Hello and welcome to our first session of our seminar, Capital Form and Flow, with our instructor Professor Ray Brassier. So I'll first introduce you to the topics of our seminar and then give the word to Professor Ray Brassier. Marx calls production in general rational abstraction. While production is always production by social individuals at a definite stage of social development, the concept of production in general allows us to distinguish those elements common to every stage of production from those specific to some. As a rational abstraction, production in general is not to be reified.
Ignoring the scavitt, Deleuze and Gattari attribute remarks the discovery of inactivity of production in general and without distinction. This allows them to suggest that their unification of social and desiring production or political and libidinal economy is Marxian in spirit, if not in latter. Yet it is neither. For while social and desiring production are twin attributes of production in general, the latter is substantialized as desire, whose magnations, connective, disjunctive, conjunctive, are trend historical. The synthesis of desire are the postulates of speculative rather than rational abstraction. removing the vicissitudes of the drives from historically specific relations of production. The speculative conjunction of drive and production,
drives are simply the design machines themselves, says Deleuze and Gattai, turns capital from a historical nexus of social forms and relations into an avatar of cosmic production. For Deleuze and Gattai, the flows of desire coded at the primary molecular level, but socially overcoded at the secondary molar level. By decoding what has been socially overcoded, capital promises to free desiring production from the fatis of social production, releasing what human sociality has hit her to repressed, desire as production for the sake of production. On this account, capital is no longer primarily a social relation with the conjunction of two decoded flows, a flow of labor and a flow of money.
What Marx called surplus value is redefined as the incommensurability between these two flows, rather than as the difference between the value of labor power and the value it produces. Capital is no longer the conjunction of the commodity form and the class relation. Labor is no longer the commodified source of commodity production. Where for Marx's living labor is required to convert the value of fixed capital into surplus value, Deleuze and Gautari render labor tributary to mechanic surplus value inherent in the means of production as such. Capital's self-moving power is rendered independent of its social relation to labor, which becomes its inert appendage. The limit to capital is no longer the moving contradiction between the expansion of surplus value and the reduction of necessary labor time, but the moment of anti-production, the disjunction of flows, imminent to capitalist production itself.
Overcoming this disjunction entails the generalized conjunction of flows reuniting humanity and nature beyond subjectivity and objectivity. This last is certainly consonant of Marx's vision of communism as the social organism's reunion with its inorganic body, nature, but at every junction, Deleuze and Gattari replaced Marx's analysis of social forms and relations with a description of laws and codes. They replace the critique of political economy with a metaphysical economy that naturalizes social relations and individual drives. The result is the metaphysics of production that turns the overcoming of capital from macro-political program targeting the commodity form and class relation into micro-political ethos maximizing the conjunction of flows, which is to say the intensification of desire.
So now I'll now give the word to Professor Ray Brassian who has obtained his PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick in 2001. From 2002 to 2008 he was a research fellow at Middlesex University's Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy. In 2008 he joined the philosophy department at the American University of Beirut and he's also the author of Nihilun Bound, Enlightenment and Extinction and the English Translator of Works by Alain Badiou and Quentin Mayassoux and he's now currently working on a book about sellers and marks which is a hot topic in the news center as well so I now give the word to Professor Ray Broussier thanks Ray. Okay thanks
Matthias thanks. Okay so before I begin with today's presentation, first of all I think there's a few kind of you know practical considerations that we need to kind of clarify. And so first of all Matthias just mentioned for the the assessment for the for the class will consist of presentations by the students together with an essay. Okay, and both can be on a topic of your choice. In other words, rather than, you know, stipulating questions or topics, I'll let you
kind of, you know, formulate questions of your own depending on whatever strikes you as interesting. in the class. But because there's so many of you, I mean right now I think there's, well not counting Matthias and myself, there's 43, it's going to be, it seems unfeasible to have these presentations during the class, that we only have eight sessions, eight two and a half hour sessions, so what I suggest then is that you record your presentations and they are kind of you know shared via email or uploaded i'm not sure onto the google classroom page and then i'll watch we can you know watch them uh together and discuss them um you know together um
um that topic yeah i think i will be sharing with you um a presentation spreadsheet um so that you you can allocate yourselves in the topics that you are most interested related to our particular sessions and i think yeah we can then go um i'll give you the link for a drive folder where we can upload the recorded videos and then we we make um groups based on this interest and record perhaps it would be interesting to record in the, to the weekend that this is planned. So if you're interested in something in the anti-Oedipus and once you present it, you make your group and you record and upload just before the class. So perhaps you can watch and even,
I don't know, address some of the issues that you, the recorded presentations are bringing or something like that. I think that would be interesting if it is okay for everyone. So I'll be sharing the link during the class. Great, okay, thanks. And yes, the second issue is that usually, I mean, the last time I taught a course for the New Centre, it was a much smaller group. So I would, you know, normally invite people to quickly introduce themselves so that I get a sense I can learn your names and find out a bit more about you or like, you know, so that we can all kind of, you know, become at least acquainted. But now, again, it seems it would take too long, I think, if there's
uh you know 44 people it would take too long um but i just hope you know we can uh yeah i hope that's not too uh uncomfortable for everyone um okay so right i'm gonna so today i'm gonna share um the screen so i've got a powerpoint prepared for today so let me see if i can find um Yep, let me see. Okay, so is that clear? Can everyone see the PowerPoint? Yeah, okay. Okay, right. And so I sent a message. So today I'm going to try to kind of
of starts the discussion by considering Jason Reed's introduction to his 2003 book, The Micropolitics of Capital, which I think provides a very useful framing of the main topics and issues that I would like to discuss during this course. And I decided to do this because although, you know, beginning, although originally I was just going to kind of plunge into, you know, the opening of Antioedipus, but then I thought that that might be a little bit too, you know, it's such a difficult book that one immediately gets kind of sucked into the kind of, you know, the trying to make sense of the terminology.
and I thought it'd be useful to kind of at least to begin by zooming out a bit and by just trying to kind of get a sense of the of the stakes, the fundamental philosophical and theoretical stakes that are, you know, articulated in Deleuze and Guattari's projects in relationship to Marx. So that's what we're going to try to do today. And the other thing I wanted to mention is that, which occurred to me while Matthias was reading the summary for the course, is that although it's formulated critically, although the kind of the agenda of the course is formulated critically vis-a-vis de Los Inventari's project,
and I will be critical in certain regards. I also don't want to lose sight of what the operation that they are unfolding vis-a-vis Marx is trying to do. In other words, however critical one may be of the way in which those and Gosari can join, let's say kind of you know libidinal and you know material production or libidinal and social production i think that's not to say that those two things don't need to be somehow articulated so even if their their you know their solution is not quite satisfying or raises as many
difficulties as it attempts to resolve that's not to say that they are not responding to you know, a genuine kind of problem or lacunae in, you know, let's say kind of, you know, orthodox, you know, 20th century marching accounts, okay. So, I don't want to just, this is just to say that I'm not, I don't want to sound as if I'm simply dismissing the, you know, the project out of hand and I hope that, you know, becomes clear as we proceed through the investigation. Okay, so let's begin. So the first, the title of today's presentation is The Mutation of Critique and the question it asks is the critique of political economy obsolete. In
other words, is there, is Marx's fundamental theoretical investigation of capital and capital social forms and of the centrality of class struggle in that analysis, has this somehow been rendered anachronistic by developments in late 20th century capitalism? Okay, and Jason Reed in his introduction to the micro politics of capital, I think gives a useful summary of the claim that such indeed is the case.
So, Reid writes in the opening of his introduction, he writes, capitalist production has undergone a profound mutation in the past 30 or so years. Stated briefly, it is no longer possible to separate capital as the producer of goods and commodities from what used to be called the superstructure, the production of ideas, beliefs, perceptions, and tastes. Capitalist production today has either directly appropriated the production of culture, beliefs, and desires, or it has indirectly linked them to the production and circulation of commodities. So this is the status of what Reid calls the mutation of
production. This transformation also entails a fundamental mutation of labor. It is no longer simply physical labor power that is put to work, but knowledges, affects, and desires. In short, capitalist production has taken on a dimension that could be described as micro-political, inserting itself into the texture of day-to-day social existence and ultimately subjectivity itself okay um so he continues a little later in his introduction reed continues um um the old terms but the old terms of marxian critique ring hall because they are not yet attuned to the fact that not only has their object changed we are no longer living in the 19th century but the very terms of
critique have changed as well so this is a sense in which the you know the the mutation of production entails a mutation of critique or a mutation in the mode of critique. It is no longer possible to critique capital according to the grand schemes of universal history or to oppose it from the last or to oppose it from the last vestiges of values and desires kept isolated from its sweeping mutations. Critique must become attuned to the micro political dimension of capital. It must become what Michel Foucault called a critical ontology of ourselves. Okay, now there's two things I want to draw your attention to here in this in this account, in this opening account,
is one is the characterization, the claim about the fundamental mutation of labor, that it's no longer simply physical labor power that is put to work, okay, that there's somehow capitalism has transformed its relation to labour. And the first thing to point out here is that, and this is a point that I'll reiterate today in this presentation, is that it seems to me that there's a kind of a misunderstanding of the nature of labour power, of what the commodity labor power is in Marx's critique of political economy. Okay. And it seems to me that this,
it's this, in a way, this physical, this claim that labor power is a kind of, is to be understood in some kind of, you know, straightforward physical or physically measurable or energetic sense that underwrites in a way the articulation of the critique of political economy onto the base superstructure model where labor power operates in the base and therefore doesn't help us understand um super structural phenomena you know uh things you know um the production of knowledge is affects and desires okay and i think um this is this is one of the things you know i I want to question today, okay? So here's the quotation from Marx where,
from Marx's contributions of the critique of political economy, where Marx seems to kind of lay out the base superstructure model, where he seems to kind of situate production or social production in the economic base. So Marx writes, in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of the material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of a society, the real foundation, German basis on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
Okay. Now, if one accepts this, you know, this base superstructure paradigm, as you know, as constitutive of the Marxian conception of critique. critique, then certain difficulties fall. And as Reed formulates, the basic difficulty as follows. So he writes, the mode of production is at one and the same time a limited concept, referring to the relations of the economy, and an expansive concept, referring to the totality of the social. In each case, the position of consciousness or subjectivity is ambiguous.
In the first limited understanding, it is not clear whether subjectivity can itself be included within the relations of production, while in the second, forms of consciousness arise from the base. and it's this you know in a way ambiguity in the you know the the conception of the base whether the base simply kind of whether the base straightforwardly determines consciousness you know so that you know consciousness human subjectivity is straightforwardly
determined by you know you know economic relations or whether it's you know it's under determined and and if it's under determined it's not clear what its relationship to this economic base is to be okay this is this kind of ambiguity between the kind of the you know the the complete and incomplete determination of the superstructure by the base that leads to what Reed following Althusser calls the problematic of the mode of production he outlines the four terms of this problematic one the relation between consciousness and production
The relations between the different forms of social practice, economic, legal, technological, political, and their effects on each other. Three, the periodization of history into the different modes of production, tribal, ancient, feudal, capitalist, and the transitions between them. And fourthly, the historicity of reproduction and dissolution in every mode of production and their coexistence. So, the claim, you know, so read following elsewhere claims that the base superstructure paradigm where the base is what determines the mode of production, you know, generates these unresolved questions or these unresolved problems about these about you know in these four
domains okay and he usefully suggests that you know Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari you know that their work can be understood as a response to this the problematic of the the mode of production that you know the concepts of apparatus in Foucault and of abstract machine and de l'Eau's and Vatari are attempts to articulate these you know the relations between consciousness and production and different forms of social practice on the one hand and and the periodization of history and the transition between modes of production on the other hand.
