Capital Form or Flow (Session 2)

Hello and welcome to our second session of the seminar, Capital Formal Flow with our instructor Ray Brassier. So please Ray, you may take it on. Okay, thanks. So I'll just, once again I've got a PowerPoint which I'll put on screen. Okay, I hope everyone can see it. Great. Okay, so, yes, I'll try. So, what I'll do is I'll try to move a little bit faster today, so that there's more time

for questions so that we don't go over time so much. Okay, and the other thing I want to mention is that, so today I'm covering chapter one of Antioedipus, the Desiring Machines, and I'll mainly talk about, you know, I'll give a brief description of the three syntheses of designing production. But I won't say so much about the importance of registration and inscription in the second synthesis because that will really feature prominently in next weeks, in the next couple of sessions when we look at chapter three, you know, kind of barbarian, savages, civilized

savages barbarian civilized men okay okay so let's proceed first of all um i want to i thought after last week's discussion just i wanted to make two notes and a note on the subject and a note on representation because these are in the in the questions last week these two topics um came up a couple of times so i just wanted to kind of you know give a a clarification to kind of about the way in which Marx is using these, especially the term subject, but also his relationship to the critique of representation. So first of all, the subject, you know, for Marx is not Descartes thinking substance or Kant's

desubstantialized, I think, that must accompany all representations, but nor is it the empiricist subject of sensation, I sense, I feel. So Marx is a post-Hegelian conception of subjectivity, whereby it is born out of the non-self-identity of substance, or in a way, the impossible self-identity of substance. So the subject then, in this sense, is a self-relation, where neither a pole of the relation corresponds to a self-identical experiencing subject or to an experienced substance and the subject object dynamic cuts across every phenomenon in this sense

which is to say it's not so it's not simply kind of of the meaning of subjective and objective and of these poles can be psychologized or phenomenologized okay so that there's a sense in which this dynamic self-relation is operative even when talking about objects or systems and structures which are very far removed from the experiential or phenomenological domain. And the final point is that either pole of this dynamic can assume the role of agent or patients. In other words, it's not the case that the subject is always the agent and the object is the patient. They can switch position. And Hegel's dialectic

is about how subject and object are constantly switching positions and switching the positions of agency and patience and then a note on representation so marxian critique operates in the wake of the hegelian critique of kantian representation can't critique metaphysics where he's trying to find conditions for the possibility of cognitive representation the social totality that is the object of marx's critique is not a representable object so marx is already operating Marx also as a critique of representation and the sense in which Marx inherits Hegel's kind of speculative overcoming of the Kantian critique of representation is that

Hegel is that Marx wants to have a non-speculative alternative to the you know the the rational reflexive overcoming both of you know of empiricism rationalism but also the critique of the critical representationism in the Kantian sense so where in a sense there's two Martin Hooper- Marx uses dialectical reflection, but in a sense, and he uses it as an alternative to representation and to the attempt to identify conditions of representability. Martin Hooper- Which is the Kantian problematic, but he wants to do this in a sense, which is very different from Hegel's so there's an idealist in the material sense of reflection idealist reflection.

reflection is the speculative coincidence of positing and posited in a cognitive register. Okay. This means that anything you know, for an idealist inspecting that the identity of subject and object and speculative thinking is the identity of the coincidence of thinking as positing and of the object as whatever, you know, it's thinking, recognizing that its object has always already been posited by it. Okay. But this unfolds in the in the elements of cognition, whereas Marx, in a way, wants to develop a concept of reflection, which involves the non specular splitting of producing and

producing a practical register. So for Marx, you know, Marx wants to kind of relocate the dialectic of reflection in the elements of human social practice or social production. And instead of the speculative coincidence of thinking and thought or subject and object, he wants to identify a point of fission or a kind of separation or a gap between the productive activity and what is produced or between subject and object if you want to put it that way but this hiatus is a practical direction not a cognitive one and we see this then if we look

at Marx's use of the metaphor of the camera obscura which I think is a crucial figure for for making sense of Marx's, the critique of political economy. And it's a figure that Marx uses in the German ideology in 1845, but I think it's still operative in capital. So Marx writes in German ideology, he writes, if in all ideology men and their relations appear upside down, as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process this means that

materialist reflection in marx articulates the outside and the inside okay um you know the The inside is the inside of the camera obscura. So Marx wants to think the continuity and the discontinuity of outside and inside as results of social production. You know, the inside, you know, the camera obscura, the chamber of interiority and internal representation is produced by external social processes. So Marx insists on the continuity of the exterior and its inverted interior reflection as the continuity of social production and its products.

But he also wants to think that they're discontinuity. And this is to say that the objective inversion of external relations that gives rise to their subjective misrepresentation. And by this, I mean, if you go back to the image, if you look, the perceiver inside the camera obscura is looking at the inverted image of the outside world. But two things, this, the, the inversion is objective, the inversion of the image inside the camera obscura is an objective phenomenon, produced by the refraction of light, you know, of external reflection within the chamber of the camera.

um so that's there's an objective inversion and it's this objective inversion that conditions and the subjective misrepresentation of the outside okay um so this dynamic is is i think crucial for marx so the objective inversion of external relations that gives rise to their subjective misrepresentation is the result of a historical hiatus separating past from present production In other words, what prevents the coincidence of producing and produced in Marx is the fact that human social production unfolds in time, in historical time, so that Marx puts it humans make their own history, but they don't choose, you know, the structures or the circumstances in which they, you know, they produce their own history.

And that's why, and not because that those structures or circumstances are simply objectively given, but because they are the result or the product of a previous, a historically, you know, anterior phase of production. So this historical hiatus is inscribed in the, you know, the objective inversion and its subjective, and the subjective misrepresentation to which it gives rise. Okay, so these are just two. So now this topic will turn up again. We'll see when we look at what, you know, what Deleuze and Guattari say about Marx and the capital associates later.

So first of all, we begin with the unity of social and desiring production. So this is this is Deleuze and Guattari in Antiochus. So social production is purely and simply desiring production it's you know it's purely and simply desiring production itself under determinate conditions and we maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire that it is the historically determined product of desire and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation any psychic operation any transformation in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social and nothing else. So what Deleuze and Guattari here are doing is distinguishing two regimes of production.

Okay, but note that they say desire and the social. I think this and is very, is kind of loaded. Desiring production suffuses social production, but the syntheses of designing production are primary. In other words, the book begins, the primary process, the primary process of production is that of desiring production and not social production. So even if the two are inseparable, and if desiring production is always enveloped in social production, you have to understand the dynamisms of designing production in order to understand social production. So that's important. The difference between these two regimes of production is a difference in scale and not

in nature. So they write, there is never any difference in nature between the designing machines and the technical social machines. There is a certain distinction between them, but it is merely a distinction of regime, depending on their relationships of size. except for this difference in regime, they are the same machines. Now, I think what's initially puzzling in this distinction, this claim that the difference between social and desiring production is a difference in scale. I mean, it's a difference in regime, but this difference in regime is fundamentally scalar. What is the source of this difference in scale? Okay, how are we to understand this discrepancy between the two regimes?

And here I think there's a line that is very illuminating in this regard. They write, not in chapter one, but later, I think in chapter two, that schizophrenia or desiring production is the boundary between the molar organization and molecular multiplexer desire. So in other words, the two regimes of production, you know, correspond to the distinction between molar organization and molecular multiplicity. Okay. And molar organization involves the hylomorphic dualism of form and function or of use and assembly or of product and production. Hyalomorphism is, you know, the Aristotelian doctrine, which kind of distinguishes, you know, matter and form, where matter has to be informed, you know, by form, okay.

And of course, this is a constant target of, you know, Delos and Guattari. That's, you know, hyalomorphism is exactly what they are attacking. Whereas in molecular multiplicity, there is a hylozoic unity of form and function or of use and assembly of product of product. Hylozoism is simply the claim that matter is alive. Matter is not kind of this passive receptacle for kind of conceptual or ideal formation, but is self-organizing or self-assembling, self-structuring, et cetera, et cetera. Peter Haslund, Ph.D.: And it's this and it's in this regard that they will describe what what they characterize as a molecular functionalism so here's another quote from later in the book, but again it's very pertinent.

Peter Haslund, Ph.D.: It is only at the sub microscopic level. David Sloan- The molecular level of design machines that there exists a functionalism machining arrangements and engineering of desire. David Sloan- For it, it is only there that functioning and formation use and assembly product and production merge all molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not formed. in the same way they function. And the technical machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions that separates their own production from their distinct product. Only what is not produced in the same way it functions

has a meaning and also a purpose and intention. The desiring machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves. Note here, this is very telling, this final kind of form. They are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves. And I think what's going on here is that, you know, molar transcendence is being pitted against molecular imminence. The macroscopic dualism of form and function or assembly and use or production and product is contrasted to their microscopic unity.

