MACHINE

"Imagined beyond this evolutive schema, the machine is no longer only a function in a series imagined as starting from the tool, which occurs at a certain point. Similar to the way the techne concept of antiquity already meant both material object and practice, the machine is also not solely an instrument of work, in which social knowledge is absorbed and enclosed. Instead it opens up in connections and couplings: "There is no such as either man or nature now, only a
process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. (p.144)"

"The problem that Guattari deals with in his first machine text, written briefly after the experience of 1968, is the problem of a lasting revolutionary organization: an instititutional machine that does not transform itselft into a state or party structure; a machinic institution that does not reproduce the forms of the state apparatus, those provided by the paradigm of representation, but produce new forms of "instituent practices:" "The revolutionary project as the machinization of an institutional subversion would have to uncover these kinds of subjective possibilities and ensure them ahead of time in every stage of struggle against being being 'structuralized.' Yet this kind of permanent check of the machine effects that affect the structures could never be satisfied with a 'theoretical practice.' It requires the development of a specific analytical practice, which immediately applies to every step of organizing the struggle. (p.147)"
"As post-operaist theory formulates, following Guattari, due to the logic of economic development itself, it is necessary that the machine is not understood merely as structure that striates the workers and encloses social knowledge in itself. Going beyond Marx's idea of knowledge absorbed in fixed capital, Virno thus posits his thesis on the simultaneously pre-individual and trans-individual social quality of the intellect. "Living labor in postfordism has a raw material and means of production: thinking that is expressed through language, the ability to learn and communicate, the imagination, in other words the capacity that distinguishes human consciousness. Living labour accordingly incarnated the General Intellect (the 'social brain'), which Marx called the 'pillar of production and wealth.' Today the General Intellect is no longer absorbed in fixed capital, it nol longer represents only the knowledge containded in the system of the machines, but rather the verbal cooperation of a multitude of living subjects.

By taking up Marx's term Virno indicates that "intellect" is not to be understoood here as the exclusive competence of an individual , but rather as a common tie and a constantly developing foundation of individuation, as a social quality of the intellect. Here pre-individual human "nature," which lies in speaking, thinking, communicating, is augmented by the trans-individual aspect of the General Intellect: it is not only the entirety of all knowledge accumulated by the human species, not only what all prior shared capability has in common, it is also the in-between of cognitive workers, the communicative interaction, abstraction and self-reflexion of living subjects, the cooperation, the coordinated action of living labour.

Finally, on the basis of Virno's writings we are able to connect General Intellect as a collective capability and a machine concept in Guattari's sense. Knowledge as collective intellectuality is complementary to the machinic quality of production and social movement. General Intellect, or the "public intellect," as Virno further further develops the concept, is another name for Guattari's expansion of the machine concept beyond the technical machine and outside its realm. "Within the contemporary labor process, constellations of concepts exist, which function as productive 'machines' themselves, without needing a mechanical body or a little electronic soul. (p.148-9)"

(Raunig, Disruptive Monsters: From Representing to Constructing Situations [Chapter - Excursus On Machines] in 'Art & Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century,' 2007. p.138-49)

If SI is a machine system that dislodges itself from so-called art yet in its detachment still securely becomes attached to it and magnifies back this 'detachment' then proceeds to initiate and run and against political machinic state apparatus - Is this revolutionary, perhaps? Anti-art as revolution, revolutionary in the everyday. The above fragments from Raunig's Excursus On Machines assist our understanding of how SI is but a machine - a machine within a machine - a collective entity evolving with certainty to disrupt and dislodge itself and undermine the status quo (from the confines of art evolving into socialist politics), it is more interesting to identify the evolution and the proceedural framework from how such a machine has developed from an avant-garde practice - an identity of an artistic/social synthesis - into still in my regard an avant-garde practice with a centralized priority for political even somewhat militant change. SI exemplifies a collective that aligns itself with not only a theoretical foundation inturn directives for change it constitutes a strategy through ideas initially from one prioritization into another. In an axiomatic sense the SI theory driven basis both reflects the everyday and the politics of the everyday people - a direct reflection on the socio-cultural political climate of the time, a machinic system embracing the so-called 'General Intellect', or 'collective intellectuality', or as 'a social quality of the intellect', etc and its transition from one theoritcal form into another even could say physical model - a mechanism that engulfed a culture with not only a complex yet equalized form of self-control '...banish all totalities and hierarchies' but also vehicle for complete yet highly agit-prop strategies that endorsed almost guerilla-like occupations of factories, workers, etc - so the situation unfolds which inturn met its apex in the May 1968 revolts. Political revolution as art, no matter how anti-art something is it always places more emphasis back on itself as Art, it is interesting to see how the term 'revolutionary' as initiated and activated and sustained by SI took its natural course as a situation that questions Guattari's problem of a lasting revolutionary organization: an an instititutional machine that does not transform itselft into a state or party structure; a machinic institution that does not reproduce the forms of the state apparatus, those provided by the paradigm of representation, but produce new forms of "instituent practices."