In the final plateau, in the plateau, it's called Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines, is because it was a place where, connected to the opening plateau of the book, Rhizome, which is in the sense that those are the two places in the text where Deleuze and Guattari come close to explaining their way of working, how they're working. So in other words, given that the whole, you know, the critique of representation is fundamental to Deleuze's kind of philosophical agenda.
and the rejection of the image of thought based on the assumptions of representation, then the task that the two volumes of capitalism and schizophrenia set themselves, but A Thousand Platos in particular, is that of how does one think without representing? okay um and if one is to think without representing that means that thinking becomes a form of doing and the the the image the contemplative image of thought which i think those in gotari align with representation is undermined by this idea that thinking is a praxis, a kind of an engagement,
but an engagement with what? Okay. Obviously, once you kind of undermine the premises of representation, you cannot contrast theory and practice, or acting and contemplating, in the way in which they have been traditionally contrasted. So what you have instead is an idea that, you know, thinking is an activity, okay, an active, you know, productive practice, but what it produces can't be represented. In other words, it can't be specified in terms of any representable goals or objectives. So, in other words, the nature
of the practical intervention effectuated in and through thinking, and the kind of thinking that A Thousand Plateaus exemplifies, is both, you know, has to be specified without ever presupposing a contrast with merely, in a way, with contemplative thought. Because then that would be, because to do so, to take up, would be to assume a kind of a reactive posture vis-a-vis representation. So in other words, you have to supersede representation
without simply kind of criticizing it or critiquing it in the way in which I think Deleuze and Guattari think you know, Derrida's deconstruction does, in a way, in such a way that maintains a kind of, you know, that remains at the level of logic, okay, or conceptual logic, rather than undermining the idea that there's a categorical division between logic and practice. okay uh between reasoning and doing so that's what um so it's the you know the uh you know with
the consequences of these opening initial moves made at the beginning both in the beginning and end of the book that i'm interested in and it what they call um you know mapping what they call when they say that the multiple must be made, the multiple is effectuated in and through a thinking doing, which is, in the case of the book that they're writing, distilled or incarnated in sentences and propositions,
But what they're clearly suggesting is that what they're doing is not, the book itself is not a program or a representation of the conditions for rhizomatic agency or rhizomatic construction or whatever you want to call it. so that's what i take the uh the sense of the imperative the multiple must be made uh to consist in um and this also means that um uh in order for this construction to be um you know to be effective i.e it must operate under certain constraints and the
constraints are laid out in terms of what they call quantifying writing. In other words, the quantifying writing involves, you know, the concrete rules, okay, which govern the, what they call the selection and the intensification of a plane of consistency. Okay, so the text is basically explicating the logic, you know, the logic through which the plane of consistency upon which their own writing unfolds is constructed, and how this logic is supposed to be a kind of a distillation,
well, not a distillation, but rather, you know, a passageway through this more, this general kind of ontological logic of expression, okay? That's why I think it's necessary to, you know, to grasp how, you know, as they put it, expressionism and constructivism coincide. That's one of the, you know, the slogans or the watchwords that they deploy in the book, you have to, you know, I think to understand how Mille Plateau connects back to Deleuze's earlier work on Spinoza, and particularly kind of the work on the logic of expressionism, or expressionism in philosophy,
as the English translation has it. And yes, so that's the basic, I mean, I can say more, but yeah, that's the basic pragmatics then means that what you're trying to do can't be specified in terms of interests or purposes that you think you already possess, or the kinds of interests and purposes that are generally invoked when people try to explain practice. So in a way, this is a practice that generates its own ends
because the ends aren't simply extrinsic to the practice. They are generated through the practice itself, but in a very determinate way, not randomly. And it's this, in a way, it's the kind of, in a way, the coincidence of chance and necessity or of the, you know, the aleatory and the deterministic, which I think is, you know, very philosophically significant in the, you know, in the writing of the book, in their kind of characterization of what the book is trying to do.
And I think that it is ultimately, for all the books, I guess, idiosyncrasy and inventiveness, it's a very, you know, it's as they say, as they themselves insist, or as Deleuze himself insisted, it's a very, it's a traditional work of philosophy. In other words, it's how philosophy, it's the kind of, you know, the re-energization of philosophy, once representation has been superseded or relinquished. And philosophy has a sense of the conjunction of ontology and ethics.
In other words, knowing what is and knowing what should be done coincide. And that's a very familiar conjunction. It goes back to Stoicism. and there's a way of understanding the book as a stoic work. Stoicism understood as the, in a way, the embrace of necessity or of fatality. So one of the things I'm trying to say is that although the book rejects the representational image of thought and a kind of deterministic metaphysics, in a way determination re-arises at a higher level in terms of the way in which the plane of imminence constructs itself through machinic assemblages.
And it's in that sense in which the book, although it rejects the idea of the closed book or the spherical book, etc., etc., you know, the book is infinite self-representation. It is, in fact, a work that, you know, folds the outside within the inside in a way so that it's always kind of trying to, you know, the cutting edge of deterritorialization, which is the, which is, you know, what propels, you know, rhizomatic conjunction, the conjunction of different kind of elements into, you know, intensifying vectors, is always this point where the outside is folded
within the inside in a way that, you know, what seems most contingent or aleatory is ultimately a reassertion of fatality or necessity. And in a way, that's what I'm criticizing at the end of that essay. So I'm saying is that although the book seems to be a pain to exteriority and openness In fact, it is a pain to fatality and closure, because the openness that they invoke is, you know, hermetically sealed to anything that isn't already enveloped by this logic of intensification, which is at the heart of the book.
I have a question. When reading the essay and reading the Lesingotary's section, I thought the book has all this rhetoric of liberation and emancipation with all the aesthetic implications of the world such as destratification, deterritorialization implies. But it seems like they want to bypass normativity for any kind of logic of emancipation that would be possible. I just wanted to ask because I couldn't find an answer myself.
What would remain of a politics of emancipation if we want to bypass normativity? And I still don't understand why we should want to desire to construct the plane of consistency. If this is not normativity, then I don't know what is. I think the question, I mean, this is, I think the problem, or rather my problem with Deleuze and Guzari is not that they're, you know, there's no normativity or that they leave normativity behind. is that they reject one paradigm of normativity, okay? Let's say a Kantian kind of paradigm of normativity, and replace it with another,
which is to say a kind of Spinozist, kind of Nietzschean-Bergsonian normativity, which in a way, which fuses the is and the ought, okay? Instead of separating, where Kant separates the is and the ought, Deleuze and Gotari want to kind of bring it back together, where what, you know, the normative injunction is always to intensify and to empower, okay? That's at the heart, what are the concrete rules rules for? They're rules of intensification, amplification, and what is amplified through the consolidation, the construction of the plane of imminence
is the capacity to affect and be affected. Okay, the power, you know, Spinoza's definition of a body in terms of, you know, affects and potencies. Okay, so the idea is that, in other words, the more you intensify, in a way, it's a question both of intensifying, you know, sensitivity, amplifying the registers of sensation and of sensitivity, but only with a view to, you know, and also kind of intensifying potency, puissance, in Guattari's terms. So the idea is that, and this is, again, a very traditional,
I'm not saying this in a dismissive way, or at least it's a very venerable fusion of the normative and the ontological. So that's why it's a mistake to think that Deleuze and Guattari reject normativity. No, the problem is that it is saturated with normativity, but the norm is always intensify, you know, intensify your power of affecting and of being affected in order to always kind of, you know, to release the, you know, well, to achieve this point of indiscernible ability with the plane of imminence itself, you know.