So, this means that there's a dichotomy, in a way it's the base superstructure model that entails a dichotomy between economic production and culture. production and cultural production. Reid writes, on the one side stemming from Marx, there are the tools for an examination of the transformations and development of the capitalist mode of production, in which subjectivity remains an afterthought or a consequence if one assumes that Marx is wedded to the base superstructure model, while on the other side stemming from Foucault and post-structuralist thinkers,
is an examination of the production of subjectivity as a relation to self which is examined apart from the transformation of capitalist valorization and what Reid proposes to do in his work is to bring these two aspects together to bring the Marxian account of the capitalist mode of production together with, let's say, a kind of a broadly post-structuralist account of the production of subjectivity. In other words, what's at stake here is a supplementation of the Marxian account of production at the base or economic production with an account of superstructural production
or the production of subjectivity. but the claim obviously is that the base superstructure dichotomy must be undone it's that this it's the very kind of the dualism of base and superstructure is precisely what is dissolved by bringing together um social um and uh cultural production okay um Okay, so this is why an account of the production of subjectivity is required to supplement a lacuna in the critique of political economy so read writes. The transition from an examination of the motor production to the production of subjectivity is itself a response to changes and capital itself as capital moved deeper into the social networks that produce and reproduce life.
produce life critical thinking in part followed this migration turning its attention to the production and reproduction of subjectivity um okay so in a way what allows um you know the uh you know the what allows us to kind of to dissolve the the dichotomy of base and superstructure and to give a unified account of production which includes the production of subjectivity of consciousness of affects of perception etc is um in a way the spinicist
conception of structural causality as filtered through Althusser. So it's Althusser in former Marx and reading capital who proposes that Spinoza offers a paradigm for articulating, you know, that the Spinozist account of substance attributes and mode allows us to articulate in a way the the totality and the you know the singularities encompassed by the totality without independently of the the expressive causality
which Althusser attributes to Hegelian idealism. So structural causality is supposed to supersede, is the materialist alternative to the expressive causality which is exposed by Hegelian Marxism according to Althusser. So Althusser famously writes, the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects. The structure which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements is nothing outside its effects and this is the the altruzarian account of over over determination okay um so that the um in a way this is an example what deleuse calls the flattening of substance onto the modes is already what altruzor is proposing with his account of structural
causality so that the claim is that the social totality is not a transcendent instance vis-a-vis its individual modes, but actually is wholly manifest in each, you know, in every kind of phase of model individuation. So the structure is nothing outside of its effects, and this is what undoes the base superstructure, you know, dualism. This is why this entails a monism of production, okay? So, as Reid puts it, there is no pure and simple economy that is transformed and altered by different cultures and belief systems, as there would be on the base superstructure model. There
exists only a mode of production, which is always already conditioned and undermined by a particular overproduction of subjectivity. Now, here, the subjectivity here is, in a way, a relation to self, as Reed has already put it. But the claim is that the way in which this, you know, the claim here is that labor power or the function of labor power in, you know, the articulation of the capitalist totality
is that it's both the generative condition for the reproduction of this totality and something that is itself inscribed in this totality itself. It's both inside and outside the social structure or the totality. This is why. So subjectivity is both producing and produced. It's producing as living labor and it's produced as you know both as you know as labor power but also as you know the
the modes of perception affection and desire that characterize living labor at any kind of phase of capitalist development okay Okay. So he reads, continues. So if imminent causality is founded on the rigorously materialist idea that materialism exceeds the production of things and includes the production and productivity of ideas. Now, just again, there's an issue here. The claim... Capitalism for Marx is commodity production. The capitalist mode of production produces commodities.
But Marx's whole account of the commodity is that commodity is a junction of the sensible and the super sensible. A commodity is never just a material thing. OK, and it seems to me that if to insist that, you know, Marx's materialism consists in the claim that commodities are merely sensible things, completely kind of, you know, distorts the whole, you know, the Marxian analysis from the beginning. OK, because it's only if you think that there's there's there's things on the one hand, you know,
Perceptible, commodities are things on the one hand, and ideas, relations, and desires are not things. On the other hand, you think that there's a bridge, that there's a kind of a bridge needs to be built from the thingly domain of commodities to the super thingly domain of ideas, relations, and desires. but this is exactly what Marx denies. The whole point is that commodities are not things in Marx. They're both, they're sensible, super sensible, which is to say that they're never merely as junctions of use value and exchange value. They are never kind of, you know, know uh definable in terms of their perceptible properties okay this is why marx insists that not
an atom not a parcel of matter enters into the exchange value of a commodity but it's the exchangeability of the commodity that makes it a commodity in the first place um okay um So, so then this makes the ensuing the kind of the second half of this sentence that you know the necessary correlates. For if one wants to include the production of ideas relations and desires into the sphere of material productions, then it seems that one needs to kind of enlarge. of matter, matter must be said to be in many senses, you know, here, as we says, you know, echoing kind of dollars.
No, actually, echoing Aristotle not not dollars is reading a spinosa. Because being is said in a single sense according to the thesis of you know university. according to the thesis of university. But the claim that this, you know, kind of dualism of, in a way, of sensible and super sensible, okay, commits one to an equivocal conception of matter, to an equivocal materialism, which is precisely entirely absent in Marx, which Marx's materialism does not need because because marsh's materialism is not a it's not an ontological thesis at all and it's not a thesis about the meaning of being and in fact it's an attempt to kind of
circumvent the entire uh domain of ontology as we'll see later um okay then to continue this this sentence um okay so if one accepts this equivocal materialism then the materiality of subjectivity is not said in the same sense as the materiality of production of machinery and relations of power and this difference is not historically static okay um so now we hear the monism of production is founded upon an equivocity of matter okay it's because you know the only way in which you can there is production but there's production of things on the one hand there's a
production of commodities and there's a production of subjectivity. Okay. So this, you know, allegedly kind of, you know, consistent or coherent materialism is founded upon this fundamental diremption of the, in a way, of the sensible and the super sensible, which Marx's entire analysis of the commodity is, tries to kind of circumvent or to show how the commodity is nothing but the fusion of the sensible, the super sensible, or the so-called, the material and the allegedly immaterial. So this modism of production, which is obviously kind of premised on Spinoza, because it basically,
it means that you have the Spinoza's kind of dualism of thought and extension here is duplicated in the dualism of you know thingly commodified you know thing production on the one hand and the production of subjectivity on the other hand okay so the modes and attributes of substance, which is to say culture on the one hand, the economy on the other, you know, supplant form determinations of social relations, which include subjective and objective determinations, okay? So in other words, the dualism, the attributive duality of, you know, commodity production and subject production
is supposed to kind of take the place of Marx's account of the form determinations of capital, which are determinations of social relations, which always include a subjective and objective aspect indissociably. So, Reid writes, the capitalist mode of production is itself founded on an abstract subjective potential, the capacity to do any work whatsoever, which it must simultaneously develop through discipline and cooperation and contain through discipline and various techniques of subjectification. Now here, I take it by, you know, I take it that what he
means or what is meant by abstract subjective potential is what Marx calls abstract labor. Abstract labor as the characteristic social form of capitalist commodity production, where abstract labor is what renders qualitatively heterogeneous modes of concrete labor equivalent. But again, it seems to me that there's, you know, for Marx, abstract labor is an objective social form, okay, and not really, not a subjective phenomenon in any kind of traditional sense.
Abstract labor is the qualitative commensuration of qualitatively heterogeneous concrete labors, it's a form of objectivation and not of subjectivation because labor power, it's labor power that is the medium of abstract labor because it's labor power that is the commodity that is bought and sold in the wage relation. The way the worker sells her labor power to the capitalist and she sells this labor power as abstract labor power. Labor power is commodified or objectified living labor, and it's important to understand the relationship between living labor and labor power in Marx's account in order to
avoid this I think this short circuiting of the subjective and objective aspects of labour. Now the second aspect in a way the the arguments for the need to unify to give a unified account of production in a way which would include both the economic and the cultural sphere is the claim that there's been a mutation in production and that remember as as reid put it at the um in the very um opening um that
capitalist production has taken on a dimension that could be called micro political and has in a way expanded to saturate the texture of day-to-day social existence and ultimately subjectivity. So, the claim is that the relevant, the decisive shift that renders Marx's is Marx's canonical account, which is supposed to be the base superstructure account, anachronistic, is the claim in a way that now that the superstructure is entirely incorporated into the base.
And this is why it's real subsumption, what Marx calls real subsumption, is supposed to be, is interpreted as this, in a way, incorporation of the superstructure into the base. So Reed writes, as for real subsumption, or what Marx sometimes called the specifically capitalist mode of production, subjectivity is not reproduced but is made directly productive not in the form of an abstract potentiality, an abstract potentiality for, you know, for labor or for abstract labor, but in the form of knowledge, desires and affects. It is this concept of Marx, i.e. real subsumption, that comes closest to at least opening up some of the questions of the present.
Capital and later, a few pages later, Rebe writes, Capital has extended well beyond the walls of the factory to encompass all of social space. I think that this kind of spatial metaphor, I think, is significant here. This idea that real subsumption is to be understood in terms of a kind of, you know, on a model of incorporation or of kind of expansion, spatial expansion, which I think is actually misleading and generates difficulties. I think, in fact, the concept of real subsumption that is being proposed here is a spinicist
account, which is radically divergent from the Marxian account. The spinicist concept of real subsumption is the integration of the superstructure into the base, a production of subjectivity, knowledge desire affects okay whereas the marxian concept of real subsumption is that of the individual inclusion that both solicits and excludes subjectivity living labor compelled to objectify itself as labor power um and now this is why that this in a way this I think the contrast that needs to be drawn between two concepts of real subsumption,
between the spinicist allegedly Marxian account of real subsumption on the one hand, and what I think is a properly Marxian one, corresponds to two concepts of labor. The expression living labor power conflates the subjective and objective aspects of labor and reifies labor as an ontological potency that obscures the difference between self-objectivating wage labor and objectified slave labor. the subject the contrast is important because the subject that is one is a subject that is a social
object for another because it is a social object for itself this is wage labor okay the wage labor is compelled to commodify her labor power or parts of her cognitive and physical capacities as labor power, which is exchangeable for a wage. wage. But this is a self-objectification that is socially compelled, but not materially or not kind of violently imposed in the way in which enslavement is. Because the slave is
is simply an object. It's a subject that has been turned into a social object by another subject. It's simply that the wage laborer sells her labor power to the capitalist, whereas the slave is simply an object that is bought and sold. So in a way, it's because labor power is a property, the propriety relation, in a way, traverses living labor.
living labor is compelled to take on a propriety in relation to its own cognitive and physical capacities, that's a sense in which it is formally free to objectify itself as labor power and to sell its labor power to a capitalist. Whereas, of course, the slave labor is deprived of this dimension of this you know kind of formal freedom and is simply kind of wholly objectified and why is this important well this this is important because it has consequences for what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they talk about machinic enslavement which is according
to them which is their alternative to the account of the martin account of real subsumption and here i want to i think one of the most illuminating accounts of what actually you know real subsumption means or what is really subsumed on a martin account is given by rob lucas in his essay feeding the infant. Rob Lucas is a member of the Endnotes Collective. He works for the New Life Review and he's an author and theorist. I'm not sure if this piece has been published, but it's an incredibly illuminating piece, not least for this account of real subsumption. So, I'm going to read
the key moments of this analysis. So he writes, if the monetary measure seems to subsume the qualities of the commodity, it does so only for an instance. Once bought, this book ceases to perform as a commodity, subsisting simply as your book, unless you decide to sell it onto someone else, because a commodity is exchangeable. Once you've bought the commodity and you own it, it no longer functions as a commodity. It's now just a piece of something that you own. Okay? And your relationship to it is no longer as to a commodity because you're using it and you cannot... And the disjunction of use and exchange is central to every commodity except
for money, which is used by being exchanged. But every commodity, once it has been exchanged for money, is used. And if it's used, it no longer has the exchangeability, which is essential for, which is the essential characteristic of its being a commodity. Likewise, labor power, once bought with a wage, ceases to present itself as a commodity, dissolving itself into the flows of daily activity. The wage presents itself as the truce of the worker's labor only when they go to markets, the labor market. Thus, this ontological mode of inclusion, i.e., the inclusion implied by real subsumption, so far signaled by the terms
assumption appears by the same token extremely weak. The various transactions which make up capital's valorization process constitute a certain unity which falls back upon itself to reproduce some of its own conditions. Profits are reinvested in subsequent iterations of the process. These exchanges can be understood as the moments of a single process and thus so the accompanying dynamic of subsumption. Where we are dealing not just with financial or merchants capital but with a capital that has taken hold of some production process, its various exchanges can be seen as enacting the subsumption of another unified process. So it is in so far as my labour
participates in this process that it is identified specifically with capital and not just with the wage that I am paid. But although insofar as it inherits a kind of necessity from capital circuits, subsumption may seem to have deepened here, it has also inherited the contingency of the mere moment of exchange and is still distinctly weak. So if I am in a sense included in a particular capital during the working day, this always remains a particular capital for the drive to accumulate as the individual firm as its irreducible nexus. It is always a particular firm that offers
a wage in order to keep in motion its own production process that aims to sell the result at a profit and that returns again to the labor market with the resulting revenues. Strictly speaking, that is to say understood rigorously, not simply as domination, but as a logical or ontological matter, subsumption under capital occurs only within this basic circuit. Whatever its outcomes, if subsumption under capital, strictly speaking, occurs only at the level of individual capitals, it cannot directly characterize society, especially not at a global level.
Okay, so what I want to suggest is going on here. What I think, although Rob uses the term logical and ontological equivalently in his analysis of the nature of real subsumption in Marx, What I want to suggest is that real subsumption in Marx is logically identifying and not ontologically unifying. Subsumption is the logical co-extensiveness of universal and particular. So of a universal of value, of value as such, which is the universal, and a particular quantum of value.