Organic, but more importantly, organic and social forms for Deleuze and Guattari are transcendent unities constraining molecular functioning. which implies that molecular functioning is anorganic and asocial which is to say asignifying involuntary atelic or purposeless but one of the things that's entailed by those and gotari's critique of representation is the claim that schizoanalysis is a practice it's not a theory it's not it's not something that's simply describing reality. It is itself a productive intervention.

It's a doing and not simply a kind of thinking. So schizoanalysis is a pragmatics, and as a pragmatics, it involves an ethics. And insofar as it involves an ethics, meaning will be replaced with sense, with what Deleuze calls the logic of sense, intention with intensification and purpose with production. So although meaning, intention and purpose are dissolved at the molecular level of functioning, it turns out that what they call machinic pragmatics or schizoanalysis involves the

the production of sense, you know, intense processes of intensification and production in general. Okay. So this is why. Okay, we'll return to this point. Now we see that the three senses of process, okay, the primary process which they are outlining in chapter one, involves, you know, an indistinction of nature and industry.

So they write, distinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called production, distribution, and consumption, the spheres of political economy. But it's the claim that these spheres are kind of discreetly separable that is that Deleuze and Guattari want to undermine.

So they continue, the real truth of the matter, the glaring sober truth that resides in delirium, is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits. Production is immediately consumption and a recording process without any sort of mediation. And the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself. And hence, everything is production. Production of productions, of actions and of passions. Productions of recording processes, of distributions and of coordinates that serve as points of reference. And finally, productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties and of pain.

Now here, before we note, you know, here that they're describing the three syntheses of desiring production, but before we describe them, note that what is excluded from this catalogue of the, you know, the dimensions of production, or of the process, the dimensions of the process of the unity of industry and nature is the sphere of exchange. The imminence of social and desiring production excludes the sphere of exchange, which is to say it excludes the sphere of the commodity and of commodification. Whereas capitalism is a production distribution and exchange of commodities.

the money form is indissociable from the commodity form and the value form. So in other words, if you, you know, by excluding exchange from the process, the primary process of the unity of industry and nature, this has, you know, very significant consequences along the line, as we'll see, because when Deleuze and Guattari talk about money, they seem to talk about it independently of its relationship to the commodity form and the value form. And for Marx, exchange is ineliminable because it is the vanishing mediator between capitalist production, distribution, and consumption, which is not to say that exchange

is separable, can be abstracted from production, distribution, and consumption, but that's the practice of commodity exchange obviously conditions production distribution and consumption. The commodity form is what unites these four spheres production distribution exchange and consumption. Okay so now we get to the first meaning of process. The first meaning of process for those in Guattari is the unity of production distribution consumption as they write it so this unity is one of incorporating recording and consumption within production itself and thus making them the productions of one and the same process

because distribution and consumption correspond to the second and third The second meaning of process is that of the unity of humanity and nature. So they write man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other, not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation ideation or expression, cause and effect subject and object, etc. subject and object etc rather they are one and the same essential reality the producer product and finally the third meaning of process is that process is neither a means to an end but nor is

it an end in itself as they write it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself, putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitely. OK. So this, again, this conception of process as irreducible to the kind of the contrast between means and end will be significant when they talk about the what is what it is that desiring production produces. So now we get to the three syntheses.

Okay, the three syntheses of desiring production is, you know, the synthesis, first the synthesis of connection, the production of actions and passions, whose operator is the and, you know, and and okay it's simply it's the coupling of designing machines okay um the second synthesis is um the synthesis of disjunction um or the of the distribution of recording and coordination on what they will call the kind of uh the surface of the body without organs or the solceus about which we'll have a lot to say later. And here the operator for this disjunction is or,

simply or or or. And finally the synthesis of conjunction, which corresponds to the production of consumption. And it's with this third synthesis that the subject is produced. Okay. Okay, subjectivity is generated in the third synthesis, but it's a subject of sensation. Okay, pleasure, anxiety, pain, these are the three kind of the fundamental modalities of sensation, of subjective sensation. And the operator for this synthesis of conjunction is the expression, that's what it was.

I mean, in French, c'est donc ça. Now, these three synthesis are kind of, in a way, parody Kant's three syntheses, the three transcendental syntheses for the constitution of the object of knowledge in the first critique. But I think it's an entirely parodic relation and there's no sense in which they can be... The functioning of these three syntheses can't be mapped onto, or I think it can't plausibly be mapped onto the functioning of the Kantian syntheses. synthesis. So these three syntheses account for the positivity of desire. Okay, so in

a way, because the subject, the experiencing subject is always itself a product of machinic synthesis, in a way, the process of design production doesn't require a subject, there is no subject of desire okay desire does not lack its object because it has no subject in fact it's a very claim that there's a subject of desire that introduces a notion of lack into the concept of desire and this is exactly what los and latari are attacking so they write desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects the expression passive syntheses comes from Husserl and it's contrasted from a selling phenomenology and it's contrasted with the

active synthesis of Kantian representation so a passive synthesis is a synthesis that is not carried out you know for the the aims of representation or cognition okay so in other words it's not a synthesis that is carried out by a subject it is kind of pre-subjective so these passive syntheses engineer partial objects flows and bodies and function as units of production the real is the end product the result of the passive synthesis of desire as as auto production of the unconscious.

And this term, you know, auto production, I think is also very important. The, you know, machinic desiring production and the syntheses of desiring production account for the auto production of the unconscious and therefore of the real. what they're saying is that the real is never um you know it's never either empirically or transcendentally um uh conditioned or manifested but it is produced through these machinic syntheses desire does not lack anything it does not lack its object it is rather the subject that

is missing in desire or desire that lacks a fixed subject there is no fixed subject unless there is repression desire and its object are one and the same thing the machine as machine of a machine in other words every machine is a machine of machine because every machine involves a coupling you know the the coupling of machines. Okay now the first synthesis you know is described in terms of the you know the cutting or the interruption of a flow. Every object presupposes the continuity of a flow, every flow the fragmentation of the object. So what they want to say

is that there's a kind of uh in the sociability of flow and cuts um there's no you know every flow is the obverse of a cut and vice versa um and it's in in this sense that there is an identity of um producing and product okay um and this identity unfolds in the synthesis of connection okay um but this this identity or this coincidence of producing and products gives rise to the second synthesis of disjunction okay so we'll read uh this this uh excerpt excerpt here now from page seven producing a product a producing product identity it is this identity that

constitutes a third term in the linear series, an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place, and then the whole process will begin all over again. From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Now when they say that this the disjunctive synthesis gives rise to the the third term in a linear series. I think they mean that the flow and the cut are the first and second terms, okay, and the third term is this, you know, this interruption or this freezing of the, you know,

the ceaseless alternation of flowing and cutting, and this is what they call the disjunctive synthesis okay which they also call you know the body without organs um and so what they want to say is that this um in a way if you think about it if everything you know if every flow implies a cut and every cut implies a flow what they want to say is that there must be a totalization of flows and cuts okay um and in a way the full body without organs is the unlimited you know totality of cuts and flows or of continuities and discontinuities okay and it's in this sense

that disjunctive synthesis constitutes an unlimited totality. A totality obviously that's not bounded, that is not kind of, sorry, that's not a limited totality, it's bounded, but it's not limited. And this is why it corresponds, the disjunctive synthesis corresponds to the disjunctive synthesis which establishes the unlimitedness of God for Kant. So we'll read these two quotes, okay? To anyone who asks, do you believe in God? We should reply in strictly Kantian or Schreberian terms, referring to Judge Schreber here,

of course, but only as the master of the disjunctive syllogism or as its a priori principle. God defined as the omnitudo realitatis from which all secondary realities are derived by a process of division. So in other words, so, you know, God in this sense, the omnitudo realitatis is the all encompassing reality from which every partial or limited reality is derived through division.

Okay, so this is why Kant writes, thus, if the thoroughgoing determination in a reason is grounded on a transcendental substratum, the determination of concepts of experience by the synthesis of the understanding and the use of reason, is grounded on this transcendental substratum or presupposition, which contains, as it were, the entire storehouse of material from which all possible predicates of things can be taken. then this substratum is nothing other than the idea of an all of reality, omni tudor realitatis. All true negations are then nothing but limits,

which they could not be called unless they were grounded in the unlimited, the all. So the body without organs, the full body, not the full body of the earth, is this unlimited, but it's an unlimited which is infinitely differentiated, and it's constituted by an interminable series of disjunctions. And it's this, and the subject, it's this, in a way, this series of disjunctions that produces subjectivity. David Sloan- So this is why, in a way, the the the subject of experience arises as the residue of disjunctive synthesis, so they write.

David Sloan- Something on the order of a subject can be discerned on the recording surface, the surface of the body without organs, it is a strange subject, however. strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state. it's me and so it's mine even suffering as mark says is a form of self-enjoyment doubtless all desiring production is in and of itself immediately consumption and consummation

and therefore central pleasure but this is not yet the case for a subject that can situate itself only in terms of the disjunctions of a recording surface in what is left after each division um so the subject is this residue of disjunction or division on the uh on this recording surface um and it's the deduction of the product from production the subject arises in the inter interstices of disjunction as the residue of deducting the product from production

So here's Dawson Guttara again, hence the product is something removed or deducted from the process of producing between the act of producing and the product, something becomes detached, thus giving the vagabond nomad subject a residuum. And this subject is, you know, characterized in terms of the third synthesis, which they call the synthesis of consummation, the production of consumption. So they write just as a part of the libido as energy of production was transformed into energy of recording the Newman.

