessary—though some experience with exploitation, alienation, and capitalist “discipline” would be helpful (?) ….

Facilitator: John Paetsch received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Georgia. His dissertation—The Texture of Foliated Time—explores why Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and G.W. Leibniz all entwine “continuity” with “heterogeneity”—whether considering how a life dissipates time or a body diffuses force. Sad to say, it spares neither philosophy nor aesthetics nor physics nor mathematics—blame his confidante, O.B. Bassler! A portion of it will appear soon in Deleuze and Guattari Studies. He is presently translating the rudely neglected essays of the philosopher-mathematician Gilles Châtelet for Urbanomic. He has published anomalous poetry with Gauss PDF (text here, review here) and Make Now Books. He has a Master’s of Liberal Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, a minor in mathematics, and a tendency to disregard the distinctions between genres. He teaches at Temple University.

Time: Saturday, February 1, 10am-2pm
In-person cost: $90.
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Online cost: Visit Online Seminars.
Readings: From A Thousand Plateaus, 12-14. (We’ll focus in particular on plateaus 12 and 13.) Optional reading: Endnotes, “Bring out your dead;” and Nicole Pepperell, “Capitalism: Some Disassembly Required.”