i'm kind of confused by this passage in fanged noumena. Can soneone explain this?
"Consider the finance capital usage ofcocaine: both aquantitative high traced out as a deviation from zero and a sumptuary expenditure voiding the historical sense ofwealth. The coked-out futures dealer passing a drunk on a Manhattan street translates the des tiny of class difference into an immanent intensity traced on a smooth surface of social disappearance. The bum inhabits the social zero preferred by capital as the vanish ing point of pre-modern legality, from which the coke rush is repulsed as an anonymous distance from death. There is a becoming a rich bum, becoming a derelict on coke. which is integral to the cynicism of frontier capital."
2 Name: Anonymous2024-04-29 22:35
there is a thought that addiction to alcohol makes you a distasteful bum, and addiction to coke makes you a high-class bum. You can make lots of money selling drugs, whereas alcohol can be easily and cheaply obtained. In reality, a bum is a bum and the type of vice you have doesn't make you any better.
In fn it says that "death" is a "machine part" of capitalism, how does this scenario reflect that?
4 Name: Anonymous2024-04-30 14:52
death is part and parcel of captialism, the cycle of getting addicted to drugs, causing a demand in the market for them, and dying. Alcohol is a widely available commodity, there is little need to drive up the price, aside from 'luxury' products. In comparison, cocaine is rare, but its customers have a deadly dependency on it, and are willing to spend and do whatever it takes to obtain it.
>>3 This would be my reading: Reference to machine makes me think deleuze. Considering death not on it's own, but as a territory for flows in the rhizomatic machine of technocapitalism. Also think about land's influence from bataille, for whom death and sacrifice is very important, serving as the ultimate mechanism for energy expenditure and the only way for humans to achieve real continuity. We take batailles concept of continuity of death (in other words, when you are alive you are individual and separate from everything around you, in death you are continuous with everything else), combined with Land's conception of capitalism as a "flattening", Deterritorializing force, and see how death becomes a machine part in capitalism's machinic Deterritorialization of everything.
6 Name: Anonymous2024-05-01 12:01
>>5 i was thinking of creative destruction in capitalism
"Consider the finance capital usage ofcocaine: both aquantitative high traced out as a deviation from zero and a sumptuary expenditure voiding the historical sense ofwealth. The coked-out futures dealer passing a drunk on a Manhattan street translates the des tiny of class difference into an immanent intensity traced on a smooth surface of social disappearance. The bum inhabits the social zero preferred by capital as the vanish ing point of pre-modern legality, from which the coke rush is repulsed as an anonymous distance from death. There is a becoming a rich bum, becoming a derelict on coke. which is integral to the cynicism of frontier capital."