Welcome to lecture 3.1 on the work of the CCIU. This lecture and these lectures coming up are on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who wrote Capitalism and Schizophrenia and What is Philosophy and some other texts. But primarily for the CCIU they were utilising Deleuze and Guattari's two volume texts Capitalism and Schizophrenia which is made up of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, and they were utilising this in a Kantian way to develop a structure of communication between the inside and the outside. They were using the theorisations of Deleuze and Guattari as a way in which we can communicate with the
outside and how this can become possible via the utilisation of their philosophy. Now, before starting this lecture and these lectures, I should just mention that if you've never read any Deleuze or Qutari before, that won't be a problem. I've tried to make this lecture as accessible as possible. Now, with that said, Deleuze is renowned for his difficulty and complexity, but luckily the concepts we're dealing with are, for Deleuze, relatively simple. Deleuze and Qutari, when working together, get relatively abstract, combining literature, philosophy, poetry, science, mathematics, occultism, and critique to reach some truly unique conclusions. Alongside this, I believe one should attend to Deleuze-Ouartarian philosophy as if they themselves are not entirely human. Any attachments to anthropocentric or human-centric ideas or thinking is bound to
hold you back when thinking about their overarching ideas, especially with regards to the CCIU, and especially with regards to the work of Nick Land. It's more helpful to think of Deleuze-Ouartarian philosophy as a-human as opposed to inhuman, which still holds itself in an antagonistic relationship with man, whereas a human is sort of apathetic to human. They're not really a part of this, but we just use the subject as a means to extrapolate on various other ideas of process and machination. When Deleuze and Guattari do mention man or humanity, it's usually in relation to the way in which a process is acting on them, or through them, or with them, and the actions of the process and the process itself are of interest, and the symptoms of the process within man, but not actually the man himself. Some Deleuze and Qatari scholars would probably disagree,
but I'm reading this in the light of the CCIU, and in their light, we are talking largely about the process of capitalism and process generally. I'll begin where I left off with the quote from the CCIU themselves regarding their reality and reality construction. The quote goes, nothing is true because everything is under production, because the future is a fiction. It has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. CCRU uses and is used by hyperstition to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually reinvent itself. This is a relatively tough statement with regards to continental philosophy, and it's relatively tough to take apart, especially if one is encountering Kant for the first time,
and especially if one is encountering Delos and Guattari for the first time. However, it can be deciphered within the framework I've already laid out, and I'll use that terminology of the inside-outside split as I've previously explained it as a way to understand this quote. Because for me, this quote holds many of the secrets of the CCRU and the way in which they communicate between the inside and the outside. Now, there are two parts to this sentence which beg further exploration, namely underproduction and traffic with the virtual. all. These might seem like relatively innocent terms, but they're both Deleuze-Equotarian terminology as put forth in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. However, I won't begin with Capitalism and Schizophrenia itself. I'll begin with Jill Deleuze's solo work and build up piece
by piece to form a greater, more complex transcendental structure, which we can hopefully use for greater clarity of understanding in relation to what CCIU are doing philosophically and practically. Consider this sort of a rather radical crash course in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Quattari and their work together. I will begin with very basic definitions of Deleuze's synthesis of time or syntheses of time as found within his work in Difference and Repetition. When these are understood in connection with another Deleuzean conception of the virtual and actual, we begin to understand the temporally communicative abilities of the virtual. We begin to understand how a communication between the inside and the outside in abstract might be
possible. To define the first Deleuzean synthesis of time, it's to understand the present as a process, a passive synthesis. The way in which man synthesizes his reality as representation, as explained in the first two lectures, where the past and the future, they're folded into a passing present as Deleuze calls it. So man is synthesizing his time and he's perceiving his time in the present and this for Deleuze is called a passing present. So this present is a single present and this present is always transforming in its relation to the passive alterations of the past and the passive alterations of the future. The way in which man synthesizes in the first synthesis is in a way which is entirely process-based. His synthesis of the past is one
