Won’t keep typing, but will say that the ending of the second chapter runs parallel to that of the first — this time, drawing on Negri and Tronti, but developing concept of the minority as that element of the assemblage which can activate nomadic-free-activity potential in ways states, or really arrangement of states by global capitalism, cannot. The key being formulating own problems, particular inventions, etc., which holds for concepts as well, as you say regarding the way that “Deleuze” becomes labor imposed on thinker-workers. Which is why, referring to our discussion elsewhere (http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/08/deleuze_and_on_.html), philosophy must oppose communication.

Returning, then. So, the real question they pose is how to find the nomad-capacity or free-action-capacity that’s within the contemporary assemblage and thus to produce something exterior to the state. This point, and the point distinguishing the essence/potentiality of a concept (war-machine) from its actual assemblage, are brought together in a helpful passage (p. 422):

“We have tried to define two poles of the war machine: at one pole, it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here — limited war, total war, worldwide organization — war represents not at all the supposed essence of the war machine but only, whatever the machine’s power, either the set of conditions under which the States apprpriate the machine, even going so far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of which the States themselves are now only parts [i.e. global capitalism]. The other pole seemed to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower “quantities,” [and perhaps we can think here of Hizbollah] has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against thw worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.”

And, on the next page: “The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of teh quantitites that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles. War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.”

Agreed. And really, when we say ‘theory’ at least some of the time we mean something like ‘the practice of theorizing.’ Right? And this practice is precisely a labor of thought, though with corporeal components as well of course. Sometimes this labor is waged labor, sometimes it’s free activity.

I think dead labor works just as well as an account of theory books as it does for other machines - the remains of the past within the present which have a power only when animated by living labor, in some cases in a liberatory sense and sometimes functional for waged labor. After all, any time one assigns a Deleuze piece to one’s students one is using the Deleuze piece as dead labor which is functional for imposing work upon those students.

cheers,
Nate

ps- what book is it that the distinction is found in, and if you’re able and don’t mind can you supply approximate page references?

http://www.elkilombo.org/documents/deleuzesanbar.html

http://www.elkilombo.org/documents/deleuzearafat.html

“We attain the power to produce the good life through our power to work or through having work.” should read “(…) through having worked.”

On that paragraph, what I mean to say is that labor power qua commodity is always greater than the specific use it is put to concretely - the boss can change the work and we can do the new work because the old work did not exhaustively actualize our potential. And the total set of our capacities (which is not subject to exhaustive delineation) is always greater than the total set of capacities that make up labor power qua commodity (which is also not subject to exhaustive delineation, however). Surplus value production, the imposition of work, is a reduction of us. We’re all always already more than that, than what the boss sees us as. In this sense then - and others - the omniproductivist perspective in Negri’s recent work - we’re always productive everywhere all the time, real subsumption such that there’s no longer any outside at all - is also wrong. (It has to be if communism is to have any meaning other than an alignment of interests between us and the bosses.)

Also, on the grad student labor, I meant to say that novelty or not is a red herring but that inquiry into how our labor in the university functions now - regardless of whether it was created only a second ago or has existed as is in perpetuity - is a pressing need. Especially inquiry not only as the production of knowledge objects but as the composition of collectivities with a desire to, commitment to, and power to act. Put differently, what’s needed is inquiry that seeks to produce knowledge useful for - and at the same time to practice - the building of the new society within the shell of the old.