The value of my labor power or the value of any other commodity in exchange. This co-extensiveness occurs through individual inclusions or individual acts of inclusion, subsumptions, which are also exclusions, okay? Not as the code and they're exclusions of what is of, for instance, of the useful qualities of a commodity. Because in the act of exchange, it's, you know, the value of the particular commodity becomes in a way subsumed or incorporated into value as such, but not the particular qualities or properties of the commodity.
And this co-extensiveness of individual, the inclusion of individual value, but the exclusion of individual qualities is distinct from the co-extensiveness of substance and mode. I've said whole and part because I think that, you know, with, you know, the Althusserian account of structural causality wants to insist that the, in a way that the structural causality is precisely what precludes the part-whole relation, okay? that if substance or capitalist production as such is flattened onto the individual mode
then the mode can't be incorporated within the substance because the substance has no extent over and above that of its modal individuation. But what I'm suggesting in a way is that there's a problem and that in a way the attempt to unify the two registers of production, economic production and cultural production, in a way resubstantializes production.
It reifies production and makes it into a substance, a social substance, which is divided or parceled out individually in individual modes. And the other thing I want to suggest is that there's an articulation that in Marx, you know, the capital is both, in a way, the reason why it's, in a way, Marx's most profound challenge to classical metaphysics is that capital is both one and many.
Okay, Marx says capital, there are always many individual capitals, and the logic of capital is the logic of competition amongst individual capitals. But nevertheless, these individual capitals, you know, instantiates a single logic, a single kind of mode of operation. and just as the um in a way that in marx articulates um the universal in the particular or the abstract and the concrete
in a register which cannot be understood in terms of any kind of canonical metaphysical conception of the relationship between whole and parts or unity and multiplicity so okay I think this is going to be a theme to which we're going to return because in a way what So when Deleuze and Guattari insist that desiring production is necessarily the production of multiplicity, that it's a non-totalizable kind of plurality or multiplicity of production,
they try to challenge the metaphysical articulation of the one and the many. But in a way, their account generates a monism of production. The claim that there is such a thing as production in general or ontological production or that being is production, in a way kind of reinstitutes, you know, a fusion of the one and the many, or in a way it kind of, you know, it's substantializes multiplicity in a manner that Marx, I think,
Frank remarkably avoids in the way in which through his account of the participle of the logic of capital production and reproduction as involving the participation of the abstract in the concrete and vice versa in a way that it's almost as if I think that I think that Marx in a sense has solve the problem, the platonic model of participation, by understanding social processes as irreducibly involving these junctions of matter and form in a way that cannot be substantialized.
Okay, so it's as if Marx, Marx as a kind of social process, involves, you know, the Aristotelian kind of of dualism of matter and form without hylomorphism, without activity being formal and passivity being material. But we'll return to this issue. So therefore, the real subsumption of the production process is inseparable from commodity exchange, primarily the exchange of labour power for a wage. In other words, you can't understand the process of subsumption. In other words, it's a mistake to think of subsumption in a way spatially or extensively
as incorporation or agglomeration or whatever. It happens, it's punctual. Real subsumption is always punctual and irreducibly plural. It involves a kind of, in a way, a manifold of points of subsumption. Now, Matthias, should we pause now for a good point to have a break? Yeah, I think so, I guess. We have two, I think we have one question here in the comments, but perhaps we can, I don't know, we answer and then we make a pause or perhaps we answer after the pause. I don't know. Why do you prefer it?
Okay, so there's, okay, I'm just opening the comments now. um okay there's a comment here um why is this more difficult than any analytic metaphysics i've ever read okay i'm sorry about this um it's actually i hope this will become clearer okay as we go and i apologize if it's been you know it's um a bit obscure um right now but i think hopefully it will become clear as we go on so i can i'll just try it again and actually in the uh the questions and answers I'll try to kind of clarify as much as I can okay then there's a question from Sean the notion that Deleuze unwittingly collapses multiple sins he originally being so one isn't
this also a bad use critique yes it is but except that he doesn't say anything about Deleuze and Guattari he focuses on difference in the position and logic of sense and the cinema books and doesn't and avoids talking about capitalism and schizophrenia. I don't see how DNG are guilty of this and how exactly Marx avoids this. Well, OK, this is something I can't hope to convince of this immediately from the get go. But I've written, I mean, Think of what Deleuze and Guattari mean by when they talk about the plane of eminence or the body without organs or the earth or the de-territorialized.
I think that if you think that unity is substance, if you think that unity must always be substantial, then it's easy to evade the charge. But actually, Heraclitus is a thinker of unity because he thinks, if you say that everything flows or everything becomes, that's a kind of a thinker of, you know, the monism of becoming is, you know, Deloitte says, when he kind of exposes the kind of the thesis of unity, being is said in a single sense. but everything of which it is said differs or is different.
But it's the claim that being is said in a single sense, the claim that there's any kind of unity in the sense of, or if you want consistency or integration, of being that is the issue here. Okay, so again, so no, I can't, I'm not going to convince you, you know, initially, right here. But this is something we're going to return to again and again. And how exactly Marx avoids this?
Marx avoids this by not talking about being at all, and by not having, actually, I think that one of the most fruitful ways to read Marx is to read him as entirely circumventing the discourse of ontology, which is in a way only rehabilitated in the 20th century in the wake of Heidegger, because already after Kant, ontology is not, you know, ontology has been superseded by critical philosophy, and then, you know, of speculative philosophy also kind of evacuates ontology. And I think that because it's so difficult to separate the question of being from the question of meaning that in a way,
the way to kind of, you know, any attempt to re-engage with ontology embroyles you with the question of meaning. And that's why Deleuze writes the logic of sense. Okay. That's why Deleuze can't kind of, you know, avoid the question of the articulation of being and sense. And he does it in a kind of a completely kind of, you know, kind of non-phenomenological register, but the claim is that you can avoid that issue altogether by simply circumventing ontology. So the claim that ontology, that you need to have an ontology, is the issue here, and Marx doesn't, I think, doesn't need one. His account of,
or the point at which it looks like he needs one when he's talking about life producing life, as we'll see in a minute, is in a way you could say that for Marx, the conditions for pursuing ontology don't currently obtain. And in a way, the transition from prehistory to history would be the conditions which makes ontological interrogation intelligible. But he uses the term life when he's talking about human genus being.
And he talks about life producing life. But he talks about it in terms of what he calls free conscious activity. And I think that free conscious activity in Marx's sense as this unprecedented kind of activity is that for which there is no ontological name. It cannot be named. It cannot be attributively specified in any order of being. And that's why I think that's one of the most kind of really interesting kind of claims
that the young Marx makes when he's talking about what Deleuze and Guattari, I think, misinterpret as production in general. Okay, there's another question from the, is there a control function in the when, who, what has the ability to pull the lever of when labor or commodity performs in which form? Can discuss later with just the role of time and who controls when. Can you simply, would you mind just saying exactly or just clarifying, because I'm not I understand the question. Is there a control function in the when? When you mean the time at which, when real subsumption takes place or when
when commodity exchange takes place? Would you mind? Sure. And again, this can, we can bring this up later, but again, if there's this kind of collapsing that happens where like who has access to control when it performs in which sphere. And I guess I'm just, I'm just asking if there's a, there's a kind of control function to think about there about again, perhaps a laborer perhaps does not have the actual control of like how their labor functions, but that there's this kind of I'll pause there. Cause maybe I'm even confusing myself but again this just this control ability of like if there's subsumption who has the
ability to decide okay your performance in thanks oh well actually um you know you choose the wage laborer is formally free to sell her labor power to an employer okay so that's a kind of um you know a voluntary act okay um of course it's socially compelled it turns out that you know you you have very little control over you know who you end up selling your labor power to most of the time but at least that's you know what's what is supposed to be under your control according to capitalism is whether or not you sell your labor power and you're supposed to be even able to choose who you sell it to, although that is rarely in fact the case. But then once it's being sold, once you
sell your labor power to the capitalist, then that labor power is subsumed. It becomes, you know, kind of a component of commodity production and value production. And that's not out of your control. That is objectively determined. So you have no control over the subsumption of your labor power in capitalist commodity production or value creation. And so, yes, so it's in a way that the when is the moment of exchange, when you sell your labor power, that's when the, I guess,
when the subsumption occurs. And there's a sense in which, you know, I mean, the point, the reason why the freedom to sell your labor power is a kind of, is ultimately a specious form of freedom for Marx, because in fact, it's empty. It means everyone is effectively compelled to work in order to live because if you don't sell your labor power, you'll starve. Who you sell it to, under what conditions you work, what commodities you produce,
none of those things are under your control. They're all kind of determined by relations of production. Okay. There's another question from Andrew. Okay, well, yes, you can ask you know, in the after, maybe hopefully we have a proper kind of, what time is it now? It's, we should have enough time for questions at the end. I would just suggest, I think, Arman and Vespina had their hands raised to make a question, then
perhaps we could answer their questions and make the pause, then we go back to the presentation. Okay, sure. Okay, sure. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. I try to be quick. One thing that I want to ask question about is this idea of anti production in Deleuze and Gautari, because it's not all about production is but also the repellent, the repellent force of anti production that makes actually the body without organ the body of be body of earth or body of capital or body of iron um so production won't be the only force the ontological force would be the opposition between production and production a freudian
opposition i think uh then if we understand it in that way um the role of anti-production actually would be what uh as much as i understand it would be what marx uh talks about in surplus value because it's not the product of labor it's something that it's a it's it's a force of anti-production as as as regarding production as a process that is already there before the subject becomes subject the first moment of repression becomes the moment of anti-production uh if i remember correctly that is the body of um maybe my question is for would be better answered later just the idea of anti-production I would love to hear about it more thank you
okay yes so the moment of anti-production I mean it's crucial in the their account and the opening of Antioedipus it's you know they talk about you know flows and then they talk about the interruption of the flow and then the cuts okay um and anti-production is the is the the cup is the cut sorry or the uh you know the the interruption of the flow now how this is okay so in terms of um you know the uh the functioning of um desiring production it's uh it can be abstractly
understood, but in terms of, I mean, I think it's linked, you know, the link that you suggested to surplus value is, I'm not sure, I mean, you know, what is it that's produced in Marx? It's value that's produced, okay? That is what, you know, that is the object of production. Commodity production is value production. Every commodity is, you know, is a receptacle of a magnitude or a quantum of value. Okay. And the sum total of commodities is the totality of value, which must expand, must increase. Okay. So self-expanding value is value compelled to increase and amplify
by itself. And value is abstract and homogenous. It can only be quantified. In that regard, then I don't think so. If that's what you mean by anti-production, if surplus value is anti-production because it is, you know, devoid of, you know, determinate qualities or characteristics, then okay, that may well be the case. But then the whole point about capitalist production is that it's only, is that the qualitative
heterogeneity of the multiplicity of commodities, all the different kinds of commodities that capitalism produces are ultimately, I mean, their heterogeneity, their quality of diversity is ultimately just a kind of a veneer for their, you know, homogeneity. They're all the same kind of you know they're all embodying the same kind of stuff which is just value as such and that's why in a way it's the that's why Marx says that the kind of you know the it's a mistake to be kind of to be taken in by the apparent heterogeneity of capitalist
productivity because it's really always producing the same thing over and over again and the point is that and once use value once the usefulness of a commodity is merely so to speak an appendage to its you know its exchangeability or its abstract kind of value then um you know even the kinds of the ways of consuming commodities the ways in which we can use them and find them useful is ultimately kind of subservient of value accumulation. And I think, I mean, this is why like stuff on, you know, recent work on, this is why the extent to which capitalism is a motor of technological innovation,
or of innovation as such, is actually very questionable. Paul Jayneeson, Ph.D.: You know the claim that's no recent work by you know Jason Smith and our banana shows that you know there hasn't been. Paul Jayneeson, Ph.D.: Lots of the time capitalism is repackaging kind of you know they know. Paul Jayneeson, Ph.D.: Already kind of familiar kind of mode of technological innovation okay because it's ultimately it's not about. It's not about creating new use values. It's simply about always finding new ways to kind of, you know, finding new ways to tack existing use values onto unfamiliar,
you know, unfamiliar kind of embodiments of abstract value or exchangeability. Okay, so, and there was another, someone else who had put their hand up. Yeah, it was me. Yes, sorry, yes. So, actually, I have to admit, I'm not familiar, I'm not directly familiar with Marxist work. So this is why I wanted to sign up to this seminar, so as to have the opportunity to read directly his texts. But I am familiar with his work through other philosophers that reference him, like Deleuze, Gattari, Lyotard, Klosowski.
um Nietzsche is not referencing Marx but I am more familiar with let's say the philosophers of impulses so my concern from what I'm um I'm getting so far is the paradigm that we are operating inside. Because I see at some point ideas such as those of object, subject, what you said about Marx talking about the operation of capital as a free conscious activity.
and all of these ideas presuppose a dogmatic image of thought if we go to Deleuze for example based on dialectics so I'm wondering and maybe this is something that will be I guess it will be examined throughout the whole seminar and through our assignments. I'm wondering how this dialectical point of view comes to work with non-dialectical approaches. And on that note, I should say that the way that the body without organs is used in Antioedipus is not as successful as it is, for example,
in A Thousand Plateaus, in my opinion. Because in Antioedipus, we see the body without organs presented somehow as a kind of an Orphic egg that creates exteriorities and interiorities. so my question is if we could go to for example to the body without organs in thousand plateaus instead of using the anti-Oedipus version so this is my main question and then the other thing is just a concern that I'm having and I suppose that it's in you know a work in progress about the paradigm that we are operating.
