difference

This week I finished the third chapter of Baudrillard's For the Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, entitled Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction. I was interested to is description of Fetishism not as manifested ideas represented by objects (typical of Marzist analysis of fetishization) but as an obsession with the reflection/refraction in the code of the system of objects, or words, the fetish is then embedded in the act of play with structural differences of the sytem in question. This is a systematic analysis of the systems themselves.

In The Politics of Difference: An Intro To Deleuze by Todd May, I found an interesting correllary, which I believe applies the significance of negative space in another way:

"We do not want to say, one should live in such a way. There is no general perscription. We have done globalizing concepts. It is not a question of how we should live; it is a question of how we might live. Seen from Deleuze and Guattari's viewpoint, the question might become something like this: "What connections might we form? Or, What actualizations can we experiment with?" If we ask the question this way, we need to bear in mind that "we" is not a given we. It can be a group. It can be an individual. It can be an ecosystem or a pre-individual part or a cross-section within an environment or a geographical slice. What makes it a "we" is not the stability of an identity. It is the participation in the formation of connections.

Wil this participation be a matter of living together? Will it involve power? Yes to both questions. Politics is an experiment in machinic connections; it is not a distribution of goods to those who lack them. To ask how we might go about living is not to repeat the dreary question of who needs what. It is instead to probe the realm of difference that we are in order to create new and (one hopes) better arrangements for living, in the broadest sense of the word living.

I think this exerpt is an incredbly beautiful one, I felt like the nihilism of Baudrillard needs to be balanced out somehow.

They totally look the same.