So libido is the first synthesis of connection and, and, and. Libido is what connects. The second synthesis of disjunction records. That's what they call the numen. But this gives rise the residue of this process of disjunctive inscription or recording. is this um uh this subject this you know consummation um this consummation of sensation okay um which they they call voluptus or or or pleasure it is this residual energy that is the

motive force behind the third synthesis of the unconscious the conjunctive synthesis or the production of consumption. And what does the production of consumption produce? It produces intensive quantities. And here again, this is a concept that I take over from Kant when Kant says that the experience, that the reality is made up of degrees of sensation, which are intensive magnitudes. What is produced by means of this synthesis of conjunction? The answer is intensive quantities,

the basic phenomenon of delirium rather the basic phenomenon of delirium the i think presupposes an i feel at an even deeper level in other words um what they're saying is that um it's feeling or sensing is more fundamental than thinking um and the subjects of feeling is produced as this um you know as this residue of um you know disjunctive synthesis and actually it's what de leu's in difference in repetition called the larval subject okay it's the larval subject in difference in repetition um so this um this i feel at an even deeper level gives hallucinations

their object and thought delirium its content delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation to the really primary emotion which in the beginning only experiences intensities you know intensities of sensation and where do these pure intensities come from they come from the two preceding forces repulsion and attraction and from the opposition of these two forces So intensive magnitudes are the result, the product of connection and disjunction or attraction and repulsion and from the opposition between these two forces, which is why.

um you know i'll continue this quotation in a word the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements all of them positive that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system but consist rather of an unlimited number of stationary meta-stable states through which a subject passes the kantian theory according to which intensive quantities fill up to varying degrees matter that has no empty spaces is profoundly schizoid two things to note here okay matter has no empty spaces so what they're saying is that what matter is filled um with uh intensive quantities it's constituted by intensities or

qualities of sensation um and what they're saying is that subjectivation occurs as the consumption of sensation of material sensation okay and this is why matter is alive this is hylozoism okay nothing here is representative rather it is all life and lived experienced a harrowing emotionally overwhelming experience which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter to a burning living center of matter so the substantial identity of the self is replaced by a serial by serial identifications engendered by individual productions of consumption

quote again an identity is essentially fortuitous and a series of individualities must be undergone Dr. David Roedteliski-O'Byrot, M.D.: By each of these oscillations, so that, as a consequence, the fortuitousness of this or that particular individuality will render all of them necessary. Dr. David Roedteliski-O'Byrot, M.D.: Okay, and I think that all this is, you know, this is just to say that molecular individuation's you know the production of consumption, the production of a subject of a sensing. sensing larval subject replace molar processes of subjectification. Okay, so now what's crucial here, I think, so this is the sense in which, you know, the

subject, you know, the sensing subjects, you know, is the residue of the synthesis of the first two synthesis of desiring production of connection disjunction, which is why, in a way, kind of of experience, you know, human experience, conscious experience is produced through the primary process of desiring production. But given what they write about, you know, the the opposition between the fact that these intensive quantities are the product of the

forces of repulsion and attraction, disjunction and connection from the opposition of these two forces, then we have to understand the role of anti-production, okay, how this opposition comes about. How does the opposition between connection and disjunction or production and anti-production come about, okay? And this is why we have to understand the status of, you know, the body without organs. So here's a description. Here's another kind of description from early in chapter one. When the, when those in Gosari first introduce, I think, the second synthesis of disjunction, they write, the flows of energy are still too closely connected. The partial object's still too organic for this to happen. What would be required is a pure fluid

in a free state, flowing without interruption, streaming over the surface of a full body. So in other words, what they're saying is that the constant, you know, the cutting of flows or the production of flows and of cuts is always, you know, kind of, you know, presupposes a pure flow, a boundless flow, an unlimited flow, a pure fluid in a free state, flowing without interruption. Every cutting of a flow, again, presupposes an unlimited flow. And the body without organs is this flowing, full flowing surface.

Desiring machines make us an organism, but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization or no organization at all. An incomprehensible, absolutely rigid stasis in the very midst of process as a third stage. The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. So, I mean, part of what's going on here is that in order not to be faced with the problem

of an undifferentiated flow, you know, in order for the contrast between flowing and cutting, you know, to make sense, there has to be, you know, flows and cuts have to be differentiated. But where idealist philosophy, let's say whether it's the Platonic tradition or the Kantian tradition, wants to think that flows and cuts have to be formed, have to be enveloped by intangible form in order not simply to have an undifferentiated homogenous flow, Deleuze and Guttwani want to suggest that, you know, with a body without organs, is this imminent,

this non-ideal or real condition for the articulation of flows and cuts, but in a way from below as opposed to from above. OK, so it's the. You know, it's a way of making sense of it's a way of differentiating flows and cuts without superimposing an intangible form. OK, and that's I think that's the role or the function of the body without organs here, the full body. okay um so that's why there has to be this moment of anti-production but if you look at it

um given what do you have told us about the positivity of desire that desire lacks nothing um what exactly how are we to understand the anti and anti-production you know In what sense is disjunction opposed to connection? The organism, according to Los Inglaterres, suffers from not having some other sort of organization or no organization at all. That's the formulation they use. So not having another organization, not being not organized. These are negations. OK, obviously, desiring production can't lack anything. It's not structured by negation.

The organism cannot lack the unorganic. Desiring machines cannot lack the full body without organs. Organization is inseparable from disorganization. But this dis, this dis in organization is a maximal state of intensive plenitude or differentiation. So in other words, this unlimited, you know, this unlimited totality of, you know, disjunctions. So the productive, the sense in which the productive and must be coupled with a disjunctive or, or the problem is understanding how the productive and is coupled with the disjunctive or without introducing negation or negativity.

So they write the full body without organs belongs to the realm of anti production, but yet another characteristic of the connective or productive synthesis is the fact that it couples production with anti production or production with an element of anti production. and they also writes we are of the opinion that that what is ordinarily referred to as primary repression this is freud's expression or primal repression as it's often translated means precisely that it is not a counter cathect as a counter investment but rather this repulsion of desiring machines by the body without organs and here they introduce a contrast between

primary repression and they use the french word refoulement and secondary suppression and they for this they use the word repression okay um and um delloz and gottari will maintain that social suppression presupposes primary repression um but note that in this account primary repression is positivized okay um it's um and it's positivized because it involves it's the condition of the repulsion of desiring machines or of the synthesis of production

by the body without organs or the synthesis of disjunction but it's this repression that also is generative of desiring machines as such so they write the genesis of the machine occurs on the spot, I'll use your place, in the opposition of the process of production of the desiring machines and the non-productive stasis of the body without organ. It's this opposition between production and anti-production that generates the machine, okay? Okay, so then the question is, what is the nature of this primary opposition or repulsion, if it is not tributary to negation.

And here there's another line that I think is very illuminating in this regard. So they write again later in chapter two, desiring production is the boundary between the molar organization and the molecular multiplicity of desire. okay so this bounding must be positive so that a positive sense can be given to its overcoming through the d in d territorialization and decoding um and as well as you know the and to the fullness of the without in the full body without organs these operators d um and without are positive

okay they are not they're not negations okay or at least they're not supposed to be negations this positive sense depends on desiring production being self-bounding the coupling of connection and disjunction is the self-bounding of production and here here I think you know Deleuze and Gattari are invoking a distinction made by Kant between the positivity of imminent bounds, Grenze, the bounds of experience for Kant are imminent. They're generated through the production of experience itself. And this positive self-bounding is contrasted to the

negativity of transcendent limits and for which cath reserves a german term you know schranke okay so production must bound itself as anti-production in order not to be negatively delimited by something else um but here this gives us i think a really significant contrast or at least it has profound ramifications for the account of the unconscious, which is being developed here. Primary repression as self-bounding or auto-bounding. Auto and allo are the Greek terms for self and other. So, you know, self-bounding or bounding through another.