Because I don't think that we can answer the object, subject, binary through the body without organs. Because the body without organs doesn't even have binaries. Yeah. Okay. Well, actually, we're just about to discuss, you know, in the presentation, there is a couple of passages from Deleuze's rejection of the image of thought, dialectical image of thought, the Kantian, the critical image of thoughts, the speculative dialectical image of
thought and his claim that critique, you know, Nietzsche's great contribution is to kind of propose a new image of thought where critique becomes evaluation. Now, Now, there's lots to say about, obviously, Deleuze and Guattari reject subject-object distinction, which they see is, you know, it comes from Kant, not Descartes, but Kant, And obviously it's consummated, it reaches its kind of its consummation in Hegel, who
Deleuze detests his entire project in the time to kind of do something other than Hegel. But there's a problem here. What is a dogmatic image of thoughts? What is dogmatism? that Kant's critique of metaphysics is a critique of what he calls dogmatic rationalism and imperses skepticism. So on those on the one hand who claim to be able to know what there is or who claim to be able to kind of to know the fundamental structure of reality or of being through the use of reason alone, through kind of sheer intellectual deduction.
And on the other hand, those who claim that kind of knowledge is impossible because all we have are, you know, all we have is this flux of sensory experiences, which doesn't allow us to make any kind of determinate judgments about what, you know, what there is or what there isn't. Okay. Okay. So the claim is that if you, so the whole problem of representation in Kant and the critical philosophy is about how the subject is able to kind of, you know, to represent an object to itself is a question of, you know, how do you know? okay so it's a challenge to dogmatism because anytime someone claims to know something I know that everything flows I know that being is multiple the answer is well how do you know this
why is everything multiple what do you mean when you say everything okay what is it to be a thing and what is it for something to be you know how do we adjudicate the difference between oneness and manyness. These are the questions which critical philosophy asks. Now the problem you have is if you reject the problem of representation and you reject epistemology as a starting point for philosophy, you know, you need to kind of, you know, you've also got to kind of, you know, circumvent Kant's critique of dogmatic rationalism and imprecisive skepticism. So in other words, you have to claim that your starting point is neither intellectual intuition, you know,
the intellectual intuition of being, I know that being is one, I just know it, okay, I intuit it, I know that being is many, I just, I intuit it. Or the claim that knowledge, you know, well, I don't know, I can't know being, but I know about my own sensations and experiences. Okay. But then there is also a third option. What is the third option? Not starting from the thinking I, from the cogito. So in difference and repetition, the third chapter talks about this dogmatic image of thought. And it says that there is always this presupposition of a thinking subject, even if the thinking subject understands reality, grasps reality via logic or via the senses.
in both cases there is this presupposition of a unified self but Deleuze and Deleuze and Gattari and Nietzsche first of all or Sade I don't know but Nietzsche for sure suggested this dissolution of the self so this is the third option that yeah sure well there's two things and actually I'm glad you mentioned difference in reposition because as Deleuze himself points out, difference in reposition, the self is not the subject. So there's a difference between saying if you reject the claim that Kant is a thinker, that Kant and Hegel are thinkers of the self
is false because the Kantian subject is not. Kant evacuates the subject of substance and the I think that must accompany all my representations in Kant is the I or he or she or it the thing that thinks and the thing that thinks is precisely not reducible to the ego this is why this is why Kant is not Descartes okay and the same holds for Hegel for Hegel the kind of the the pure I in in Hegel is this pure negativity self-relating negativity which is precisely the kind of the dissolution and destruction of every kind of you know substantial attribution or positive characterization so subjectivity in Kant and Hegel is a point of
negation or of subtraction if you want it's got nothing to do with the philosophy of the self or the unity of you know the unity of sensory or worldly experience in the ordinary sense And the claim is if you want an alternative, now in Deleuze, it's the kind of you're forced to think through the kind of, you know, the disjunctive use of the faculties, you're always kind of never choose to think, you're always forced to think by something, you know, in sensation that cannot be recognized, difference in itself, okay. but this whole account so you know there's a in a way there is still a resort to something like
there is still a subject of thoughts in Deleuze but it's an impersonal and anonymous it's the nomadic subject it's this impersonal and anonymous kind of subject of thinking which is ultimately kind of, you know, like thought thinking itself and, you know, A distributive subject. Yes. So, but, but then the question is, if you, if you, if you claim that what allows you to think beyond dogmatic rationalism and skeptical and criticism is this kind of this circuit whereby thought is able to kind of, know to think to access the impersonal the pre-individual you know they accept all the stuff that delloise talks about in difference in her position um this is still um you know
a broad and ontological construction it still involves you know an account of the nature of thoughts and an account of the individuation of um you know the thinker which delloise kind of develops, which, you know, is not, you know, to, about which all sorts of questions can be raised. In other words, it's not as if it's less questionable or less, you know, it raises fewer problems and objections than, you know, either the, you know, the Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian paradigms that kind of Deleuze dismisses as dogmatic.
And in a sense, if dogmatism is a claim, you know, what is dogmatism for Kant? It's an assertion that refuses to justify itself, that refuses to kind of, you know, to validate, you know, to... you know, to, it's an assertion or an affirmation that refuses to be interpolated by the game of giving and asking for reasons, just because, okay? And in what sense is that not dogmatic, okay? If you affirm that, you know, the, you know, it's a difference in itself that causes us to think okay and i say well how why explain this to me okay which deleuze does but
whatever else deleuze's account is it's not um you know um self-evidence or kind of beyond philosophical um or kind of removed from the domain of philosophical justification unless of course you claim that philosophy is not about justifying or explaining but about affirming and creating which is exactly what Deleuze does and then you need to explain why affirming and creating and why simply affirming for the sake of affirming and creating for the sake of creating is somehow not dogmatic. because it's not according to Deleuze because I'm with Deleuze I'm not with Kant at all
I would say that for Deleuze at least in difference in repetition the dogmatism of thought is defined when someone takes dialectics as the sole methodology for making meaning manifest. So he doesn't dismiss dialectics as a whole, but he says that it's a mistake to take a methodology that was about the logical veridiction of sentences to displace it as the methodology per se
for the making of sense. So, yeah. Okay, I'm just, I was just raising my concern about the paradigms that we are operating with and how they can work with each other. So, yeah. For me, yeah. I take your point. And look, I mean, this is, you know, I'm not hoping to convince you but I think I will say more about you know I mean I'll talk about Deleuze's kind of you know rejection of dialectics in a minute and his alternative paradigm of critique and and I'm sure we'll return to this issue you know later so I think we'll there'll be
you know more conversations about this. Is there any other questions I should answer before proceeding yeah no i think yeah i think it's very free we can make the pause right now perhaps um and then we'll go back to the presentations okay what i'll do but i'll try i'll note the questions and i'll try to respond in the questions after you know first thing after the uh the presentation um correct perfect so um yeah i will be sharing the the link for the the presentations um now during the pause so everybody as you go come back here you can start looking at it so then i'm gonna pause it here and we see each all in five all right all right okay um so let's maybe just try
to okay so we we paused um at the moment where just after this discussion of um real subsumption And the difference between this, you know, the kind of, let's say, the spinnist Marxism take on real subsumption and the kind of what I think is the properly kind of Marxist account, which is that real subsumption is logically identifying and not ontologically unifying. The word subsumption is about the reduction of activity to its value substance.
But it's not about, it's not simply incorporation or amalgamation in a kind of, you know, physiological or spatial sense. Now, Reed points out, again very usefully, points out a key kind of disjunction in the attempt to kind of update Marx in terms of this mutation, this so-called mutation of
production entailed by real subsumption and this is that the the de-anthropologization of labor okay and it's this de-anthropologization of labor which i think you know yields the ontologization of production um which is you know fundamental to the uh you know the spinnizist recording of Marx and it's fundamental to those and what's already occurrence. So Reed writes, the rejection of a traditional Marxist inquiry into the exploitation of labor, exploitation of wage labor in the wage relation, takes the form of the redefinition of an expansive sense of production.
Note the term expansive. The idea is that Marx had a, you know, a restricted sense of production, you know commodity production and which must be expanded okay the production of desire or the productivity of power relations there is a critique of the idea of production or labor as an anthropological constant that opens up the possibility of an exploration of the productivity and materiality of multiple dimensions of human existence the rejection of an anthropological and instrumental schema of labor a subject working on an object through the use of an instrument would historically coincide with the rise of a services and knowledge-based economy in which
labor has expanded to include the production of subjectivity taste desires concepts by subjectivity the production of subjectivity by subjectivity and here reed is reasserting his claim that it's the subjectivity as a relation to self that is fundamental here. Now, but one thing to observe though is that the so-called the anthropological instrumental schema of labor as a subject working on an object via an instrument is also I think fails to take into account what Marx means by abstract labor and the point is that in capitalist
commodity production involves in a way the the equivalence you know the exchangeability of labor the commodification of labor and the commodification of labor as wage labor entails the entails the you know the abstraction of labor as such okay um what what does this mean this means that in a way what i think is the distinction between material and immaterial labor is based on a failure to understand the distinction between concrete and abstract labor for marx there's no
such thing as material labor the point of it that's that's not what marx means by the mistake is to think that labor involves kind of doing something you know with your hand you know or something that you can kind of you know that can be um you know physically measured whereas marx's whole point is that labor becomes a commodity, becomes a commodity that produces other commodities in the capitalist economy at the point where productive activity is no longer measured by any purely physiological or empirically accessible characteristics.
That's why it's under capitalism that labour becomes a fundamental social category. Everyone is compelled to work to live. But that's because labor as such is an abstraction, which can be realized in any, you know, in an endless, almost endless kind of variety of ways. And this is why the claim, for instance, that service and knowledge-based economy somehow requires amending Marx's account of labor is, I think, a complete misunderstanding.
working in a call center is perfectly Marx's account of commodified labor power. The call center worker is responding, answering people's queries, being helpful, etc. etc. That is labor in exactly the same sense for Marx as the labor involved in constructing an automobile, driving an airplane, or soldering iron or whatever. That the whole point of abstract labor is that all those things become equivalent okay and the distinction and because um the
because a commodity is simultaneously sensible and super sensible um the identification of labor with this so-called this instrumental schema which involves again um you know producing kind of you know tangible or perceptible physical objects is um i think you know serious misunderstanding um so in other words you only need to kind of to supplement you know to move to production you know if you don't understand that commodity production is already production in general value production David Sloan- Then you're going to kind of assume that Labor you're going to identify Labor with production, whereas Labor is in fact an instrument of production under capitalism.
David Sloan- it's also to assume that it is living Labor that is productive, whereas for Marx, it is Labor power, which is commodified or dead Labor that is productive for capital. Capital. Commodity production is value production as the abstract equivalence of concrete labors. And it's only abstract labor that is generically productive for Marx. This is why we have two kind of different conceptions of generic productivity. There's a generic productivity of value, which is quantitatively infinite, but qualitatively homogenous. Every commodity is the embodiment of a magnitude of value.
So all commodities are valuable, but they're all the same. The value that they embody is the same. It's only kind of quantitatively differentiated in terms of the socially necessary labor time that's going into its production. And this conception of generic productivity is contrasted to another conception of generic productivity, which we can see in the young Marx, which is the generic productivity of what Marx calls free conscious activity, which is, you know, which is that of an infinite qualitative heterogeneity. So now if we look at the extract from Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts,
you know, of 1844, where he talks about life activity. So Marx writes, for labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need, the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the genus. It is life engendering life. The whole character of a genus, its genus character, is contained in the character of its life activity and free conscious activity is man's genus character. Life itself appears
only as a means to life. Life becomes an end in itself. Generic productivity or life producing life for Marx is free conscious activity, which is no longer subordinated to the satisfaction of, let's say, biological needs, but becomes self-determining, you know, and autonomous in that it creates its own needs, which is to say it becomes akin to desire.
