Deleuze and Guattari and The Dark Knight Rises

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates‘s summary (“No, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Isn’t a Right-Wing Opus”) of a longer piece in The New York Times by Ross Douthat, discussing the politics of The Dark Knight Rises, and it contained the following quote:

All of which is to say that Nolan isn’t trying to push a crude, Ayn Rand-esque parable about heroic Gotham capitalists threatened by resentful, parasitic looters. His model, as the movie’s literary references make clear, is “A Tale of Two Cities” rather than “Atlas Shrugged,” which means that he’s trying to simultaneously acknowledge the injustices of the existing regime while suggesting that both the revolutionary and anarchic alternatives would be much, much worse. Across the entire trilogy, what separates Bruce Wayne from his mentors in the League of Shadows isn’t a belief in Gotham’s goodness; it’s a belief that a compromised order can still be worth defending, and that darker things than corruption and inequality will follow from putting that order to the torch.

Douthat then goes on to mention different flavours of conservatism, suggesting that what is on display in this film is a “quiet Toryism” (I am being somewhat snotty; Douthat takes this idea from an excellent piece in the Slate by Forrest Wickman, “The Dickensian Aspects of The Dark Knight Rises“).

This idea of a compromised regime which is nevertheless worth defending is going to be a hard sell for most right-on, left-thinking people. There are names, nasty names for people who hold such ideas. We used one of them already (that c-word), but there are others. Neo-liberal, reactionary, cog (that’s a ‘g’, missus). I have been called all of these, recently, and it’s hard to argue with those who like calling people names. So instead, I wanted to share a quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus which makes the same point, in the very specific and very precise language of that wonderful work:

You don’t reach the BwO [Body without Organs], and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying … If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane, you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged towards catastrophe. Staying stratified – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done; lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.

This experimentation with opportunities, the lodgement on various strata, the production of flow conjunctions… this all sounds like the overall strategy used in the last third of this movie, a mesh-work of tactics made to cohere into a strategy by the goal of destroying Bane which unites all of the goodies. A flow of different intensities which eddy temporarily into dynamic flows of resistance. So perhaps it’s not just reactionary nonsense after all.

Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object: 2

[Continued from part one] Such a production is made of the notion that Harman’s philosophical project refers to objects as diverse as copper wires, bicycles, wolves, etc. This creates difficulties because it misleads us about what his philosophy is meant to do. In saying this, we give Harman’s work a sheen of specificity which it does not deserve. Even the occasional points where he does attempt to engage with things in a substantive manner, this is not usually successful, because for an object-oriented philosophy, it is weirdly uncomfortable with objects in the concrete. These forays into particulars are awkward, uncomfortable, as though Harman is straining at the leash to get back to the abstract and the general. There is nothing wrong with abstraction, of course, but it is remarkable because one is rightly entitled to expect from a philosophy whose entire project hinges on an engagement with objects, indeed which takes its name from such premise. 

Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object: 1

So, I understand how this book developed in the context of continuous blogging, etc., and I will immediately set out my stall and say that I don’t think it is any the better for it. It is mentioned that this book was written in an impressive (or “impressive”) 86 hours and something minutes. I am trying not to be snotty about this, but I mean… don’t shout about it. The reason I say this is because, well… those 86 hours… they show somewhat. I am not saying it is bad, and there is the occasional almost-striking turn of phrase, and to a point there is a certain amount of clarity to the writing. This is what brings me to my main issue, and primary intuition about Harman as a philosopher.

Up until chapter seven, the prose is lucid, and the ideas are coherently communicated. I confess that though I am a giant fan of diagrams, those included in the body of the text are unhelpful – at best. When chapter seven begins, however, I felt that this book would have benefited from a period of longer exchange with some similarly-minded philosophers. I say this because Harman is simply better in dialogue.

Hierarchy and network

“If this book displays a clear bias against large, centralized hierarchies, it is only because the last three hundred years have witnessed an excessive accumulation of stratified systems at the expense of meshworks. The degree of homogeneity in the world has greatly increased, while heterogeneity has come to be seen as almost pathological, or at least as a problem that must be eliminated. Under the circumstances, a call for a more decentralized way of organizing human societies seems to recommend itself.

However, it is crucial to avoid the facile conclusion that meshworks are intrinsically better than hierarchies (in some transcendental sense). It is true that some of the characteristics of meshworks (particularly their resilience and adaptability) make them desirable, but that is equally true of certain characteristics of hierarchies (for example, their goal-directedness). Therefore, it is crucial to avoid the temptation of cooking up a narrative of human history in which meshworks appear as heroes and hierarchies as villains. ”

Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear                                                                                                                             History, p. 69

The purpose of disagreement

I do not really believe that one can convince another person of a philosophical point to which they are constitutionally opposed. That is to say, at best we have a conversation, and we come to understand the context of our interlocutors’ convictions, but because in philosophy there are seldom indubitable rights and wrongs, there is never a guarantee of understanding, never mind consensus. So what transpires is we translate our rationalizations into the language of reason, we divest decision-making of the emotion inherent to it, pretending it isn’t there – and even if it were there, we say, it’s not important. Then we play you show me yours, and I’ll show you mine with these rationalizations. This sounds a little tragic, as though I have no hope in philosophy or conversation, but I don’t think pessimism necessarily follows.

We all know the benefits of debate in a “civilized” context as replacing the settlement of disagreement through violence. Often, however, we do not settle disagreement. So what happens then? I assume we have all had that experience in conversation or debate, where we make a point in passing which we regard to be innocuous, only for it to be turned around on us, and given a spin which we would never have thought possible.

Via The Atlantic: “The film is constructed entirely from archival NASA footage and edited together by Harvey. It’s a poignant reflection on life, death, friendship, and abandoned automatons. The story is told through the eyes of the protagonist, a robonaut built by NASA, whose slow, sad, mechanical voice narrates this sorrowful tale of sentience, departure from Earth, and then his eventual marooning in space. It’s made all the more compelling through the use of found footage, which adds to its realism.”

Techno-scepticism is not Neo-Luddism

A continual hazard, when one writes about technology, is that being out of step with prevailing opinion leaves you open to charges of being a Neo-Luddite. The received wisdom is that technology=progress, and that progress is a Good Thing. From this it follows, according to the vulgar logic, that not going along with this generally agreed-upon approval is a Bad Thing. You do not even have to criticize; simply questioning and suggesting that perhaps we need to think things through a bit more carefully is sufficient. I attempted to draw out some of the implications of the Luddite’s views in a previous post (“The Luddites Were Right”), and by saying they were right I intended that this was so according to their socio-economic status and level of political enfranchisement. This shows that Luddites were not simply reactionaries. We should be wary of using it as an epithet of dismissal, and even more wary of those who throw it around as a term of contempt. I wish to come at things from a different perspective now.