Unknown Lands - Lecture 4

Okay, so that was just a sample from Nick Land's essay Meltdown set to audio visuals by the art collective Orphan Drift with whom Land worked and the CCOU worked extensively throughout the 90s. so the last two weeks of this course are basically going to be breaking down what the hell was that kind of thing okay yeah okay so although all of Land's writings from the earliest polemics against Canton Capital that we've looked at over the past three weeks to his more

mature works on Deleuze and Guattari and cybernetics that we're going to look at in these last two weeks. Although all of this is motivated by the same driving motive to critique anthropomorphism by confronting us with our own demise, from 1993 onwards, Land's works do differ in two key respects. So, firstly, I think what most clearly distinguishes his mature works from his earlier writings, Land re-evaluates capitalism not as the human security system's repression of the excesses of the outside, but rather as the outside's own imminent meltdown of all our values, meanings and beliefs. And more specifically, Land envisions capitalism's technological innovation in the fields of

cybernetics and AI research as the ultimate transcendental horizon from whence to decode anthropic reason before what we'll come to see next week is a sublime artificial superintelligence. okay even though land develops these two mature theses as i'm calling them simultaneously in the same works for clarity's sake this week we're just going to focus on land's reassessment of capitalism before considering how this connects up with ai and cybernetics in the final week judgment day right in both cases however the key work that inspires land is delizagotari's two volume magnum Opus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. So again, breaking it up into two sections. This week, first I'm going to just provide an introduction

to Deleuze and Guattari's joint work before turning to examine how land kind of modifies and reinterprets them in pretty significant ways. Okay, so part one. Okay, to understand Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Dilizat Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, published in 1972, I think it's first necessary to understand at least a little bit about the 1960s insurrectionary political and cultural climate in which the book was composed. So just as the young land had hoped, in the United States, African Americans and women rose up in revolt against the racist Jim Crow laws and the oppressive patriarchal society

to demand their civil rights. And much of society was also protesting against the American capitalist war machine in Vietnam in a direct challenge to capital's imperialist ambitions. In the year Anti-Oedipus was published, lands-owned Britain saw a wave of factory occupations, national builders and dockers strikes, and the first national miners' strike in 46 years was only heating up the next year as hospital workers and civil servants joined in the industrial action. And the climax really came in 1973-4 when, in response to a miners' overtime ban, the Tory government put industry on a three-day week to isolate workers, which only actually sparked a second national miners' strike. And this forced the government to call an early election to decide whether it was they or the workers who were really running the country, only for the Tory government to resoundingly lose.

in the eastern bloc as well 1968 saw of course the czech people protest against the soviet-backed government during the prague spring forcing russian tanks to eventually roll into the city to quell the unrest in china that same year mao zedong called for a great proletarian chinese chinese cultural revolution during which young students and workers were encouraged to directly confront the state apparatus to weed out the bourgeoisie suspected of having infiltrated its ranks. In Deleuze and Guattari's own Paris, students inspired by these Chinese Red Guards began protesting the Vietnam War. The police's violent response only angered more people into joining the protesters, eventually leading to the largest general wildcat strike in human history,

which shut down most of France for the month of May and even incited President Charles de Gaulle to briefly flee the country. So these are just a couple examples, but the point is that all around the world ordinary people were rising up against the capitalist imperialist machine to demand radical social cultural change and political rights for exploited workers and oppressed minorities so it was in this insurrectionary atmosphere where new desires and identities were being fought for and won that Deleuze and Guattari wrote anti-Oedipus it's therefore no wonder that in the first chapter called desiring machines Deleuze and Guattari proposed to develop a theory of human desire and society by modelling both on what they call machines.

The idea is that much as machines are assemblages of different parts that carry out different functions, so are humans composed of organs that produce different desires and different functions, such as mouths for eating, legs for walking, etc. And just as individual bodies are organised as machines in pursuit of various desires, so are social bodies, collectives also organised around a division of labour to pursue the production of different goods and services which are necessary for the smooth functioning of that society or that social body so every society is founded on what Deleuze and Guattari call a territorialisation, coding or stratification of the social body for the production of certain desires and the reproduction of the social machine

which organises the whole process and since every society is stratified around certain codes this naturally leads to other possible codes being left out of that society's desiring production so social change would then consist in a decoding or what they call de-territorialisation of the present codes by overcoding them with new flows of desire ultimately however no social order amounts to an absolute de-territorialisation because every society is grounded upon at least some codification of the flows of desire. If the full satisfaction of all desires are what Deleuze-Guattari core both the body without organs or the abstract machine, if this abstract machine or body without organs can never be realised,

it's because it would mark the cessation of society in as much as every society is constituted by at least some kind of limited stratification of desire. in other words without a bare minimum of territoriality the social machine would simply break down into an absolutely de-territorialised field of social anarchy chaos, madness and of course death so Diluz Muttari say the full body without organs is the unproductive the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable death instinct is its name and death is not without model because desire also desires death because the full body of death is its e-mobile motor as it desires life because the organs of life are working machines.

