The Strain

"The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of the power is based on its optimizing the system’s performance—efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is commensurable) or disappear."

"some of the general guidelines offered by Deleuze, Lyotard, and Foucault are consonant with a political perspective that emphasizes the local, intersecting, and contingent nature of political relationships. These guidelines include the call for social, personal, and political experimentation, the expansion of situated freedom, the release of subjected discourses and genres, and the limitation and reorientation of the role of the intellectual. …the activity of political reflection must have as a primary goal the freeing of an individual (be that individual a person, a group, or a practice) for new practices, practices that change, undermine, or abandon the power relationships that keep old practices in place."

"Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault share a refusal to view power as solely a negative, repressive force; alongside that refusal—and intertwined with it—they share a rejection of subjectivity as a viable source of political action. …This new anarchism retains the ideas of intersecting and irreducible local struggles, of a wariness about representation, of the political as inventing the entire field of social relationships, and of the social as a network rather than a closed holism, a concentric field, a hierarchy."