Also, this is why when I say at the end that, you know, the account of destratification, which is, I think, is at the very core of the book, okay, because all the, when they talk about, you know, the decoding of flows that is, you know, that they're always, that is a necessary kind of condition of deterritorialization presupposes, deterritorialization presupposes destratification, okay? But destratification can only proceed on the basis that stratification is always already underway. So, in a way, the concession, it's not that Deleuze and Guzzari
simply kind of reject mediation and evoke a kind of a brute immediacy. The point is that there is mediation in the book. The mediation they propose is the mediation is what they call the middle, okay, the intermediary. Always start in the middle. That's where a rhizome, rhizomes proliferate in and through the middle, in between. You always start in between. You're in between stratification and destratification. So these two vectors of stratification and destratification are always coincidental, okay? And everything, every phenomenon is caught in between these two kind of, you know, opposing counter tendencies. And in that regard, they can always defend themselves against the
objection that they are beginning with a naive immediacy. It's not a kind of a simple appeal to vitalism as, you know, kind of, you know, the power of, you know, sensational lived experience. But the problem is that the middle itself, what is in between stratification and de-stratification, is itself immediately given. So in other words, mediation is immediate. Whereas the Hegelian point is that neither mediation nor immediacy can ever be strictly separated. So the point is not to replace immediacy with mediation, because then you just have another immediate mediation.
And that's the problem, is that stratification, in order for de-territorialization to be constantly affirmed as an injunction, you know this kind of this imperative there has to be you know stratification and destratification must always already be at work okay but the problem is that destratification is entirely the concept of destratification the positive sense that is given to the word destratification in the book depends on the account of stratification, which is set out in the geology of morals. Who does the earth think it is? That's the heart of the book, okay? And as I say, the point is
understanding what does the D in de-territorialization and de-stratification mean? That's the key to the entire book, and it means you have to assume, you know, territorialization and stratification, actually stratification is the condition for territorialization, in order to understand what this D, which is the cutting edge of, you know, de-territorialization, de-stratification, or how this D operates. And the way in which it operates ultimately is, explicitly is always contextual and depends on what they call the analysis
of a concrete assemblage. You have to understand how the kind of concrete assemblage incarnates an abstract machine and on the basis of this analysis, this you know, kind of this mapping of these kind of forces and powers at work, then you can decide what to do. You can choose how to consolidate and intensify whatever it is you're doing. But in that sense, although, you know, they don't want representation and they don't want mapping, or rather no they reject what they call tracing and they want to talk about a mapping of you know the movement of intensities in other there is a schema for mapping okay there is a
schema for mapping, you know, relations or conjunctions of, you know, of forces, both territorializing and de-territorializing. And it's in terms of this schema that you decide what to do. Okay, and that's what the concrete rules are there for. The concrete rules are there to allow you to understand how this concrete assemblage uh you know incarnates an abstract machine what forces um are at play and how they can be uh you know consolidated um in a way which will uh which will be empowering ultimately empowering
can i take a take a shot at a question there uh right bye hi hi hi how are you doing hi not too bad yeah um the um i guess you know i i agree with your critique uh in a lot of respects um you know especially in terms of uh doula's not being able to uh sort of cash out uh these kind of binary distinctions that are frequently uh made in the tax in terms of stratification de-stratification and so on, and how he privileges these terms. But I guess one thing, if I had to raise an issue in terms of your critique, and I really liked the article. But when you talk about, I mean, you seem to speak about Dula as, you know, in terms of it as being a sort of foreclosure, or that there's,
you know, an alighting of reality, in a sense, that's being enacted through the myopia of this work, which relies on these kind of traditional, you know, as you might see it, traditional ontological distinctions. I mean, I think probably in terms of the mentality which generates a book like A Thousand Plateaus, it would be, you know, quintessentially postmodern. And we know what the law is. He says, well, philosophy is a kind of play, right? So you say, you remark in the work yourself, well, you know, there's some nice analogs with the sciences and so forth that are set up here. You know, we could look at a philosophical work and say, does it agree with my inductive experience? Does it, you know, are the deductive arguments strong? Okay, it's an interesting philosophical work. And that could be one kind of criteria. But of course, when we make
this critique, you know, from the standpoint of, well, reality is elided by this text, because reality is more indeterminate, let's say, than what this text can possibly encompass, right? You know, that it's significant that Kant, you know, permits there to be a thing in itself, that kind of functions as a regulator within a system, you know, that for Hagel, you know, there's a great suppleness and amorphousness in terms of the sort of, you know, structure which he creates, which means that reality never becomes foreclosed or circumscribed, you know, in this ontological way that DeLiz does. I mean, I guess one of the problems I could see with that
is of course the fact that, you know, whenever we, you know, even these, you know, systems which permit, let's say, a distinction between the is and the ought, there's a sense in which they're also normative, right? So that's Hagel's critique of Kant, right, for example. You know, that this notion of the thing in itself ultimately isn't, you know, philosophically tenable. By the same token, you know, if we look at the work of Hagel, and we have the classic sort of Schillingian critique of Hagel, that the initial move, you know, to being in the nothingness, you know, there's something lost there, right, in this sort of conceptual translation that the system can never account, you know, from whence it sort of emerges, right. So, you know, and we could look at Marx's, you know, critique of Hagel that, you know, Hagel's separation of, you know, the rational
and the real in a way is symmetrical with the structure of the value form, right, in terms of way that that imposes decision, right, in the structure of reality. So I guess when you make that kind of comparison and you say, well, these systems, you know, open themselves up to precisely on account of their indeterminacy or their, you know, the fact they don't make these sort of stringent ontological distinctions, don't you think in a way that what's already implied there is a philosophy that could somehow free itself from normativity through some kind of direct appeal to the real. You mean that's implied by the critique I'm trying to make?
Yeah, implied by the critique, yeah. Yes, the point is, so look, I think in a way it's, a sign of Deleuze and Guattari's sophistication and intelligence that they don't believe you can kind of completely abdicate or kind of you know, you can purify your ontology of all normative commitments. By which I mean, by normative commitments, I just mean kind of, you know, value kind of, you know, value judgment, some kind of value ladenness of determination. So they, and rather than shying
away from it, what they do is they say, well, there's an articulation of, they're rejecting one paradigm of the normative, which is basically Platonic, Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, which they see as oppressive, both intellectually oppressive, but also kind of ethically and politically oppressive. And they're proposing a new normative paradigm, a new fusion of the ontological and the normative, which they see as emancipatory, because it's about what is being. Being is power or potency, but no longer a potency,
which is no longer tied to substance or unity. So being is simply this kind of this concept, this infinitely kind of self-differentiating power of affecting and of being affected. And one can construct an art of living from this ontology. So the criticism is not that it's still too normative. The point is that the the normativity they propose, or in a way the way in which they conjoin the ontological and the normative,
does not, in fact, have the emancipatory consequences that they proclaim, because in a way, for two reasons, because both ontology, the discourse of ontology, has become philosophically problematic as a result of Kant's critique, but also as a result of Hegel's critique of Kant and ultimately of Marx, Marx's critique of Kant and Hegel. and the rehabilitation of ontology in the 20th century is due to Heidegger. And it's insofar as Deleuze's embrace of ontology in the 1960s,
especially in difference in repetition, is clearly, in a way, his negotiation with Heidegger. The fact that he, even in his earlier work in the article on Bergson from the 1950s, he explicitly wants to propose an ontology rooted in Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche, capable of countermanding what he sees as the forced choice between a phenomenological ontology in a Heideggerian sense and a Hegelian ontology.
