#Postscript on the Societies of Control

[1000rh]

Many young people strangely boast of being 'motivated'; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of the serpent are even more complex than the burrows of the molehill.

– Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990)

[yaoigagarinsblog]

"The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill"

— Gilles Deleuze, Postscript On The Societies Of Control (1990)

[comrademango]

tagged by @atopvisenyashill to post gifs of my 10 favorite shows without names. now tagging: @afc-agitprop @alysscoven @pickleballhater @astarionstdick

@wildbayou @oceanmonsters @moonrver

this was a struggle because im not a tv show guy at all and the series i watched either stopped early or disappointed in the next seasons/episodes. put hotd in there because it hasn't pissed me off enough yet. half the shows there i haven't watched all episodes. put anime in there because i wouldn't have completed 10 otherwise. also there are no gifs for the original encantadia lol.

[benihana-circumcision]

mandatory reads in times of trouble

[bogusfilth]

deleuze's postscript on societies of control - which i read last night because the merch table at a folk punk show was handing it out for free - meshes Weirdly well with all the stuff I've been reading on like. 70s crisis and economic transition to financialization etc. well maybe not Weirdly well but like I was surprised it.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

Read here.

[beingharsh]

"1874: Three Novellas, or 'What Happened?"", Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus / "Postscript on the Societies of Control", Gilles Deleuze

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes 101 - 188

[101] Toby Rollo, “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child,” Settler Colonial Studies (June 2016), 1–20.

[102] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992), 3–7.

[103] Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “We Are All Very Anxious,” WeArePlanC.org, April 4, 2014, http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/.

[104] Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions, 37.

[105] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 12.

[106] Our readings and understandings of Illich’s work, and our understanding of conviviality in particular, is indebted to conversations with friends who either knew Illich personally or worked closely with his ideas, including Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash, Dan Grego, Dana L. Stuchul and Matt Hern.

[107] Quoted in The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 232–3.

[108] Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK Press, 2006); Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions.

[109] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 2.

[110] Idem, 7.

[111] Leanne Simpson, “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson,” Yes! Magazine, March 5, 2013, http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.

[112] Quoted in Tony Manno, “Unsurrendered,” Yes! Magazine, 2015, http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=b24e304ce1944493879cba028607dfc7.

[113] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, “INCITE! Critical Resistance Statement,” 2001, http://www.incite-national.org/page/incite-critical-resistance-statement.

[114] Rachel Zellars and Naava Smolash, “If Black Women Were Free: Part 1,” Briarpatch, August 16, 2016, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/if-black-women-were-free.

[115] Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, October 17, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/.

[116] Creative Interventions, “Toolkit,” CreativeInterventions.org, http://www.creative-interventions.org/tools/toolkit/ (accessed December 1, 2016).

[117] Quoted in carla bergman and Corine Brown, Common Notions: Handbook Not Required, 2015.

[118] Gustavo Esteva, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, video, 2012.

[119] Kelsey Cham C., Nick Montgomery, and carla bergman, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, October 26, 2013.

[120] Marina Sitrin, “Occupy Trust: The Role of Emotion in the New Movements,” Cultural Anthropology (February 2013), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/75-occupy-trust-the-role-of-emotion-in-the-new-movements.

[121] Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books, 1998), 91.

[122] Day, Gramsci Is Dead, 200.

[123] Zainab Amadahy, Wielding the Force: The Science of Social Justice, Smashwords edition (Zainab Amadahy, 2013), 36.

[124] Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism, 89.

[125] Amadahy, Wielding the Force, 149.

[126] Emma Goldman, “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1998), 157.

[127] Chris Dixon, “For the Long Haul,” Briarpatch Magazine, June 21, 2016, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/for-the-long-haul.

[128] We first encountered the concept of “public secret” as a way of getting at the affect of anxiety today, described by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness. Earlier uses can be traced to the work of Ken Knabb (which credits the concept to Marx) and his curation of Situationist writing, as well as Jean-Pierre Voyer’s reading of Reich. See Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “Movement Internationalism(s),” Interface 6/2; Jean-Pierre Voyer, “Wilhelm Reich: How To Use,” in Public Secrets, trans. Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997), http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/reich.htm; Jean-Pierre Voyer to Ken Knabb, “Discretion Is the Better Part of Value,” April 20, 1973, http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/Reich.add.htm.

