microtextures of ϑ’petty bourgeois - ϑ’entirety of ϑ’machine

marxists recognize a complexity in their molar interpretations of oppressed and oppressor.., the petty bourgeois., the nomad handyman that can swing towards either team, that exists separate from the wage worker / mass exploiter dynamic. but the reality is this dynamic is interwoven across strata at various points. it is at this intersection where someone can be a freedom fighter in the streets, and a misogynist in the home,. or a wrecker in the sheets and carer in the kitchen. while it seems at first to be contradictions, the multiplicity describes every assemblage functioning by making and breaking connections for wildly different flows (in the soul, the lover, the worker, the state…). it is tempting to say, for example, that America lusts for their own destruction, that they perpetuate and find jouissance in their helplessness.. to follow daddy’s lead, ⅋ut the reality is much different.

The microtextures — not masochism — are what explain how the oppressed can take an active role in oppression: the workers of the rich nations actively participate in the exploitation of the Third World, the arming of dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.

it is much more accurate to understand the money machine as a single body that engulfs the proletariat’s flows of desire between their organs, rather than a separate entity. to simplify things, we can understand the connection to function like a “voluntary” (it’s not, we are engulfed) “social contract” (it’s not, it is a flow of desire), in which the molecular exploitation of their labour is exchanged to be part of the molar exploitation of their global dominance. the proletariat are not tricked into participating in it’s destruction, they are in perfect harmony with it. this seems to be why, now, there is such resonance between the black holes of the nationalist and those of the neoliberal. by enforcing an abstract nameless national facility, an illusion of the molar identity is reinforced and forms a feedback loop, integrating into the money machine. the neoliberal and fascist are not merely “in bed together”, on this strata, they have found each other, molten, and coagulated into one entity.. hardened into a committed romantic relationship. this is true even as The Father abolishes the department of education, it’s not a libidinal bimboification, it’s merely part of the subjected “contract” that keeps the relationship between power and impotence running.

this whole chain and web of power is immersed in a world of mutant flows that eludes them. It is precisely its impotence that makes power so dangerous. The man of power will always want to stop the lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in the overcoding machine. But he can do so only by creating a void, in other words, by first stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it within the local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving the assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the “closed vessel.”

manufacturing consent is only one menial aspect of the machine that provides conscious justifications for its existence, but the unconscious subjectification of the proletariat had long been stratified. it’s a performance. this is nøt to say the bourgeois does nøt aim to mislead the prolitariat, only that it does nøt matter. that either way it is the same machine and the same flows of desire. so following a single flow’s narrative, it’s manufactured “consents” (Brexit, 9/11, Tiananmen Square…) often overlook the entirety of the machine.

though this totalizing view, that the prolitariet are inseparable from their own exploitation, can make us feel even more helpless, i also maintain that there is no “libidinal band” only a cancerous machine that consumes everything. the jouissance in it’s consumption is merely a coincidence. the proletariat do not “hold onto their chains” out of sheer intensity of feeling, b∵c microtexture is nøt skin, and the “chains” are non-linear. the masochism surely exists, but it is not why we are here.