It desires, it becomes purely productive. And in a way, it determines both its ends and its means from itself. OK, this is the sense in which, you know, productive life itself is, you know, life itself appears only as a mean. It's an end. It's life would be an end in itself. OK. And life becomes an end in itself when it's no longer subordinated, for instance, to biological reproduction or survival. or the so this is the characteristic of free conscious activity
or the generic activity of of humanity which marks distinguishes from let's say merely biological activity So Marx writes, the animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Whereas man or the human makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. um he says he has conscious life activity but he is not you know it's it's the difference between
being and having okay it is not a determination with which he directly merges conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity it is just because of this that he is a genus being gatungswesen or it is only because he is a genus being that he is a conscious being, that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses this relationship so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence. Okay, there's two things I'd like to draw your attention to here.
is one is that the importance the standard english translation of get to his basin is a species being but i think it's better to translate it as genus being because a genus is unlike anything else okay a species is a species of a genus it's a subdivision of a genus. And in Aristotelian metaphysics, the generic divisions in being are fundamental and irreducible. And to say that they are sufficient unto themselves, they can't be
be derived from anything more fundamental, nor can they be subsumed under any more kind of a higher determination. So to claim, so the term Gatunsvesen or genus being is the claim that free conscious activity is unlike any other activity carried out by other beings. In other words, it's unlike biological activity whose means and ends are biologically determined and constrained.
And it's an activity which is properly self-determining. which this is life creating life in Marx's sense. But this activity involves an objectification for Marx. In other words, when he writes, it's only because he is a genus being that he's a conscious being, i.e. that his own life is an object for him. In other words, the objectivation of activity is precisely what allows it to surpass the kinds of the purely, you know,
the purely objective determinations that it would have if it was merely a specific, you know, biologically specific activity. It's also the sense that for Marx, and we'll see this we look at another kind of his critique of hegel in the manuscripts is that the uh the subjectivity of um social production in marx's sense is in a way kind of objective it's um it's an objective form of subjectivation so in other words that there is a the um there's a coincidence of subject and object in this generic human activity, free conscious activity,
which leads it to objectify itself in a product. But this product is something that immediately transforms life's self-relation or life's relationship to itself. And this is why free conscious activity is not merely vital activity or this kind of uh the uh its spontaneity is not the um the um it's not the immediacy um of
let's say um you know animal vitality or biological vitality um okay so what is the point of this the contrast that Marx is drawing here is between life producing life versus life as a means for life and in a way what Marx's whole account of alienated labor is that life becomes a means for life okay in other words when you know when you're compelled to work in order to live as you are in a capitalist society, it means that your life becomes a means to an end. And the emancipation of labor or unalienated, the de-alienation of labor would allow kind of productive activity
to become an end in itself. Universal life, you know, generic human activity produces itself through its individual expression. This would be unestranged labor. Whereas individual life under capital or alienated labor uses universal life as a means to produce only itself. In other words, the cognitive and physiological capacities of the human organism under capitalism our means are subordinated to individual reproduction but now the individual is compelled
to reproduce itself while allowing capital to expand and augment itself so in other words so that the uh in alienated labor um you know human productive capacities both cognitive and physical are a means whereby capital or value keeps expanding and increasing itself you know humanity becomes an appendage to you know to to the expansion of capital in the first case you know in the first case life producing life universal life
consciously produces itself. Whereas in the second case, when life is a means for life, individual life instinctively reproduces itself. And in a way, I think what Marx is saying is that the formal freedom of wage labor under capital reduces the creative spontaneity that should be the generic characteristic of humanity to the function of instinctual reproduction. So we are compelled to reproduce ourselves by working, by creating value for capital.
And capital in a way, you know, kind of appropriates the creative, cognitive and physiological capacities of human beings to kind of to keep on infinitely expanding. So here the contrast we have is between generic productivity of abstract labor is the estranged form of free conscious activity or the universal life producing itself through individual activity. conscious activity would be universal like producing itself to individual activity and the generic productivity of abstract labor which just produces more and more value more
and more commodified value is the what marx calls the estranged form of free conscious activity but of course now traditionally the big at this point the classical objection to make is that this is a the classical humanist essentialism, that Marx has to kind of suppose an originally unalienated state, you know, an originally unestranged state in order to kind of, you know, as the condition of estrangement. I actually think that that is a misreading. And I actually think that for Marx, estrangement is the condition of de-estrangement. I actually think it's not true that there's an originally unalienated labor, a kind of spontaneous production, which then is alienated under capital as wage labor and will then subsequently be kind of de-alienated.
I think precisely the proper way to read Marx is insisting that the estrangement, which is exemplified in the money form, and he talks about it in these manuscripts, when Marx talks about the divine power of money to commensurate incommensurables, commensurables to kind of as the to harmonize impossibilities to fraternize to fraternize impossibilities is the estranged manifestation of you know free conscious activity of generic human activity so in a way so it's the it's the objectified and alienated form of human
productive activity that becomes the condition for de-estrangement and for the um the uh the release of um free conscious activity or life producing life um which is why for much the full expression of the generic in the individual can only be historically realized and this is exactly what he means by communism the historical communism is the historical transformation of human being the transformation of the more of the abolishing of the capitalist mode of production. And communism, therefore, is the abolition of human types of the class relation, but also of the distinction of the very typology of the human. And this is to be opposed to, I think,
the Nietzsche paradigm, which is one of metaphysical transvaluation, where the overman becomes the superior successor to the human type. So on the one hand, we've got historical transformation, communism has historical transformation. On the other hand, we have the prospect of a metaphysical transvaluation. And this is where we encounter Deleuze, obviously favors deloes claims that critique the proper paradigm of critique is as evaluation deloes right this is from nietzschean philosophy okay the problem of critique is that of the value of values of the evaluation from which the value arises that's the problem of their creation
evaluation is defined as the differential element of corresponding values an element which is both critical and creative value here means sense okay the creation of values the creation of sense so the evaluation of values is the evaluation of senses which are produced through you know differential concatenations of forces of you know active and reactive forces evaluations in essence are not values but ways of being modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge this is why we always have the beliefs feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being our style of being okay notes you know this is delloise's nietzscheanism okay we have the you know we have the beliefs
feelings and thoughts we deserve given um our way of life our mode of life okay in other words what you believe you know how you feel what you think is a function of your way of being okay um here's de leuze later in the same book um um for a clarification on sure yes yes quickly just if you go back to the last slide uh yes um so when you're saying de leuze um understands value as sense here are you meaning sense in a way that's distinct from sense incorporates meaning um but also affect or yes sense is meaning is propositional sense is non-propositional okay
so meaning is a you know a proposition is meaningful or meaningless okay Okay. Any well-formed proposition must be meaningful. So judgment for Deleuze is meaningful, but Deleuze is against meaning and judgment, but he's for sense. And what is sense? Sense cannot be propositionally encapsulated. Okay. So sense is constituted through the differential kind of interplay of forces every concatenation of forces you know yields a sense which expresses a value which which is there to be evaluated okay so organisms so so beings relate to one another beings evaluate one another's
and evaluate one another's um behaviors perceptions affections etc etc um so value is an expression of or is indistinct from practice and an expression of a form of life right yes or well a form of practice is a yeah yes in a sense of yes yes yes okay this is why there's no um it's it's a mistake different forms of of life different ways of being have different values and therefore it's a mistake so the rejection of universalism of uh you know cantidism hegelism etc etc is to say that there is no value of values which is why the you know
rejection of goodness truth and beauty is a goodness truth and beauty have been traditionally elevated as the supreme values okay all values must be kind of subordinated to goodness truth and beauty. But what Deleuze is following Nietzsche is saying is that no, there's no such thing as these, you know, all kind of subsuming kind of totalizing values are based on, are themselves the products of a reactive form of life, you know, the moral evaluation of the world, which must be kind of superseded so that we can recognize the, you know, the, you know, the multiplicity, the plurality and the antagonistic plurality of values and of forms of life. I think that's clear,
yeah, just to reiterate then you're distinguishing here between Marx's conception of value, which you're basically saying is a kind of Hegelian purposive one. Ah, well, no, because you have to be careful here because value, so far what we've been talking about value for Marx here is value as this abstract commensurability or exchangeability of everything. So Marx is also a critique of, let's say, kind of identitarian, you know, this abstract homogenizing universality. But his claim is that this is a perversion. This is a false or a spurious universality. So value, and Marx is also saying, what Marx, I think, is also saying is that the differences in sense or value that we claim to be able to recognize
using our current intellectual and practical resources are themselves kind of masks of value, of this, you know, or surreptitious kind of avatars of this actually utterly homogenous kind of value, as such um which is why you know the the aesthetic evaluation the nietzschean aesthetic evaluation of the world the world you know the world can only be kind of justified as an aesthetic phenomenon it can't be judged as right or wrong or true or false what marcia's saying that this aesthetic evaluation, okay, presupposes, you know, in a way, an abstraction from the, you know,
commodified value, from the homogeneity of capitalist kind of value production. And the question is, how? How is this possible? How are you able to do this? How are you able to intuit these values, these kind of differential quanta of forces independently of the, in a way, the kind of the, in a way, the capitalist kind of circumscription. of meaning. Because the point is that capitalism also produces sense.
It's not just aesthetic experience that produces non-propositional sense. It's that capitalism produces meaningless sense, ways of feeling, responding, evaluating. But what Mark's saying is it's a mistake to think that these are kind of pure eruptions of, you know, nature in itself or being in itself. They're actually, you know, you know, avatars or complex social relations, not not dynamisms of force, but antagonistic social relations. So what I'm saying here that so in a way, Marx is playing, you know, Deleuze is playing Nietzsche off against Marx. He's saying Nietzsche is more radical than
Marx. Marx is just an old Hegelian who thinks that kind of, you know, who still believes in goodness, truth, and beauty. What I'm saying is that there's the Marxian critique of the value form and of the logic of commodification and of reification and of the way in which subject you know subjectivation always involves you know corollary of objectivation everything is simultaneously subjective and objective is actually um you know more incisive undercuts the attempts to segregate a sphere of um you know sub-propositional value
or a field of forces, you know, forces in themselves, okay, forces operating independently of social relations. This is the question, what, you know, is there a world of forces independently of social relations, okay, and Nietzsche says yes, and Marx says no, there isn't okay so um can we stick on oh yeah no sorry go on go on go on oh yeah i just wanted to to stick on this point maybe um to avoid a bit to continue but yeah to sort of distinguish between marx's account of value in the critique of political economy and i guess what what i was
thinking of as the connection between value and meaning maybe, or just sort of trying to relate your previous comments on alienation as a kind of disruption of practical reason and desire, or a kind of moment in the realization of the mediation of these things, that Marx's account in some ways is about how sort of homogenous abstract value under capitalism prevents sort of short circuits the kind of meaningful, proposatively directed activity of conscious free beings, right? And that's the sort of distinguishing between value as
affirmation of simply what a practice is and and being able to distinguish between what is and what ought and and make arguments for the odd or the good right which is the hegelian background on marx and it seems to me that what you're saying or how to understand marx is marx is critiquing the form of value internal to political economy or to the capitalist mode of production that prevents that keeps us from being able to talk about the good in some ways, right? Yes, but also what he's also saying, this is why I think, I mean, that's not very clear, or I haven't developed it very clearly, but what I think that Marx is saying is that what's really interesting
is that Marx's critique of political economy is the critique of value, saying that all value, all the values that humans, you know, aesthetic value, religious value, you know, moral value, etc, etc, are all kind of mired in, you know, capitalist value creation. They're all ultimately, it's not possible to disintricate the values that we, in terms of, or the meanings in terms of which we orient ourselves, you know living in a kind of existing in a kind of capitalist society from
the ultimately the kind of you know the the meaningless you know the meaningless condition you know or the unevaluable condition of all evaluation which is value as such which is what which is what? It's measured by money. Because the money form is the most, the crucial kind of embodiment of the value form. It's the way in which kind of value relates to itself. And when Marx says that, oh, you know, the, talks about the, what he calls the fetishism of commodities is material relations between producers
being turned into social relations between products okay or commodities social relations between products are that it's commodities talk to one another commodities communicate to one another and they communicate to one another through the medium of money okay and money is in a way um shapes um what he's saying is that money kind of you know shapes um and determines you know not only the relationships that commodities have to one another but the relationship that you know commodity producers have to one another and that this
has you know more fundamental kind of consequences for understanding you know the the possibilities of human interaction that is you know usually kind of appreciated and And so the point I'm making is that he's not simply saying, oh, the world used to be meaningful. We used to have goodness, truth and beauty. And then capitalism came along and kind of ruined it all. He's saying that, in a way, capitalism has dissolved goodness, truth and beauty as we knew them. And every other kind of, you know, social kind of social register. and this is actually one of the dozen gotari kind of when you talk about capitalism as a kind of uh
the monstrous kind of um pathology that must be warded off by all other um social formations you know they're talking about this kind of uh you know the the anti-social aspect of capital the way in which it kind of you know it's it disintegrates um and you know unearths all kind of pre-existing kind of social relations but it's still um uh ultimately it's is capital is still the expression of a social relation um but now a social relation which is one of fundamental um which is fundamentally antagonistic um and which generates a fundamental contradiction okay
Okay, so the capitalist society is fundamentally contradictory. And it's this contradictoriness that both dissolves all, you know, preceding horizons of goodness, truth, and beauty, but which, but the overcoming of this dissolution, the negation of the negation, will allow human beings for the first time, will allow human history to begin and human beings to produce goodness, truth and beauty in registers that were historically unimaginable before. So that the creation of values, in the sense that Nietzsche is interested in, or Deleuze
is interested in, is precisely only becomes possible if one takes seriously capital's kind of dissolution and evaluation of every kind of, you know, regionally specific mode of value. And the historical transformation that would occur would then allow, you know, would open up this possibility of life producing life of like this generic activity which doesn't which is not in a way which is not about fetishizing production the point is that
when life produces life the category of production becomes obsolete as does the category life I think this is what Marx is saying. This is why he refuses to ontologize life and production, because he's using kind of, you know, categorical resources, existing historically specific categorical resources to talk about what would happen if the horizon of social production, the existing horizon of social production was abolished and, you know, opened up so that human beings could produce, you know, without commodifying. And they could produce without commodifying and produce their own needs, produce their means and ends. And that's what freedom,
that would be the realm of freedom. So I'm saying all this to point out that there is a kind of a radical, the radical emancipatory promise of Marx's account, which is truly, which is truly kind of transfigurative in all the kind of the interesting senses that kind of Deleuze wants to kind of affirm or wants to kind of extract from Nietzsche but I think that actually that the Marxian account in a way I think that kind of in a way I think that the mistake the mistake is to fetishize production and to fetishize creation and affirmation because if you do that you end up kind of preemptively curtailing the possibility, the historical possibility of ushering in a mode of activity,
let's say of activity, which would be, you know, which would release human beings from the need to dominate. So that the whole kind of the economy of domination, okay, and of the will to power, which is fundamental for Nietzsche, would be rendered historically anachronistic by the revolutionary transformation of production in Marx's sense. I think that's what, I'm sorry for this kind of going off. I think that was really helpful. I think I followed most of it.