of retention and retaining. He retains the past, which has just happened within the present or now. In much the same manner, the way in which he synthesizes the future is a manner of expectation. He is waiting or expecting for something to come in the future. Now, I must be clear here that when I state the way in which man synthesizes here is not psychological nor phenomenological. Though these possibilities will come up later in relation to the CCIU's activities, these acts of retention and expectation are simply formal processes part of the whole. They're passive. In the first synthesis, man isn't using the past to change the future and he's also not trying to alter things to change the future generally. And so both these processes, passive processes, are subsumed into
the single process which is known for man as the present or the the passing present one can quickly see that the very conception of the present in the form posited by this first synthesis can only happen on the inside because man is synthesizing what he perceives within synthesized temporality which this denotes a linear temporal framework so the idea of past present future we are of course on the inside because it is on the inside where linear time happens that is the only place it can be perceived that is each present itself a synthesis of man's retention of the past and expectation of the future is called by de leuze as i've stated a passing present it is the succession of these passing presents we can understand as the sequence given to us by what kant called the
inner sense. So Deleuze's first synthesis then is sort of a alteration of the Kantian notion of inner sense, a needed stepping stone to form the next two syntheses. Now let's go on to Deleuze's second synthesis which deals largely with the retention of the past which is part of the passing present of the first synthesis. So the second synthesis deals with the way in which our process of synthesis alters this retention into something much larger. The way in which we synthesise the past, the retention of the past, is altered in this second synthesis. The second synthesis alters the past into what Deleuze calls a pure past, a past which determines that the
passing present must pass, and also how it must pass, a past which determines the form of the passing present. So the pure past is the past which determines the form of the current present or the passing present, but which doesn't determine it. So the second synthesis, this pure past, it doesn't determine the current present or the passing present. It doesn't determine or cause any particular passing present and can be defined as the former index which led to this passing present. This notion of determination, which I previously extrapolated as the inner sense, does have a clear difference. So there is a difference here between the pure past and the inner sense of Kant. That is, Deleuze's second synthesis of time and Kant's inner sense
aren't synonymous. Kant's inner sense is an ordering of time, a sequence, whereas Deleuze's second synthesis of time is an indexing, relating one previous memory to another to form a previous sequence, as opposed to sensing the present and assuming a relationship of cause and effect. For Kant, the present is in effect. For Deleuze, the present is indexed against a previous lineage of passing presents, the form of which is not determined by any sensing or sense data. For man to attend to this pure past, the one of Deleuze's second synthesis, his memory begins to become active. The aforementioned passing present of the first synthesis is passive. That's really key to remember. and this trait carries over into the second synthesis with one minor alteration which is
as I've stated the active memory. So the active memory of the second synthesis allows for a transformation of the present into an aiming present or an aimed present wherein man can aim his memory back upon an indexed series of passing presents. Let's say there have been 30 passing presence in a man's life. Deleuze is never this cut and dry, this is merely an example. With an active memory, or an aimed memory, man can aim his meaning, if he likes, at one of these passing presence in his lifetime, in his index of 30. So he can aim his present towards one of the index passing presence as a means for acquisition of this knowledge. Now this is where the terminology of the action and the virtue come into play, but I'll just go over that last
bit there. So if you think about a ball hitting a vase and then the vase hits the floor and then the vase smashes all over the floor and one of the bits hits the wall so we have hitting the wall and then we go back to the smash and then we go back to the vase hitting the floor and then we go back to the vase falling and then we go back to the ball hitting the vase and we go back to the ball being thrown so we sort of have six or seven passing passing presents there and we can call that an index and what we can do is in the second synthesis we can actually aim our memory you can sort of think back to how things happened in that index so you could aim your memory at the vase falling or aim your memory at the ball hitting the vase. Now this in itself isn't necessarily useless but without connections to other things we can't do too much with it so let's start to