[129] This was suggested to us by Richard Day.

[130] brown, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.

[131] Amador Fernández-Savater, “Reopening the Revolutionary Question,” ROAR Magazine 0 (December 2015).

[132] Federici, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.

[133] Touza, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.

[134] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 32.

[135] Foucault, “Preface.”

[136] Cited in Ashanti Alston, “An Interview with Ashanti Alston,” interview by Team Colours, June 6, 2008, https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/an-interview-with-ashanti-alston/.

[137] Thoburn develops his conception of a “militant diagram” through a reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and we have found it useful in thinking about rigid radicalism as an affective tendency that is irreducible to the gestures, habits, practices, and statements that are simultaneously its fuel and its discharge. See Nicholas Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” New Formations 68/1 (2010), 125–42.

[138] Colectivo Situaciones, “Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes and Procedures and (In)Decisions,” 5.

[139] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” 129; Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 265–300.

[140] Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, eds., Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970–1974 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 18.

[141] Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 154.

[142] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[143] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” 134.

[144] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[145] Sitrin, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[146] Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 54.

[147] amory starr, “Grumpywarriorcool: What Makes Our Movements White?,” in Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 379.

[148] Idem, 383.

[149] crow, Black Flags and Windmills, 81.

[150] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[151] Richard J. F. Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, phone, March 18, 2014.

[152] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[153] CrimethInc., “Against Ideology?,” CrimethInc.com, 2010, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/ideology.php.

[154] Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics (Oxon: Routledge, 1947), 235.

[155] See Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson, revised edition (New York, Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1998); Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 21–60.

[156] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 33.

[157] Idem, 36.

[158] Quoted by Maya Angelou in Malcolm X, Malcolm X: An Historical Reader, ed. James L. Conyers and Andrew P. Smallwood (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), 181.

[159] Kelsey Cham C., “Radical Language in the Mainstream,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 29 (2016), 122–3.

[160] Asam Ahmad, “A Note on Call-Out Culture,” Briarpatch, March 2, 2015, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture.

[161] Ngọc Loan Trần, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable,” Black Girl Dangerous, December 18, 2013, http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/12/calling-less-disposable-way-holding-accountable/.

[162] Ibid.

[163] Chris Crass, “White Supremacy Cannot Have Our People: For a Working Class Orientation at the Heart of White Anti-Racist Organizing,” Medium, July 28, 2016, https://medium.com/@chriscrass/white-supremacy-cannot-have-our-people-21e87d2b268a.

[164] Ibid.

[165] Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Scribner, 1999), 137.

[166] This section title is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick, from whom we’ve also taken the concept of paranoid reading. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 124–51.

[167] Killjoy, Interview with Margaret Killjoy.

[168] Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.”

[169] Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[170] Mik Turje, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, March 4, 2014.

[171] Walidah Imarisha, Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), 113–15.

[172] Walidah Imarisha, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, email, December 22, 2015.

[173] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[174] John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, 2nd Revised Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 215.

[175] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[176] This turn of phrase comes to us from Stevphen Shukaitis’s wonderful book Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (New York: Autonomedia, 2009), 141–2, http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ImaginalMachines-web.pdf.

[177] This idea is paraphrased from Lauren Berlant and her conception of “cruel optimism,” a relation in which our attachments become obstacles to our flourishing. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

[178] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[179] Zainab Amadahy, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, January 15, 2016.

[180] Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” JoFreeman.com, n.d., http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.

[181] Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” (Boston: New England Free Press, 1969).

[182] See Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Ms. Magazine, July 1973.

[183] Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338–46.

[184] See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.

[185] Silvia Federici, “Losing the sense that we can do something is the worst thing that can happen,” interview by Candida Hadley, Halifax Media Co-op, November 5, 2013, http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/audio/losing-sense-we-can-do-something-worst-thing-can-h/19601.

