Producerism

Consumerism is a constant byword of cultural criticism. Consumer culture is bad, consumerism is bad; these can stand in for some kind of richer engagement with Marxism that would inevitably lead one to a non-liberal politics. I most often see this word used by soft lefties being careful about overcommitting with their language. And there is, obviously, something to it. We (and I say "we" because if you are reading this you are almost definitely of this group) consume a whole fucking lot, and are at the very least deluged with demands or supplications to do more of it.

But what of the other half? Where is production? The rhetoric of anti-consumerism treats production as something immune or at least anathemic to perversion. At worst the processes of production are themselves perverted (this being the core of Marxist humanism and the ontologisation of labor)--in which case we need to get back to the "good" production, the essence that is definitively good. (Does anti/consumerist discourse have any concept of good consumption?)

This juncture, of course, points to what is most desired by capitalist reproduction: not a consumer society, as Foucault shows in his 1977-78 lectures on the collapse of anti-scarcity models, but a producer society, and it is around this nexus that late capitalism has been able to incorporate some of the social genetics of an earlier generation of anti-capitalism. The tales of Heroes of Labor have ironically become more accessible as the Stakhanovite ethos has been demythologized into the only means to achieve marginal superiority over the pack (or herd). If there is any substance to theses on the move to an information economy (or whatever one's preferred term for a digital world) it is in capital's much better ability to avoid underconsumption. At the same time we have an increasing pressure to produce, not because we need more shit--no one says that--but because production, in the few hundred years capitalism has been working on this, is now better at the almost-immediate capture of relation into circulable value. Consumption can only make you so stupid before it dulls its own effectiveness; now you need to get to working producing that stupidity, with a fervor and skill only you can know.

This provides some context for why "inoperability" might be, if placed in a Marxist narrative, actually useful.

Darwin and Deleuze: species in motion

How does the temporality of evolution work? And if species are evolving, how is there such a thing as "species" anyway--why not a total flux? Darwin is clear that "species" is not a precise term. The difference between a "species" and a "variety" or subspecies is murky because species arise from varieties.

"Certainly no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and sub-species.... These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage" (The Annotated Origin 51).

Actual exemplar organisms can only constitute a series with discrete differences, but somehow these series amount to differences of species, for we see quite clearly that sheep are not pigs are not cows. But in another sense, one which Darwin must affirm, sheep are pigs differentiated only by temporal duration and environmental transaction.

(Incidentally, the text I'm using is this really beautifully done facsimile of the first edition of the Origin. Worth the 25-35 bucks if you can afford it).

This paradox sheds light on the metaphysical subtlety underwriting Darwin's new concept of evolution. The extant alternatives of Paley and Lamarck both wrangled with the difficulty of change in metaphysically conservative ways--both essentially see change as a surface phenomenon, Paley by punting processual agency to the deity (if it exists at all), Lamarck by tethering change to individual intention. (Darwin, on the other hand, upholds "unconscious selection"--the selection process might be concealed to all intentional actors.) Most importantly, change is not an extra metaphysical layer, the proverbial icing on the cake, but existence itself. Species exist as temporal accumulations. A being is a discrete organism and a point in a series of discrete organisms, but it is also and necessarily a blur of motion in a dimension of being that does see the series, a dimension better termed becoming; thus a being is "an actual passage." Darwin's fundamental, if unstated, metaphysical revolution then opens a whole new and profitably analytic despite the evidentiary gaps and downright errors in the Origin. (Remember he did not have Mendelian genetics at hand--can you imagine affirming Darwinism without a gene theory of inheritance?!)

The metaphysics of Darwinian evolution are put forward more concisely by Deleuze in a lecture on Spinoza:

"The affection envelops an affect...It is not a comparison of the mind in two states, it is a passage or transition enveloped by the affection, by every affection. Every instantaneous affection envelops a passage or transition. Transition, to what? Passage, to what?... There is a specificity of the transition, and it is precisely this that we call duration and that Spinoza calls duration. Duration is the lived passage, the lived transition." (From the Deleuze's lectures transcripts on Spinoza's affect)

The Origin of Species touts not just a theory for how species arose, but a radical redefinition of the concept "species" of which it is equally originary.