build a bit of a toolbox here and this is where the terminology of the actual and the virtual come into play and these are some extremely key theorizations which are truly needed to understand how communication between the inside and the outside is possible. So the the virtual and the actual as theorized once again primarily by Deleuze. Obviously other philosophers, specifically largely continental philosophers, have utilized concepts of virtuality time and time again but Deleuze's conception is the one CCRU are using so that's one we're going to stick with and it's the one which is sort of the clearest formation of a system which we can use. Let's take a laptop as our object of attention regarding the virtual and the actual. The actual is expressed in one's
encounter with the phenomenological or representational reality of the eye on the inside, an object of sensation. The laptop is hard, clunky, and heavy. Within the actuality of the laptop, all its actuals, resides the virtual or the virtual aspects of it. These are relational aspects and transferable attributes of the object which posit virtual connections to other objects and things and ideas and basically everything. So heaviness, hardness, etc. Transferable attributes which we can attribute to various things. Attributes which all coexist on the plane of the virtual or a plane of possibility which itself is located on the outside. So you're already seeing
here. We have the actual on the inside which is the phenomenological and representational realities which we synthesize via our usual means, via our senses. But within these is these conceptions of the virtual, and these are the things we often talk about in everyday life, which connects things in an abstract manner which is atemporal, because it's not beholden to the time and space of representation, because it's their transferable abstract virtual attributes. So if the ball is representationally heavy, there's an abstract virtual attribute of heaviness which can then be applied to various other things. Now in relation to the index series of pasts given in Deleuze's second synthesis of time,
we can see that the past and present, man's now, is actually a compound of virtual times or virtualities folded into a single passing present. As such, if man was to desire a sponge, it's for man to desire spongeness or sponginess or the virtual attributes which equate to what a sponge would be in actuality. So it's for him to aim his active memory back towards index notions of spongeness within his pure past as a means to acquire his present desire and actualise it. No one desires the actual thing, they desire the virtual thing, and what they receive is the actualisation of it, which can only be received in the past and present.
Because we can't attend to actualities which have since gone by, because they have been indexed as pure pasts and have since become memories and virtualities. The structure of such a reality is a relation between the virtual and actual, a utilisation of one to manifest the other. there is some glaring differences here between Kant and Deleuze. In fact, the concept of virtuality is one of the areas in which Deleuzean philosophy begins to truly separate itself quite drastically from Kantian philosophy. Whereas Kant formed his transcendental system as a legislative idea, that is, he was taking reason to core and putting everything in its place, Deleuze is cracking that open with his rather typical productive philosophy, and attempting to push and alter these concepts in such a manner that they become productive. Deleuze is always
pushing things to their limit in this way. When man desires something, then what is desired is not the actual roughness, which is merely a representation. A man does not desire the representation itself. He desires what it is which composes the representation, what it is behind the representation. What is desired is something sent in from the outside. The present is never desired in itself, only in relation to a past virtuality. Of course, as stated, Deleuze does tend to lean away from human-centric viewpoints. However, as the CCRU are bodies dealing with the possibility of exit, desire is important here. And so, for a potentiality of exit or escape, one cannot search amongst phenomena, for that is always going to be a useless pursuit. It's going to be like a dog
chasing its tail, for phenomena and representation only lead to more phenomena and representation. So what one needs to investigate then is the virtualities which link and alter phenomena in what they are and the way in which they have an inherent relationship with time and the way in which they have an inherent relationship which isn't strictly phenomenological. In relation to time, these virtual or transferable attributes are retained in Deleuze's second synthesis of time. These virtualities for Deleuze are key for potential and potentiality. They are real without being actual, and they are ideal without being abstract. This realm of the virtual is, for Deleuze, an untapped source of potential and production. There is nothing predetermined
about the virtual as there is in the sequential Kantian framework. These virtualities are that which do not constrain the actual, but allow it to be born and emanate anew. But something even stranger happens with regard to the virtual and time. What locks the actual into a linearity of time is the fact that as material it has to happen in space, and as such has to happen within the temporality and spatiality of man's synthesis. It's locked to the full mode of synthesis, and yet the virtual, these aren't bodies, they are not material, and they're not locked to the fully forced, locked in, mandatory linear sequentiality the material is the virtual are effects separated from their causes by their inherent separation from matter they are not causes but ingenuity innovation nodes of