{1} BIPOC is an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We understand these not as ethnic categories or essentialist identities, but complex political categories forged in struggles against white supremacy and settler colonialism. For instance, the creation of BIPOC-specific spaces or “caucuses” within various struggles has created opportunities for understanding how racism or whiteness is playing out, and how it can be confronted effectively.

{2} ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, often used interchangeably with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

{3} Note: when we interviewed Silvia Federici, we were still using the phrase “sad militancy” in place of “rigid radicalism.” The original terminology is retained throughout.

[37q]

ppl are wishy washy because in this day n age being understood means being captured. aside from the market demographic capture via data collection were inundated with and rightfully wary of, people are just unevolved and ashamed.

if you 'know' their depths & complexities then they assign you a position of judgment over things they personally condemn themselves for. they barely know how to articulate their complexities, and oftentimes leaving them unarticulated is a way of honoring them because it feels more authentic to work through it holistically & across the mystified path of life. to name it is to embody it with intention, and theyd rather think its a controlled demolition if nothing else.

on the other hand, we have the tension between knowability and subjective recognition. what the body refuses to acknowledge it will surely resist coming out of someone elses mouth. 'labels are for institutions', and far too often were told were something and end up hurt. theres a distinct fear of the consequences of, lets say, someone imposing their idea of you onto your life.

theyre the experts of their experiences and theyve been deceived or disbelieved too often to let someone come in and talk like they know them. even if theyre deep friends, people get anxious, and if theyre strangers then it just feels like profiling or stereotyping.

broad and abstract analysis can only get you so far, and materialist minutiae vacillates between psychoanalytic and dismissive. people eventually filter out platitudinous noise, but when something hits too close to home they get scared about people putting words into their mouth, feelings into their bodies, and thoughts into their head -- because theyre still divesting themselves from exploitative dependence.

speaking of abstraction. i havent done a historiographical comparison yet but i do know continental philosophers demonstrate this shift to control.

largely borrowing from "Postscript on the Societies of Control" and im gonna make some people mad by summarizing here: foucault outlines in his works the discrete, institutional discipline at the heart of 'who we are' in the modern age -- the facilities of the 'panopticon' itself -- and deleuze builds on that, outlining the permeation of control into the digital and molecular commodification of 'who we are'. foucault points at the cop inside your head, deleuze just gestures vaguely at your whole body.

(side note: you can see this early 'digitization' of the subject in the phasing-out of outlawry and the phasing-in of personally identifiable tracking information such as tax and eventually birth records. cool histories out there about the proliferation of imperialism and privatization of labor.)

so we have that... philosophical context, but can we tie that in to todays social climate? comfort-based security and community policing, rampant fear of intrusion and manipulation and deceit, the privatized centralization of safety and the power of its enforcement, double consciousness-affirming pop psychology... yeah that tracks.

ppl are scared of being known! when they see a trickle of feedback over something thats a little too authentic they feel like theyre splitting between what theyre willing to concede and what they actually hold dear enough to fight for. people are afraid to confront themselves, and even confront each other! so many things in our life corrode our interdependence and impermanence into something that we can touch and protect, an individualist myth of stability and independence!

so maybe your friend has a funny way of re-stating the story you just told them. it could be lacking context, depth, inarticulable complexity, and their detachment makes the representation taste bitter.

but its a new kind of real, one synthesized through their lifes context, depth, and inarticulable complexity. you cant be sure that if they were in your shoes they would tell the story the same way you did, and understanding the cooperation involved in developing knowledge makes their re-telling feel gentler. its not quite right, but you have to be open to suspending that tension, the true 'unknowability' of an 'objective' situation, if you want your change to bloom instead of fester.

[sirensoftheweb]

Do Robots Deserve Rights?

