Here are some fun and Easy quotes from “1227: Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine” from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateau
“Common Sense, the unity of all faculties at the center constituted by the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the absolute … It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of thought” p376
“Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people is certainly no crueler than the lineal [savage/primitive - h3m] or State organizations. Treating people like numbers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geometrical figures to shape and model” p390
“But the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.” p398
Finally,
“33. Gilbert Simondon [a famous-in-France philosopher/biologist h3m] has contributed much to the analysis and critique of the hylomorphic schema and of its social presuppositions (‘form correspondes to what the man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he gives his orders:form is thus of the order of the expressible’)…” p555
Please feel free to comment as you will, provided of course it pertains to the post. (Don’t comment on how pork tastes best when barbecued with corn or something like that, but you all know that already)
I think Deleuze and Guattari are dead on regarding Common Sense. I always love when random people I know tell me that the only knowledge that’s worth a damn is common sense. But they never realize common sense is as trained and acquired as a PhD. They never seem to understand (I’ve tried to explain this, leaving out “Weltanschaung” and such) that it is completely possible to look at one thing and see two utterly different things. Common Sense is little more than saying that White European thought is the Best.
The issue of hylomorphism is great. Marxist/Materialist interpretation at its best (When is it at its worst you ask? When an anthropologist looks at ritual aztec cannibalism and says that they must not have had sufficient dietary protein and had to turn to people, lest they starve. I shit you not. I have read the excerpts and can point you all to the papers.)
Finally, I put the assemblage deal in as a special treat to all the holistic Ken Wilbur hippies out there - the above quote is how you do systems philosophy.