potential waiting within the transcendental to be picked up honed in on it doesn't copy the real but acts as its reaction the virtual is a principle of potential waiting to be picked up by those who know how or at least can figure out how. So I'll conclude these explanation of Deleuze's synthesis by expanding on his third synthesis in relation to the newly formed notion of the virtual and how time allows the innovative virtualities into the inside so that they become actual or in short how we can begin to theoretically communicate with the outside. The third synthesis is a theorization of fracturing in relation to the subject. But this is a fracturing of the Deleuzean
subject, of the subject as process within process within process. To articulate the third synthesis then, I shall first compound this theory into a practical activation of possible communication. Once all these syntheses are understood, we can return to the initial CCRU quote and understand how it is they are iminatising themselves into the culture via the outside, whilst at the same time communing with the outside as their form of theorisation. So at its most stripped back, the first synthesis is an understanding of the subject's place within Deleuze's continuation of critique, or of camp, that the subject and the inside are unable to control their relation and the effects put on them by the synthesis of the outside. That is, as stated before, the retention of the past and the expectation of the future within Deleuze's first synthesis
are not being determined by those who are doing the synthesizing. The retention and the expectation are only accepted. Man is entirely passive within the passing present. So now we move to the third synthesis. We place this first synthesis, the entire first synthesis, we place it onto the circle of Nietzsche's eternal return, Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of eternal return and eternal occurrence. This might seem as if we're drifting off, but Nietzsche's eternal return is relatively simple and is the underpinning of Deleuzean temporality. The eternal return or eternal occurrence is the idea that there is infinite time, but only a finite number of events. And as such, what occurs within the finite number of events will recur over and over and over again.
forever on a circle which spins forever infinitely there's a little more to expand upon here firstly we must understand that the past recurs what happened in the past will be re-experienced in the future and secondly it will be experienced again in the future as the same in every detail the concept of the same is its very own concept which will come up a little later thirdly recurrence as i've stated doesn't happen once or a few times but eternally forever it does not stop There's a psychological reading of recurrence regarding one's practical reason and outlook, in that once one understands recurrence as a lesson in overcoming one's bias, one can sort of overcome the future, and this idea of the future. However, Deleuze alters things, and within his first synthesis, this is largely useless.
For we understand that we cannot do anything about the past, and yet we still think ourselves able to do something about the future. So we can't do anything about the past, and yet we believe we can do something about the future. And yet, in non-linear Kantian time, where the past, the present, and the future aren't entirely what we think they are, this doesn't make sense at all. Because if we can't do something about the past, then we can't do anything about the future. Because these things aren't coming out of any certain area of time, they're just coming out of pure time. They are time. So this isn't right. This moralistic and ethical reading of the eternal return is commonplace, and yet rather empty. It's what we have to do with the eternal return which is important, especially important for the CCRU. For now we can understand, as man locked into synthesis of representation and locked into cyclic temporal terror,
the question of escape now becomes doubly important. And this is where the third synthesis comes in. This is not so much a saviour, but as it's the cut. it's the third synthesis of Deleuze is where everything becomes possible. The third synthesis there is upon the circle of the eternal return a cut, a fracture. Up until that cut the first synthesis was passive in its creation of a subject, a momentary or event-caged subject slash desiring machine which we'll get on to whom within that previously allowed section of first synthesis began to form a subject itself and this subject with the help of the first and
second syntheses begins to form its subject from the indexing of retained pasts and expected futures which it had no say in it is a subject core in the belly of a machine which has already been going the form of the first and second syntheses with their inherent passivity allow for the subject to be formed. The retention and expectation aspects of the second synthesis allow the subject to understand itself in relation to a pure past of indexed memories, or pasts, and also allows the subject to direct this formed self, which is formed from these pasts, towards an expectation of the future. The subject is then held in the passing present as a whole of its pasts and expectations. But what happens with the third synthesis?
