Decapitation, Acceleration and Conceptual Manifolds
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Transcript of Decapitation, Acceleration and Conceptual Manifolds
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Decapitation, Acceleration and
Conceptual Manifolds: Aida Makotoand the Mori Art Museum.
001. Decapitation.
The act of decapitation and the subsequent display of the
severed appendage is one not unfamiliar to
anthropologists. Cranial dismemberment was rife
throughout the societies of ancient Mesoamerica and has
been traced in great detail by Christopher L. Moser in his
Human Decapitation in Ancient Mesoamerica:
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The concept that the head, the heart, and/or other parts of the
body contain certain physical/ psychic powers of the owner thatcan be transmitted to another person when those parts are
consumed or preserved is a very widespread cultural
phenomenon. The nearly worldwide occurrence of this concept
cannot be simply explained other than by assuming that several
distinct and independent process of logical thought have been
carried to similar conclusions.1
Moser goes on to give some grim examples:
(T)here are the Asmat of Dutch New Guinea, where a man
must kill a member of another village or territory in order to
obtain a trophy head and thereby a name for his offspring,
and the Upper Amazon Jivaro who take heads in similar raids,
shrinking them for preservation as trophies and indicators of
strength and power.2
This practice has continued undeterred across the globe:
Ciceros execution and the display of his head and hands
on the Rostra in the Forum Romanum in November of
43BC, the practice of gibbetting, or the public display of
recently executed criminals and enemies of the state in
17th Century England as well as the use of old LondonBridge as a display site for enemies of the hegemonic
1 Christopher Moser Human Decapitation in Ancient Meso
America, (Dumberton Oaks, Harvard University, 1973) P.
12 Ibid
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order featuring, amongst others; William Wallace,
Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell. At the same time,
the public display of the heads of the aristocracy during
the French revolution towards the end of the 18th Century
and despite its claims for enlightenment and civility, the
tradition of beheading and display is alive and well in late
Capitalist culture.
002. Kafkas two Death.
While the motives for such acts have remained, the
practice itself has become somewhat more sophisticated incongruence with the defamation of Capital punishment in
line with the rise of liberal ethical jurisprudence and the
deterratorialization and subsequent reterratorialization of
the concept of artist and artwork. With the emergence of
the artist-artwork dyad after the Renaissance the body and
the body of work were severed from their roots as
designers and works of craft and heterogenized into two
corporeally separate but subjectively interlocuted beings.
The body of work became an extension of the artists
subjectivity, as Manuel DeLanda might say, a residue of his
morphogenetic becoming-artist and becoming-individual.
Such an interlocution of phenomena leads to the notion
that the destruction of either the artist or the artwork
would amount for one of the two Lacanian deaths; that isto say the death in the symbolic (the destruction of the
body of work) and in the real(the destruction of the body
of the artist qua biological death). We could combine both
DeLandas and Lacans ontologies to posit the notion of
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the body of work as the residue of the artists becoming-
subject as artist. In other words, the residual evidence for
his relationship and inclusion in the symbolic order.
Franz Kafkas attempt to wipe his residue from the fabric
of the symbolic order in his request that Max Brod
cremate his body of work in the event of his death is an
attestation to the belief in the efficacy of such procedures.
Kafka wrote to Brod:
Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ...
in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'),
sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread3
Kafkas biological death was insufficient to realise his want
to disappear, to finally realise the isolation which had been
placed on him by the language he spoke, the religioustradition he was born into, and the emergence of his
socialist beliefs that ostracized him from Zionist circles
that had become occupied by, amongst others, his close
school friend Hugo Bergman. Kafka knew that biological
death alone would leave his presence floating in symbolic
space, fortified by the presence and circulation of his
corpus. The work of art and the artist have becomeintertwined in a way that was unthinkable in the times
before the renaissance.
3 Franz Kafka (source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-
t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
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003. The Weight of the Body of Work.
