4.11. How to escape from axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down? - Part XXXII - Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

How to escape from axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down?

Part XXXII - Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

Here we finally return to the plot of money and revolution, under the sign of the Œdipic contrast. If, in our modern empirical experience, our societies are pervaded with economic optimism – descending from the eighteenth-century positivism thoroughly analysed by Marx at the socio-productive level and by Nietzsche at the impulsive-energetic level – and with cybernetic processual evolution of monetary and credit circuits farsightedly described by Deleuze and Guattari, what strategies could be adopted to escape from commercial axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down? Which relation exists between money and revolution? Shall we switch to a detailed and bureaucratic plan descending from a totalising “keys-in-hand” theory that explains and foresees everything, according to fixed relations between the forms of the Earth and of human set theory, or shall we adopt a plan of impulsive consistency corresponding to the always productive swinging energy of desire, of the real and of imbalance? Between organisation-administration and chaos-creation, what levels of synthesis and innovation should we choose in order to “search and destroy” and to then rebuild? Shall we build revolutionary subjects and identities within class or economic determinations, or shall we de-construct forms, to discover the “hollowness” of subjects and to increase the speed of activation of the revolutionary “process” of the irregular idle, of the non-exchangeable group and of the community of singularity? Nonetheless, from a different perspective, as Ewald seemed to argue, if the seventies history has handed over to us a “fact” in all its tragic evidence, that is the disappearance of the social revolutionary horizon, that is, the sinking of the concept of insurrection as magnet for political action from the Enlightenment onwards. Are we assisting to the Death of Revolution as palingenetic event and qualified creative rupture, mother of modern politics – as Foucault seems to foresee after 1978 and after the Rhizosphere period, or are we facing the perpetual revolutionary becoming as human condition at the times of post-revolution and post-capitalist control-based neo-societies – as Deleuze and Guattari argued in the multi-stratum desert of A Thousand Plateaus? Something has changed after 1978, revolutionaries become spectres like beautiful losers, as if the sedition and the overturning of desire on the carpet of Reality were symmetrical to the decline of industry and to the erosion of the historically fixed capital. The productive practices of industry and the concept of cathartic revolution decay together with the West, in a miserable and stagnant dusk. To us, authors of this volume, the intersection between “money and revolution” suggested by Klossowski and Deleuze, and by the whole anti-œdipic rhizosphere, seems still profoundly relevant, no longer in the westerly vulgate but instead on a global scale, the only possible one today. In the wildest present circumstances, the reproduction of money and liquidity has not stopped, neither have the attempts to become revolutionaries and pathologically seditious, in every single planetary background. Daily events speak for themselves. As Foucault consciously wrote, the triangle of “desire, value and simulacrum” still dominates us, and we seem unable to grasp it nor to understand it in its horrific geometrical effectiveness. How to escape from axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down: the question of the Anti-Œdipus is still relevant in the present, as it has been in the past. Part of the answer, within the context of the evolution of the relation between technology and liberation, can certainly be generated and developed by the conflation of three specific fields of our age: cyberpunk, blockchain/DAO technology, and the heterarchical movement P2P. The new alliance between peer to peer – a digital evolution of anarchic and self-organised reticular logics of autonomist philosophy of existentialist punk dis-intermediation – and DIY – the do-it-yourself already post-capitalist in its very own nature. The fourth pillar, which has to escort the three fields indicated above, could be the philosophy of the rhizosphere, or of the future. The “philosophy of the future”, in order to return joyful and dangerous, must abandon the collusive position that has occupied in the industry of knowledge and of wisdom, and return to being an informal peripatetic wayfarer – a gypsy scholarship. With great awareness it must experiment, fail, create: study, deconstruct and reconstruct, even itself. The gypsy scholarship, though, conceived as pedagogy of freedom and insurrection, cannot become science, absorbed by institutions: it is like a gust of The Fixer, or the glow of a moment lasting for a century.

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