Because Jean Hippolyte's kind of logic and existence is a kind of a quasi-Heideggerian reading of Hegel. In a way, it's an attempt to reactivate Hegel in a post-Heideggerian environment by saying that Hegel is also an ontologist, but he's not a bad ontologist. He's an ontologist who can kind of, you know, withstand the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics. And we saw ontology is pitted against metaphysics here. But the problem is that, you know, one doesn't have to accept the terms of this alternative in a way between ontology, you know, ontology, which is anti-representation,
an ontology beyond representation on the one hand, and a metaphysics which is still tied to representation or bound up with representation. And that's the problem in a way that the kind of, that dichotomy, the way in which, you know, Mil Plateau, ontologist work with Guattari, kind of conjoins the ontological and the ethical, you know, what there is and how to live, is, I would say, a refusal of the whole, of the undermining of that conjunction of ontology and ethics, which is a consequence
of philosophical modernity, as consummated by Kant, Hegel, and Marx. And the Marx is the most Marx's critique of Hegel is that if Hegel is simply, you know, inviting us to kind of to embrace, to identify the rational and the actual, you know, what is actual is rational and vice versa, then his, you know, the revolutionary modernistic impulse of his work has lapsed. He's become a kind of, he's become a pre-modern philosopher. In a way, Hegel's philosophy is compelled and propelled by, you know, this understanding of the conjunction
between Kant's critical revolution and the French revolution. And the point at which the task of philosophy simply becomes to kind of to recognize, belittively recognize that, you know, the rationality of the actual, is the point at which philosophy fails to live up to the injunction not to describe what is or to represent what is, but to transform what is in light of what must be, okay, which is the realization of freedom. And it's this, it's freedom, okay, it's this, in a way the key term you know for for marx uh is it's because hegelian philosophy
can't satisfy the injunction to realize freedom to make freedom to make the idea the philosophical idea of freedom real and socially actual that it must be superseded so the point is that a Social revolution is required to actualize freedom and to render the world truly rational. Now, it's because in a way, so that's the benchmark for an emancipatory philosophy or a philosophy that aligns itself with social revolution.
And a philosophy in a way that retreats from this conjunction of critique and revolution, you know, is a philosophy in a way that, you know, has regressed or in a way is kind of reacting against, you know, the perceived failure to successfully carry out this realization of the 20th century. which is you actually exist in communism and socialism. So this is why I actually don't believe the claim that Deleuze and Guattari are communists, or that they actually, their philosophy can be aligned with communist aims. And I think one of the things I'm trying
to do in the work now is actually reading what Deleuze and Guattari say about Marx, especially in Antioedipus, and you realize it has all, well, if you read Marx, you know, and if you read Capital, you see that what they say bears little or no relation to what Marx is actually doing. And as I said, you know, in the second paper is that it's a kind of, you know, quid pro quo. In other words, they don't attack, you know, they, there's guys, they're systematic rejection of Marx's basic theses and analyses by using his name, but then completely
proposing counter-Marxian theses instead of his, you know, his original claims, or not original claims, but I mean his substantive claims. So the point, to sum up, the point is that ontology it's not just metaphysics that is obsolete, it's that ontology is obsolete, because ontology is only, I think as Adorno actually rightly says in an early text about the idea of natural history, is that Heideggerian ontology is just the ratification of what is, okay, of social reality understood as second nature. And philosophy must relinquish ontology in order to realize
in order to clarify the stakes of the realization of freedom, which entails refusing, systematically refusing the ratification of what is, or of any kind of discourse about what is, being qua being. Could I interrupt for a second? Yes. Martin Rosenberg here. Good to hear you speak. It seems to me that the tension between what is and the desire for freedom
gets played out in precisely what you were bringing up about Spinoza and about Bergsson. It seems to me that an ontology of expressionism requires a focus on process rather than on the thing in itself. And that anti-representation is really not a denial of ontology, but a shifting of ontology from what is
to the nature of expression itself as Spinoza lays it out. Now I'm going to take one second to shift over to Deleuze's insistence that we take into account philosophical concepts, scientific percepts, and artistic constructions by suggesting that the way towards opening up a critique of Thousand Plateaus
is by looking at the ways in which those three sources of knowledge impinge upon the thousand plateaus. So there's a genealogy implicit there from Spinoza to Nietzsche and Bergson to the kind of thinking that was coming into visibility in the 40s and 50s and which gets played out in Simondon, but which you can see really precisely in the work of Prigogine and Alan Turing
on the physics of emergence. That the notion of irreversible time. The physics of bifurcation which has had an impact in almost every realm of scientific inquiry since, which might be equated with the notion of individuation in Simondon, and which the reference to Turing and Prigogine you can't find in Simondon.
But what's interesting is that Deleuze cites Simondon, but then points back to Spinoza to suggest where Simundon is coming from. It seems like we're talking about an ontology that's based on a completely different set of theological assumptions than what underlie Kant and Hegel and Plato and Aristotle.
And it seems to me knowing your work just a little bit that you're critiquing a thousand plateaus, which to me is playing out the implications of not a rejection of representation, but an insistence that the ontology be based on process and not things in themselves. that you're using logic which is rooted in the first
ontology in order to critique a completely different ontology did that make sense? Yes it did yes I think you might if you know me you know where I'm coming from I'm a theorist and a historian of emergence and we may have met at the Warwick conference on Pynchon I'm not sure that Dan O'Hara and Eric did in 94 but that's beside the point So I'm wondering, what does that do?
What does it do to notice that there are representational features in Thousand Plateaus when the rhetorical project, philosophical project of Thousand Plateaus is to assert this ontology of process and emergence and not a static being behind reality? Okay, let me try and respond. This is a very, you know, very interesting question, but
the first aspect of my response would be to say that I'm not simply, my criticism is not simply the claim, oh, Deleuze and Guattari claim, you know, they claim to reject representation, but here they are representing something. That's not my criticism, because they're very clear about, if you think in that way, you think, you know, you know, where you kind of, you construct a kind of an artificial dichotomy between, let's say, process and substance, or between kind of, you know, movement and status, etc. And their point would be that, you know, the traditional,
if logic is always on the side of representation, if the resources of conceptualization are always on the side of representation, then philosophy as, you know, an art and science of the concept becomes redundant, you know, a priori, and all that's left is either is kind of some kind of mysticism. And Deleuze has always rejected that. Okay, Deleuze insists that the point is once you can, you know, expose the fallacious logic, the fallacious premises of the logic of representation, you can propose an alternative
logic, a non-representational logic, a logic of difference in and for itself, which is what he's, he does in difference and repetition and logic of sense. And then you can understand how the problem is not how how we can get how we can get how we can the problem is to understand how is to you know to criticize the traps okay the conceptual traps that lead you to think you know that lead you to restrict thinking to you know to identification and the subordination of difference to identity
and the identification of thinking with representing. So Deleuze and Guattari have an account of the logic, the logic of expression and the logic of construction involved in what they call mapping or constructing the plane of imminence. And the work itself is full of, I mean, its conceptual inventiveness is a consequence of this. They create the conceptual resources they need
to be able to map the plane of imminence. So here, in a way, thinking is no longer representing. So the concepts are already kind of, you know, mapping the processes, the movements that they are ostensibly about. But of course, they're not about them in the sense of like, you know, representing. They are themselves a manifestation. You know, the thinking, the conceptualizing that is going on in the book is itself a manifestation or an expression of the movements that they are, as they say, not representing, but mapping or expressing. So this is why I think one of the great strengths of their work
is the way they circumvent this. It's only from the vantage point of representation that you think that movement, you know, becoming multiplicity, etc., are simply the kind of the abstract negation of stasis, identity, unity, etc. Okay, so they want to undermine that. You see, that very opposition is representational, and once, you know, we've subverted the conceptual premises of that opposition, we can understand that to think the multiple is also to make the multiple, as they put it.