The development and accumulation of an artists body of
work and the circulation and the degree of intensity of
immanence of that body of work in the social conscience
amounts to the degree by which they are mandated the
signifier ofartist. While the subsumption of subjectivity to
this symbolic category must always remain incomplete, in
both the personal and public sphere, the perceived
completeness of the subsumption is evidenced in the
cultural weight applied to bodies of work by socio-culturalnetworks. This weight is not applied evenly throughout
the artists corpus, however, but intensified upon works
generally considered to have had a greater impact on the
continuum of historicized art as we currently understand
it or by sheer reproduction and circulation in the social
plane. In other words, while Jacques-Louis David is
accepted to be a great artist, works like Bonaparte
Crossing the St. Bernard Pass or The Death of Marat are
considered to be greater works of art than some of his
earlier paintings or indeed, even some of the sketches that
lead to his later paintings. The concentration of these
works and the exclusion of works with less cultural
weight attached to them can be said to amount to a more
accurate representation of that artists symbolicsubjectivity as perceived by the public. It is this
concentration of modules of identificatory association
with subjectivities that relates an artists body of work
with his body in the material world. Da Vincis Vitruvian
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Man or Mona Lisa are as distinctive a part of his
subjectivity for us, if not more so, than our figurative
perception of him.
As such, in cultural terminology, anatomical referents are
frequently used to symbolize an artists work in its various
assemblages; corpus, or body of work being the most
commonly used set-categorical variants. The headof this
body amounting for the work most often displayed in
artists retrospectives. Those exhibitions that present the
most accurate representation of the popularly digested
parts of the artists work and that which provide thegreatest support to the semblance of his subjectivity.
The corporeal head is, in the same way, the sight of the
most immediate form of aesthetic recognition of an
individual, the house of the mind, the container of a
subjects subjectivity, the mediator of our relationship with
the material world, a multi-sensory input/ output hub that
modulates information feedback loops and that allows us
to plug-in to the symbolic matrix. An invaluable piece of
hardware to any socio-politico-cultural antagonist, the
removal of which would amount to what Moser referred
to as similar conclusions. The body of works head
provides an equally tempting opportunity for decapitation
and display by hegemonies that deem its owner to requiresuch treatment. The success of capitalist-realisms affluent
reanimation of decapitation and display is its realignment
of the semiotics of such a practice; from monstrous anti-
human debasement to the pinnacle of artistic achievement
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and its realignment of the site of decapitation from the
corporeal to the symbolic. The display site has been
similarly shifted from bridges, spikes, city gates and
gibbeting cages to, amongst other places, art galleries.
004. Mombis Gallery.
Galleries, at their core, are inherently social spaces; intense
manifestations of psychogeographical manipulation that
are a determinate factor in socio-cultural relations. They
are spaces that regulate social and cultural categorization
and mediate the interpolation of the subject into thesymbolic plane. Rigorously categorising their visitors as
consumers of cultural Capital and placing them into a
network of organizational strata that is oppressive in its
instantiation.
005. Jurisprudential Incompleteness.
At this point there would appear to be something of a
lacunae in the comparison to artists retrospectives and
more traditional forms of decapitation and display.
According to the arguments above it would seem that the
destruction of an artists body of work would prove more
effective in quashing an attempted subversion of
hegemony than promoting and increasing the intensity ofcirculation and recognition that would ultimately result
from the organization of a retrospective exhibition. In
order to neutralize the threat of ideological insurgency
wouldnt the destruction of the symbolic assemblage of
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the artist-artwork dyad be the most effective way of
ensuring that those becoming-politicalor becoming-praxis
morphogenetic aspects of the work could not be realized?
To forcefully carry out the fate that Kafka had wished
upon his own body of work on the same work of those
artists who stand to subvert the ideologically reproductive
apparatuses of late Capitalist culture.
The answer to this problem is two-fold. The first and most
obvious answer is that which lies in the understanding of
the incompatibility of art destruction and neo-liberal
cultural politics. Throughout history those regimes thathave enforced, endorsed or encouraged the destruction of
art that is seen to be incompatible with the hegemonic
order are vigorously condoned as totalitarian or fascist by
modern liberal societies. Such practices are fundamentally
incompatible with the current formal axiomatic systems of
law and human rights standardized by neo-liberal
democratic convention and as such would create
unwanted and destructive associations with those regimes
that have been demonized for these reasons. The second
is that the mechanisms underway in such exhibitions
provide far more effective means of neutralization and
also contribute to the reproduction of late Capitalist
cultural ideology.