I think the only other interjection I wanted to make was to try to see if we could like talk about it in a concrete example in case the abstraction of it was difficult to follow. But just to make sure I'm clear on it, it does seem to me like you're contrasting a sort of, yeah, value as affirmation of a form of life versus value as meaning, on the other hand, is the other one, on this distinction between is and ought for a purpose of activity to continue to shape things dialectically toward its own ends, right? Yes, but the difference between is and ought, and this is another thing that I think is, there is no such, okay, this is something that, the difference between is and ought, between is and ought, is what is, in a way, kind of, given, there is no is without an ought.
And in a way, what's the point about, you know, the kind of, you know, as Nietzsche himself understands, the point about nihilism, active nihilism, overcoming the overcoming of passive nihilism, which is the attempt to kind of describe, you know, to say that what is, to articulate the is and the ought according to a moral evaluation of goodness or rightness, is that he supersedes this, but he replaces the moral is with an aesthetic, the moral ought with an aesthetic ought, okay? So it's not that Nietzsche gets rid of the ought altogether. On the contrary, he replaces it with a purely, with the ought of creation,
of affirming, you know, creator destruction, et cetera, et cetera, okay? So what he's doing is the transvaluation of values wants to, in a way, still operates in terms of the direction of the is and the ought, but now proposes to replace the reactive oughts of, you know, Judeo-Christianity, slave morality, whatever you want to call it, with this, you know, these active, you know, you know, the values of, you know, self-creation, self-legislation,
but also the pathos of distance and, you know, the claim that suffering is no longer an objection to life, you know, the affirmation of suffering, cruelty and destruction, you know, as not only an eliminable but necessary components of the value of existence. That's what Nietzsche's immoralism entails, okay? Now, the point is that, so you see what's going on here, it's like you haven't, the, you know, immoralism is not the kind of, the complete kind of dissolution
of morality or of normativity. By normativity, you simply mean the difference between, you mean this kind of norms of what ought to be, what should be. So Nietzsche fully affirms, you know the ought the normative but he's simply saying that this you know we must affirm what was what was abominated what was previously abominated and the strength of will is is shown by its capacity to affirm what's you know a decadent culture abominated and in a way It's that dichotomy that I think marks entirely circumvents by saying that, in a way, it's
still a capitulation this um you know affirming you know the affirming of this ought of this normative ought is still um it's a love of fate it's a love you know it's affirming what is as though it was fated to be this way so in other words it's an actual it's it's an act of submission it's a submission it's a submission to the for all of you know the talk about activity and overpowering in fact it's it's uh it's bowing down to the fatality of what is and marx is saying that it's precisely by um once we realize that what is is what we have made there's nothing
you know that there's a sense in which kind of you know everything that we recognize as being is something that we have made either directly or indirectly i mean there's you know a collective social sense then um we can we don't need to re-evaluate what is we can transform our way of making. And then, and that's what kind of, you know, that's what kind of free conscious activity or social production released from the constraints of, you know, commodification, the class relation would bring about. And this doesn't entail, this, this, in a way,
this doesn't, instead of celebrating, you know, hardness and cruelty as signs of kind of, you know, virility or strength, you'd be able to kind of, you know, the ability to assuage suffering, in fact, to eliminate unnecessary suffering would be the kind of the greatest, you know, manifestation of creativity and strength. So that's the sense in which, yes, so again, I've kind of gone off topic a bit, but that's the sense in which I'm trying to say that so when, if I can, I only have a few kind of pages to go.
When dialectics, according to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, is all surreptitiously moralizing. It's all surreptitiously moralizing because it criticizes but never asks about the identity of the type of life or the type of subject who affirms these values and denounces these other ones. So what was required says as true critique or the kind of the transvaluation of critique according to Deleuze would identify principles of internal genesis, not of external conditioning, but of internal genesis.
And we need an account of the internal genesis of reason itself. Reason itself is a manifestation of a form of life or a way of being. What is the will which hides and expresses itself in reason, et cetera? I mean, this should all be familiar to you. I'm sure you all know this. And a new image of thought, so critique beyond truth would identify a new image of thoughts whose elements are sense and value. Sense and value are the elements of thought. The categories of thought are not truth and falsity, but the noble and the base, the high and the low, depending on the nature of the forces that take hold of itself. Note the typology, noble, base, high and low. Differentiation, distinction,
the pathos of to evaluate is to differentiate in terms of types of force and types of will, active and reactive forces affirmative and negative wills okay so in a way so um critique as evaluation is precisely is is differentiation is distinguishing or discrimination um and um nichan critique diagnoses the difference in types of will to power affirmative or negative underlying the difference in types of force active reactive whereas so instead of this kind of um this discrimination, this advantage of discrimination,
Marxian critique, by way of contrast, exposes the class relation, you know, the capitalist class relation, which, you know, pits capitalists against proletariats, underlying society's self-knowledge. Every form of all self-understanding, and the self-understanding is also kind of a mode of social self-understanding, is ultimately kind of conditioned, indirectly conditioned by the class relation, which is also what, in a way, philosophy or ideology tries to kind of occlude. It's a class relation that has to be kind of occluded by orthodox science or ideology. for Nietzsche or you know for Deleuze's Nietzsche it's the economy of competing wills and forces
that determine social relations whereas for Marx social relations give rise to forms the commodity form the value form the state form that determine the economy of forces so this is why so if we return to the opening question in what sense is the critique of political economy redundant or in what sense has it been superseded well for Marx political economy explains social relations in terms of competition and exchange whereas the critique of political economy explains competition and exchange in terms of social relations competition and exchange are effects of a fundamental social antagonism the class relation
and the class relation pits the capitalist who owns the means of production against the worker who owns only her labor power the class relation separates the producer from her products as well as from the instruments of production so now the question is in what sense then if this in a way, if it's the critique, Marxian critique, in terms of it, to the extent to which it's always drawing, leading investigation back to the class relation, the fundamental status, the uncircummentability of the class relation, the question is,
and the class relation involves the separation of producers from the means of production or of wage labourers from capitalists, then the question is, has there really been, is real subsumption, you know, the real subsumption, is it to be understood as domination, as a domination which can never be totalized, or as an enslavement, or as a mode of enslavement, which is totalizing? Okay, and here, here's a passage from Antioch, from, sorry, from A Thousand Plateaus, which I think is very,
very interesting and relates in a way directly to the account that um that reed was um setting out in his introduction so doesn't gotari talk about um um this new regime of machinic enslavement okay um by integrated global capital what they call integrated global capital so they write it seems that in the capitalist regime surplus labor becomes less and less distinguishable from labor strictly speaking and totally impregnates it. Modern public works have a different status from that of large-scale imperial works. How could one possibly distinguish between the time necessary for reproduction and extorted time, what Marx calls surplus labor, when they are no longer separated
in time? Now, the ratio of surplus to necessary labor under real subsumption is an intensive quantity, which is to say that its magnitude is independent of the length of the working day. And Marx explicitly, in volume one of Capital, Marx identifies the passage from the formal subsumption of labor to the real subsumption of labor in terms of the difference between what he calls absolute and relative surplus value. Absolute surplus value is created simply by lengthening the working day. Okay, so you kind of you get you extract more, no surplus value from wage labor, you make by making the worker work more, but you do this extensively by making them
work longer. Okay. Relative surplus value is extracted through the the intensification, not through the extension of the productivity of labor, but through the intensification of the productivity of labor. So you can do it by shortening the working day. You can increase the ratio of surplus to necessary labor, you know, while reducing the working day. But labor can become more creative. It can create more value than it has itself simply by, you know, through a process of intensification of the intensification of productivity, which involves, you know,
mechanization, technological innovation, and other kinds of, you know, strategies, okay. But the point is that this is the value ratio, you know, the um uh is that you know the ratio surplus necessary labor is a value ratio of the commodity labor power to the value of the commodities produced through the consumption of labor power and labor power is valued abstractly as abstract labor the value of any commodity is measured you know, abstractly by its, you know, its exchangeability, its exchange value. But labor power, while being valued abstractly, is used concretely, okay? So labor is exchanged
abstractly, but used concretely in the labor process. The capitalist uses your concrete labor. And it's in a way, it's the difference between, you know, it's the fact that labor is always simultaneously abstract and concrete that is the source of surplus value. That's where surplus value comes from, in a way, the kind of the structural incommensurability between the value of abstract commodified abstract labor power and the value created through the use of concrete labor, which is the obverse of this abstract labor power.
So the difference between abstract and concrete labor underlying Marx's theory of exploitation is a function of the class relation, which involves obviously the privatization of the means of production. And if this difference is obscured, if the difference between abstract and concrete labor is obscure, social abstraction is reified as a metaphysical power. You start talking about kind of production in general or abstract production or abstract productivity as something that in a way can operate independently of labor, okay, and of the class relation. because the difference between abstract and concrete labor is a function of the class relation,
the commodification of labor and therefore of the privatization of the means of production, the separation of the producer from the means of production. Now weirdly, Dillous and Guattari immediately say this remark certainly does not contradict the Marxist theory of surplus value for Marx shows precisely that surplus value ceases to to be localizable in the capitalist regime, that is even its fundamental contribution. There's no reference given for this claim. I mean, you could say that it's both, in one sense, you could say that surplus value, there's a sense in which it is, and it's not localizable. I mean, the extraction of surplus value happens in the wage relation, in the consumption of labor
power. But the question is whether this consumption takes place, the question is whether the site of the consumption of labour power can always be recognised. And I think that this is where Deleuze and Gotari claim that surplus value can be extracted independently of the wage relation. They are confusing, in a way, the fact that the invisibility or the unfamiliarity of the consumption of labor power for the suggestion that it's being the capitalist consumption of labor power has been kind of dissolved altogether.
