Daniel J. Martinez
Self-portrait #9b: Fifth Attempt to clone mental disorder or How one philosophizes with a hammer, After Gustave Moreau, Prometheus, 1868; David Cronenberg, Videodrome, 1981, 2001
Let us call for an autonomous band of architects, nomads clammering for, if nothing else, an excess of capitalism - with architecture as the extreme manifestation of this excess. And through this excess let us explore the anatomy of capitalism's contradictions - the cracks and fissures in the institutional edifice where new beauty and new activity might take hold - driving for the fragmentation, multiplication and proliferation of this edifice as a shattered mirror reflecting itself.
We must not confuse the product of culture with its means. Man's species activity constitutes him as responsible for his reactive forces: responsibility-debt. But this responsibility is only a means of training and selection: it progressively measures the suitability of reactive forces for being acted. The finished product of species activity is not the responsible man himself or the moral man, but the autonomous and supramoral man, that is to say the one who actually acts his reactive forces for being acted. He alone "is able to" promise, precisely because he is no longer responsible to any tribunal. The product of culture is not the man who obeys the laws, but the sovereign and legislative individual who defines himself by power over himself, over destiny, over the law: the free, the light, the irresponsible...This is the general movement of culture: the means disappearing in the product. Responsibility as responsibility before the law, law as the law of justice, justice as the means of culture - all this disappears in the product of culture itself...Culture is man's species activity; but, since this activity is selective, it produces the individual as its final goal, where species is itself suppressed.
- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. 137
In history culture takes on a sense which is very different from its own essence, having been seized by strange forces of a completely different nature. Species activity in history is inseparable from a movement which perverts it and its product. Furthermore, history is this very perversion, it is identical to the "degeneration of culture". - Instead of species activity, history presents us with races, peoples, classes, Churches and States. Onto species activity are grafted social organizations, associations, communities of a reactive character, parasites which cover it over and absorb it. By means of species activity - the movement of which they falsify - reactive forces form collectives...Instead of justice and its process of self-destruction, history presents us with societies which have no wish to perish and which cannot imagine anything superior to their own laws...Instead of the sovereign individual as the product of culture, history presents us with its own product, the domesticated man in whom it finds the famous meaning of history: "the sublime abortion" (Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil, 63), "the gregarious animal, docile, sickly, mediocre being" (Nietzche, Geneology of Morals, 11).
- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. 138
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