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006. Conceptual Morphogenesis and Conceptual
Manifolds.
This being resolved we can progress by positing the
notion that a body of work, particularly one with
culturally subversive tendencies, is conceptually
morphogenetically charged in that it is, at least
idealistically, constantly in the process ofbecomingin the
symbolic plane. Exactly in what direction that becoming
goes is contingent on an almost infinite list of exterior
factors. Its capacities to affect and be affected (in the
Deleuzian sense) are mediated by the perception of thebody of work and the capacity to be affected by those
interacting with that body of work. That is to say an
audience, or in this case, a viewing public with the
potential to become socially-unrested and civilly-
disobedient are more likely to be affected and unified into
a seditious assemblage by politically subversive work that
is framed in a way that accentuates and elucidates its
counter-cultural animus. It is thus the work of late-
capitalist culture to manipulate the conceptually
morphogenetic potential of the body of work into one that
is depleted of this subversive potentiality and, at the same
time, work to cultivate the processes that contribute to the
reproduction of its ideologies. And these are exactly the
processes at play in retrospective exhibitions.
These processes are ones that materialize concept-control
apparatuses with the aim of manipulating conceptual
manifolds. DeLanda has spoken at length about the
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ontological implications of morphogenesis in topology,
hydrodynamics and cellular biology and has gone a great
distance to edify concepts of virtual becoming in these
state-spaces and the use of manifolds in relation to them.
DeLanda defines a manifold in the realm of dynamical
systems as an object that becomes the space of possible
states which the physical system can have [M]anifolds
are connected to material reality by their use as models of
physical processes4 . This model of manifolds can be
transferred to the register of the symbolic. That is to say
we can understand a conceptual manifold as that which
becomes the space of possible symbolic states that asignifier can hold if we define a signifier as an ontological
object capable of carrying signification in a symbolic space.
The work of Capitalist realism is the attempt to control
this manifold and to channel and organize symbolic states
into a homogenous appropriation of mechanisms that
seek to undo its totality. The Situationists had formulated
a similar hypothesis in their work on the spectacle, Sadie
Plant crystalises their concerns:
Anything which resists alienation, separation, and
specialisation of the spectacle must be brought within the
confines of commodity exchange; challenges to the commodityform must be made to assume the vacuity and equivalence
necessary to the reproduction of commodity relations. The
Situationists argued that collapses of the marvelous into the
4 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy,
(Contiuum, London 2002)P. 13
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mundane or the critical into the counterrevolution are never
signs of natural destiny or apolitical degeneration. On the
contrary, such shifts are effected in order to remove theexplosive content from gestures and meanings which contest
the capitalist order5
What is important to note here is that it is not the gestures
and meanings themselves that are removed but rather the
explosive content from within them. That is to say thespectacle is a symbolic recoding mechanism, a
morphogenetic manipulating Trojan horse that works by
subsuming the manifold of symbolic becoming (the
conceptual manifold) to a restricted, recapitulated version
of itself, becoming ever more efficient at simulating thereal experience of conceptual multiplicity until total
replacement has been achieved. The multiplicity ofconceptual trajectory reduced to Capitalist-realist
singularity. The control of these multiplicities takes places
in all manner of cultural domains but it is within art and
specifically within retrospective exhibitions that the
investigative efforts of this essay take place.
5 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist
International in a Postmodern Age, (Routledge, London,
1992)P. 79
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007. Aida Makoto and Roppongi Hills.
Such a retrospective recently took place in the Mori Art
Museum in Tokyos Roppongi district, situated on the
53nd floor of the crowning achievement of Roppongi Hills
culturo-corporate splicing apparatus, the Mori Building.
