/lit/ - Literature

>There are no more authorities to which to refer, under whose jurisdiction producers could exchange their values in accordance with controlled equivalents: the end of the gold-standard. There are no more authorities to which to refer, under whose aegis a subject could exchange objects dialectically or exchange their determinations around a stable identity in accordance with definite rules: the end of the conscious subject. (We are tempted to say that this is the reign of the unconscious.) The logical consequence of this is, if the conscious subject is the mental equivalent of the gold-standard, then the unconscious is the mental equivalent of speculative currency and hot money. Today, individuals, disinvested as subjects and robbed of their fixed relations, are drifting, in relation to one another, into an incessant mode of transferential fluctuations: flows, connections, disconnections, transference/counter transference. Society as a whole could easily be described in terms of the Deleuzian unconscious, or of monetary mechanics (or indeed in the Riesmanian terms of 'other-directedness', which is already, unfortunately in Anglo-Saxon and therefore barely schizophrenic terms, the flotation of identities). Why privilege the unconscious here (even if it is orphan and schizophrenic)? The unconscious is that mental structure contemporaneous with the most radical, current phase of dominant exchange, it is contemporaneous with the structural revolution of value.

>We will not destroy the system by a direct, dialectical revolution of the economic or political infrastructure. Everything produced by contradiction, by the relation of forces, or by energy in general, will only feed back into the mechanism and give it impetus, following a circular distortion similar to a Moebius strip. We will never defeat it by following its own logic of energy, calculation, reason and revolution, history and power, or some finality or counter-finality The worst violence at this level has no purchase, and will only backfire against itself. We will never defeat the system on the plane of the real: the worst error of all our revolutionary strategies is to believe that we will put an end to the system on the plane of the real: this is their imaginary, imposed on them by the system itself, living or surviving only by always leading those who attack the system to fight amongst each other on the terrain of reality, which is always the reality of the system.

-- JB/SE&D

these were the days when people talked unironically of Destroying the System and actually meant capitalism, and not The Patriarchy!!1!, mind you. anyways, JB was very much keyed in on the philosophical significance of what a transition from the Gold Standard meant in both economic and cultural terms. turned out to be kind of a thing.