Primary repression as auto-bounding constitutes the unconscious as being, as a positive, as an entity okay and this is a conception that can be traced back you know through Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche you know Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are obviously kind of or Nietzsche in particular is a key kind of source for Deleuze whereas primary repression as you know bounding through another or allo bounding constitutes as otherwise than being in Freud and Lacan and in between it constitutes as in between being and non-being or presence and absence. And it's precisely this in betweenness or this in a way this the non

the indivisibility of what is unconscious in terms of the domain of presence and absence or being a non-being or positivity and negativity that is fundamental for understanding the return of the repressed. The repressed returns as something whose negation fails but whose failed negation is also what succeeds in constituting it. So what is repressed returns because it is neither full being nor its complete absence. It is not fully being in the sense of congenitally incomplete or partial. And here I think, okay, this is just a kind of an

open question, but I think that there's a very, you know, the question is whether or not the you know the unlimitedness or the unlimited auto differentiation of the full body without organs you know or of anti-production which involves which is the condition for the self-bounding of production of unconscious production is fundamentally opposed to the, in a way, the incompleteness of the unconscious in the

Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, okay? in a way the unconscious is in a way is not simply constituted it's a question of whether the unconscious can be constituted you know through this junction and through this juncture synthesis okay I think that's I mean I don't know what the you know that that's my suspicion anyway um um okay and this this leads us this also this you know contrast between positivity or between the positive and negative conception um of um you know the unconscious um also has um you know pertains to the discussion of the sources of the status of

the socius in the uh it doesn't gotari's discussion because the positivity of the socius can be contrasted to the negativity of class because the positivity of the social you know the latin word socius means comrade friend or ally um is defined as an anti-production that falls back upon or appropriates production okay so what they're saying is that um the social relation has a false positivity because it involves usurping or appropriating the true positivity of design and production. That's why the term socius is not a kind of, it's an object of critique for Deleuze and Guattari.

glitzvary you know that's why there's something i mean the choice of the you know the very choice of term socius is um facetious in a sense they want to say that every kind of social formation involves um you know the uh the repret you know involves primary repression but also the suppression of libidinal energies, the forces of desiring production. So what is positive is the social suppression of desiring production, which is why this social suppression must be undone and the flows of desiring production must be released. That's the revolutionary optic for Deleuze and Votari.

Whereas for Marx, I think the negativity of the class relation as the separation of the producers from production is the condition of, you know, of class struggle. But this separation is the prelude to the negation of class. OK. OK. Perhaps we should pause here. I'm about, I think I'm a bit more than halfway through the material I've got, you know, I wanted to discuss. So perhaps I could, we could pause here for a few questions. Does that seem sensible? Yeah, okay. I think we could perhaps get you questions and then make a break.

Sure, yeah. So, Armand, please. Thank you. Yes. It was fantastic. I heard your talk very much, by the way. But two questions, maybe they are, they seem, you know, but something you said about commodity and exchange, stay with me till the last point actually. For Marx, the condition of possibility for there to be any, any capitalist kind of relation between human agents is the commodity form. That is, in the commodity form, human beings and their relation

become a unity. And for this unity, we have in the source of repression, the repression of particular labor to general labor. That is, because there is a commodity, you have this kind of both the value form of money the exchange value and the labor form of general labor or abstract labor labor as such if i understand correctly then if if you look at it through a capitalist point of view that is you look at it from the point of view of somebody like kaint or uh somebody like for me this for them this is not the case the case is that exchange

is the condition of possibility of anything else that is for exchange an unconscious an unconscious productive productive quote-unquote productive uh relation that we do anything else in the economic plane for example we abstract from labor for example we use money and blah blah blah blah So if we introduce a third point of view that if I understand you correctly again, or if I read Dolores Angotaric correctly, is exactly this point of view of miraculous socius. That is, the condition for even there to be any labor, for labor to be meaningful activity, any activity to be meaningfully called labor, let's put it like that, is something like a socius. That is,

is the divine presupposition. I think their phrase is that, the divine presupposition for labor to be a productive labor, a desiring production. So in that sense, maybe we can say that there is a way out from the formalism of political economy in this idea. I'm not sure that I get it correctly. I would love to hear you talk about that. And if you, allow me, I would ask a second question about God and only to the real status. That they put, they try to put the two,

the idea of the destruction or infinite distinction of either or, or, or, or. And I understand, I read this like something like a nexus of inferential path between all the concept of categories of understanding or what in a brandonian register, we would call, I don't know, a normative, a normative nexus of concepts for autonomous language or dispersive practice. Would that be something fair to call that idea of God, again repeated in this understanding of a nexus of a language, of a natural language that actually posits a being like culture or something historical in that again manifests itself in a

language or concept of language. Sorry to take too much time. No thanks, those are very very interesting questions um okay the first question about exchange i don't want to be misunderstood i'm not saying okay the sense in which the role of exchange but the critique of political economy the point is not to kind of uh to make exchange into the condition for of production um you know distribution and consumption the point as marx explains tirelessly is that um it's private property and commodification is the exchange of is the condition of exchange so um you know what is exchange it's commodities that are exchanged so understanding how commodities are produced and

how society becomes organized around the you know the production and consumption of commodities is fundamental and the point is that this involves the the class relation you know that the capitalist class relation. So it's a separation of the producers from the means of production that conditions, that generates the conditions of commodity exchange and of commodification. So the point is simply, is not at all to abstract the practice of exchange and to make this into the source of, you know, of kind of sociality, which is what liberal, you know, capitalist ideologues do. So that's very important. I just want to emphasize this. I'm not saying that But the point is that commodification, in a way, the point about abstract labor directly falls from this.

Marx says, you know, in the opening chapter of capital and the commodity, that it's precisely through, you know, in exchanging, buying and selling commodities that concrete labors, qualitatively distinct concrete labors, are equated or rendered equivalent as, you know, varieties, as abstract labor. They are commensurated as abstract labor. And that's because every commodity, you know, has, you know, these two facets, use value and exchange value. And in a way, it's the exchangeability of a commodity

presupposes the abstraction of labor, the equivalence of socially, of all, you know, socially productive labors. Can I ask a question here? Do you call something that just have a use value and no exchange value? Is there anything like that? Is there a possible, is that possible, is this a possible entity or not? Not for Marx. I think it's a mistake for Marx. Look, I mean, he's saying that, you know, the use and exchange are contained within the commodity form. They're aspects of the two facets of the commodity. if you try to he's saying what's wrong with capitalism is the subordination

of use to exchange of use value to exchange value however every um you know utility as such presupposes social relations okay and relations of production what you mustn't do is reify is think that there is an originary stratum of use values. That's also a kind of a mystification or reification. What is and is not useful always implies a nexus of social relations and relations of production. So Marx, you know, it's not that he wants to say that. so in a way it's the subordination of use value to exchange value under capitalism

that is pernicious and destructive but he's you know he's not saying that you could simply kind of you know the destruction of capitalism doesn't simply in you know abstracting you know what are recognized as use values within capitalism and trying to kind of you know you know you know rest them free of the nexus of capitalist social relations. That simply will not work. That's why a new mode of production is required. And a new mode of production involves producing, you know, to satisfy social needs and not simply exchangeability. And therefore, what would be produced would be, you know, what is produced and how it's produced

would be fundamentally different, okay? I mean, another way to say this is that although Marx uses Aristotle, and I think he uses Aristotelian hyalomorphism in an incredibly inventive, critical way, he is not an Aristotelian because the claim that substances have intrinsic use values is Aristotle's metaphysics. That's what telos is. The claim that everything is useful, that everything exists for a purpose, is Aristotle's claim. and Marx is not an Aristotelian. He doesn't think what is and is not useful, the usefulness of any object will always kind of point back to a complex of social relations

and it can be abstracted and reified. And okay, so that's in response. But to go back to your point about abstract labor is fundamental. And that's why, in a way, it's because exchange implies the abstraction of labor. In a way, that's why exchange can't be positively, you know, shouldn't be fetishized or made into the condition of sociality. So, in a way, so I think Deleuze and Gautari, you know, take on, you know, they reject the primacy of exchange, the claim that, you know, societies are founded upon exchange, the exchange of goods. They rightly reject that claim as does

Marx. But I think that they, it seems to me, I mean, it seems to me that then they neglect the analysis of the commodity form in understanding the interdependence of production, distribution, and consumption. That's the issue. And then your second point about the disjunctive synthesis and language. Well, that's a really fascinating point. I'm not sure how to, you know, I'm not sure I know how to respond. I mean, except given Deleuze and Guattari's, you know, I mean, if we go

back to, sorry, see if I can go back to this, you know, the Kant quote. Yes, but the omnitude of real justice. He says the transcendental substratum contains the entire storehouse of material from which all possible predicates of things can be taken. And then this is nothing other than the idea of an all reality. So if you're a Brandomian or if you're an inferentialist, I'm not sure that, you know, inferentialism requires, you know, rightly or wrongly, the appeal to this storehouse of material.

The Brandomian claim, certainly in terms of Brandom's reading of Higgle, would be that the materials from which possible predicates are taken always involves predication. In other words, there is no kind of, that the material is already kind of predicatively articulated and differentiated. And it's not simply a kind of an inexhaustible all. In a way, and the Hegelian, I mean, here I think, or I assume, I don't know, I assume that Brandon would side with the Hegelian critique of Kant, that this omnitudo realitatis is a kind of a bad abstraction. But that's a very difficult question to answer, but yeah, that's all I can say really.

Okay, right. I think we can get perhaps one more question from Maria now. And and then sorry on Avrin and Sian. Perhaps we can get back to you at the end after our break and the further discussions. So please, Maria. Mateus, there was also a question by Kirill. Otherwise, it would get lost because of the chat. Let's ask this one. OK, all right. Which question was that in chat? I know how it is annoying to be just auditing, so I will read it.