The head on display in question was that of Makoto Aida,
whose rigorously anti-consumerist, skepto-occidentalist
lan seems jarringly at odds with Roppongis modus
operandi which wholeheartedly cultivates itself on such an
ideologies antithesis. The result of the exhibition was one
of rendering impotent the anti-consumerist impetus atplay in Aidas work, a manipulation of the morphogenetic
potential by means of deterratorialization and
reterratorialization of the nomadic, destratifying elements
of Aidas work.
The most obvious example of this was in the geography of
the exhibition itself. The Roppongi district of Tokyo is
well known as an attractor to wealthy foreign and
domestic consumers, home to some of the most expensive
residential housing in the city, as well as large retail stores
for top-end international fashion houses like Michael
Kors, Gucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton (one of the first
paintings seen in the exhibition is named after this
ubiquitous French label and clearly critical of thefetishistic hold the designers famous logo has over the
Japanese consumer). It is also the location of the
headquarters for large international corporations and
investment banks: Yahoo, Google, Ferrari, TV Asahi,
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Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs to name a few. The
Mori Building and the surrounding Roppongi Hills area is
a sutureless splicing of globalized ultra-consumerist,
corporate and cultural activity, fusing cinemas, concert
halls, art galleries, fashionable high end restaurants and
corporate headquarters that serve as an aesthetic that has
done much to do away with the circulation of associations
with Yakuza and examples of corporate corruption that
led to the filing of arrest warrants against the ISP Livedoor
in 2006. The entire area is a sophisticated matrix of the
very assemblages and mechanisms that Aida has done his
most to protest through his work and that continue tothrive and germinate in spite of the widely circulated
motivations of his corpus.
The second site of morphogenetic manipulation is the
gallery itself. Aidas work occupies a nomadic space in the
art world, built to be interacted with and adapted as time
progresses, with a motive to reterratorialize notions of
social and urban space. A prime example of this is the
temporary sculptures located in the exhibitions central
display room. Huge cardboard constructs modeled on the
aesthetic of traditional Japanese castles and built as living
spaces for the homeless in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. In
their originally designated setting these cardboard castles
would have drastically altered not only the physical spaceof the locals in which they were placed but also served as a
marker for the consideration of the economic underclass
that exists in the mires of Tokyos social strata. There is an
instantaneous reunderstanding of the notion of the
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artwork as precious in accordance with its market
exchangeability. These structures are cheaply and quickly
constructed and extremely temporary, not only due to the
structural integrity of the material itself but also in the
understanding that the Tokyo Municipal Police would
quickly remove them. This clear inversion of the typical
sanctity and interactive restriction normally endowed on
works of art is a refreshing reappropriation of bourgeois,
business-class lounge sensitivities to art in general. By
placing such works back into the space of the gallery,
behind the boarders and signs that limit the very tactility
that catalyzes the animus of the work, Aidas socio-political motivations are rendered impotent, placed into
conceptually restrictive strata and back into the
mechanism of market exchange, the damage of which he
has done so much to try to elucidate. The same line of
thinking can be applied to Aidas paintings. The
seditiousness of their message ultimately laid to rest by
their presence in the corporate sponsored gallery space.
While the works themselves lie kettled and out of reach in
the physical plane so to do their messages in the symbolic.
Any serious invocation of the self-destructive tendencies
of ultra-consumerism and western-centric cultural and
linguistic globalization are ultimately pacified by the
abundance and spectacle of the corporate space in which
they are framed. As we leave the exhibition we arereminded of the extent to which we are indebted to capital
for the experience. Mark Fisher, in relation to the London
Olympics, has made the implications of such a mechanism
explicit. He writes:
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The point of capitals sponsorship of cultural and sporting
events is not only the banal one of accruing brand awareness.Its more important function is to make it seem that capitals
involvement is a precondition for culture as such. The presence
of capitalist sigils on advertising for events forces a quasi-
behaviouristic association, registered at the level of the nervous
system more than of cognition, between capital and cultural. It
is a pervasive reinforcement of capitalist realism.6
These sigils function not only to enforce this quasi-
behavioristic association outlined by Fisher but also to
nullify implicit concerns as to the damaging effects of
global culturo-corporate empire by encouraging theassociation that this empire is inherently supportive of
critical thinking of its own mechanisms. To borrow a
phrase from
iek, this allowance of criticism of Capitalby Capital itself in a sense, does the protesting for us,
allowing us to continue to consume the commodities of
late-capitalism, free of the guilt that is associated with
passivity. Implicitly, the taking place of Aidas exhibition
allows Roppongi to continue to function as a symbolic
space. Giving the illusion of the existence of the
conceptual manifold while in reality having replaced itcompletely. As Fisher states:
6 Mark Fisher, The London Hunger Games, (from http://k-
punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2012_08.html)
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[this] exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called interpassivity.
