A Schizo-Stroll: Anxious Reflections On Late Capitalism

CCTV, performance management reviews, the unemployment office, the privileges system in the prisons, the rise of right-wing political parties, the constant examination and classification of even the youngest schoolchildren...it seems that we are all very anxious these days. But what is it about the organization of society that instills different socio-economic and marginalized groups with varying degrees of anxiety? Are the visceral and cartographical architectures (urban spaces, occupations, social strata, and other forms of knowledge production) of our modern world predisposed to engender experiences of fear, anxiety, dread, and ultimately, control? In deploying the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and others to uncover the affective alienations of late capitalism, this book is a political geography that seeks to generate conversations about the relation between our everyday anxieties and larger political structures of control. Of course, there's always a political motive behind any map-a motive that lives in the almost-invisible spaces between a map and the territory it seeks to represent. What draws this schizoanalytical intervention 'together' is an attempt to uproot from the social's causes and traditions in order to conduct physical exoduses from the ideological territories that have harboured us through much of our previous lives. In other words, to embark on a schizo-stroll is to embark on derive of bodies, spaces, and times; of kinetics, materiality, and the non-conscious faces we present to the world. It is to strive for many heightened degrees of empathy and perception-to focus our gaze on something and tease out the intangible in it-an intangible that transforms something within each of us. Schizoanalysis does not argue that revolutionaries are schizophrenics. Rather, it points out that there's a schizoid process, of decoding and deterritorialising, which only revolutionary activity can stop from turning into the production of capitalist paranoia. In this spirit, this book is considering a problem to do with the close link between the reproduction of capitalism on the one hand, and between revolutionary movements on the other. The only question is to try to make a text work. And, from this point of view, what has always been alive in revolutionary modes of thought, in their initial stages, is not the coherence of their statements, but the fact that the very act of enunciating them represents a breaking off, a way of telling the obsessive limitations of bourgeois political economy, academic psychology, the clinical psychiatry of the time, etc. to all go to hell. In this spirit, schizoanalysis-and by extension, this precedent collection of schizo-strolls-has one single aim: To get revolutionary, artistic, and performative machines working together as parts, cogs, of one another. After all, to embark on a schizo-stroll is to leave the furrow, to go 'off the rails, ' to wander in imagination and thought-meanings, images, and so on float in a dream of dis-logic rather than calmly following from one to another along the familiar lines or tracks of cold reason. That's what these schizo-strolls are most interested in-a revolutionary schism necessitated by the current crises, the splitting off into post-capitalist worlds that, for now, only exists in those almost-invisible spaces between a map and the territory.

• | Author: A. T. Kingsmith
• | Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• | Publication Date: Feb 17, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 120 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1544802277
• | ISBN-13: 9781544802275