I hope someone will ask about suppression and repression. I'm worried about some slippage and meaning there, and I'm not clear on what the term is doing. All right. Okay, sorry, because I'm having trouble seeing the chat, so I'm not sure if I can see the question. Yeah, I think that question is from Kirill, I think, and he was asking on the uses of repression. Oh, yes. Okay, yes, I see. Suppression and repression. I'm worried about some slippage in meaning there. I'm not clear on what the term is doing. um okay so in the english translation um the both the french terms uh and the repression

are both translated as repression okay um and so i suggested you know in a way um you know so reserving the term repression for what de leuze and gottani called you know primary repression, which is to say anti-production, you know, the moment where disjunction in a way, you know, interrupts connection or the possibility of connection and reserving and the term suppression here would mean social suppression and simply, you know, the use of the way in which social institutions or forms suppress human activity or certain human

behaviors. So the distinction between repression is the repression of of production, of machinic production by the full, the body without organs. And this is an entirely unconscious phenomenon for those in Guattari. And suppression is social. It just means like repression in the ordinary sense, repression, political repression, okay, social and political repression. But the key thing, or I think, I'm not sure, but it seems to me that Deleuze and Guattari want to say that all political, social and political suppression, you know, is ultimately kind of a consequence of the primary repression of desiring production.

That's what I think they're saying or seem to be saying. Does that help? All right. I think we could go to a break now perhaps and then also we got the discussions and then we go back to the questions as we finish this. So we can, I think we have time this today so. Okay, okay. All right then.

So break now. Okay, we're back. Sorry. Okay, right, so for the remainder of the presentation, I just want to kind of reconnect or focus in on the strand of Delos and Guattari's kind of account, which is I think, you know, which is about Marx or re-invokes Marx. Okay, so this is the, you know, the nature of, you know, the social status of anti-production,

or the socius of anti-production. So here they write on page nine, the forms of social production, like those of desiring production, involve an unengendered non-productive attitude, an element of anti-production coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant or capital. Those are the three forms. The primitive socius is the body of the earth. The barbarian socius is the tyrant. And the capitalist socius is money. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition.

And they continue, in fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. it falls back on all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power they appear to be miraculated by it now here i think those are explicitly invoking

marx's account of objective inversion in the third volume of capital okay um the way in which capital then appears as the source of all value and of all social wealth okay um so Marx writes in volume three the way that surplus value is transformed into the form of profit by way of the rate of profit is only a further extension of that inversion of subject and object which already occurs in the course of the production process itself this is the objective inversion that we I mentioned earlier when using the analogy of the camera obscura. We saw in that case how all the subjective productive forces of labour present themselves as productive forces of capital on the one hand, value, i.e. the past labour that dominates living labour, is personified into the capitalist.

On the other hand, the worker conversely appears as a mere objectified labour power as a commodity. this inverted relationship necessarily gives rise even in the simple relation of production itself to a correspondingly inverted conception of the situation a transposed consciousness which is further developed by the transformations and modifications of the circulation process proper okay so now wait so here Marx is is kind of spelling out the way in which you know the inversion of the you know the real relation between capital and labor um gives rise to its ideological misrepresentation and the um you know the the uh the misrepresentations that are

characteristic of political economy um so here's and following up on this is here's his um account of the trinity formula okay so marx writes capital profits or better still capital interest land ground rent and labor wages this economic trinity as the connection between the components of value and wealth in general and sources completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production the reification of social relations and the immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity the bewitched distorted and upside down world haunted by monsieur le capital and madame latter who are at the same

time social characters and mere things so how does this subjective inversion come about well Well, total surplus value produced by labor is split into interest or profits, rent and wages. And interest, rent and wages are the portions of total social value. But then what happens in the inversion is that capital, land and labor appear as the separate productive sources of interest, rent and wages. and Marx's critique of this inversion is that it involves you know what Kant would call paralogisms or what we could call kind of category errors okay so you know

Marx's first point is that capital is a social form while land and labor are the are material elements possessing what he calls simple natural existence or in German Blossom Naturdasein Stephen Campbell- And secondly, the claim that interest rent and wages derived from capital land and Labor involves a category mistake that conflates social forms, on the one hand and material elements of production, no capital is a social form. David Sloan- You know land and Labor or material elements of production and also reified forms and elements of production capital is a form London Labor of the elements. David Sloan- These are completed with the portions of value interest, which is that are taken as their products.

So capital is taken as a source of autonomous value from whence interest arises directly. So M becomes M prime without the intervention of labor, through this kind of miraculous process. But then political economy either claims that a magnitude of value increases itself by itself in terms of an occult quality how can value simply you know increase itself by itself this seems completely kind of you know mysterious um or political political economy can try to

you know derive this increase from capital's material substance which is to say from the use value of its instruments and materials of production. But use value is strictly incommensurable with surplus value, because the use value of the instruments and materials of production only gives rise to surplus value through the use of labour power. And the use value of these instruments and materials is a concrete quality, while surplus value is an abstract quality. So in the claim that interest derives from capital, the material conditions of production

are endowed with the magical power to engender a social form of production in the derivation of ground rent from land. Land as a means for the production of use values, i.e. wheat is taken to be responsible for their exchange values. But the means for the production of use values cannot produce their exchange values. And similarly, when labor is taken as what generates wages, what is forgotten or recluded in this derivation is that labor as such has no value or has no price.

But only labor power as a commodified social form has value. That's why Marx's distinction between labor and labor value is absolutely crucial. Use values cannot determine value. The material elements of production cannot determine its social form or capital. and in a way what this is Marx's critical hylomorphism when it comes to social production hylozoism is purely ideological because the claim is for Marx is that social forms cannot be derived from their material elements and components and the attempt to do so

is straightforwardly ideological. It's simply capitalist ideology. It's a mystification. So the flattening of social form of production onto the material product is what gives rise to this mystification. So Marx writes, this form pertaining to a particular period of history is thus taken to coincide with the existence and function of produced means of production and the earth in the production process in general. These means of production are in and for themselves or by nature capital. Capital is nothing but a mere economic name for those means of production and similarly the earth is in and for itself or by nature the earth as

monopolized by a certain number of landed proprietors. I think the best kind of explication of you know this marcus critique here um is by dardo and laval in their book on marx um and they write you know this uh this naturalization of capital involves um this uh you know the same it's the same equal and symmetrical incongruity that erupts in these three relations you know the relation you know of capital interest um land ground rent and labor and wages. One carries out the same immediate identification of the specific social forms which the conditions of production assume in the capitalist process with the simple material

existence, stuff like in Dasein, of these conditions insofar as it is independent of every social form. Just as all labour presents itself as wage labour insofar as it is useful productive activity, so every material means of labor, produced means of production and land, present themselves as capital in and for themselves. So this is, Delos and Gautari, and this is what they're echoing this analysis, they write, this is a sense in which everything seems objectively to be produced by capital as a quasi cause what is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital as a full body to constitute the recording or

inscribing surface but some kind of full body that of the earth or the despot a recording surface and apparent objective movement a fetishistic perverted bewitched world are characteristic of all types of society as a constant of social reproduction. And this is, here they are kind of echoing Marx, who writes again in volume three, all forms of society are subject to this distortion, i.e. this objective inversion, insofar as they involve commodity production and monetary circulation. So here, I mean, there's a difference of it, an emphasis between Dillard and Gussardi and Marx. Marx says all societies that involve commodity production

and money give rise to this kind of phantasmatic inversion. But clearly there are societies that don't involve this and presumably communist society would not involve this inversion. So yeah, I mean, so although, Whereas Dulles and Guattari are insistent that every socius involves this bewitchment or this fetishistic perversion. The social appropriation of design and production of productive forces. And here is where this kind of distinction between repression and suppression, I think, becomes significant for Dulles and Guattari's accounts.

okay of um of what is peculiar about um the uh the capitalist socius um so they write when we posited the socius as the analog of a full body without organs there was nonetheless one important difference for desiring machines are the fundamental category of the economy of desire they produce a body without organs all by themselves and make no distinction between agents and their own parts or between the relations of production and their own relations or between the social order and technology desiring machines are both technical and social it is in this sense that desiring production is the locus of a primal psychic repression

whereas social production is where social suppression takes place and it is between the former and the latter that there occurs something that resembles secondary psychic repression in the strictest sense the situation of the body where organs or its equivalent is the crucial factor here, depending on whether it is the result of an internal process or of an extrinsic condition, and thus affects the role of the death drive in particular. Okay, and here, I think in this last kind of remark, I take them to be claiming that

The difference is that the anti-production as emerging imminently from the primary process of desiring production gives rise to kind of, in a way, gives to the death of the compulsion to repeat a positive productive role or even an emancipatory role. Whereas the appropriation of the forces of desiring production by the sociists and by the capitalist sociists in particular is an extrinsic imposition.

position, which uses compulsive repetition, the death drive, simply in order to potentiate itself. So capital, in this sense, is an appropriation of the death drive, but simply for its own limitless accumulation. but it's this extrinsic appropriation of anti-production, which is a positive sense at the molecular level on Deleuze and Guattari's accounts. So this is why, so then finally, you know, the three, the phases,

the historical phases of social production can be kind of distinguished in terms of the role played by coding, over-coding, and decoding. The prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated. When the primitive territorial machine proved inadequate to the task, the despotic machine sets up a kind of overcoding system. But the capitalist machine, insofar as it was built on the ruins of a despotic state, more or less far removed in time, finds itself in a totally new situation.