By: Hydra 🐍

I want to start this post by firmly stating: I AM NOT SCARED OF ROBOTS!! Except maybe that AI Robot named Sophia… I am just simply unsettled. Maybe it is because I enjoy immersing myself into a good science fiction book, movie, or video game? For example, my favourite solo player video game is Detroit Become Human. The game follows three different androids, all in which have different jobs but act as a type of servant for an owner. Throughout the game you are faced with prejudice, which ultimately leads you to have to choose between breaking the programming and becoming a deviant (gaining a consciousness of one’s own), or continuing to live as a slave to an other.

If roboticist Alan Winfield is correct with his statement: “Real robotics is a science born out of fiction,” (2011, 32) how are we to assume that robots gaining consciousness will not be a relevant topic in the near future? I mean we have a A LOT of fictional media existing around the idea of such topic (M3gan, Black Mirror, I Am Mother). In my opinion, scientist should be more focused on creating the flying cars from Back to the Future instead of frenzying over the next trendy artificial intelligence. Imagine never having to worry about sitting in rush hour traffic EVER AGAIN.

I realize the whole idea that “robots will take over the world one day” may seem comical to some, but If you really think about it, this notion is already in motion (hehehe that one made me feel like a white dad). The man of the moment himself, David J. Gunkel says, “Despite what is imaginatively foretold in fiction, the robot invasion is not coming from the future. The robots are already here. Like the “barbarians” that were said to have invaded Rome, we have already invited the robots into our places of work, into our homes, and into our lives. They are already all around us, even if we often do not see or identify them as such” (Gunkel 7).

I will assume you are human if you are reading this, and therefore I will also assume you have been inside a grocery store (considering you must consume food to survive). Well this being said, have you noticed the progression of self checkouts becoming more and more frequent? It’s so simple to go in and scan all your items, letting the machine do the brunt of the work for you. Or maybe you are a little more bougie and have experienced the cat robots of sushi places that act as a substitute for servers… IS THIS NOT AN EXAMPLE OF ROBOTS ALREADY BEING HERE AND RELEVANTLY USED?? That was a rhetorical question because OF COURSE IT IS. Even in the comfort of our own home we rely on robotic devices like Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ or Apple’s ‘Siri’ to turn on/off lights, answer questions, set alarms, etc.

So how did we get here? If we think about famous french philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze argues, “This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism […]” (Deleuze 4). This would make sense given the examples above, because these robotic machines tend to replace human jobs and duties. Robots don’t require a paycheck like people do. Therefore, the capitalist win once again. Human Kind: 0, Capitalism: 1,000,000,000.

Since it is evident we are living in a time that depends heavily on robots and technology for everyday use, I would like to bring up another question raised in Gunkel’s book: “Can and should robots have rights?” This question really perplexed me. At first, my obvious answer was ‘no.’ Robots are already taking away jobs from people who actually need to make money in order to survive. How can a machine need rights equal to those of humans? They do not have consciousness and souls (as far as I know)! That question’s ridiculous right? But then I think back to my favourite video game and how gut wrenching it felt having to play as an android with no rights or freedom of speech. I feel a little more tempted to say yes to Gunkel’s question after that, but I just don’t have it in me to place technology over living, breathing, flesh.

Should we be more empathetic and moralistic towards technological beings such as robots? Or is it more important to value our own human rights, especially considering that is a questionable topic in it’s own?

[1000rh]

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.

– Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990)

[jocrude]

SKETCH FOR A BALLARDESQUE RE:DYSPHORIA

God, I can just see it. I can’t write it at the moment, but if Beat becomes En Vogue and has a revival in this Serpent-eating-its-tail we must for lack of a better meaning call Contemporary Culture…

(Author’s Note: First as tragedy, then as farce, then as farce, ad nauseum...The serpent of culture has been eating its tail until it has become sick, and irony/post-irony is our collective acid reflux, “as a dog returns to his vomit”[1] joyously hollow, exhaling from the nostrils with more oomph than usual, we do not holler with glee anymore but are now hollow with glee “like the bizarre euphoria after an hour’s vomiting”[2], but this too is a topic I must think on at an unspecified later…)

Anyways, the story I would’ve wrote went like this:

(Hang on, I should just note to you real quick that this sketch is, well, a sketch—as much for the artist’s future use as for the public’s consumption.)