So yeah, the body without organs or abstract machine can only ever be a regulative ideal of desiring production or the object of society's death instinct to which society forever tends even as it recedes. Okay. Now, Angotari also formalized these dynamics of territorialization, deterritorialization, and absolute deterritorialization. They also sort of recapitulate this in terms of three symphases. So this is kind of just more jargon, but it's essentially recapitulating the same dynamics. But just to go through it, firstly, the paranoic desiring machine's connective symphases codes and stratifies the full body without organs in order to effectuate a determinate desiring production, a certain territoriality of desire.

Secondly, the miraculous machine's disjunctive symphysis marks that greater regulative ideal of the body without organs from whence the first symphysis recedes as it territorialises. And finally, the conjunctive symphysis marks the movement from a determinate desiring production to a greater intensive excursion into the body without organs, or in other words, from the first connective symphysis to the second disjunctive symphysis. Now, given that there are three sympheses at play here, Jalur Zenguattari also identifies three different kinds of subjective positions that one can take towards all these dynamics. So, yeah. So, firstly, the neurotic subject strives to maintain the current,

determinate territorialisation of design production as the ultimate end point of all desire. Secondly, the pervert seeks an even greater territorialisation than the neurotic in order to reinforce this status quo, this determinant desiring production, against the menace of potential deterritorialisations and decodings. And finally, the schizo is the only subject that goes in the opposite direction to territorialisation by seeking to deterritorialise the social codes and map the greater surface of the body without organs. So as we're going to see in a moment, it's ultimately the schizo that Dulles and Guattari as well as land are firm against the pervert and the neurotic. But I think we can already begin to see or at least glimpse why an anti-humanist and nihilist

like land is attracted to Dulles and Guattari inasmuch as they identified the limit of or desiring machines with death or the body without organs. They say, Dulles and Guattari say, the model of death appears when the body without organs rejects and removes organs, no mouth, no language, no teeth, until it's self-mutilation, until death. So given that the body without organs is identified with death, Deleuze and Qatari characterise living organisms, anything living, as neurotic stratifications of the full body without organs to serve that organism's specific desire for self-preservation, reproduction. So they go on. The organism is not at all the body, the body without organs, but a strata on the body without organs which is to say a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, sedimentation

that imposes on it forms, functions, liaisons dominant and hierarchical organisations organised transcendences to extract from it useful work. If life stratifies the body without organs to reproduce itself then a true materialism, a consummate materialism could only amount to affirming the reality of this body without organs insofar as the index is a greater reservoir of reality or in some sense non-reality, non-being, beyond the living. So again they say, we shall call matter the plane of consistency or the body without organs, which is to say the unformed, unorganised, unstratified or destratified body. Clearly this co-identification of matter with a death

which outstrips human thought and even all life itself resonates with land's own conception of death as the materialist weapon to be wielded against the narcissism of the organism, as we've looked at in the past three weeks. Okay, in Antioedipus' second chapter, Psychoanalysis and Familiarism, the Holy Family, Deleuze-Guattari contrasts their machinic conception of the unconscious to Freudian psychoanalysis' what they think is a more neurotic model of the unconscious. So according to them, the problem with Freud is that and this is simplifying a bit, but it's that Freud's Oedipal complex makes this mummy, daddy, me triad the unconscious's only object of desire but in reality

the unconscious does not seek any one determinate desire, such as the mother but a multiplicity of desires because its real aim is simply to decode desire and de-territorialise on end Freud's mistake then was to conflate a historically contingent bourgeois family as the unconscious as one true desiring production before which all other desires are but seen as deviations, negations and defects and perversions. In this way psychoanalysis as De Luz and Guattari put it supposes a fantastic repression of desiring machines. So what Land will particularly latch onto here is the way that De Luz and Guattari critique the Oedipal complex for reducing the unconscious's material desiring production to humanity's parochial representation of it as

the current set of social codes. So they say in the second point, all desiring production is crushed, submitted to the exigencies of representation. Seen in this light, the function of psychoanalysis is to, you know, as a therapy, is to stratify the unconscious's potential flows of desire such that it merely produces the present anthropic order such as that is founded upon the bourgeois family. In place of neurotic psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari proffer what they call a schizoanalysis that models the unconscious on the schizophrenic's constant scrambling of all codes. By modelling the unconscious on the schizo, schizoanalysis eliminates Freud's personalisation of the unconscious around humanity's parochial Oedipal desire

