Monday, March 16, 2015

Paranoid Subjectivity and the Challenges of Cognitive Mapping...


Via 'patacritical researcher Joni Spigler:

Anthony writes "One of the great ambiguities of the present is whether and how to attribute plotting to state or capital, or to myriad agencies pullulating in the intermundia between them. Jameson's 'Totality as Conspiracy' was of course anything but a counsel to abandon the (in any case inevitable) activity of totalisation, but a manner of tracking how socio-economic compulsion was figured and displaced as para-political agency. Piglia explores a way to bring totality and conspiracy closer together, by considering Pierre Klossowski's view of the economy as 'an invisible and multiple manipulation that knots and rivets individuals, groups and ensembles to the movements of money', amounting to a 'practice of experimentation on subjects'. But the upshot of this conspiratorial imaginary is not paranoid passivity, it is a counter-conspiratorial activity, in which the artist conjures an opposition to the productivity of monetary conspiracies, another economy (here Piglia nicely brings in Bataille's admiration for Keynes's own 'plot' to counter, or perhaps save, capitalism: by burying money in coal mines). 'The conspiracy (complot) tries to modify relations of force that are adverse to it and has the secret as its foundation and flight as its condition'. Such a movement from an epistemology of totality to a practice of conspiracy can also be traced from Debord's Society of the Spectacle to the later Comments, which is prefaced by this statement: 'As long as certain pages are interpolated here and there, the overall meaning may appear just as secret clauses have very often been added to whatever treaties may openly stipulate; just as some chemical agents only reveal their hidden properties when they are combined with others.'"

from a rewarding thread at http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/paranoid-subjectivity-and-the-challenges-of-cognitive-mapping-how-is-capitalism-to-be-represented/1080

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