Candice, do I hear some echo of the micropolitics plateau in D&G, ATP?

For those who may have a copy of A thousand Plateaus to hand, page 229 may
have some use in understanding Israel's current situation. The paragraph
beginning: But there is a fourth danger as well, and this is the one that
interests us most,...

In Nietzsche's Zarathustra four dangers are pointed to, clarity is one of
them and the fourth is disgust. Disgust is what I was trying to get towards
in my response to Josephine, yesterday. Those who may read N in a
prescriptive way may well give danger a wide berth. I am interested in danger
and want to sail right into dangerous waters. My problem is how do I turn a
totalitarian quarantined (thanks to John K in Masthead) liberal democracy,
such as Australia, into a fascist movement. Fascism is a mass movement,
Daniel Guerin, cited in the micropolitics plateau, argues this and if you
follow this line you quickly come to Leon Trotsky writing on fascism and the
Revolution Betrayed, further back. A line of flight is a double turning away
and the scapegoat, with jews being the primordial scapegoat, make such a line
of flight. This takes me to the regime of signs plateau and betrayal.

A strange book, A Thousand Plateaus is, and certainly in recent literary
theory keen to quarantine itself from essentialism while D&G chase the
essentials. But I must go, I am too excited to make much sense today.
Deleuze's Fold book and Shame and its sisters, a Silvan Tomkins reader,
arrived today and I don't know which to read first so am reading both
together. Tomkins and Deleuze fit together as does complex as in cybernetic
history.

best wishes

Chris Jones.


On Sun, 21 Apr 2002 02:02, you wrote:
Historically, it seems to me, every sort of mass movement
> _against_ a people from the neighborhood pogrom through the larger regional
> or national scale of, say, the US Red Scare to the (inter)national scope of
> the Holocaust (and to some extent the complex antipathies of the Middle
> East come under this umbrella too) has succeeded because it operated on
> both levels--macro and micro--whether it operated as a top-down phenomenon
> or as a "grass-roots" bottom-up one. There are countless anecdotes about
> the way the top-down kind served as a cover for specific individual acts of
> malice against other individuals--such personalization often being
> inculcated in the general population by such sloganeering as the
> McCarthyite "if you're mommy is a commie, ya gotta turn her in." By the
> same token, those pogromic programs that begin at the personal level of
> one-to-one are all too easy to "elaborate" into a concealing mass movement
> of sorts, especially if different prejudices or weaknesses (gullibilities,
> e.g.) are manipulated by the one who has targeted the (other) one. That
> larger endeavor can then take on a life of its own, which may also be a
> goal at the individual level of one or more instigators, who may also have
> other scores to settle among that larger population. Groups can act as
> individuals, and vice versa, in other words, and groups or the individuals
> who compose them may be variously (and strategically) destroyed as a
> result. It's very complex, right down to the mindset, with its mix of
> conscious and unconscious factors, but it often does come down to the one
> preying upon his/her victim, whether as a group or as an individual with a
> personal rather than a political agenda.
>
> Or so it seems to me.
>
> Maybe we should change the terms of the discussion to avoid the loss of
> clarity that's inevitably going to color (and muddy) our ability to
> confront prejudice with our specific tendencies along these lines. Would
> "killer artist," say, strike you as more or less shocking or neutral or--?
>
> Thanks again for keeping this discussion on track--
>
> Candice