because the schizo does not actually desire any particular fixed code but rather the disruption of all codes, the movement from one code to another. yes so they say schizophrenia is the unconscious's field as well as the socio-historical field because the unconscious itself is no more structural than personal it does not symbolize any more than it imagines or figures it machines it is machining so in other words schizoanalysis does something like it de-edipolizes the unconscious by opening it up to ever greater intensities of the body without organs from whence all particular psychosocial codes recede as only partial stratifications. Okay, now in Land's first detailed engagement

with Deleuze and Guattari in his 1992 essay, Circuitries, that we'll look at again next week, he fully endorses their critique of Freud as re-subordinating the very impersonal machinic unconscious that Freud himself discovered by ultimately conflating it with the historically contingent Oedipal complex. so Land says about Freud instead of rebuilding reality on the basis of the productive forces of the unconscious psychoanalysis ties up the unconscious ever more tightly in conformity with the social model of reality all the stories lead back to Oedipus so you want to fuck your mother so in reality against this vision Freud's personalisation of the unconscious is humanity's last ditch effort to ward off the unconscious's schizophrenic scrambling of all human codes

in other words for Land schizophrenia is not just pre-human but pre-life altogether insofar as he reads the machinic unconscious as one and the same with a primordial matter before any rational and social animals like us come even emerge just then stratify this matter in order to meet our parochial ends Land says it is not merely that schizophrenia is pre-anthropoid schizophrenia is pre-mammalian pre-zoological, pre-biological it is not for those trapped in a constrictive sanity to terminate this regression. Again, it's not that the Oedipal complex is the primary process and schizophrenia is a mere defect or negation of true desire. On the contrary, it is schizophrenia that marks matters, larger alien reality, of which Oedipus is its neurotic stratified repression.

Again, Lent insists, far from being a specifiable defect of human central nervous system functioning, schizophrenia is the convergent motor of cyber positive escalation and extraterritorial vastness to be discovered. So if we view things from the schizophrenic unconscious as greater kind of material reservoir, Freudian psychoanalysis does not decode or human sense, but rather oedipolises or oedipolises the real to make it conducive and consoling for our species hubris. in the first week we saw that Kant was right to critique dogmatic metaphysics anthropomorphisation of the things in themselves even as Kant was only able to do so by ultimately reinforcing the primacy of the subject as the condition

of the possibility for any appearances at all so that's ultimately why Land turns to Deleuze and Guattari namely Schizzo analysis materialises Kantian critique by confronting the anthropocentric view of the subject as the synthesis of all objects with the reality of matter's own productive and synthetic forces for which the human subject is just one arbitrary product or synthesis. The way Land puts it, he says, schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant's thinking that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the sympathies of personal consciousness with sympathies of the impersonal unconscious.

Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. Whilst, as we've seen, Land has always waged this kind of transcendental materialist critique of both pre-critical and post-Kantian metaphysics, from 1992-93 onwards, he finds that this is best expressed in terms of Deleuze and Wattari's schizoanalysis. Okay, in the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus called Savages, Barbarians, Civilised, Deleuze and Guattari turn from focusing on individual subjects, you know, the neurotic, the pervert, the schizo, turning from that to what they see as the three social regimes in history. So as I sort of proceed to go through them,

I'm going to take special note of how Land's 1998 essay called Meat endorses all three regimes, like in terms of the analysis of these regimes, whilst integrating his own earlier work on shamanic religion and cybernetics into each of them, respectively. Okay, so the first regime. So the first savage society for Doulouse and Guattari territorialised the earth for the production of the necessary resources for survival, as well as encodes individuals' own bodies with various tribal and familial affiliations which determine social hierarchies, marriage alliances and child rearing arrangements they say savage families form a praxis, a politics, a strategy

of alliances and affiliations they are formerly the motor elements of social reproduction given that savage society is territorialised around fixed tribal and familial lineages and relations savage society's arch nemesis is anyone who transgresses these social codes. According to Land's meat essay, the savage regime particularly betrays its own limits through its two highest taboos of incest, on the one hand, and cannibalism on the other. So, on the one hand, cannibalism is forbidden because it amounts to treating other humans' bodies as meat in a way which ignores the precise social functions that are literally encoded on their bodies through tribal piercings and tattoos. And on the other hand, incest is similarly prohibited

since it also treats our relatives as just another body with which to satiate sexual appetites in a way which again ignores how each body is imprinted with precise familial relations, duties and responsibilities. So the incest and cannibal taboos testify to how savage society functions by coding bodies with precise familial rapports and tribal alliances with an eye to the reproduction of the status quo. Land says, incest and cannibalism are prescribed loops, short circuits, the avatars of a delirium indifferent to persons which the codes must segregate, condensing a totemic social order protected by taboo. Now Land also argues in the meat essay that savage social codes are also evident from their twofold approach to shamans.