It is faced with the task of decoding and deterritorializing the flows. David Sloan- Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows the decoded flows of production in the form of money capital. David Sloan- And the decoded flows of Labor in the form of the free worker can we have no we will look at this kind of claim much more closely in the. David Sloan- The next couple of weeks, but i'll just you know ignore it for now, hence, unlike previous social machines that capitalist machines. the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field by substituting money for the very notion of a code it has created an axiomatic of abstract

quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the de-territorialization of the socius capitalism tends towards a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a de-territorialized field is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine as manic depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine and hysteria the product of the territorial machine okay so this is you know that here there's something or there

seems to be something um interesting going on here the way in which you know repression and suppression libidinal repression and social suppression are being articulated um in those and Guattari's account of of capital um it seems that capitalism is the point where the suppression the social suppression of decoded flows which is the you know the task of every other socius flips over into the repression of suppression and hence the conjunction of flows it's almost as if they're saying that what capitalist unleashes a kind of capitalist axiomatization

through abstract quantities of value or money involves this conjoining flows in a way which kind of slowly kind of dissolves or kind of you know destroys the organization of social suppression okay so capital conjoins production and anti-production reconstituting a full body and the full body for thousand guitarists is money so it's kind of money that constitutes the full body of capital while also staving it off in order to protect the territories and codes necessary for capital

to accrue to the capitalist. Now, the key thing in this account is, I think, if, according to those in the contrary, capital is a conjunction of a flow of money and a flow of labour, which is not for Marx, but it is on their account, then it's in this sense that what you have is, in a way, it's the, this is the condition, in a way, it's reducing account of capital, the functioning of capital to this, in a way, the kind of

the expansion or the accumulation of money independently of the independently of money's you know instantiation of value that seems to be essential to this claim that capital the capitalist deterritorialization and decoding has this you know Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: Positively anti social and therefore kind of potentially emancipatory value, because what they're saying is that it's the capital has the potential to unleash.

Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: The flows of designing production or the process of design production, and this is obviously you know they say this, you know several junctures and it's the most. the most provocative proposition of the book. But I think it depends on a peculiar, again, this very peculiar partial reconstruction of Marx's account. And that's what I want to focus on in the next couple of weeks. Okay, but we'll stop. I'll stop. We should stop now so we have time for discussion. Okay then, yeah, so I think we have time for some questions. I don't know, perhaps we could start

with Maria, that was a good interest before, then we go on the slide. Yeah, my question was about, I think that Delos changed his notion of subject when he teamed up with Gautari, because he earlier wrote three sentences of time, and the subject was time, as in Heidegger. but now in this 3t synthesis the subject seems a split subject of psychoanalysis. What does it mean? And what does a synthesis exist? Because I can miss something in this whole synthesis thing. So you're asking... Oh yeah, okay, so there seems to be a change in Deleuze,

So the account of the subject in Antioedipus as this residue of disjunction is, you're saying, very different from Deleuze's account in difference in repetition. Well, that's a complicated question, but I think, and you were pointing out the kind of the role of the synthesis of time and difference in repetition for the kind of subjectivity subjectivision, but I think, in a way, I think there's more than one subject in Deleuze, like there's more than one subject in difference of reposition. I think there's a larval subject, a subject of larval synthesis, the synthesis of habit, and I think this synthesis reappears,

This subject reappears in Antioedipus. It's the subject of just of sensation, the subject that kind of that registers intensive quantities and that consumes intensities is almost kind of, you know, um you know it's remarkably similar to uh the the larval subject of that contracts kind of um you know intensive differences in difference in repetition and difference in repetition there's another subject okay which is the um the subject as you point out that you know that results from the uh well the subject that affirms all of chance in a single throw the

subject of eternal recurrence and yes and actually the relationship between whether or you know whether anti-Oedipus you know in a way contracts those two different subjects in difference repetition into a single instance of subjectivation is an interesting question I I'm not sure, I don't know. They haven't said anything about time so far, interestingly. So when they're talking about the nomadic subjects generated through, which is the residue of disjunctive synthesis, they don't say anything about time, except, you know, as Deleuze does

Delos does elsewhere. They point out, they use kind of Nietzsche's claim, you know, I'm all the names in history. So this identification with all the, you know, all these kind of a multitude of different individuals, you know, seems to be, of historical individuals, seems to be a characteristic of the nomadic subject, you know. Yeah, that's, I think that's all I can say in response. It's a complicated question. So, but you're right that so far, nothing has been said about time and about how

So the relationship between these, the synthesis of desiring production and the synthesis of time. And I'm not sure exactly what that relation is. But thanks for the question. all right um perhaps then you just follow the the order now of raised hands so it could be missed slab okay thank you can i ask yeah ah so my question is based uh it's originated in

in today's lecture and the lecture of De Laud's The Nature of Flows, about parallel between the identification of capital as socius and Marxist concept of verwandelte form, the transformed form or inverted form. My question is, since Marx used verwandelte form as the as the way of way way of conjunction compensation connection of what was suppressed by capital so can we view uh capital associates as a this from our pervander the form of social relations uh

which comes which is the outcome of the suppression of the decoded flows and there over and uh deacrification. So between the connection of Deloitte and Guattari concept of socials and capitalist socials and Marxist concept of fervent and deform as the way of substitution of some inverted forms of relation or inverted parts of some substance to the social relations to the social to the social flows which are decoded and overcoded and recorded as it is posited in Delos lecture on the nature of flows okay okay so I haven't read that lecture

I will send in so yeah happily please please do so yes so they are what's happening i think there's a really i think there's a difference between okay so although i kind of uh you know i try to kind of follow the parallel between what it doesn't do doesn't go attorney call the the appropriation of productive forces by the cap by capitalism um and marx's account of the um you know the inversion you know the uh the objective inversion

of social relations that gives rise to ideological misrepresentation, I think there's a key difference. One is the objective inversion of social relations, of relations of production. That's Marx. But it's not relations, it's not social relations that are inverted in Deleuze and Guatari. It is, it's forces, it's kind of, in a way, it's the kind of the syntheses of desiring production and the productivity of desire in a way that that is kind of um you know appropriated but also suppressed by the socius um and what is and social relations are conspicuous

by their absence in the leuze and votari's account okay so i think that if marx wants to say that all you know, ideology is always the kind of involves, you know, the misrepresentations of social relations, which is somehow conditioned by an objective inversion. in a way what we what marx is saying is that um you know production social production you know generates its own you know ideological misrepresentation through this inversion through this kind of this phenomenon of appearance this is why it's an illusion and not merely it's an objective illusion and not simply a kind of uh you know um

you know, an error. But this is generated, it's still ultimately kind of generated by social relations of production. Whereas in Deleuze and Guattari, you know, the socius, the capitalist socius as quasi-cause creates production, all social production to itself, doesn't kind of, you know, there's no, it seems that there's no account of the objective inversion of, you know, social relations of production. I mean, the key question is this, is that Deleuze and Guattari claim that

desiring production and social production go hand in hand okay um but there's a scalar distinction between them you know one is molecular the other one is molar okay so um and you know in a way to understand um you know social transformation or social becoming is propelled by these molecular dynamism so these molecular becoming and it seems that although they insist that you know molecular functioning can never be kind of you know abstracted from social production um it's clear that it's the the accounts of um machinic synthesis the synthesis of desiring

production that yields the key to understanding social production and the way in which social production kind of arrogates for itself the productivity of desire. And the problem is that this account of the primary process, the primary process of production is not, might be enveloped by social relations, but it is not kind of constituted by social relations, or at least you know, it doesn't seem to me that it is. So this is why I think there's a significant disanalogy between the Marxian account and

the Deleuze-Guatarian account here. And yeah, I think that's, I don't know if that really answers the question, but... It's much more than just an answer. Thank you. Okay, so I think Sean. Yeah, so I have four very short but just clarificatory questions. So the first is, could you speak a bit more about the confluence between Kant's three

synthesis and Deleuze's, D&G's three synthesis? I'm having a bit of trouble trying to understand where exactly the resonances are. I get it for a difference in repetition, like what they're doing there, but in Antiochus, I don't understand. Well, the very short answer is that I don't think, I think that there isn't really, it's not possible to map them on. You know, the syntheses of design and production simply can't be mapped on to the syntheses of, you know, of representation, the transcendental syntheses of representation in Kant, precisely because they are syntheses of representation, whereas what Deleuze and Guattari are talking about when they talk about desiring production is this sub-representation.