[It] performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue
to consume with impunity.
The replication and subsumption of the conceptual
manifold by late-capitalism renders the gallery space as a
spectacular singularity of subjective experience, a
synecdoche of wider cultural collapse, or in another sense,
a hyper-structuring of cultural produce, and a synonymic
model of what Fisher has termed Capitalist Realism.
Judith Butler has similarly surmised the fate of Kafkas
works, to an extent justifying his want for the annihilation
of his corpus:
It was however not just the spectres of technology that would
eagerly feed on Kafkas work, but those forms of profit-makingthat exploit even the most anti-instrumental forms of art, and
those forms of nationalism that seek to appropriate even the
modes of writing that most rigorously resist them. An irony
then, to be sure, that Kafkas writings finally became someone
elses stuff, packed into a closet or a vault, transmogrified into
exchange value, awaiting their afterlife as an icon of national
belonging or, quite simply, as money.7
7 Judith Butler, Who Owns Kafka, (from
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-
kafka)
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008. Always Already Headless.
The implicit tragedy of such singularity is that
decapitation in this symbolic sense has always already
happened. There is no escaping it. The creation of the
work of art itself, its preconditioned inclusion into the
politics of market exchangeability and the network of
wider culture is the means of its own conceptual
infertility and impotence. The means of decapitation have
accelerated to such an extent that they happen even before
the act or event, the birth of a work of art or even an artist
has taken place. The gallery does not so much representthe location of post hoc display but rather a manifestation
of the eternally immanent conditions of subjectivities own
death by manifold replication. Braveheart born on the
spike. The point is not that galleries represent an
autonomous space that presents the conditions and results
of the becoming singularity of conceptual manifolds but
rather that they act as a continuation of social space itself.
Late capitalist consciousness subsumed to a singularized
conceptual manifold in fact projects the everyday onto the
gallery space. It is immanent, inescapable, and ubiquitous
and has been sold to us wholesale:
The current revolutions index themselves on the immediately
prior phase of the system. They arm themselves with a nostalgic
resurrection of the real in all its forms; in other words, with
simulacra of the second order: dialectics, use value, the
transparency and finality of production, the "liberation" of the
unconscious, or of repressed meaning (of the signifier, or of the
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signified called desire), and so on. All of these liberations offer,
as ideal content, the phantoms which the system has devoured
in successive revolutions and which it subtly resuscitates asrevolutionary fantasies. All these liberations are just transitions
