Agamben on movements

http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Movement.html

Very fucking interesting.

My first thought is that it's so helpful to read honest-to-God nazis sometimes, because they're so frank about their utter satanism that they reveal easy marks to look for.

So I find it fucking interesting that Schmitt completely separates the passivity of the people from the agency of the movement. I'd start just commenting on the obvious here, the structural repetition of matter (inert)/mind (active yet disembodied) dualism here, but just mentioning it is already too easy and cheap.

What I find interesting coming at it as an admitted member of the Great Underground Deleuzo-conspiracy is the total divergence of this idea from Deleuze's ontology. Against the inert populace (be it of humans or animals or fields of grass or molecules or matter itself or the chaosmos from which we draw concepts and functions and affects) Deleuze asserts "the plane" of immanence. The daring duo offer a clear enough description of this in What Is Philosophy? when describing chaos. It's generative, it's dynamic, it's constant creation and destruction. It is by no means inert. And they build their entire notion of production of subjects as arising from those immanent flows, repetitions of difference, etc.

Really, anyone working through Deleuze, this is the most important concept you will ever get from him, the plane, otherwise known as the BwO composed of machines, etc. This brings out its importance.

I wonder then of maintaining these three terms the people, the movement and the state. In America we can identify the state along with corporations, but the point is roughly the same. We think and act in these terms.

So if we are to break with the modern project of depoliticizing the people and constructing them as a population, subjects only of regimentation and micromanagement of desire and action, then we must reconsider what a movement actually is. We must begin with a sort of autonomist position I suppose, one in which the movement springs from the internal dynamics of the people and is not a specialized compartment of the desire thereof.

I've been moving more and more towards this position myself and I must admit, it's flustering. There is a hefty dose of elitism pure and simple in my thinking, and I am too tempted into rejecting the "spontaneous desire of the masses" (to be a dick about it) as a positive sign of, well, anything. As Agamben says, we've already been regimented, we've already been rendered into a system of biological categorization and explication. We are already made statistical objects of research and instrumental rationality, especially in the US. So within that where do you see revolutionary movement?

What I'm starting to think is that it has nothing to do with what people voice as their desire, and everything to do with it. It's not what people say, it's the aggregate of their massified action that counts.

I'm starting to see that regardless of my personal aesthetic predispositions, "the people" just don't do what they're supposed to do. They just rebel, without knowing it. If you just start to look at every weird social problem in America it all starts to make sense- people just fucking rebel, every second, in that they err in repeating and performing instruction from Power of any sort.

Folks express living by their clinamen...

This presents as much difficulty for the conventional revolutionary as for the most bloodthirsty of hegemons.

I don't know though, it's kind of amazing. There's no thought to it whatsoever it just happens, this omnipresent refusal.

So the question becomes, what is an intensity? An eternal return, engendered by Spinoza's joy perhaps?

And there, an (inverse?) ontological definition of "joy," that which is capable of provoking a return.

So perhaps a movement must be expressed not so much as leading or politicizing a people, as offering it increased diversity of powers of action.

A movement that is not a leader, but a toolsmith?