There's something, for Deleuze and Guattari, representation happens at the molar level. It happens through kind of, you know, the theater of representation is generated by through the kind of through the oedipal and then social kind of you know appropriation and inversion of these you know the forces of design and production so in fact I mean maybe it was misleading for me to kind of to even mention to put them there at all because if you go So, we'll go right back to, yeah, you know, kind of connection, you know, for Kant, Kant's syntheses, apprehension, intuition, reproduction, imagination, recognition, and the concepts.

You know, these correspond to three different faculties, okay, kind of sensibility, imagination, and the understanding. David Sloan- Whereas there is no that doesn't seem to be a faculty distinction between connection disjunction and conjunction okay they are. David Sloan- You know, well, they say there's action and passion recording and recording and coordination and you know sensation. David Sloan- So these. David Sloan- In a way, these you know these. you know, these syntheses of design and production would be, you know, much, much more kind of, you know, fundamental than Kant's syntheses, which, you know, and these are syntheses,

actually, which are ontologically generated for those in a matter, because they think, you know, you know, what is, you know, what is being produced here is the real, they say this, It's kind of the auto-production of the unconscious produces the real. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire. Whereas the active syntheses of sensibility, imagination, and understanding produce the cognizable object. the object of cognitive experience, which is, for Deleuze, is simply this kind of superficial overlay. It's this superstructure which is kind of imposed upon this more

originary kind of fundamental stratum in a way where reality and experience are woven together. So what Deleuze and Gautaria are saying, what Deleuze often is saying, this is why he's, you know, he's a high resource. he's saying that in a way kind of matter itself you know you know the matter kind of reality at the most elementary material level is constituted through these you know units of experience which are obviously but which are not um human experiences or subjective experiences

in the uh in the ordinary philosophical sense um but they are nevertheless they're still experiences but they're these um you know contractions of sensation these experiences of differences in differences in intensity which which organic you know organic functioning organisms are built up out of these kinds of these connections of you know disjunctive synthesis so okay so then the canton rejoinder to Deleuze would be to say, well, how do you know what this is?

This is just metaphysics. So why? On what kind of basis do you claim that reality is produced through these three syntheses? And that's obviously the kind of, that's the question that, you know, Deleuze likes to turn the table on the Kantian by saying that's you know the kantian account of knowledge and experience and you know well how do you know is always some kind of abstraction from something more is itself a kind of um you know a presupposition okay you know the you know the the image of thought a dogmatic image of thoughts um

the representational image of thought, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not convinced by that claim. I think it's a bit of an evasion of the real question. But as metaphysics goes, I mean, Deleuze in particular is a, you know, maybe one of the most ingenious metaphysicians ever, but he's still a metaphysician. And I think I'm not convinced he circumvents Kant, although Deleuzean's disagree. Thank you. That answers like the first and second question. So that's amazing. So another short question is just a technical one.

Use the term intensive quantity. Yes. It's a bit foreign to me. I think the only time I've seen it is it occurs once in AO and then once more in difference and repetition, but they talk about Kant's left hand, right hand. So I'm kind of wondering what exactly you mean by that term. It's a term that's used by Kant in the critique of pure reason. And when he talks about the real and sensation, when he talks about, when he says that the reality of an object is gauged in terms of the degree of intensity of the sensations,

the sensory qualities in terms of which it is apprehended. and that's not a very good definition I mean I'm wondering how sort of Deleuze and Guatari are using it and the sense in which you are using it okay well is it the same sense sorry is it the same as Kant are we using technically I'd have to go back and read but yeah, Deleuze takes the idea, he's quite explicit about that he's taking it from Kant. He says this, like he says this in, when, I mean, Deleuze is very Kant, he takes a lot from Kant,

and when he takes, yeah, the Kantian theory according to which intensive quantities fill up to varying degrees matter that has an empty space, so Kant says that matter is constituted through intensive magnitudes okay which is which means what he's saying that um space is simply a form of intuition so that um the uh you know the uh and that matter the materiality of a spatial object is um constituted of these intensive magnitudes which are ultimately degrees of sensation so that what you um so in other words what you can uh obviously these intensive

magnitudes are apprehended through the collaboration of our sense organs and then these are you know kind of coordinated by the by the understanding etc etc but what Kant is saying is that when we talk about reality um empirical reality that you know you know the reality that we experience or that is experienceable, we are ultimately talking about a reality that is made up of intensive quantities. And that's Kant's claim. And Deleuze is simply taking it, but then he's liberating these intensive, instead of saying that these intensive quantities have to be objectively enveloped in the representation of an object, of an object of experience, what he's saying

is that these intensive quantities constitute these kind of these molecular subjects, okay? These molecular subjects, these larval subjects, which can't be, you know, comprehended or subsumed by the you know the the forms and the categories of experience that can't lays out in his epistemology. Okay, so, so they want to say that can't is right about what the what the fundamental units of experience are, but he's wrong that's about the way in which these intensive quantities

have to be coordinated into objects by a subject. Yeah, that helps so much. Yeah. Just one last point, I think this is a question I've had for ages, but the basically how does capitalism know its own limit? And this is kind of referring to your last or second last slide where you talk about how capitalism on the recording service of money staves itself off from falling back on the full BWO. And they say this multiple times throughout the book. Capitalism schizophrenizes right to the limit. It decodes all the way to the limit while always maintaining its own unity, maintaining its own codes and its own reproduction. Basically, how does capitalism know to keep itself at its own limit,

to schizophrenize and de-territorize to the limit without ever going across that limit? This is especially problematic because they say it's a nameless, thoughtless thinking, thoughtless, formless automaton of a being. I've always wondered, how does it know when to stop? Well, okay, this is a very interesting question. Well, because what's especially interesting is that although it's translated as limit, the distinction between bound and limit, again, this Kantian distinction between the positive bound, the self-bounding of desiring production through the body without organs, on the one hand, and capitalism's you know what they say positing of its own limits capital is also self-bounding capital also posits its own limits only to overcome them to supersede them

um this is um you know there's a there's a sense in which so how it overcomes these limits because it must um It's compelled to reproduce itself and to amplify the magnitude of value. I mean, not just capitalism as automatic subject in Marx, it keeps reproducing itself and simply kind of is this limitless compulsion to kind of expand the magnitude of value. But in Marx, it's constituted by its relationship to labor, and it still depends on labor.

And the problem in Deleuze and Guattari, it seems to me, is that they kind of disavow this capitalism's dependence on living labor, on the consumption of labor power. And they see, I mean, we'll see, we'll have to kind of examine, read these passages more carefully, but it seems to me, at least on a cursory reading, that there are several passages where they seem having kind of pointed out the parallel between, you know, pointed out Marx's account of, you know, the objective inversion, how capitalism, you know, presents itself as, you know, the fundamental source of value and wealth and of productivity, you know,

as a condition of human reproduction by claiming that the instruments of production can be generative of value. There are places where those in Gautari seem to say, when they talk about machinic surplus value, it sounds as if they're saying that the materials and instruments of production can generate, that capitalism has found a way to make the materials and instruments of production generative of value or generative of money, if you want to put it that way. And that's not that's exactly the kind of the the the necessary illusion propagated by capital itself that's intrinsic to capital self representation in marks.

And so the question about you know you're asking about how does capital know it doesn't know. um well except no okay this is it for marx and marx is very interesting marx will distinguishes capital from the capitalist okay he says on the one hand the kind of the capitalist is merely the personification of capital but precisely in so far as the capitalist is the personification of capital um he or she has has specific psychological um and cognitive traits dispositions and characteristics that make them you know kind of agents of capital um and that means therefore

that there is a sense in which capital knows you know capital is intentional it kind of um It has its agents, okay, who do act on its behalf and kind of carry out, you know, plan and strategize to maximize the extraction of surplus value and profits. And that's the sense in which there is a class struggle is ineliminable for Marx, however abstract the domination of capital becomes, because abstract domination needs to be concretely personified. And that's why the class struggle can't simply be kind of written off.