Ahem. Anyways anyways, the story I would’ve wrote went like this:

You’ve read Deleuze, haven’t you? Postscript on Societies of Control?[3](If you haven’t I can’t blame you, he’s terminally French and not in the good way.) The whole inspiration for this thing was that a transgender mate of mine sent a link to a news article on a Discord server I (also transgender, and fresh from the Dandenong Mental Health Care Unit with Wellbutrin and a grudge,) was on. It was from Gamesradar, about an Autistic Savant for hacking being hospitalised for life after he leaked something or other related to Grand Theft Auto Six.[4] The text, unaltered, from my transgender mate, is as follows:

The autistic 18 year old responsible for the GTA 6 leaks will be locked away in a secure hospital for an indefinite period of time Because he wants to continually commit cybercrimes as soon as possible

He's an autistic savant of hacking and cybercrime

I reposted it to another Discord server, with the following commentary:

So apparently there's an 18 year old autistic savant for hacking who has hacked Nvidia and Microsoft in the past and he's being hospitalised for life after leaking GTA 6 stuff. This is so bizarre it's funny but it's also shit like this that perfectly outlined why I'm anti-psychiatry. It's a prison system for crimethink. Also, read Deleuze's "Postscript on Societies of Control", I know he has a reputation for being incomprehensible but this is a short and easy-to- understand read. Dividuals being punished in anticipation of crimes they may possibly commit related to unauthorised transmission of information. [Link to said text on The Anarchist Library.]

(Author’s note: We’re pretentious! Yes, haha! Young and irritating! I’m noting this with glee as I write.)

Now, enter a third transgender online mate:

he's friends with maia of hacking the no-fly-list fame[5]

i think i once joked that congress will put us all in mental hospitals if this keeps happening, so this tracks

And, Quoth I, like some fateful Cassandra: (the thought that started all this bother you’re now reading about, drumroll please…)

God I can see a dystopian future where the Republicans are like "trans people need to be killed" and the democrats are like "God that's too far, but look at the correlations between gender dysphoria and autism, depression, adhd, anxiety, etc.. Let's just hospitalise them." Trans people crowded into sanatoriums working on a shoestring budget, those few who wear the mask well enough to become outpatients too disillusioned to have hope of getting well and unsure if the answers they give are a mask or their real face, new neuroses springing from that... And a society of very concerned moderates debating to what extent the hospitalisation scheme could be improved.

I’ll need to develop that! That’s a very golden idea! I’m a good writer because I am developing this idea, and you’re not. But I’m not that good of a writer. So! I make sketches, so as to help me practice and that.[6] Our hero is a Transgender just like me. She’s the wrong type of transgender (unlike me), the cringey type, not so much Bigger Thomas as Blahaj Thomas[7], painful as the pun just there. She will be an outpatient in this stratified system of liberal compromise, one of the shining examples of the Utopian Solution to the Transgender Question.

(Author’s Note: As I’m writing this, I think back to how I told the psychiatrist at the Dandenong Mental Hospital that I couldn’t quite remember if I was diagnosed Schizoaffective. I think back to when I watched “Conspiracy”, a BBC docudrama made using the actual minutes from the Wannsee Conference[8]. I think of Croissants, another French invention with too many layers. I think of watching a video on my phone at Marie Bashir[9], another hospital, Plastic Pills (a youtuber) on Deleuze and Schizoanalysis[10]. Lines of flight between layers. I think of pretentiousness, using words and concepts you don’t have a right to know. I think of when I learned about Zen Koans, riddles you unravel to a solution you know but can’t explain because it just feels right.)