In other words, that they are doing a philosophy of expression insofar as their work enacts the very process of non-representational accounts of the physical world and the world of ideation. Yes, but that very kind of contrast is itself representational. representation. So it's not like you have the physical, the biological, the chemical. In a way,
the whole account of stratification is to show stratification is more fundamental than representation because they say, this is already a point made by Bergson, is that in a way, if why is the world amenable to representation? If representation is simply an illusion or a fallacy, the problem is you have to explain why would anyone, you know, how does it ever come about, okay? If it was merely an illusion, it could be easily dispelled and corrected. But the point is that the world generates its own representation. There are real processes in the world that, you know, set the conditions for its representability. This is why representability is not, you know,
it's a domain of transcendental illusion, but transcendental illusions are necessary. And as I understand it, the whole account of stratification is to show how the world stratifies, segments, sederentizes, generates the segmentations and the interruptions of these flows and processes through which utilitarian representation can get hold. and the whole, here they follow Bergson. You know, representation is not, it's not that representation is false, it's that it's merely an instrument. It's a utilitarian instrument,
which organisms, certain organisms need to be able to navigate reality. And the mistake, the philosophical mistake is to think that what is in fact merely an instrument, you know, a tool whereby certain kind of organisms can better navigate their environment is an adequate account of what there is. So the challenge is to show how the world generates organisms that need to represent and how, you know, it's certain aspects of the world lend themselves to representation,
but how representation is only a very kind of, you know, incomplete, partial, and selective account of what is really going on, of these more kind of ubiquitous and deep-seated processes. um so that's what they um and it's these processes then that the book sets itself to to express okay but to express them it must you have to construct concepts but now the problem of representation which was a problem of what is the relationship between a concept and the thing it is supposedly represents. Now this, even if you've gotten rid of intentionality and representation
as correlation between idea and object, now the logic of expression, which is how do we find, how do we construct concepts that adequately express these fundamental processes, these flows, processes, whatever you want to call them, then the problem re-arises in a more, you know, kind of challenging form, is that there has to be a criterion for what is a successful expression, i.e. an expression that, you know, succeeds in constructing and expressing
imminence, becoming, whatever you want to call it, and one which fails, one which still, you know, lapses back into representation. And the book itself, this is why when they say the multiple, you know, this book is a, you know, a rhizomatic construction, this book is a process of construction. Well, a construction has to be constrained. Otherwise, you know, it would be, you know, there has to be a criterion of success and failure in constructing. The difficulty is that you can't appeal to the utilitarian criteria that govern representation. So now the new criteria for distinguishing between, you know, successful and unsuccessful expression construction
are those of whether or not it intensifies and amplifies the power of expressing. And that's what the chapter about concrete rules of abstract machine does. And that's why they say that the book, when they say that the book is a toolbox, Everyone remembers that the book is a toolbox. Okay. Well, the problem is that in a toolbox, the tools, you know what the tools are for. Okay. Spanners, hammers, you know, screwdrivers. Okay. You can tell what the tools are for.
You know, the tools are constructed according to the effectuation of pre-established finality. But a pre-established finality is a representation. So now these tools, the tools of which this particular box book consists, can't be identified in terms of pre-established finalities. In other words, what the tools for which, you know, the tools that are being constructed in and through the book can only be specified by tasks that the book is also constructing and expressing.
okay? So this is why, in a way, it's in this sense that the book succeeds, you know, it succeeds beautifully in, you know, saying what it does and doing what it says, but the cost of this consistency, the cost of achieving this consistency, is this, is that that you mentioned Spinoza, okay? Well, Spinoza says there's only one substance, okay? Infinite eternal substance with an infinity of attributes, but we can only know two, okay? Thought and extension. The problem is that, now, the reason we can know two
is because thinking is an expression of this substance, and it's through thinking and the fact that we think that we participate in the expression of this infinite substance, okay? But then the problem is, is if thinking is an expression of this infinite substance, and, you know, the relationship between the infinity of substance and the infinity of the attribute of thought is in the, you know, the intellection as the immediate infinite mode in which the finite human intellect is subsumed, that allows us to grasp the essence of substance and achieve the third kind of knowledge. But the third kind of knowledge, if it is to succeed in expressing the infinity of substance,
must give voice to the infinity of its attributes, the qualitative infinity of its attributes. And in a way, the problem of rhizomatic construction and the problem about the assemblages, you know, the assemblages, abstract machines, concrete assemblages, all the different conceptual functions catalogued in a thousand plateaus would have to correspond to, you know, characterizations of attributes. and and the question here is um well how do you um you know if thinking is um are these the only
um you know are the how do we know and i use the word no because you can't um you can't simply dismiss the word no as you know part of uh the machinery of representation because Spinoza insists that you have to know the infinity of substance, and know its attributive infinity. How do we know that these conceptual tools and these instruments successfully manifest the attributive infinity of the single substance? Spinoza is a rationalist. Spinoza thinks we can know substance, and it's because we can know substance that we can act according to and kind of achieve beatitude, achieve this kind of coincidence of knowing and doing.
Once you get rid of knowing, okay, you have a problem, okay, because the problem is that it keeps reappearing, okay? The more you repress it, the more it's the consequences of repressing it keep manifesting themselves in the book. So in other words, how do you construct concepts that are supposed to successfully express the infinity of substance? in this case, the plane of eminence, okay, the plane of eminence with its kind of, you know, you know, intensities and particles and a signifying signs, etc. If the only criterion
of, you know, the criterion is not one of, you know, truth and falsity, but of intensification or disintensification. And this is when the book, this is the circularity, I mean. This is when you have to believe that whatever, you know, because the book is ultimately, it's not a transcendent object. It's not a book written by God, for God. it's a book written for creatures existing in between
you know the plane of imminence and the plane of consistency between the kind of the pure movements of becoming on the earth and everything that is facialized stratified subjectified etc then we cannot not buts, you know, make the selection between what is empowering and disaparing, or what is a successful expression and a kind of an unsuccessful one in terms of our own interests and predilections, which is going to say that subjectivism, the subjectivism that is, you that they see as like a congenital defect of representation reasserts itself with a vengeance
at the book's conclusion because they say remember when they say the point is not no longer to say i but to achieve the point where it no longer matters whether or not one says i how would one know where it would no longer matter that's that's the question that's the question if you believe the point is not and this is the power again the power and sophistication of those and gotares account the point is not to de-stratify and merge with the plane of eminence because if you do that you're resubstantializing it and you turn the plane of eminence into a transcendent telos okay the point is that if you think that the point is to merge with the plane
of imminence, then you relapse into an ideal of mystical fusion, which is simply the erasure of identity, you know, the ratio of every kind of stratified distinction. The point, the insist, is to use stratification in order to release a becoming or a movement, you know. The problem is stratification is not the enemy in and of itself. It's only when it's kind of elevated as the only paradigm or the dominant paradigm. So given that it's about negotiating between stratification and destratification or between flux and permanence,
then this negotiation cannot be adjudicated using criteria that will be, that are themselves in between, which is to say the conditions of, on the allocentric anthropomorphic strata. If I could interrupt. Where does success fit into this? Because success suggests permanence. Why is success a value-laden criteria for evaluating this book? I use the word success two things one success is not necessarily permanent if you win a game
you just won you know you can make a winning move in a game there's nothing permanent about it you can have success can be as evidence and fleeting as one wishes secondly you can dispense with the word success if you're doing something if you're constructing something if you're doing something if you're the moment you're distinguishing constructing from something else then there has to be you're doing something so there has to be some way of discriminating between if you don't want to use the word successful between you know let's say an empowering and a disempowering uh construction or an intensifying or a disintensifying, whatever I'm saying, but whatever words you use will simply
be ciphers, will simply be placeholders for success and failure. And this is the point, is that you can't do something, you can't be trying to, doing is an achievement word, okay, and you're constrained by, if you're doing something as opposed to not doing anything, then there has to be some way of distinguishing between achieving and not achieving even if of course not all achievement is teleological in this bad representational sense I mean that's a the way it's once you realize that once you get rid of this kind of this cartoonish stereotype of you know what success and failure are of what like you know achieving and not achieving are
you realize that, you know, you cannot but be compelled by this minimal discrimination between, you know, achieving and not achieving. And as soon as you do this, then there has to be a selection, a criterion of selection. And they're explicit about this. They're explicit about what that criterion is. it's about intensification or disintensification. I just want to pick up on this question of words as ciphers and the kind of pragmatic aspects that this leads us into. Hello, by the way, I've admired your work for many years,
so it's nice to get a chance to discuss it with you. So concerning words as ciphers, so I noticed in this essay you do this sort of twofold distinction. So you set up D and G as kind of this classical ethical pairing and you try and distinguish them firstly from materialists, so Marx, Alphazer et al, and then from other pragmatists, so Sellers, Rorty, Brandom and so on with this kind of machinic, you say the machinic materialists and then machinic pragmatists as well. And I'm very interested in hearing how, how do you think that efforts compare and how has the sort of mainstream of pragmatism you sort of raises as the abject there, how does that relate to your reading and especially this notion of
articulation, the twofold double articulation. Yeah, which to me, well to me, they seem very redolent of Brandon's explication. Similarly, the focus on strata and your reading of strata. Maybe this is just me reading into it, but it seems strikingly similar to this essay in speech, how has analytic philosophy failed neuroscience, which sort of does the same thing with with Fraga sort of talks about Fraga's tears. And this is Brandon's kind of reading of analytic philosophy's unique bounty. So I'm curious about clearly there's a lot of this. a lot of this brand and vocabulary, the normative commitments versus normative statuses, which is another framework used earlier in this talk. So what role do you see, what relation do
you see articulation, explications, strata and tiering? Like what are you sort of getting at? And if you're rejecting Deliz and Gattari, what sort of, what's left there and how pragmatic is your account? And are you hoping to kind of have a more informed Salazian-Deleuzian dialogue, or is it a matter of one replacing the other? Okay, thanks. That's, you know, that's a difficult question. I mean, a couple of things. One is that, So the term, I think I used the term machinic pragmatism, okay, as well.
