War Machines and Love Machines... A Foucault/Deleuze Synthesis
The World is a War Machine. But it is also a Loving Machine. These two impulses drive the entire world. The insatiable desire for acceptance, love, affection, approval, and nurturing actually leads to the wanton abuses of power, war, destruction, and so forth.
Dispersed social energy, molecular bio-energy, the energy produced through the consumption of flesh flows throughout the entire eco-system. Food webs are produced, grow, reach apogee, and fall as a result of a precarious set of balances within a given social, bio, or geological realm. What happens in one distant corner of an ecological web, has a direct impact on Us. The illusion of a self-enclosed, knowing "I" that can fend for itself goes back to Leibniz (his monadism as opposed to Deleuze's wandering, precarious, Nomadism of the War Machine).
Cities destroy food webs, but they also create a mesh-work of relations that always put humans at the center (De Landa's point in 1,000 Years of Non-Linear History). Any irregularity, a boom or bust cycle that spirals out of control in capitalism for instance, can actually have a dire ripple effect upon the entire species. Hence, the word for this type of precarious social environment, where a whole population, or rather a whole species, is regulated, monitored, and subject to extinction, is Bio-Power (Or Bio-Politics).
All of us living in so-called Modern, technologically advanced societies are living in this type of precarious situation. None of us can actually fend for ourselves (we'd all be dead if the local grocery store went bankrupt) yet we cling to this illusion of the Rugged-Individual, the Ego-centric "I" that has control over destiny. This is hogwash. An illusion or a discursive trick of the Liberal-Humanist incarnation of Capitalism linked to Democracy as it stands today. We are not free. We are progressively regulated in every little minutia of our daily lives.
(What I'm about to say IS NOT SOMETHING I"M MAKING UP... This is all Documented on History of Sexuality Volume 3 Care of the Self by Michel Foucault)
Like pederasty for instance. In Ancient Rome sex with young boys by grown adult men was common place. Marriage between man and woman was not where Romantic Love occurred. In fact, marriage was only a necessity for basic household upkeep. Women were domestic slaves, not thought of as romantic love interests. This Romantic Love was reserved for young boys who were thought of as being aesthetically beautiful. Sex and romantic love was thought of as being pleasurable because it was reserved for showing affection toward beautiful bodies, and young boys were thought to epitomize the Aesthetic Ideals for the most sought after types of beauty.
Think about all of the hullabaloo regarding Michael Jackson's pederasty controversy. After he was run through the mill he was viewed as being Strange, or suspicious because he laid in a bed with young boys. While I don't know what actually happened with Michael Jackson, to simply imply that he was laying in bed, with his clothes on with young children is enough to label him a criminal. That was not always the case. But people get fired up about this stuff. Just mention the term, "Pedophilia" to someone with kids, and they'll talk about all kinds of violent acts of retribution and vigilante justice, "I'll cut his nuts off, and burn him alive," etc. Not that there's anything wrong with this response. However, it elides the internalization of a type of normalizing sexual discourse, indicative of a Tension between the War/Loving machine. Our lives are regulated in so many ways, most of which we are unaware of, or we blindly accept without second-thought...
If you think that pederasty, or homosexuality is abnormal, without realizing that these are types of pathology were basically invented by medical discourse, these labels have not always existed, then you have already internalized, and been constructed by the invisible hand of Bio-Power. The incendiary panopticon that subsumes daily life.
Dispersed social energy, molecular bio-energy, the energy produced through the consumption of flesh flows throughout the entire eco-system. Food webs are produced, grow, reach apogee, and fall as a result of a precarious set of balances within a given social, bio, or geological realm. What happens in one distant corner of an ecological web, has a direct impact on Us. The illusion of a self-enclosed, knowing "I" that can fend for itself goes back to Leibniz (his monadism as opposed to Deleuze's wandering, precarious, Nomadism of the War Machine).
Cities destroy food webs, but they also create a mesh-work of relations that always put humans at the center (De Landa's point in 1,000 Years of Non-Linear History). Any irregularity, a boom or bust cycle that spirals out of control in capitalism for instance, can actually have a dire ripple effect upon the entire species. Hence, the word for this type of precarious social environment, where a whole population, or rather a whole species, is regulated, monitored, and subject to extinction, is Bio-Power (Or Bio-Politics).
All of us living in so-called Modern, technologically advanced societies are living in this type of precarious situation. None of us can actually fend for ourselves (we'd all be dead if the local grocery store went bankrupt) yet we cling to this illusion of the Rugged-Individual, the Ego-centric "I" that has control over destiny. This is hogwash. An illusion or a discursive trick of the Liberal-Humanist incarnation of Capitalism linked to Democracy as it stands today. We are not free. We are progressively regulated in every little minutia of our daily lives.
(What I'm about to say IS NOT SOMETHING I"M MAKING UP... This is all Documented on History of Sexuality Volume 3 Care of the Self by Michel Foucault)
Like pederasty for instance. In Ancient Rome sex with young boys by grown adult men was common place. Marriage between man and woman was not where Romantic Love occurred. In fact, marriage was only a necessity for basic household upkeep. Women were domestic slaves, not thought of as romantic love interests. This Romantic Love was reserved for young boys who were thought of as being aesthetically beautiful. Sex and romantic love was thought of as being pleasurable because it was reserved for showing affection toward beautiful bodies, and young boys were thought to epitomize the Aesthetic Ideals for the most sought after types of beauty.
Think about all of the hullabaloo regarding Michael Jackson's pederasty controversy. After he was run through the mill he was viewed as being Strange, or suspicious because he laid in a bed with young boys. While I don't know what actually happened with Michael Jackson, to simply imply that he was laying in bed, with his clothes on with young children is enough to label him a criminal. That was not always the case. But people get fired up about this stuff. Just mention the term, "Pedophilia" to someone with kids, and they'll talk about all kinds of violent acts of retribution and vigilante justice, "I'll cut his nuts off, and burn him alive," etc. Not that there's anything wrong with this response. However, it elides the internalization of a type of normalizing sexual discourse, indicative of a Tension between the War/Loving machine. Our lives are regulated in so many ways, most of which we are unaware of, or we blindly accept without second-thought...
If you think that pederasty, or homosexuality is abnormal, without realizing that these are types of pathology were basically invented by medical discourse, these labels have not always existed, then you have already internalized, and been constructed by the invisible hand of Bio-Power. The incendiary panopticon that subsumes daily life.