And in Deleuze and Guattari, the problem is that it seems that there is no capital as this, you know, kind of simply as this vector for the decoding of flows and deterritorialization of flows doesn't you know it's not clear to what extent this decoding and de-territorialization still supervenes on the consciousness of capitalists um and for that to be the case you would need to give you need to give an account of the in the sociability of the libidinal and the social of design production social production where you would say it's not simply

that they are that they can't simply be um distinguished in terms of scale of the difference in scale the scalar difference still means that the molar supervenes on the molecular and if that's the case then there comes a point at which capitalism um I mean, the wager of Deleuze and Guatari will be that, in a way, that the kind of the momentum or the impetus of deterritorialization will simply overcome the social imperatives or the social axiomatics that are implemented by capital.

by the capitalist class to preserve themselves, okay? So that the capitalist class will self-destruct and release unfettered desiring production. But to understand that this is what, we're gonna have to look at what they say about this in those passages where they do discuss this. But the short end, I don't have a clear answer to your question because it's not clear to me and Deleuze and Guattari themselves. It's not clear what they're saying. But part of the problem is because

their whole account of the associate abstracts the you know the dynamic of anti-production from social relations of production and it seems to me it's that abstraction that generates it's what I said last week what they do is that they reify social abstraction so in a way they're putting one abstraction you know deterritorialization and decoding are simply reifying kind of you know emblems of social abstraction and that that's the worry in Deleuze and Guattari that what they're also kind of surreptitiously hypostatizing you know social abstractions as autonomous forces as autonomous powers and forces which they call decoding and de-territorializing

Yeah, no, that's completely answered my question. I think I know where I've gone wrong now. Yeah, so, yes, so thanks so much, yeah. Okay, all right. Yeah, I think we have time for one more question. So please, Matthew, go on. Hi. So I guess my question, it goes back to the slide that had to do with the idea of self-bounding and or kind of allobounding, I think you put it, so like alterity-oriented bounding. And the question around negativity and the operation of deterritorialization, because it seems like the distinction that you're making between primary repression as autobounding and primary repression as allobounding kind of breaks down the line on a dialectical method and a non-dialectical method.

And the question around, can deterritorialization be conceived of an anti-production? And also, I think, in a certain sense, the death drive be conceived of as positive in some way, you know, in opposition to this idea of allobounding or I think, you know, the self-relating negativity of the dialectic. And I guess, does this mean that, you know, and maybe this breaks down on the line of how Marx and Dostantara conceive of like revolutionary, I guess, practice or process, is that it feels like for Marx, the idea of the negation of the negation as the freeing of labor power as life rests on this idea of alabounding in some way and the use of negativity,

or the role that negativity plays. Whereas for DeLiz and Guattari, it feels like what has happened is that capitalism has actually appropriated the process of revolutionary decoding. And so in a way, both you have these accounts where capitalism leads to its own either negation or de-territorialization, but you end up in fundamentally different places, which is that in Deleuze you end up with a kind of a fully de-territorialized socius which it feels like is the kind of like an apocalypse of social relations where like there's a kind of there's a total decoding whereas in Marx you end up with the kind of the free reproduction of social forces and I guess I'm just asking like do you see those things as following down from that very

basic logical operator step around the conditions of negation and positivity and maybe also like how is it possible to even think a kind of auto-bounding positivity without a kind of syreptitious repetition of negativity? Okay, thanks. I mean, the short answer to your question is yes. I mean, I think so. I think this distinction is pregnant with really profound philosophical consequences and political consequences. And it really, it goes back to sense in which what do we mean by positive and negative or affirmation and negation and it seems to me that remember this um the polemic the pitting of you know affirmation you know against

the powers of the negative you know is is part of a kind of a rejection of the legacy of hegelianism which is fundamental for Deleuze, not only Deleuze, for that generation, for Foucault and Derrida as well. I mean, it's not peculiar to Deleuze, this anti-Hygia, this enmity of this antipathy towards the negative. I also think it's politically, you know, it's politically overdetermined. It has to do with the French Communist Party and a certain understanding of what kind of Hegelian negativity meant and how it was kind of complicit with Stalinism in a way.

Okay, so that's on one side. But also we have to ask ourselves, what is, you know, look, what is Hegel? when we contrast the kind of positivity and negativity in this philosophical register, what's at stake in this contrast? And I think it's about the destitution of substance. What does Kant do? Kant shows that in a way he destitutes you know traditional metaphysics as the science of substance okay

metaphysics is a priori knowledge of substance whether substance is one or many whether it's thinking or extended etc etc okay and Kant shows that there can be no science of substance okay if substance is taken as synonymous with being to be is to be a substance so Kant redefines substance as a category of the understanding and as a condition a determination of you know the object of experience you know to be an object is to be a substance in some sense So he deontologizes substance. He also desubstantializes the subject of experience by making it this pure I think.

The I or he or she or it that thinks. And Hegel pushes this desubstantialization even further. okay because he thinks that hegel thinks that even the can'ts kind of you know destitution of dogmatic metaphysics is still too dogmatic and that the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding are still kind of too reified are still too substantial you know too fixed too solid so he wants to show how all all of these these fundamental conceptual forms and determinations which are implicated in experience, are involved in this constant kind of process

of change and transformation, of which negativity is central. And what's really... This is why after Kant, ontology is not a philosophical topic. and when hegel says that being is the most impoverished being pure being without any further determination is the most abstract and impoverished um of determinations it's pure in the you know indeterminacy in some sense you know he's he's pointing out that we're not thinking anything or or rather it's a kind of the you know the uh it's the most attenuated form of thinking That's why thinking being, it's only if you kind of, you know, think everything that follows from the abstraction of being that you're actually going to, you're thinking something.

um it's it's only in the kind of you know the the anti the the rejection of hegelism in the 19th century um but and the rehabilitation of ontology with heidegger in the 20th century that makes the question of being and non-being fundamental again that was not a kind of a philosophically salient question because it's so because in a way the identification of positivity with being and negativity with non-being falls from the claim that there is a significant contrast between being and non-being but that's exactly what Kant and Hegel undermined and Hegel shows that you know when you're thinking you know being a nothing or equivalent. So what Heidegger does is Heidegger says that well being's irreducibility

to present, you know, to what is present, you know, to what is representable, does not mean that being is not a thing, but it's not simply kind of, you know, coterminous with nothingness, as Hegel insisted, so that there's still something to think in being, okay, there's something to think beyond the form of the object, beyond subject and object, and that's Heidegger, so it's Heidegger who reactivates the kind of uh you know the discourse of ontology the discourse on being and deleuze is i think you know deleuze's anti-hegelianism makes him want to take up the question of being that's why deleuze is an ontologist and that's why deleuze wants to kind

of have a theory of being you know in difference in repetition um but which he kind of um but his alternative, you know, his way of rendering ontology compatible with the destitution of substance is through his, you know, through Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson. Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson allow him to think being beyond substance, being as pure, you know, as pure becoming, as production, etc., etc. And it's only someone who is committed to thinking being who will reject the primacy of self-relating negativity or who will claim that

or who will try to turn the kind of a dialectical negativity into a kind of you know, a pathos of negation, which is, you know, philosophically pernicious and politically kind of, you know, dubious. So I think it's, yeah, so I think one of the things that has to be questioned when one is looking at, you know, Deleuze or Deleuze's work with Gaussan is this whole, this kind of the pathos of affirmation of production of creation etc etc is um it's not philosophically innocent okay and it's uh it's you know philosophically determined and historically

determined um and the question is what's um why are we being invited um to constantly you know Why are we being invited to contrast affirmation and negation in this way? And I mean, look, I mean, the most elementary criticism of Deleuze is almost to point out how negativity, you know, it will inevitably return. The more you try to disavow, the more it will return as a return of the repressed. And the whole point about Hegel and Freud, and the affinity between Hegel and Freud, is to point out that, you know, the complicity of affirming and negating, instead of pitting affirmation against negation, recognize that every affirmation is a negation, and every negation is an affirmation.

and that's dialectics but the attempt to separate affirmation um from negation is forlorn um and in a way that's what deleuz is trying to do but why he's trying to do it is you know i think is more rooted in uh you know conjunctural um and cultural reasons and you know fundamental kind of philosophical reasons um so so i agree with you with your account so i think this distinction between atto and adult bounding has very far-reaching consequences um you know that's why you know the the dialectic of identity and different identity and difference you know

i think can only be dialectically articulated you know as affirmation and negation and the attempt to think without negation is debilitating it's simply debilitating and it's also politically debilitating i think um that's why i think the um um that's why i think the kind of the uh you know the yeah animate versions against lack and castration anti-edipus are so unconvincing you know and um you know uh a bit silly and also why i think that um you know marx you know is uh there's no you know marx is a think of there's no fetishism of negativity in marx um but he thinks it's

precisely because he thinks what is not or what is occluded by any positive you know kind of um you know catalogue or representation of what there is that he is a thinker of emancipation thank you that was very helpful okay you're right um so i think we are already a bit past the time um yeah so So I would just give the word back to you, Ray, for some ending comments. And perhaps the Spina could post questions in one of our chats or the classroom or the Discord.

Sure. I mean, if people have questions that they wanted to ask but weren't able to, I mean, You can actually email me the questions at my, either at my AUB account or the New Centre email account, which I'm able to access again, I wasn't before. So yes, so, you know, I'm happy to kind of try to answer questions via email as well. And yes, and that's really, you know, I think that's enough for today. But next week, so yeah, we'll start going through the chapter three, which is Savages, Barbarian, Civilized Men.

And I think we'll try to get, I mean, I'd like to, you know, it's a long chapter. So I think I've suggested pages 139 to 153. but obviously, you know, if you want to read more, because it's a long chapter, I might cover a bit more than that next week, because I'd like to do that just in the next couple of weeks. I'd like to get through the whole of chapter three in the next couple of weeks. Okay. Should we stop? Yeah, okay. All right, then. Thanks, everybody. Okay, bye.