That's one way of, in which, one way to characterize, one possible way to characterize what Deleuze and Guattari are doing, because of this, you know, this emphasis, especially in A Thousand Plateaus, on doing, the primacy. The consequence of their rejection of representation is that thinking is a kind of doing. So they, okay, they reject the reason that they, you know, the new conceptualization of doing that they propose is, you know, incompatible with philosophical pragmatism, or at least kind of, you know, philosophical pragmatism in the line that goes, I go from Peirce to kind of, you know, to Brandon.
is that they think that you can't privilege a doing or a paradigm of practice, which they think is beholden to, I guess, to purposes or ends or interests that can be read off either from a philosophical psychology or a philosophical sociology. So in other words, this is the post-human bit.
The post-human bit is that because they reject, for them, American pragmatism is still too humanist. It's human beings that do things, and human beings have the kind of, the way in which human beings are agents, and human agency is tied to social agency, collective, you know, cognitive and normative practices, which, although they might be embedded in, you know, biological nature, are in some sense irreducible to it, okay? and in a way what Deleuze and Gautari want to do in a way is that they want to kind of
to reaffirm the continuity between you know they want to kind of undermine the kind of the distinction between first and second nature and reaffirm the continuity between human doing and non-human doing, but without simply, you know, without kind of dissolving what they take to be kind of crucial kind of discontinuities. Hence their distinction between the kind of, which is often elided in discussions of the book, between the three fundamental varieties of strategy, what they call the kind of the physical, you know, the physical, the biomorphic, and the allocentric or anthropomorphic, okay?
So, they, so yeah, so it's kind of, it's pragmatism, it's a pragmatism where thinking and doing are supposed to be kind of, you know, conjoined, but, you know, what is to be done and how it's to be done is going to be kind of characterized in terms of this, you know, fast, this ontological construction, this kind of, in which everything is doing something, everything is expressing something, everything is, you know, kind of expressing some kind of potency of being to a greater or lesser extent, depending on its characteristics. So, yeah, so in a way, it's a kind of naturalism, but that's one of my objections to it.
It's a kind of, they don't use the word metaphysical, but you could say it is a kind of traditional metaphysical naturalism, which wants to, you know, abolish the idea of a hierarchical discontinuity between nature and culture, and want to say that everything that is understood as specifically cultural can also be understood in terms of these, you know, ubiquitous ontological processes. but while at the same time, you know, retaining a kind of, you know, a strategic privilege for the human, again, it's often disregarded because they claim that it's precisely, you know, on the, what
they call the, you know, the anthropomorphic or allocentric strata that, you know, humans can can do more to give, you know, to express this, the de-territorialized or whatever you want to call it, than, you know, than other creatures or life forms. And my criticism is that I think that that's again that um re-injection of the normative and the natural is it's very seductive and it's it's done in a way this is one of the most sophisticated versions of it but it's also kind of
you know objectionable um objectionable you know on philosophical grounds and on political grounds. And as I said, I mean, I'm just repeating what I said at the beginning, because I think the true, you know, it's Marx is the philosopher who understands, it seems to me, how the conditions under which, you know, what we can, since what we know about the world, once we understand that what we know about the world is a function of our social relations and what we do without knowing that we're doing it. Understanding how social relations condition
and constrain both our possibilities of thinking and doing entails that nothing less of a social revolution, a complete radical reconfiguration of social relations, you know, can truly, you know, in a way can truly liberate thinking, okay? It's only if we change, you know, modes of social reproduction, what we do every day without understanding that we're doing it, that we can hope to discover those aspects of the world that are currently imperceptible or recluded from us. So I think that this is why I think that there's a kind of a radical
epistemological promise encoded in Marx's kind of revolutionary project. And it's because it's precisely the philosophy that thinks its task is to kind of ratify the rationality of the actual or to find a clever and ingenious way of saying how things really have to be the way they have to be, it's only by completely rejecting this, you know, on the basis of a program of like realizing freedom in the most radical sense that we can come to know, we can both become in ways which are currently unenvisageable for us, and also come to, you know, to know
those aspects of the world which are shrouded from us because of our, you know prejudices and preconceptions so in a way that's why it goes back to the Spinoza question is like if there's an infinity of attributes okay why can't you know them you know you know that you know you know that there's only two and but your account implies that you should be able to kind of to express the other ones as well so you can't just stop and say you know, you have to explain why you can't, why thinking, which is itself supposed to be a manifestation of qualitative infinity, can't register, which is to say can't kind of successfully
manifest this qualitative infinity. And Marx's answer is that, yeah, that would only become possible through a complete transformation of our social being and therefore of our modes of perception and thinking. Can I just wanted to maybe just ask another question if it's okay? I mean, I think in Marx's work, there's a real tension between, you know, you before, I think when you described Marx, you spoke about it in a certain way, as a kind of continuation of the Hegelian project in a certain sense, right? That, you know, this is something that's going to be worked out kind of on the terrain of representation.
And once we bring about, you know, social revolution, this will enable answering those questions in a better way. You know, I also think within Marx's work, there's a strong critique of, you know, representation of the Hegelian sort. So of course, Marx says that, you know, Hegel's logic is the logic of political economy, right? And specifically, he links up the way that Hegel interprets history to the category of labor, right? Which we could go and discuss even the relationship between that and Smith and sort of Newton's physics. But part of the idea here is that, you know, in a way, what we call the labor of the negative is in a sense, human labor, right? Insofar as the rational in Hegel as sort of
capital or dead labor, which directs, you know, which, which governs over the real, right, which is represented as labor in this sort of comparison. And, you know, I think, and of course, you know, compared to certain past systems, you can say there's kind of fluid, somewhat more fluid relationship between the two. But I think, you know, in many respects, Marx can be seen as challenging that. And I think so I think if you stay within kind of the Hegelian paradigm, right? If you say, well, you know, representation, this is a, you know, the trans historical kind of problematic that we're trying to work out, which I think actually elides a lot of important distinctions as well about, you know, how representation itself is conceived, you know, where does the subject object distinction come from? Where does the notion of substance come from?