Okay, so, for instance, they write, you know, they're talking about, it gave Marx a sense that machines would themselves become productive of surplus value, and that the circulation of capital would challenge the distinction between variable and constant capital. Okay, Marx does not think that machines themselves would become productive of surplus value. I mean, absolutely not. Nor that the distinction between variable and constant capital can be, you know, superseded. it. This is what they're saying. In these new conditions, it remains true that all labor involves surplus labor, but surplus labor no longer requires labor. Surplus labor, capitalist organization in its entirety, operates less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding
to the physical social concept of work. Once again, the claim that surplus labor no longer requires labor is simply based on, I think, on an obliteration of the difference between concrete and abstract labor, okay, and the fact that the wage labor is compelled to sell her labor in order to reproduce herself, in order to, you know, to exist, and surely they're not saying that people are no longer compelled to work to live. I mean, in fact, more and more human beings are being compelled into the wage relation than at any point in human history. So it seems absurd to suggest that surplus labour no longer requires necessary labour. The necessary labour has become,
i.e. working in order to live has not been, you know, more people have to work in order to live now, not less, okay? The social measure of labour is abstract labour time, which as social average is fixed independently of physical measure but the non-physical character of abstract labor goes hand in hand with increasing spatial temporal and psychic regimentation of concrete labor surplus value extraction is explained by the formal separability and real inseparability of abstract and concrete labor living labor is socially compelled to estrange to sell itself as labor power but this social
compulsion falls from the class relation capital does not objectify living labor it compels it to objectify itself labor is alienated not because it is objectified but because it is compelled to objectify itself. And this is why formal freedom is domination and not enslavement. Because capital dominates without enslaving, revolt is not sufficient to overcome it. Emancipation from the abstract domination of the incommetant with purely formal freedom, the formal freedom to sell your labor power to a capitalist, would entail a revolution in social production. Okay. So I think that this is, I think the very kind of suggestion that we've gone,
that real subsumption ushers in this era of machinic enslavement, which renders the distinction between necessary and surplus labor redundant. And therefore, the claim that it's the real subsumption occurs in the individual capitalist consumption of labor power. I think that this leads to retotalization. This leads to a kind of a metaphysical kind of reification or substantialization of capital as this kind of, you know, this fluid kind of substance that permeates every aspect of psychic and social existence.
And this is why, okay, it is as though human alienation through surplus labor were replaced by generalized machinic enslavement, such that one may furnish surplus value without doing any work. Children, the retired unemployed, television viewers, etc. Not only does the user of such tend to become an employee, but capitalism operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling every semiotic system. But if it's true that consumption is exploitative and users have become employees, which I think it's true, this part of their analysis is correct. This is due to a mutation in the wage relation following from subsumptive exchange and not from the dissolution of the wage relation following from machinic enslavement.
David Sloan, Capitalist production is value production, so that the complex qualitative process or semiosis a sense production. David Sloan, has a has an underlying homogeneity capital does not produce, which is it doesn't commodify subjectivity, it creates the can it creates conditions of reproduction that compels subjectivity or living labor. living labor to commodify itself in order to live, i.e. to sell itself to capital in order to live. And if the modes of perceiving and feeling entailed by self-commodification are socially mandated, they are modes of objectivation in Marx's sense and not subjectivation.
Self-commodification is not subjective production. So when Jason Reed writes, labour has expanded to include the production of subjectivity, taste, desires, concepts, the production of subjectivity by subjectivity. Well, the point is that living labour's relation to self under capital is mediated by the objectivity of the commodity form, and thereby the class relation. Okay, so what are the consequences? Real subsumption is only intelligible within the critique of political economy it doesn't render it obsolete and the mutation of critique thesis first ignores marx's claim that the commodity is a cell form of capitalist production this is inherited from althusser who insists on reading marx by completely
kind of um you know um you know extracting you know erasing the opening analysis of the commodity form um and it assumes that the base superstructure diet is constitutive of the critique of political economy which is the central once you understand if you understand the claim that the commodity is the cell form of the capitalist social organism the base superstructure diet is immediately nullified okay because if capitalist you know produces if capitalist commodity production involves reproducing labor power as a commodity, and it stands to reason that all capitalist production involves commodification and the reproduction
of the conditions of commodification. But this reproductive schema does not require the base superstructure. There are not two regimes of production. Economic material production on the one hand, you know, affects production on the other hand. And only on this basis can the account of real subsumption be replaced by the thesis of machinic enslavement, which reifies and separates social abstraction from the class relation. Okay. I'm sorry. Okay, that's, you know, I just wanted to kind of to get to the conclusion. Okay, I'm happy to, you know, I realize
I've gone a bit over time, but I'm happy to discuss, to go through your questions. Matthias? Yes. Yeah, so we're a bit over time, as you just said. Perhaps you can get, I don't know, two or three questions and then close it for today. Okay, perhaps people can post also on the questions. Sure, yes, of course. Yeah. The classroom page and so on the Discord, I don't know which they prefer. So, I don't know, two or three questions, preferentially shorter ones.
Who wants to go for it? Okay, Maria, we've got so Maria, Ivrim and Matthew, I see, have your hands up. So Maria, do you want to go first? Yeah, thank you. We had a whole discussion about slave labor and why Marx distinguishes between slave and voluntary labor and what relation, the most acute question is what relation does it have with capital production? Since both of those are abstract labor, are there any difference in how they produce capital? And will capital one day become human independent,
just a robotic entity, and will become all slaves? Is it the possibility? um no actually i think no i think the answer to that question is that and this is why the difference between wage labor and slave labor is important now people think that if you insist on this difference you say that this is not to say that capitalism does not and has not used slave labor okay and as we know you know america was a capitalist economy which you know used slave labor slave labor can be a component of you know capitalist production however capitalism i think can never kind of enslave um the labor force because and the reason it it can is that it because
it needs um because it needs consumers and it needs and um to have consumers there must be a wage relation. In other words, you need, there need to be consumers, there need to be people who have money to buy commodities, to purchase the commodities. You don't pay a slave, okay, and therefore you don't pay a slave and therefore if you own, a slave is just a piece of property, a slave is just effectively, you know, a speaking tool as Aristotle puts it. So therefore, you know, keeping the slave alive, keeping the slave in good working order is another expense for the capitalist. Okay. The slave labor is an instrument in a way is like, is a part of the means of
production. Whereas wage labor is, in a way is, you know, has to be consumed in the production process but can't be in a way wholly integrated into the means of production okay so the the wage labor plays a role in the production process and the role in effect is is to convert fixed capital okay um the fixed capital you know the capital invested in machinery in the means production into surplus value. And this process of converting, in a way, the whole process of creating surplus value requires wage labor. And I think that if you eliminate wage labor,
you know, well, or it seems to me that you eliminate, you know, the essential resource for surplus value extraction. Now, of course, I think people think that the wage relation must, you know, because Marx wrote so much about industrial capital and industrial production, people you know in a way it's it's the the institution of the factory as the paradigm for the consumption of labor power and the extraction of surplus values in a way that you know leads to these um kind of i think confused debates about since you know if with the
you know, the, uh, the sidelining of industrial production, at least in the, in kind of, you know, Western Europe and North America, um, it seems that surplus value extraction is happening independently of, um, the site of labor. Okay. But I think that what's happened once you understand that all concrete labor is also abstract labor and abstract and any kind of, um, any kind of wage labor is abstract labor, then the consumption of labor power can happen, you know, in an almost limitless variety of sites and locations. And it doesn't need to be, in other words, it doesn't need to look like a factory or
or kind of a traditional manufacturing, a traditional place of manufacture or industrial production. And to answer Maria's question, I think that the spontaneity, the formal freedom of labor power is a condition of capitalist reproduction, which is why capitalism cannot enslave the workforce. the workforce and in fact it's that that would kind of completely destroy it it would nullify so so in a way that's why i think capitalism needs capitalism needs human beings um you know to need it to stay alive um but if it integrates them if it's um um if it does this
without compelling humans. It wants to compel human beings to sell their labor power to it, but it doesn't simply want to own humans because that would completely short-circuit the process of its reproduction. So in a way, that's why I think, look at it this way. If capitalism is a parasite or a virus, you know, a good virus wants to keep its host alive. It wants to keep its host alive because if it kind of completely kind of, you know, it kills its host, it will kind of, you know, destroy itself. So I think that's why, you know, the capitalist virus is compelled
to keep the kind of the human organism alive, albeit by compelling it into the wage relation. Okay, Ivrin. Thanks. When you propose to replace Doleuze's transcendental account of Nietzsche's theory of forces with the Marxist notion of sociality and, of course, production. There I'm having difficulty in grasping how can an empirically and historically contingent
phenomenon like sociality have a transcendental power. I mean, we have experiences that are not social and also experience consists of objects that are not related to sociality, like the objects we observe and experience in scientific research, for example, or artistic experiences. So, I mean, my question is basically concerns Marxist relationship with Kant and how can sociality have a transcendental power? How can it condition experience while it is itself an empirical occurrence? Okay, that's a very good question. Thanks.
I think that Marx, what distinguishes Marx, the Marxian account of sociality, kind of, you know, what he calls social relations. What Marx does is that he says, where previous philosophers and metaphysicians are trying to give a positive account of the social relation, for instance, in terms of something like a social contract. Mark says that any such account is going to be, you know, a kind of a more an ad hoc rationalization or kind of an ideological kind of, you know, an ideological fable of one kind or another. So what he wants to say is that what is the social relation?
It's the fact that human beings, you know, depend on one another to stay alive, that they must collectively reproduce themselves. A human being, you know, to say that, you know, humans are social animals is to say that they can only, you know, they can only individually reproduce by collectively reproducing. Okay. And if you think about it, like even the kind of the sexual division, that's what Marx says, that says that the division of labor begins with the sexual division of labor. It means that you need at least two humans, you know, to, for biological reproduction. Of course, those two humans are always part of a larger group.
So a human being, a human individual, I won't use the category individual. I mean, that's a historical category. But it's simply to say, what Marx wants to say is that this, the ways in which humans have reproduced themselves are historically variable. But what he wants to say is that those, you know, those ways develop independently of their consciousness. So it operates in a way the mode of social reproduction operates behind the back of self-consciousness.
So, for instance, this is why I think Marx thinks that the social, you know, social relations as involving material reproduction is irreducible to any interpersonal or intersubjective relation. And for instance, Farbach wants to give a positive account of the social relation in terms of what he calls the I-thou relation, the relationship between two self-consciousnesses, mutual recognition. For Marx, mutual recognition plays no role in sociality. It's simply kind of material interdependence that conditions the sociality. And this interdependence evolves behind the back of self-consciousness.
So this is why he thinks that, you know, he only gives a kind of a negative account. Apart from saying that human beings can only, you know, reproduce themselves collectively, how they do this and with what success is historically variable, you know, and open-ended. But what he then says is that the forces of production and relations of production then indirectly mediate their relations to one another and their relations to nature.
So, in other words, how human beings relate to nature, okay, to non-social or non-human nature, is always going to be filtered through the means of production and the relations of production. And in that regard, you know, what we're simply saying is that, you know, how we understand nature, what aspects of nature we find useful or dangerous, etc, etc, is always a function of these, of this conjunction of productive forces and relations. This does not involve, it's not, so now you use the word transcendental.
Transcendental, I think here is, if by transcendental you mean necessary, okay, you mean like a necessary condition, then okay, it's transcendental in the sense of being, you know, kind of an indispensable structural condition for our relationships to one another or to non-human nature. but it certainly is not transcendental in any kind of constitutive or genetic sense and also it's not transcendental because for Marx you can't you know the it's not transcendental because there is no production in general okay who's you know
whose positive modes could be specified a priori. If it was transcendental, you know, reflection alone, transcendental reflection would allow you to distinguish between, you know, universally necessary and, you know, historically contingent features of production. But Marx says that it's not. Transcendental reflection won't allow you to kind of, you know, to distinguish the necessary from the contingent features of social production. Only history, only contingent history gives you the resources to do so.
So that's why I think the term transcendental is of limited utility in this context. Okay, Matthew. Hey there, thanks. So I think my question, you know, we've been talking a lot about this kind of distinction between like macro and micro politics and you know one of the other threads that's moving through anti-Oedipist other than Marx is obviously the question of like psychoanalysis and French psychoanalysis with Lacan in particular. particular. And I guess when we're talking about Marx, and we have this idea of then a kind of objectification that would be unalienated as the kind of horizon or the eschatological horizon for communism, is not Delizinho Tariya, they're not trying to track
the ways in which there are other forms of compulsion that are built into systems of determination, like Lacan is doing with language, right? And for Lacan, the unconscious in the relationship to language there, it means that there's a kind of a fundamental direction between particularity and universality. And so in a sense, all linguistic universality is the kind of spurious universality. And so this kind of horizon of non-spurious universality becomes problematic, in a sense. So I'm just wondering how you think about that kind of problem. um there's a lot in your i mean there's a lot in your question um i mean do you mind rephrasing the kind of uh what you think are the you know it's my fault it's not your fault it's not it's
just because i'm you know i'm slow and it's um i didn't get everything in the question yeah so um but i saw i got the contrast you were saying between i mean if you can you rerun the your initial point about Deloes and Guattari. Yeah, so I think, I guess what I'm saying is that if free conscious activity is the kind of horizon that communism is after, so a kind of objectification that wouldn't result in estrangement, like a self-objectification that wouldn't result in estrangement, because they're coming from the Lacanian kind of like in that milieu, that idea of an objectification where particularity and universality would be linked to each other um it creates it's like there's this kind of sense of a necessary insufficiency um that i think they're trying to overcome by rethinking the relationships between
these kind of more granular compulsions about language and all of this kind of stuff and okay uh you see what i'm saying like because because the question is if language is a condition that uh like if it's unconscious in lakanian sense um and it creates that gap between particularity and universality then then how could free conscious activity as unalienated objectivity um occur without even the abandonment of language in a way okay i see i see no no okay okay that's a very very um interesting question um okay yes so the lacanian point would be that kind of alienation there's a constitute actually samu tamshik's book on marx and lacan makes this point i think um you know, extremely clearly that there's a kind of, you know, constituting alienation that, you know, to be human is to be alienated, to be alienated in, you know, the symbolic order and language.