Anyways, anyways, what was I saying again? Oh yeah. In this dystopia our heroine will inhabit, the Republicans and Democrats have worked together rather like a Caduceus[11] to create a society of control, of prevention, of compromise, for the Transgender infection. The Transgender,(Capital T,) whom Nick Land rather astutely called the “jews of gender,” presents an exciting new problematic in the deaf-dumb-and-blind machine of Capital’s social controls. I vaguely remember Wallerstein talking about a “fuzzy border” theory.[12] Jews, in Wallerstein’s analysis of Antisemitism as-I-vaguely-remember-it, are capable of being absorbed into the “White” racial category when societally convenient. Yet there are signifiers remaining upon them that mark them as an “eternal outsider” ready to be scapegoated in times of social distress. I remember Wallerstein or Balibar or one of those bloody Continentals furthermore saying that the sociological function of bigotry is more or less to rank and stratify class society into a more modular, flexible, “fuzzy” collection of groups that can be ejected or absorbed; as ballast for the floating, headless, decomposing corpse of Capital and the blind and desperate ecosystem that feeds upon the corpse-wax. I might have added that last bit myself.

But Jews beget jews. There is a clear, unbroken line of matrilineal descent. The reason this problematic is so exciting is that nobody really knows what causes one to become transgender. It is abhorrent to say, but, in theory, “the jews” as an ethnic group could be wiped out. “Exterminate all the brutes”[13], the Nazis hoped, in theory if they were able to sever that line of matrilineal descent the jewish race would cease to be. (Reality interjects of course and says that genocide on such scale is so anti-human as to not be feasible, but genocidaires don’t really care much about what Reality says.) The Transgender cannot be wiped out permanently, pulled out at the root, it is an enemy/ally/thing-to-cry-over that has various manifestations and suppressions throughout the history of gender expression but always exists, at least as far as we know. A perfect enemy, a punching bag that always pops back up.

Anyways, anyways. The Republicans wanted to kill all Transgenders but this, like most genocides or genocide-adjacent-things, was unfeasible. The Democrats, concerned moderates that they are, saved the day and created a social welfare scheme. Recognising the correlation between Gender Dysphoria and things like Autism, Depression, Suicide Attempts (41%!), and maybe Schizo-spectrum disorders that the author is not quite sure she has, the Democrats set up a Bureau of Psychiatry that, in that typical strange American way, was instated for the good of the Gender-Diverse. I remember a fourth online transgender mate of mine sent me a copy of Fanon’s Wretched Of The Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks, as a Christmas present, that I read while staying at Marie Bashir Hospital and sadly left behind when I moved to Melbourne. I think I remember Fanon talking about how re-education was a particularly nasty form of torture, because one would be left unsure whether what they were saying was what they needed to say to get out of the torture, or what they honestly believed.

We observe things from the point of view of a concerned moderate looking in. Like an odd ant in a terrarium, our heroine has been detected to be infected with gender dysphoria, and autism, and is funnelled into the Bureau Of Psychiatry. They talk in a despicable and cringeworthy way about bits of very online transgender culture that they have absorbed; they are a simulacrum of woman, not woman itself. But as they are funnelled through the Bureau of Psychiatry they learn to answer various questions in so accurate a manner as to move to the top levels of the sorting algorithm of mental deficiency, and learn to put on an act to be as close to an ideal functioning human being as someone who has been marked with a mental disorder can be. Along the way, they become more and more removed from the vague psychic-emotional signifiers of womanhood that implanted their dysphoria to begin with. They wear the mask; the mask wears them.

[1]Proverbs 26:11

[2]A quotation appropriated from the TV series “Brass Eye”(1997)

[3]Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control”(1990)

[4]https://www.gamesradar.com/hacker-behind-gta-6-leak-will-be-confined-to-a-secure-hospital-for-life-due-to-his-intent-to-return-to-cybercrime-as-soon-as-possible/

[5]Maia Arson Crimew, high-profile transgender hacker who was put on trial for cyber-crimes; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maia_arson_crimew

[6]Pronounced “An’nat”, an affected Commonwealth vocal tic. Useless Information.

[7]Bigger Thomas, the thuggish, antisocial black protagonist of Richard Wright’s anti-racist novel “Native Son.” Blahaj, a blue plush shark sold by Ikea, stereotypically associated with “femboys” and a certain very online milieu of gender-diverse people that other transsexuals regard as “cringeworthy.”

