What do you folks make of the rather odd illustrations and diagrams on p.282? I can't make heads or tails of it, but by god it must be important because its depicted on the back cover of my edition. What gives?
Whew, that's a dissertation right there... but they loathed Hegel, mostly because they viewed all conceptions of "Universal History" as being a purely State-oriented political project. It is the state that creates the impetus for collective action and any kind of general will (or what Marx and subsequent post-marxists like Paolo Virno called "general intellect") and that this creates a vast homogenizing intellectualism... Universal history creates a political theory and collective desire based on a binary choice between "Unity" or "Difference" rather than thinking of politics and desire as "Unifying/Difference" Also, would "universal history" entail a movement or a flow to History as if world events were the product of "Beings" rather than market forces? Like, Hegel's conception of Universal History implies that Napoleon created the French Empire through his own blood sweat and tears, because of his own greatness, rather than stating that the French Empire was a result of bourgeois capitalism that necessitated colonial endeavors thorughout Europe and beyond... I would assume that D&G are skeptical about "Universal History" because it reeks of valorizing the macro-political at the expense of the molar, the micro, the local, the material base of capitalism. Yet contingency would play into "history" in the sense that capitalism is one contingent manner in which assemblages of desire become manifest... capitalism is a contingency because it is one of many ways of fashioning subjectivities. Also.. Universal history is a thought of "transcendence" or "going beyond" projecting ones self into the future, busi-ness of being if you will... D&G in certain contexts although they often contradict themselves, are strong advocates for "Immanence" or immersing oneself in being as beings, to corporeality... (this is a contradiction because in Chaosmosis Felix Guattari talks of psychotics as being the best mode of expressing being-in-the-world.. so its all very confusing, I'm still sorting things out in my own head)
The quote you draw from is fascinating to say the least. I especially like the part where they say, "In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes." Universal history is a contingency... a liquidation of moral codes and traditions? "All that is solid melts into air" sort of stuff. Presaging Derrida's book Spectres of Marx only in the oppsosite direction, a spectre of capitalism is haunting all of us. The universal history, I guess is a concept that changes according to their particular train of thought at the time because they clearly contradict themselves... systematic destruction of what constitutes a systematic way of thinking! The only universal is contingency.
Also, would "universal history" entail a movement or a flow to History as if world events were the product of "Beings" rather than market forces? Like, Hegel's conception of Universal History implies that Napoleon created the French Empire through his own blood sweat and tears, because of his own greatness, rather than stating that the French Empire was a result of bourgeois capitalism that necessitated colonial endeavors thorughout Europe and beyond... I would assume that D&G are skeptical about "Universal History" because it reeks of valorizing the macro-political at the expense of the molar, the micro, the local, the material base of capitalism. Yet contingency would play into "history" in the sense that capitalism is one contingent manner in which assemblages of desire become manifest... capitalism is a contingency because it is one of many ways of fashioning subjectivities.
Also.. Universal history is a thought of "transcendence" or "going beyond" projecting ones self into the future, busi-ness of being if you will... D&G in certain contexts although they often contradict themselves, are strong advocates for "Immanence" or immersing oneself in being as beings, to corporeality... (this is a contradiction because in Chaosmosis Felix Guattari talks of psychotics as being the best mode of expressing being-in-the-world.. so its all very confusing, I'm still sorting things out in my own head)
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The universal history, I guess is a concept that changes according to their particular train of thought at the time because they clearly contradict themselves... systematic destruction of what constitutes a systematic way of thinking! The only universal is contingency.
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