Text page
Mackay - Wildstyle (Deleuze and Philosophy, The Difference Engineer) (1997)
"Wildstyle (Deleuze and Philosophy, The Difference Engineer) (1997)" uses feedback, automation, or machinic desire to describe modernity as a recursive system rather than a human-centered project.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The key claim is that cybernetic process and capitalist abstraction belong to the same field. Feedback, machinic desire, and recursive automation describe how modernity runs through distributed systems rather than sovereign subjects.
These pages make recursion operational by tying desire, signal, and control to technical process. Cybernetics becomes a vocabulary for understanding how abstraction feeds back through bodies, media, and institutions.
That matters because the archive's account of meltdown depends on feedback rather than simple linear progress. The future arrives here as recursive escalation, not as planned development.
How to read this text
Begin with the page's account of feedback or machinic desire, then move outward to its claims about culture or politics.
Track how automation, recursion, or systems language displaces centered agency. That shift usually reveals why the text sits in this section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 38
Like Nietzsche’s will to power, like Bataille’s general economics, the machinic unconscious is a cipher for the dissembling force of critique whose runaway feedback loop consists of increasingly sophisticated analyses of its own stratification. Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a program for desirevolutionary autocritique, a toolbox for migrating (=) intelligence.
Definition · paragraph 40
Robin Mackay 260 desire. The bombed-out schizophrenic is the one who takes this diagonal too far too soon, before the socius can digest it: Artaud binned by society, obsessively decoding vocal and/or logographical systems into the ‘gasps and cries’ of schizonautic BwO burnout, ‘sheer unarticulated blocks of sound’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:9). The alphabet as an object of exploration, of machinic exploitation, an apparatus of migration.
Definition · paragraph 25
The question will be, what sort of tactics are most efficacious in the releasing of machinic potential (surplus-value)? And how is it that, speaking in terms of the sonic assemblage, the vernacular cybernetics of underground subcultures have already sent such vectors crashing through the strata? * * * Lift the needle, bring it across, smooth, gliding, frictionless, cue it up and then let it delve into that 12 inch plane of existence. (Two Fingers and Kirk 1995:37)
Definition · paragraph 42
But at its outer limit, the capitalist socius is the machinic unconscious. It clicks into desiring-production as decoded language clicks into rhythm. Capitalization agitates for decoded communication, the abstract general equivalent, whilst performing a gross overcoding which dichotomizes monetary exchange as capital/cash, one mapping an intensive series, non-linear positive feedback, the other mapping extensive, linear and unproductive circles: investor/ consumer.
Stakes · paragraph 50
In its insistence on the practicality of stratoanalysis (icebreaking), Capitalism and Schizophrenia plugs into the vernacular cybernetics of Gibson’s street-voudu, emphasizing the power of minority microcultures whose pragmatic survivalism precludes for them the bourgeois marginality of the avant-garde or the heroic martyrdom of resistance politicos:
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.