After Marx has laid out the model spatially, he repeats the gesture, as if to say, “Again, again, again . . . Let’s do it again.” But differently, in another way: [Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory] Model 2: “Narrative” Human beings, first of all (before they are even “able to ‘make history’”), “live” (the…
Tag Archives: Production
Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels) lays out his method of revolutionary critique in The German Ideology. Not a professional philosopher (like Kant and Hegel, or Feuerbach) and more like an intellectual journalist absorbed in political economy committed to the Revolution, Marx, drawing from the philosophical currents of his day (Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism), nonetheless…
[The Prison-Industrial Complex, a work of "revolutionary art" from the Maoist International Movement] Under capitalism, the laborer, because s/he does not own any means of production other than him/herself, sells his/her labor to the capitalist, for which s/he is paid a certain wage. This is the economic production (of the goods we use everyday) that…
The Base-Superstructure model is basically a theoretical framework, a schema, a blueprint, charting the different parts of society, how these elements interact, and how they form a coherent social structure, i.e. the particular shape that society takes at a given moment (hence it is a historical model). The model has two main elements: the base and the superstructure, both of which can be divided further into two parts.
DeLanda explains in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy that “Deleuze is not a realist about essences, or any other transcendent entity.” Nonetheless, he is a realist. “A non-realist can simply declare essences mental entities, or reduce them to social conventions.” Not Deleuze. Deleuze “does not get rid of essences until [he] replaces them with something else” to “explain what gives objects their identity and what preserves this identity through time.” This something else consists (using the terminology of Difference and Repetition) in the virtual, the actual, and the intensive.
