Status Updates From Topología de la violencia

achievement society = doping society. keeping healthy at all costs in order to keep the excessive growth & progress going. ‘They are too alive to die and too dead to live.’ yikes
i disagree w his take on labor camps no longer being located on the ‘outskirts’ of society. yes we’ve brought a lot of those practices into the everyday, but CECOT, prisons, israeli torture camps etc..still hidden in plain sight

‘The only possible way to oppose empire would be to mitigate the process that creates it, eliminating its diabolical sting.’
but what does that even mean?? concretely?
acceleration of empire will lead to total burnout and be catastrophic, he says. lowkey what we’re seeing happen right now i believe.
how do we reverse these processes? what is the alternative?

‘The lack of a counterforce perpetuates the neoliberal economic order. It develops a strong appropriative energy, which absorbs everything and converts it into a capitalist formula.’
ouch

empire is decentralized capitalist regime these days. lack of belonging and community makes class alignment very difficult.
everyone within the capitalist system belongs to it, he says is both victim and perpetrator, which makes resistance nearly impossible.
everyone is hurt and subject to the expectations, but i still see a ruling class that, while also subject to this, are the main arbiters of continuing it all

‘Deficiency naturally comes to an end when the point of saturation is reached, but excess knows no end.’

some forms of negativity, like pausing boredom hesitating etc, can actually be constructive and necessary

i don’t really understand what he defines as ‘diabolical’ and what he thinks is the source of this.

over communication, spamification, once more hyper positivity and acceleration.

‘i am, therefore i shop.’ lol han makes me laugh

transparency of today, the panopticon. obscenity of everything as on display, everything exposed, everything able to be equated to a price, every subject is its own product for sale.
‘The society of achievement reaches maximum efficiency when freedom and self-exploitation are indistinguishable.’ self exposure and self exploitation merge’
transparency as an economic compulsion

‘The more political and action is, the more secrecy it generates.’
oof…i must do more research on this…

he claims the constant demand for transparency is bad. ‘A person’s integrity requires a certain inaccessibility and impermeability.’
in a certain sense i agree, but also don’t want to go fully towards faith based direction where there is no transparency. you need trust for that.
does transparency truly eliminate ‘otherness’??

erosion of the social..scattered, self-focused selves with weak connections to a “we”
excessive growth as major issue-cancerous, becomes destructive at a certain level. and blind to the higher entity which it serves

overwhelming ‘positivity’ of life, congrats and blocks. baudrillard thought on war now is mainly without an enemy, one is at war with oneself.
‘Those who destroy are destroyed…It is a war that no one can win. This war without enmity wouldn’t be ended by the victory of one party over the other but only by global collapse, global burnout.’

wars waged in the name of a nation or a people, rather than for a sovereign, it’s existential, and this increases its range and casualties, unleashed more deadly violence.

invisibility of systematic violence which makes people unaware of it or think it’s normal, thus it’s even more efficient. achievement society of today, the system is in the utmost power, even the ruling class is subjugated to acting according to the system. think, ways in which men are also hurt by patriarchy for ex.

‘Violence dissolves borders’ completeellyyyy disagree on this front

power as a constructive force, creating systems structures institutions, inscribing itself. lowry be is musk etc, they’re constructing. something that is ultimately destructive though:.:kind of circular.
what about violence of armed resistance? violence can’t be the only source of power ofc but, how to go against oppressive/systemic violence???

******* ‘Politicians also establish themselves in this depoliticized space of spectacle. It is not their political acts but rather their personality that is staged in the media.’
UGH. for ex brat kamala 😩🤮

kind of disagree w his takes on law&violence. Y violence is destructive, but compromise is not necessarily anti violent. law mediates but sometimes it literally prescribes violence.
power is space building? power operates on a yes? but what about forced yes? idk.
is friendship more mediating than law and justice? honestly maybe.

violence doesn’t stabilize anything, actually widespread violence is a sign of instability

‘To free itself from the narcissistic hamster wheel in which it circles itself ever more quickly, it would have to restore a relationship to the other, one beyond Schmitt’s enemy/friend principle and its concomitant violence of negativity. A different construction, indeed, a reconstruction of the other is necessary, one that doesn’t provoke a destructive immunological defense...

determining between enemy and friend. mainly determined existentially. for ex zionism, crusades, existential problems by creating an enemy.
*** ‘Existentialization deprives the factual domain of its factuality, lending it irrational tendencies.’ !!!

‘Virtualization and digitization are increasingly contributing to the disappearance of the real, which is notable above all for the resistance it provides.’

contemp society’s impossibility of objectively valid/definitive forms of closure ‘drives the subject into a narcissistic repetition of itself’ — it’s harder for us to feel completion of goals projects etc.
‘This lack of closure is to a large extent economically necessitated; after all, openness and open-endedness facilitate growth.’

nuclear arms race for ex shows that we still have archaic belief that accumulation of the ability to kill will ward off death. roundabout circularity
‘…capitalism actually has much to do with death and fear of death….The hysteria of accumulation and of growth and fear of death are mutually dependent.’

violence as 1st religious experience—archaic religions about sacrifice to forces (animals, nature etc) that control/affect/even enact violence onto us
killing in order to not be killed.
violence increases one’s sense of power ‘More violence meant more power.’ oof
“Mana” from Marquesas Islands…elder wand vibes

violence used to be on display and an integral part of society, rulers expressing power and glory thru violence.
shift to invisibility of brute violence — surveillance, concentration camps/prisons at the edge of society not meant to be seen, (tho violence is still normalized for/onto bipoc ppl in “faraway places”)
psychological internalization of violence