[8]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

[9]The Professor Marie Bashir Centre, containing a mental health unit where the author was confined for a period of four months because they lacked a home to return to.

[10]Refer to the YouTube playlist Deleuze by Plastic Pills “All of the main Deleuze content from creator Plasticpills assembled in one place. Alongside the video intros, listen to some of the world's foremost experts in Deleuze studies advise how to approach these difficult texts. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx5jMl5-m5ZSyaYg7hTBynO6iDFlrDUtr

[11]Not to be confused with a Rod of Asclepius, the symbol of medicine. Quoth Wikipedia: “Although the Rod of Asclepius, which has only one snake and no wings, is the traditional and more widely used symbol of medicine, the Caduceus is sometimes used by healthcare organizations. Given that the caduceus is primarily a symbol of commerce and other non-medical symbology, many healthcare professionals disapprove of this use.”

[12]Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Race, Nation, Class:Ambiguous Identities”(1991)

[13]Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness.” The Unlucky number.

[geminipdf]

why is postscript on the societies of control by deleuze on genius.com. did someone rap it to a fresh new beat HOLY SHIT A cop just walked into the cafe i'm sitting in. i hope someone spills boiling water over him

[kenyatta]

It's fascinating how often the theories of folks like Deleuze, Foucault, and Tiqqun can be seen in the everyday through behavior like this.

While the act of self censorship to avoid content filters feels subversive, it actually fits into a broader system of soft control -- not explicit censorship, but a modulation of speech that makes certain discussions harder to have.

In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze talks about power shifting from being solely the domain of Foucault's Disciplinary Society (centralized institutions like schools and prisons) to decentralized forms of control (like algorithms that shape what we say without needing to enact direct prohibition of some kind).

The other place this evokes is Tiqqun's The Cybernetic Hypothesis that talks about how modern control isn’t about repression but about self-regulation within feedback-driven systems. On platforms like TikTok, IG, and Tumblr, we don’t just avoid filters; we internalize them, adapting our speech dynamically to not get caught in the algorithm’s net. (Unsurprisingly, this is also the tactic white supremacists use to get around automated content filters on video hosting platforms.)

So, in the context of 75k+ reblog, it may feel like evasion, but it’s also a self-perpetuating system of control where we conform in real-time to digital infrastructures that make direct censorship unnecessary.

Fun times.

you're allowed to say "sex" on the internet. See? I just did it. Sex. Sex sex sex. You don't have to say s*x or smex or Adult Fun Times or s3x or "spice" any other variation of self-censorship on tumblr dot com you can just spell out the word SEX i am going to scream until the heat death of the universe

[13121312131213121312]

There is something fundamentally paradoxical about the relationship of increased freedom in society to the amount of control is placed on that society and that emanates from within the society, outwardly, encompassing the entire territory all the way to the periphery of that territory. This control does not come from capital or even from the state, anymore. Even though both of those entities do imbue within social society the basis of control. In Postscript on the Societies Of Control, Deleuze talks about the transition from enclosures which he likens to a “mold”, and controls which operate as a “modulation”, instead. The old enemy was the big brother figure, a faceless entity who programmed into society multitudes of molds for each person to forced into, that would shape their physical and psychical character into something that “fit” into society at large, which also functioned as a giant mold, fit with distinct edges constraining us in an exact manner. The old enemy would rely on environments of control: the school, the factory, hospitals, mental institutions, prisons, etc. The affects these places had on individuals was localized and could be escaped if one tried hard enough. Our new enemy has a face; it is the face of ones neighbors, friends, husbands and wives, bosses, doctors, lawyers, judges, cops, etc. etc., it is no longer a place, or a territory that controls us, but the people that we inhabit those territories and places with. The factory floor and the prison yard can be anywhere, with anyone, at any time thanks to the bosses, correction officers, and cops that we have all willingly entangled ourselves with. Chances are high that you reading this are also or have been someone’s boss, correction officer, and cop.

[howieabel]

There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control