toward a generalized manipulation. The revolution itself is
meaningless at the present level of random processes of
control.8
009. Acceleration and Collapse?
If, as has been discussed above, even revolutionary or
rebellious socio-cultural activity is contributive to the
processes that it attempts to undo, then where and howmight the collapse of the singularized conceptual manifold
take place. InAnti Oedipus, Deleuze and Guatarri provide
us with a potential answer:
But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?To
withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third
World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist
economic solution? Or might it be to go in the opposite
direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the
market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the
flows are not yet de territorialized enough, not decoded
enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of ahighly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the
process, but to go further, to accelerate the process, as
8 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (extract
fromJean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford
University Press, 1988) P. 121
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Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we havent seen
anything yet.9
Advocating a speeding of the processes of the apoptosis of
capitalism by destratisfying, deterratorializing and
decodifying rather than by revolutionary force. In his
essay On the Fault of Accelerationist Aesthetics from the
Point of view of the Body, Franco Berandi Bifo makes
claims contra those of a small group of current politicalphilosophers thinking within the philosophical space
opened by Deleuze and GuattarisAnti Oedipus, Lyotards
Libidinal Economy and Baudrillards Symbolic Exchangeand Death. Bifo identifies inherent contradictions in the
analyses of current accelerationist thought processes that
understand the acceleration of the mechanisms of Capital
to lead ultimately to the destabilization and collapse ofCapital itself. For Bifo, the fundamental inconsistency that
undoes accelerationism at the level of praxis is the
inversion this idea. It is in fact these very schizo-
mechanics that allow for capitalism to function and grow.
The train of hypercapitalism cannot be stopped, it is going
faster and faster, and we can no longer run at the same pace.The only strategy, therefore, is based on the expectation that the
train is going to crash at some point, and the capitalist
trajectory is going to lead to the subversion of its own inner
9 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti-Oedipus,
(University of Minnesota Press, 1983)p. 239.
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dynamics. This is an interesting proposition to consider, but it
is ultimately untrue, because the process of autonomous
subjectivation is jeopardized by chaotic acceleration, and socialsubjectivity is captured and subjugated by capitalist
governance, which is a system of automatic mechanisms
running at blinding speed.10
The perceived downfall of the accelerationist program,
according to Bifo, is a misunderstanding of the means by
which Capital allows itself to germinate.Neither Aida, nor his contemporaries of the Super Flat
movement (Takashi Murakami or Hiroki Azuma)
contribute to the slowing down or derailment of Capitalby making us aware of its means and machineries but
rather contribute to the very schizo-acceleration thatallows capitalism to function. This is not the apoptosis of
late-capitalism but the inversion of it. Capitalismproduces the very mechanisms that allow it to grow.
However, it is not the case that Aida or his
contemporaries point to a concluded fatalism with regard
to the loss of the conceptual manifold. They instead act as
examples of the failure of current mechanisms of concept
creation and the concepts that they have birthed. In factthe Deleuzian project of the flow of concept creation,
10 Franco Berandi Bifo,Accelerationism Questioned from
the Point of View of the Body, (from http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/accelerationism-questioned-from-the-
point-of-view-of-the-body/)
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deterratorialization, and decodification should work
toward fracturing the semiotic associations that constrict
the conceptual manifold to singularity. The structure of
late capitalist subjectivity is a paradoxical one. The
having-become-singularity of the conceptual manifold
points towards a hyper structuring of symbolic space but
Deleuzes schizo-analysis of desiring machines and
Baudrillards explication of simulacra points to a more
entropic, chaotic model of the same manifold. Entropic
mechanisms structure symbolic space towards
negentropic ends. When the chaotic creates hyper-
structure an unveiling of the real of the situation isnecessary. Creations of new associations, both
linguistically and conceptually, the presentation of that
which is excluded by types of representation, and the
opening up of the conceptual manifold are all necessary
projects to be considered. The singularization of the
creation of concepts, that is to say, the creation of any
concept at all, creates an outside to that concept, an
exterior plane that is occupied by the not-concept of the
new concept. In other words, the creation of concepts is
always an instantly double process. The creation of the
concept always already also creates the concept of thatwhich is not . The not of the current conceptual
manifold may well be a small territory but it is a territorythat can be occupied and expanded upon. But there must
be a jump-start. As Alex Williams has proposed:
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[M]uch of the initial labor must be around the composition of
powerful visions able to reorient populist desire away from the
libidinal dead end which seeks to identify modernity as suchwith neoliberalism, and modernizing measures as intrinsically
synonymous with neoliberalizing ones (for example,
privatization, marketization, and outsourcing).11
The creation of the concept of capitalist-conceptual-
manifold-singularity () creates its own notand it is to
this that we must find a cognitive jack and attempt toaccrue connective intensity.
11 Alex William, Escape Velocities, (from http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/escape-velocities/)