But if you stay within that perspective, there are certain problems which emerge, right? So I'm thinking in a way of, Ben Woodard has a great essay called User Errors, and he's talking about Brandon. And he says, you know, Brandon seems to go too far in a certain way of presupposing the kind of quality of reasoners. And when I when I read that, I was thinking about Marx's comments on commodity exchange. In the first chapter of Capital, where he kind of discusses commodity exchange in this abstract fashion, right, you know, in which people are just making goods and exchanging them freely. But throughout Capital, what he shows is that there's no actual equality to the structure. So what Marx is suggesting here is that, you know, if we even if we analyze the world on the terrain of representation, right, you know, and sort of privilege, you know, these kind of individual or atomized units whose representation then maybe indexes, right, to a
figure of the rational, right, which would be like accreted dead labor, that this doesn't do justice to the real structure of reality. I think if there's a problem in Marx's work, it's that because he sees the focus on representation as being, I think, characteristic of, you know, the history of the value form and the capitalist mode of production. He makes certain suggestions about what, you know, what thinking on representation would represent, but he's not able to or willing to cash them out because he wants his critique of capital to be an imminent critique. But that's sort of where I see Deleuze as entering this debate in a way, because I see Deleuze as trying to, you know if we're going to talk about dualism communism you know using this sort of expressive model to try to think in an ontological manner that is you know beyond representation and beyond
capital but maybe you could say that he goes too fast right and then in a certain way ends up reprising certain structures or presumptions which are precisely capitalist in nature which is like badia or something we'd criticize him for right um yes i mean um I mean, I'm not sure, I mean, it was a complicated comment, and you began by talking about representation, and the, I mean, Hegel is already a kind of, you know, many commentators have now pointed out, is, you know, Hegel is already a critic of representation. There's a, you know, kind of very detailed, Hegel thinks that kind of to think philosophically is to think beyond representation.
In Hegel, you know, it's the, you know, the distinction between reason and understanding, you know, the understanding is representational, but reason kind of, you know, can think beyond, in and through kind of the structural contradictions of representation, but it can't dispense with it. And I think that it's one thing, I mean, so in a way, the critique of representation is not peculiar to kind of the 20th century philosophy. It doesn't begin with Heidegger and, you know, consummate itself with kind of Deleuze and Guattari. In Hegel, in a way, what they're doing is that their critique is an alternative to Hegel's critique. It's because they reject
the consequences of the Hegelian critique of representation that they propose this alternative critique which reactivates ontology. And what seems to me really important about Hegel's critique is that he says that you can't oppose reason to representation. Only representation would oppose reasons to representation. The point is, you know, representation is indispensable. You need to represent, you need opposition, contrariety, truth, falsity, etc., categorization, in order to kind of to pinpoint the fundamental contradictions, the fundamental kind of
inconsistency or impasses which points to something you know which are the indices of the in itself okay or what kind of uh what concept and what conceptual categorization you know fails to you know successfully integrate and synthesize but the point is that this you know failure can then be overcome you know through a higher kind through dialectical kind of you know reasoning um and at the point is that at the point at which dialectical reasoning consummates simply in the identification of you know the actual and the rational in a way is where marx's critique this is where marx would say that um
Hegel has perhaps conceded, you know, it's one thing to insist on the indissociability of reason and representation. But there's a point at which if you simply, you know, the speculative identity of thinking and being need not entail the philosophical ratification of the actual. And Marx then sees that this ratification is based on a failure to recognize what is operating behind the back of reason's own kind of critique of representation.
In other words, that there are social forms that structure reason's own dialectical articulation of the blind spots of representation. Okay, so that's and Marx in Capital, the critique of political economy, you know, in a way is a point at which you use a kind of speculative logic to kind of to show how, you know, thinking can grasp these abstract social forms that condition thinking itself behind its back. and doing so is the precondition for it's by identifying these kind of social forms
these real abstractions that you pave, you prepare a social transformation now I think that's my response of the first half of your comment. And then, can you remind me of, you know, yeah, I don't think that does justice to kind of the last bit you said about Deleuze and Guattari, that in a way, okay, Marxist point is that this is what, unless you understand how philosophical logic is itself socially constrained,
how the logic, even abstract philosophical conceptualization, is still unconsciously inflected and structured by these opaque social forms, which philosophical self-consciousness or philosophical self-reflection cannot see. This is what Marx is exposing. okay so this is what philosophy and the point is that this is not something that philosophy can simply integrate and continue doing business as usual because these that you have a of a social unconscious there the idea is that there are kind of things you know we generate through our practical kind of, you know, reproductive activities, these structures that prevent us,
prevent self-consciousness from, you know, transparently kind of grasping the structure of the actual. So that doing generates opacity within the actual itself, and it's only by registering these blind spots in philosophical self-consciousness that you can really kind of take the next step forward and the point would be that Deleuze and Guattari although they kind of try to kind of align Marx and Freud Marxism and psychoanalysis in a way they by re-ontologizing them they kind of miss the force of the most radical aspects of an eminent critique.
The idea that the logic, the forms of logic commensurate with philosophical self-consciousness are conditioned by real abstractions or kind of social logics that are refractory to consciousness. Can I ask a question? Yes. How do you think then Marx and maybe Freud or even Lacan may be used as a supplement or even a critique of brandon and sellers account of reason and maybe their brandon's in particular supposition of this transparency of commitments.
Okay, yes, this is the key. Well, this is something I'm working on. It's very, so I think the, from a Marxian viewpoint, I mean, in a way, the, the, the rejection, you know, the rejection of what Seiler's calls the framework of givenness, because I think it's important to, you know, the myth of the given isn't just kind of empiricism or naive positivism. What Seiler's calls the framework of givenness is operative at the level of a kind of, you know, transcendental phenomenology and a kind of, you know, metaphysical rationalism as well. If you think that thinking or self-consciousness is purely transparent to itself that's another manifestation of you know the you know the framework of givenness
so in a way and there's a difference between sellers and brand of years i think that sellers does recognize that there's something that in a way um they're what he calls representings in themselves non-conceptual representings you know are not themselves transparent to um you know self-consciousness, you know, or, you know, the resources of the space of reason. Whereas I think that for Brandom, in a sense, and part of the, you know, I think the problem perhaps with Brandom is that there is this assumption that instead of the distinction between, you know, the, in a way, the kind of the phenomenal and the noumenal, which Brandom rejects as a kind of Kantian residue in Salas, you simply have the
implicit and explicit. So in other words, with brandon there are, you know, implicit kind of, you know, activities which, you know, condition, you know, are thinking and doing and it's, they can simply be rendered explicit. The task is of explicitation and explicitation is the way that coming to self-consciousness um and i wait the point the marxian point would be that there are um you know to say that you know we we do things without knowing that we're doing them is to say that um it's not to say that we kind of um you know they're implicit you know in our
practices and they've simply you know to be rendered explicit is to say that they are you know our self-consciousness is structured around their their occlusion okay in a way the condition of transparency in in one register is the opacity at the level of you know uh social practice So in a way, so that the space of reasons is, it's not simply that the space of reasons is kind of embedded in these kind of, you know, opaque social practices, is that it would be that the kind of space of reasons
is actually kind of traversed or kind of, you know, split by these, in a way, by kind of unconscious social forms on the one hand and libidinal dynamics on the other hand. Now, this is not to say that they cannot be, that they're unconceptualized. Of course, they can be conceptualized. and Marx and Freud provide the resources for conceptualizing them, but the way in which they do this shows that the power, our autonomy, our power of self-transformation, our freedom, can't simply be kind of adjudicated
at the level of self-consciousness, as Hegel most famously thought. So that the desire of self-consciousness, the desire that elaborates in and through self-consciousness, which leads to the kind of, you know, because self-consciousness desires itself, desires another self-consciousness, freedom as this kind of intersubjective realization is insufficient unless one understands how this desire is kind of vitiated by these unconscious social structures and drives, libidinal kind of drives. So in a way, it's weirdly, I actually think that Sellers is more compatible
with Marx and Freud than Branden. I think there's more space in Sellers for Marx and Freud than perhaps there is in Branden. Partly, I think, because he underestimates, in a way the, I mean his whole kind of accounts, I think his characterization of Marx and Freud as genealogists is inadequate. I think Nietzsche might be a genealogist and Nietzsche-Foucauldianism is genealogical, but I don't think Marx and Freud are genealogists. And what their theoretical, I mean, in a way, they're the most radical kind of heirs of the Enlightenment.