The kaisura happens, the cut, the fracture, and it's inherent implication of a before and after, outside of the first and second synthesis. And it's a slice. As soon as you slice the circle, before the slice is a before, and after the slice is an after, which are no longer on the linear framework that once was. So what happens to the subject? The I of the subject is sliced. the subject itself is sliced, creating a temporal event. In this way, the third synthesis begins a transcendental ordering of time. The kaizura, the cut, is the drama of time. For with cutting and creation of a new event, when the slice happens, when the kaizura happens on the circle, on the
eternal return, there begins multiple relations between the event, between the before and the after between the slice it's worth noting that for deleuze there was never really such a thing as a beginning because in the transcendental manner or critique in combination with recurrence each beginning has always had its own beginning so a beginning is always a middle there's always an ordering there's always a catastrophic multiplicity of ordering and slicing and cutting going on everything is relational. A cut within the circle of time, a cut within recurrence, implies the beginning of an assemblage, or the middle of an assemblage, as Deleuze might say. For if there is now a clear before and after, you have the slice and you have the before
and you have the after of the slice, within a certain passing present, then an assemblage can begin, with its dependency reliant on an image or symbol standing in as the assemblage itself. So when you have the slice, an image forms, an image, an event image forms. The slice happens, there is a before, there and after. And you can almost draw a circle around this, nothing to do with the recurrence here, but you could box it in and say this itself is an image. There is an event happen in history, there's a before it and there's an after it, and that assemblage is an image of time. The times then assemble and they're synthesized in relation to subjects in the mode of the first and second syntheses. Passive, subjective conceptions of time created by a primary, transcendental, temporal assembly.
Or as Deleuze says in his very stereotypical jargon, indifference from repetition, on page 113. Non-localizable links, action at a distance, systems of replay, of resonances and echoes, objective chance, signals and signs, roles transcending spatial situations and temporal successions. successions. One or many of these synthetic times, as Deleuze puts it on page 93, are assembled upon an image standing as a symbol of the times assembled. A symbol, event, or event assembly of a synthesis is created from this cut in time. A novel, new action is dependent on this cut, for without a cut, without a fracture, without a break, it remains only a possibility. There is no
event, no assemblage, no time image without the new. The future is not continuation, it is fragmentation. But once there is this cut, then time has something to build from, something to react for or against. There is something allowing a new determination. But what of this future? Because ultimately when talking about the question of exit or escape, or the way in which the CCIU wishes to escape the human security system, it's a question of time and the future. For the only way in which one can escape their current and previous continual predicament is to find a way to make the future work for them. The question here then is one of the future, but not just any future, a new future, a future in which we can change it, in which we can assemble it, in which we can begin the ordering
ourselves. Whether or not a new future is possible, and if it is, how? For Deleuze, the new is produced in a present act and is conditioned by the third synthesis the circle that is the eternal return spins as an assemblage of times as an assemblage of assemblages of multiplicities of retention and expectation it makes its return or spin or cycle and is cut fractured and the previous cycle is knocked out of joint the circle of recurrence is dissented if you think of a circle with a point directly in its middle and it's spinning if you were to knock that circle just off the cycle continues the circle continues but it's descended from that initial point this time descended and spinning from a new temporal locale begins to spiral as such the
cut on the recurrence acts as the bringer of difference the future is the new cycle the eternal return has never had an originary position if viewed from the Deleuzean framework. It is an eternal spiral, descentred circle, mutating its temporal self by way of fragmentation into new different temporal assemblage, tightenings of spirals. So the way in which the new arrives should be understood. We can understand that Deleuze's third synthesis is that which allows the new to arrive, but the question still stands then. Where does the new arrive from? Whereabouts can we retrieve newness? Anyone with an acute analytical mind here will notice that what Deleuze is theorising here is how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. And it's my belief
that what the CCIU are doing is removing the question of how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible away from scholastic theorisation and toward practical exercise and application. for the ccriu it's not a question of whether it's possible theoretically it's a question of what methods are the most interesting and efficient for developing finding and giving birth to new knowledge how can we utilize this new temporal system of bringing the new in of bringing innovative time in via these syntheses how can we actually do that how can we use that what methods are there to make that happen i'll see you in the next lecture