The question is, remember, in Marx following Hegel, there's externalization and estrangement. Alienation covers as a kind of a positive and a negative sense. And it's not clear, you know, the sense in which, you know, from a Lacanian viewpoint, this, you know, constitutive alienation is a positive enabling, you know, feature of, you know, human subjectivation. And so it couldn't be overcome.
So in a sense, it means that the dialectic can't close itself, basically. Yes. There's a kind of a fundamental negativity in which the dialectics, like there's so it's a different way of having to lead to an affirmation of a kind of constitutive suffering or alienation, but it doesn't have the same flavor as the transvaluation one. Yes. And I actually think that, you know, in a way, what is misleading or what is kind of perhaps, you know, yeah, what's problematic about the kind of the life producing life, you know, is that it's an entirely kind of positive kind of formulation.
In a way, I think that Marx would, I think, happily concede the ineliminability of constitutive alienation, which is to say of a kind of negativity as, you know, constitutive of human being in a way of of human social production. But then I think that it's almost as if there's, you know, when we produce, you know, on his account, okay, so we generate, you know,
human productive activity generates these social forms, which actually, you know, starts, you know, commandeering it you know to their own end that's what capital is it's the it's the um as he put us the alien social form that commandeers and co-ops human activity you know to serve itself um and so so then the question is well is it possible to kind of um if that's you know alienation could be overcome the question is is does that is that does that is that also to say that this kind of you know the um alienation the symbolic order of the alienation that is
indispensable for linguistic activity could also be eliminated and then but yeah and because i think that's where deliz and gattari are going i think that's they're trying to not only think the the resistance to the alienation of capital, but also to that symbolic level. And that's why the micropolitics question, I think, comes back again, is because they're trying to work through that as an issue as well. Ah, okay. So, because I wasn't sure whether you were saying that they were endorsing part of the Lacanian account or rejecting it or... I think they're endorsing the role that the subjective, or sorry, the symbolic plays in alienation via identification, and then trying to find a mode of collectivity that doesn't operate via identification as its
primary okay the kind of synthesis yes um okay um but anyway that's that's you know far down the line but yeah yes no no i see i i see i think yeah i think that's uh you know that's right um but then what's what complicates is that it ends up being um Yes, what they call, they're looking for more, you know, kind of modes of collective, you know, what they call your collective assemblages of enunciation, etc. A collective subjectivation that doesn't involve this, these symbolic identifications. And I mean, that's one of the most interesting aspects of their account.
but then the problem is that I mean because of the whole rejection of negativity of like these all these they're kind of rhetorical attacks on you know on lack on negativity on castration and the valorization of affirmation. It's not clear that they... I think perhaps initially they kind of... Well, Gutari was a Lacanian. It's not clear at what point you can...
convert a structure into a machine, you know, as the title of Guattari's paper, where he's doing the contrast between kind of structures and machines. It seems that machines function entirely well. There's this moment of anti-production, which has already been mentioned, and of disjunctive. but the point is that it's only, it's not negativity. Antiproduction or disjunction is a condition of conjunction, I think, in Deleuze and Guattari, and they are adamant, they refuse to kind of,
you know, they reject the separation, you know, of negation or of negativity. And actually, this is something, you know, we'll kind of look at more closely. I can't. Yeah, this is I mean, your question is very good. It's a very. It's a difficult question to answer, actually, so I can't really answer it properly, but it's a very good question. May I contribute? Sure. Yes. On page 52, I have the Bloomsbury edition, but it's the same translation as the one that you gave us. On page 52, it says about Jacques Lacan and his signifying chains, Le Chaine Signifiant.
And then they try to explain how the code, the machine code operates through Lacan's signifying chains. And then it says that the support of these chains is the body without organs. in my opinion this is problematic because it again it goes to this idea of a ground where everything is placed even though they are dispersed and they create nomadic distributions instead of vertical hierarchies again we have this idea of the ground and and the ground
and creates exteriorities and interiorities. So needless to say that Lacan and this reflective relationship between language and reality is also problematic. So in my opinion, this is very problematic. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. That's very helpful. I mean, actually, the notion of code and actually the very contrast between code and signification is, I think, crucial. And I think that because codes for Dose and Gautari are a signifying, you know, they're
not part of, you know, they're a condition. David Sloan- So, you know, every kind of signifying order presupposes a kind of a certain, you know, you know codification regimes of codification, etc, etc, but which are themselves. David Sloan- You know. David Vogelpohl- A social which are you know kind of ubiquitous, you know material phenomena, because so the kind of and in a way the coding of flows. David Vogelpohl- There are no kind of all flows are always already coded, which is why the kind of the decoding of flows is only kind of only happens on the basis of a kind of a prior coding or a codification. means that there's also kind of, in a way, it's the closest they get to a kind of a dialectical
articulation of, you know, immediacy and mediation. The point is that, you know, everything has a kind of structure. Everything has a kind of... Yeah, but structure doesn't mean representation. A code doesn't have to be an illustration of something, a representation of something. A code can be a signal, can be a pulse. a pulse. Sure, but the problem then is the code is a category. The distinction between coding and decoding, the distinction between flows and codes, these are concepts, okay? When you say that the
kind of the real itself nature itself involves this kind of this you know this articulation of coded flows you know the coding and the decoding of flows you can it's all very well to say that this occurs you know independently of representation but so does biological reproduction so does kind of you know geological accretion these all operate independently of representation but you need the resources of representation to know about them. The claim of representation is not that to be is to be representable. That's not what Kant says at all. He's saying that to know something, you need to represent it. To know about the accretion of the earth, you need to be able to kind of, you know, conjoin concepts, you know,
in propositional form, you know, to be able to kind of, you know, to say something about, you know, to say something about something being thus and so, okay? To say that, you know, in other words, there's a confusion between the claim that knowledge has propositional form and the claim that reality has propositional form. And it seems that I don't think that there's, well, I mean, you know, a good materialist can insist that reality does not have propositional form, but still, you know, insist that knowledge of reality must have propositional form. and the claim is that when you you say that your own account of reality is non-propositional that's
when the difficulties begin in other words how can you know about reality without representing it that's it and if you claim that you're in because if you claim that you know about reality without representing it well what kind of knowledge is this is it intuition you just intuit that this the way the world is this is how things work but if you're intuiting it it can't have conceptual form but code is nothing if not a conceptual category it's actually very difficult to understand what a code you don't just in you know intuit that you know the coded structure of flows you see what the problems are i think the problems are that people think that um you know people
confuse the claim that you can't know what is, you know, without judgment, that knowledge is a condition of saying anything intelligible about being with the claim that knowledge constitutes being. Barclay, you know, is a philosopher who says that, you know, to be is to be perceived, you know, to be is to be experienced. But Kant doesn't say that to be is to be represented. He simply says that, you know, to know, you know, that anything is thus and so involves representing it. So, you know, this is, I just want to, you know, just on, I mean, I just want to, yeah, to
to set our time because I think we are getting like too late now and I think we should probably keep the discussions going I don't know in the classroom or something or save the questions for next time. Sure so I'm sorry this Mr. Slav had his hand raised and I didn't answer his question but if you I mean I can I'm willing to answer your question you know now quickly if it's not too too complicated because you've been waiting for a long time yes my question is not so huge I think it would be easy to answer so I want to come back to the concept of a generic production and
just wanted to ask what is the relation between the notion of generic production of value and generic production of free conscious activity in Marx's works. Since as far as you have mentioned his notion of generic production of free conscious activity is related can be attributed to his early works then uh i have deduced as far as i can presume uh that the production of value can be attributed to capital uh or some works of this period so what is the relation between these two notions are they are completely distinct should they be regarded in this way or one can be viewed
as augmentation or addition to another one something like this okay um Yes. So the question is that obviously in capital, so generic production is, you know, generic value production. I mean, the question is whether they stand to one another as negative and positive. Okay. The question is whether in order to be able to characterize kind of, you know, what's wrong with, you know, capitalist value production, or the way in which capitalist value production is a form of, you know, abstract domination, domination by value,
the subordination of all human activity, cognitive and practical, to the imperative of value creation, whether you know the claim that that's um an illegitimate form of domination of social domination requires you know the the countervailing positive claim that there is there's a form of production without domination there's a form of um you know coordinated social activity that doesn't entail domination either concrete domination you know concrete dominations which you have in kind of your ancient and feudal societies or abstract domination which you have in capital. So although Marx doesn't say anything about kind of, you know, the generic productivity of free conscious activity in his later work,
at least, you know, to the best of my knowledge, it does seem to be, I think, communism, which is production freed from the imperatives to kind of, you know, to, you know, to reproduce value, to amplify and feed, you know, abstract value, whether that doesn't require the concept of, you know, the generic production as, you know, free conscious activities. The difficulties are, okay, the biggest objection to saying this is that, well, it seems to imply the overcoming of alienation, you know, this complete kind of overcoming of, you know, social alienation.
though Marx says that it involves a kind of it involves objectification involves kind of you know objectification but an objectification that wouldn't kind of be co-opted by this you know these alien social forms in other words the claim is that can human beings produce reproduce themselves without generating alien social forms because that's what unalienated production would be. And I think that's a difficult question. Maybe there would be new types of alienation. Maybe all that Marx is saying is that this is a particularly punitive and destructive form of alienation, subordination to an alien social power, and there would be other kind of
less punitive forms. But I think, in a way, I don't think... I think people are too kind of... There's been, you know, in the wake of... There's this kind of paranoia about um you know um there's this paranoia about you know the claim about the uh the overcoming of alienation as involving a kind of uh some kind of metaphysical essentialism and i think that um you know in a way i think it can it becomes unnecessarily kind of prohibitive And I think that there's a positive sense, I think that Marx needs to have a positive sense
of, you know, generic human activity, free conscious activity, that doesn't involve, you know, that at least that doesn't involve the forms of alienation that we have recognized so far. And anyway, so the risk would be, can we know that this won't involve another kind of, you know, more, you know, an unforeseeable or not currently unimaginable form of alienation? Perhaps it will. But the claim would be that surely that can't be used as a reason to disqualify it, because that would simply perpetuate what is.
and the claimant was Marxist always like well because he hasn't told us enough about what communism would be it's not worth it becomes easy to kind of say well it's not worth the risk better the devil you know but I think that Marx's whole point is that you know the part of what is most objectionable about you know capital is that we know it so know that we do it is you know headiously familiar um so that the kind of the risk of um you know an unfamiliar estrangement or an unpredictable estrangement is is worth taking thank you
Okay, I realize we've gone over so I'm sorry. But yes, if people have more questions about this session, if you could write them. And next week, so next week we'll start with chapter one of Antiripus, but also if you could please read Dan Smith's essay, which is flow code and stock and note on Deleuze's political philosophy because I think it's very, very helpful for, you know, understanding what's what's going on in the opening of Antioedipus. May I ask about the presentations?
Yes. How long should they be? And is there a specific format that you would like them to have? Mathias, would you? Yeah, so usually we have 15 to 20 minute presentations and the format is pretty free, so whatever that you and your group agree upon, it's usually good enough. So you should just, I'll send an email with some of the details, but in general, yeah, record a presentation about one of the topics that you choose and then you upload it to the drive and we can all watch and comment on the further moment. So that's it. Thank you.
So I think on this note, we should probably just finish. Is it okay, Ray? Yes, sure. Yes. Sorry, quick question. When's the due date for the assignments and the presentations? Is there a due date? I guess I need to figure out what perhaps, I guess, Matthias, is the order, do people volunteer? the order of present so people volunteer so um i guess whoever already has a sense of what they would like to present if they can kind of say they'd like to go first so then you know we can um you know the uh the order in which people do it will be kind of uh determined by you know
their eagerness or their preparedness to do it um and if people want more time or prefer to kind of you know um save it till later that's okay too if they're going given that they're going to be uploaded you know in a way they don't have to be um um i guess you know we should have a few of them done by i don't know session four so that you know they're not all left till the very end but um um okay uh what about this the essay then and the essay or the essay will be on a topic of your choice and or or i can give you i mean i can also give you cues or i can suggest questions if
if uh if that's helpful um but it was suggested to me that i just leave it up to you know to students to to decide for themselves um but the due date for that sorry is what i'm asking end of course yeah it's usually two weeks after the the last class okay okay and how many words i'd say um around 5 000 words all right all right if you have um not any more practical questions i think i'll just end this session and see uh meet y'all next week so thanks everybody okay thank you thank you um