In a way, Enlightenment enlightens itself by seeing its own kind of blindnesses, its own kind of congenital blindness. And then, and the consequence of that is, I think, still the consequences of that kind of realization are still being worked out. I mean, the Frankfurt School, Adorno, most kind of impressively struggles with this legacy. But I think we're still at that moment of trying to work out the long term ramifications of the achievements of Marx and Freud vis-a-vis Kant and Hegel. To be fair, what's regarding...
So I have to say, I think that I'm totally in agreement concerning Brandom's reading of Marx. And I think he accepts this kind of rather middle brow bracketing of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx as pursuing the hermeneutics of suspicion, which kind of leaves them this sort of undifferentiated slop of critique or paranoid reading or whatever you want to call it. So I think Brandom is quite unforgivably ham-fisted when it comes to Marx. But as a reader of Hegel, I think this catchphrase of his, Hegel's non-psychological conception of the conceptual, I think quite considering the non-psychological conception of the conceptual and Marx's modal analysis, probably to me would present some problems with bracketing Marx and Freud so simply.
because I feel like there's often a shift in registers into sort of slipping in this sort of Zizekian, Lacanian move of sort of saying, well, Marx was thinking of things in terms of the unconscious, which I think, especially having read Brandom, I think it's quite difficult to make the case that that's what he was doing. Like when I read Brandom and I read Marx's modal analysis, to me, it seems very clear that this process of, like clearly there are commonalities between Freud and Marx, but quite clearly Marx's siding is more with Hegelian consciousness and eminence and so on, and crystals having a consciousness and so on than Freud. I mean, that's my own little axe to grind. But I think that's sort of what...
Brandon shouldn't be underestimated simply by his reading of Marx in terms of the consequences he's going to cast on Marxian. Sure, no, and no, Brandom's, you know, engagement with Hegel is enormously kind of powerful. And I mean, I'm still trying to work out, you know, how much of it I would accept. But no, I take your point. I do take your point, however, and I don't propose simply to align Marx with Freud at the level of, I think Marx, as far as I know, doesn't use the term, but I'm unconscious.
but I simply mean that the idea that there's something, although Marx's own, the critique of political economy, is in a way the most acute kind of form of, you know, social self-consciousness, like pointing out how, you know, in a way it's critical in the sense that it's trying to show how the conditions, you know, that the categories of political economy can only successfully represent. social reality on the basis of social conditions, social relations, which political economy also occludes. So in a way, it represents by blotting out something. And in this sense,
so when I use the word unconscious in Marx, I'm saying that what Marx is trying to do is to show how the conditions for us, you know, self-consciousness, the self-consciousness that Hegel is trying to kind of, you know, articulate involves also recognizing these, you know, how, in a way, kind of, you know, the way in which blindness is a condition of vision in certain circumstances. And that's why it's a critique of political economy in both a kind of Kantian sense as well. It's showing the conditions of possibility
under which the categories of political economy can kind of successfully align with social reality while also, you know, So that successful representation requires some kind of misrepresentation on another level. And it's that relation between, I guess, successfully representing and misrepresenting, or the role of misrepresentation and representation, which is, you know, that's what kind of socially necessary false consciousness is. that you know you have to it's socially necessary it's not just a subjective illusion
but thanks thanks for that point um another parallel um i haven't uh heard you um mention or sort of um talk about before um i don't I don't know if you've read Carl Sachs' book about random and McDowell. So Carl Sachs makes the point that one limitation of random is that RDRDs are really helpful, but they're something that something can do by rusting. They're also something that a parrot can do. So he's basically saying two plies isn't enough plies to talk about experience and grasping.
his answer seems like a bit of a Baroque one he borrows from Merleau-Ponty so it's all sellers sellers sellers plus Merleau-Ponty to sort of fill in that gap which for you I think I'm basically entirely using your work but I think that this is an interesting area so our intendings are already in some way impregnated by these past conditions and we can look at it through this psychoanalytic Freudian lens. I'm at the moment looking at it in a slightly different way which is probably closer to the Merleau-Ponty side of it so
Ilyenkov will talk about how it's actually not in me it's in the piece of wood that we have this that the part of the desire that i feel in using a piece of wood is already in the piece of wood in and in that it is treated as a particular piece of wood to me so that basically these things are within phenomenology um in the world so the world like solicits or invites um certain actions um I wonder whether you have a position on these ideas of affordances and solicitations as a way to explain unconscious experience, sorry, non-conceptual experience. Okay.
Yes, no, I know I've read Carl's book. I think it's a great book. So the key distinction he makes is between, you know, discursive intentionality, which he thinks Brandon, you know, kind of gives a good account of. a somatic intentionality, which he thinks is required to kind of, in a way, to, you know, to bridge this gap, okay? Otherwise, so as not to introduce a kind of an unviable kind of, you know, hiatus between RDRDs, reliable differential responsive dispositions, which are ubiquitous in nature, like rusting iron, and full-fledged kind of, you know, sapience, okay?
So he talks about bifurcated intentionality. So intentionality is bifurcated between the somatic and the discursive. And Merleau-Ponty's work, especially his kind of phenomenology of perception, shows how somatic intentionality is, in some sense, a precondition for discursive intentionality. I mean, I think, in a way, I mean, this is a tricky point, but I see that there's the dangers of an implausible kind of hiatus between sentience and sapience, you know, as if, you know, you have to kind of
try to articulate, you distinguish sapience from sentience and insist on its sapience as the reducibility of the sentience, but you have to somehow articulate them without simply kind of showing that one you know kind of ineluctably emerges from the other but the danger of bifurcating intentionality is that somatic intentionality in a phenomenological register presupposes a concept of sense of meaning and a way of which is of non-conceptual meaning which I find problematic. And this is a residue of Heideggerianism which I also find problematic in that Dasein's, you know, Dasein has, so to speak, a kind of a preconceptual understanding
of its environment, its ability to kind of to cope, its skillful coping, its ability to kind of to navigate the world and to use things requires this recognition of different ways of being, the different ways in which things are manifest or available. But this understanding is not yet conceptual. It can be rendered conceptual, but it's not yet, it's pre-ontological understanding. Now the problem is that, and I see it that, so for Myrtle Pontier, he shifts it to this
kind of register of embodiments, and our sensory capacity squares, our sensory capacities are already kind of intentional. intentionality presupposes the intending of a sense or of a meaning. And I think, you know, it seems to me that the strength of this post-Kantium account is to insist that kind of, you know, meaning, you know, it's insist that, you know, meaning, words are not signs, that meanings are not simply indices or indexes for practical transactions between an organism and its environment.
And the danger of reintroducing something like full-fledged intentionality, intentionality of using the word intentionality in a somatic register is that there is this kind of layer of non-conceptual meaning which has to be always already there which is transcendental okay so it because itself it's it can't be constituted it seems by any kind of uh you know it's the condition of intelligibility for kind of at the explicit conceptual level so it itself is in some sense kind of you know there or given that and that this would be and I think there's a problem there so I think that the part I think that in a way if one insists on rejecting the framework or givenness one has to insist that meaning is conceptual and that
you know it can be very very kind of you know complex and you know but I think that if you start to kind of spread meaning you know over the world re-infuse the kind of the world or the sensory realm with meaning in this sense what's meaning in this full fledged sense while insisting that it's kind of not conceptual that's kind of you know i think worries over at least it kind of it worries me so I think that and here actually I think that psychoanalysis is like actually maybe Lacanian psychoanalysis is very kind of interesting because it says that there
is you know a register of unconscious meaning that there is a kind of a level the level of you know there's a domain of signification you know in this which conditions kind of consciousness, but it can't be cashed out in terms of intentionality. And here, I mean, although I'm just talking off the top of my head, but I'd be more inclined to go, if you wanted to kind of expose the non-conceptual conditions of conceptualization or the non-discursive conditions for discursive intentionality,
then it seems to me that it would be better to do in a kind of psychoanalytic register where you have this account of unconscious kind of signification, which is not ontologized. I mean, the key thing is it's not ontologized and it's not taken to be kind of this, you know, that unfortunate expression of Merle-Ponty's, of course, you know, the flesh of the world, you know. So I'm very sympathetic to kind of Carl's account. And I don't have a kind of, it's not as if I have a kind of, I see the problem. I don't have a satisfactory alternative, but I'd be very reluctant.
I don't think it's possible simply to split intentionality down the middle in this way. And I think in some sense you have to reserve intentionality to the discursive level at which Brandon articulates it you know and then expose both its you know its libidinal and kind of socio-historical conditions but that's obviously that's very very difficult thank you I don't know if that's an adequate answer
I mean I'm far closer to your work in answering it I know he's not treated as a philosopher but just to explain very easily the way I mix your work with Vygotsky is just in terms of this standpoint that i have so um because of my affect i'm standing a certain way i'm in a certain position and because i'm in a certain position certain things are um in reach so like it affects my activity it's within my activity would be the like um other tradition of doing it which is um in the past um set itself up against both phenomenology
and psychoanalysis within the activity theory school we would say this thing which you're calling non-conceptual intentionality is a facet of the dialectical progress of the activity itself and because you because i have a body in the material world that there are things that i don't attribute as me that are nonetheless affecting me and being felt by me. Exactly, but those things I think would have to be so, I mean, even in the case, they would be socially, historically, the reason that they are significant for you, the reason you care about them, the reason, you know, whatever affordances they provide would be kind of socially,
historically kind of, you know, mediated. So even your relationship to your kind of, trees, plants, trees and rocks, like, you know, would still be kind of mediated by this, you know, social historical kind of domain. So I would resist the idea that affordances, that we can talk about affordances in a purely biological or kind of neurophysiological register. Yeah, no, it's exactly not that. It's called cultural historical psychology. So that's the Paul Paul You know access to a purer whatever It's But but nonetheless there's something None of the one categories Captures the thing in ways that exhaust it and
That's why There's still like a role to talk about Affect and to say that Some of it is being historically accumulated And Some of it of it is like outside of my um view and structuring me because of concrete material conditions like in a different shape to the conceptual so it's still structured um and i don't think about it independent of my concepts of it but nonetheless um it's still um changing in a systematic way and those systems of, let's say there was an earthquake,
then obviously that earthquake. Oh, well, no, the best example is Jonathan Lear's one. He criticizes Brandon saying when all the buffalo were killed, the crow way of life, it's not like they were like, what is the reason for this? The whole basis of things being the reason for other things collapsed when the buffalo died because that happens to have actually been a type of given. There was a way in which they had a standpoint towards the world which they hadn't realized was a given that wasn't to do. It's absolutely historical.
Of course, it's culturally historical and yet it's the buffalo. Yes. I agree. That's very helpful, actually. Thanks. I would like to pose just one more question, although this might be a little off topic. it seems that some post-Cantinian philosophers, especially even post-Hagelian philosophers, especially those who are more inclined to emancipatory politics, have criticized and tried to criticize this concept of possibility
as some sort of restriction on emancipatory politics. Even Hegel has this dismissal of the category of possibility and the science of logic, but you criticise the category of possibility. Even Adorno does it sometimes. I wonder what would your take on this be? As the category of possibility, do you think does it limit any sort of conception of emancipation? Okay, I'm increasingly convinced. I think that one way to understand, for instance, the concerns of post-war French philosophy and of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, but also
like you know Badiou is this attempt to kind of to develop a concept of possibility severed from substance and essence. In other words, what after the failure of the kind of you know the revolutionary emancipatory projects of the 20th century, the idea that there's this kind of this this deadlock, and we need to kind of think possibility severed from actuality. So we need a kind of a conception of possibility that would be decoupled from the actual, so that, in a way, so that, you know, what is possible would no longer be kind of circumscribed
by substantial potentials or the range of potentialities that are kind of, you know, circumscribed by an essence. And I think that that is a kind of a, I think also Adorno, like in a way, is, you know, preoccupied with this issue. and the danger then is that if you kind of once you decouple possibility from actuality and you say you know something can be or something might be that cannot be you know that is not predetermined by what is you know then the danger is that it
becomes a purely transcendent possibility, which is kind of relegated to that, which is no longer kind of, you know, practically effectual. It's not a possibility that you, you know, that can be realized in and through a practice, okay? And the danger then is of a kind of, you know, the resort to kind of, to either, you know, to theological kind of, it becomes an absolute alterity. Things could be otherwise, we know not how. And, you know, so I think, yeah, the reason that people want to, if you don't believe
that things could be otherwise, even if we know not how, it seems you cannot but resign yourself to affirming the actual, which you can't do if you are committed to human emancipation. So I think, yeah, this is a kind of a key problem, and the problem is to kind of find a you know, a concept of possibility or a concept of transformation, which is no longer kind of tethered to what is represented as actual, but is also kind of, you know, could be effectuated through practice.
In other words, it's something that could be realized. Because if you have pure possibility or pure potentiality, without any possible kind of register of actualization, then you have divine transcendence. That's God. God can be anything. his potencies are unconstrained by anything that we can recognize as actual because he is nothing but pure he's the coincidence of acting so I think the problem is to kind of
to come up with, to construct a concept of, to think of a concept of possibility that would be irreducible to representation, but without being relegated to the domain of transcendence, of unknowable transcendence. And in a way, all these discourses about the events, but also about redemption, the standpoint of redemption and Adorno, I think have to do with this. so yeah I think it's and in a way kind of part of like you know the Deleuze concept of becoming is also like
becoming is a kind of precisely is not the actualization of a pre-existing potency the concept of becoming is an alternative to the concept of potentiality because potentiality is always anchored in actuality but But in the kind of the Delusion case, it goes with this kind of this ontology. You know, becoming is rendered imminent by being ontologized, because everything is becoming, and it's just about degrees of becoming and rates of becoming. So the problem is, how do you do this? How do you liberate possibility from the prison of actuality
without either resorting to absolute transcendence or without affirming, saying that everything is really becoming, but we just don't recognize it? And I think that's a problem. I don't know how to resolve it, but I think it's a really key problem. Thank you.