so on the one hand savage shamans engage in mystical otherworldly experiences from whence they derive new supposedly divine knowledge only so as to introduce new rules and codes which reinforce and maintain the status quo when needed in other words shamanism is primitive society socially acceptable way of rewriting its codes as supposedly as the gods authoritative legislation only when it helps to fortify the same old hierarchies, identities and social relations. At the same time, land proffers another understanding of shamans as voyages into the body without organs realm of death beyond all social codes or together. So while savage society accepts a mitigated

sort of bureaucratic shamanism, it violently rejects what land distinguishes as this epidemic shamanism, and as much as this epidemic shamanism demands a radical scrambling of social codes rather than a mere modification. Revolution rather than reform. So it's no wonder that it was often believed that the spirits with which the shamans communed literally removed the shamans' organs to make them, after all, a literal body without organs. Okay, so yeah. According to Land, Savage Society has a twofold coding of shamans as, on the one hand, priestly bureaucratic authorities, territorialisers in other words and on the other hand demonic feral madmen or de-territorialisers. So he says

at once monster and social agent, creature of darkness and of light tending in one direction towards the explorer werewolf scrambling the codes in contemporaneity with all generations and in the other towards the bureaucratic priest redoubling the codes with a reflexive traditional authority. so what Land's doing in his reading of primitive society's twofold understanding of shamanism what he's doing as well as the incest and cannibal taboos what he's trying to do is to precisely delineate and demarcate the permitted social codes as well as therefore the transgressions beyond those specific codes so as he goes on to say the very territorialisation of the social body into a determinate set of savage codes

simultaneously delineates a limit point which haunts the society with its own potential violations. So de Lisbonne Guattari's next, second despotic society emerges when an individual takes advantage of this limit point and deterritorialises the savage primitive associates by reorganising it around the production of his own body's desires. The despotic societies that de Lisbonne Guattari see including Asiatic despots, feudal lords, royal absolutists, and even some of the socialist states. All of these determine people's identities, roles, and relations in terms of whatever the despot decrees them to be. They say the despot recuses the former community's lateral alliances and extended filiations. He imposes a new alliance and implements a direct filiation with God.

The people must follow. Whereas primitive society was, we could say, neurotic in the sense that it sought to reproduce the status quo, the despot is perverse in that he seeks an absolute territorialisation of all peoples and all tribes into a single empire organised around a centralised bureaucratic state apparatus. So while the despot does indeed de-territorialise the primitive socius, he only does so to create an even more rigid territorialisation around his own desires. and just as Land integrated his theory of shamanism into the primitive regime so does he link the despotic regime to his earlier critique of religion and patriarchy so in Land's view the despot territorialises society

through the introduction of a monotheistic religion to which all are obliged to obey as the one true doctrine of God he says monotheism arrives as a break from ancestrality affected by a transcendent instant that overcodes all genealogy and serves the ambivalent integrity of taboo. The purest instance of depotism is a holy book scripting patriarchy. So yeah, the reference to patriarchy is obviously recalling his earlier critique of class societies organised around women's oppression, as we saw in the first week. So here, as early on in Land's first essay, Land again is arguing that the despot has to repress women's sexual freedom in favour of monogamy to ensure the bloodline of the despot's heirs. since Lann sees both religion and patriarchy

as we've seen as the despotic regime's two key pillars as well as transgression or exogamy as the primitive society's taboo we can already I think begin to surmise that what Lann is ultimately advocating is anything that can break with both the primitive and the despotic society through a far more heretical de-territorialisation okay now given that the despot only territorial de-territorializes primitive codes in order to re-territorialize a new and ever more perverse ways de Luz and Guattari explained that de-territorialization is only really let loose with the advent of the third capitalist regime the idea is that since capitalism is organized around the production of goods to make money

that is then invested to produce more goods, to make more money, to be reinvested to make more goods and more money, and so on ad infinitum, capital can never rest content with reproducing the same goods and fixed identities. Rather, capital has to constantly create new desires for new goods and identities to increase its profits through what de Luz and de Tari call a generalized decoding of flows. Whereas previous societies were founded on the production of specific fixed goods and social functions and identities, to sustain the status quo, capitalism's drive for profit means that it has to create desires for new goods as well as new identities that come packaged with those desires in order to reproduce itself anew. And according to Diliz Guttari,

capitalism achieves this general decoding through two key innovations. Firstly, the form of capital money, and secondly, the form of the free worker. So on the one hand, capitalism uses money as a universal equivalent which abstracts things from their fixed use value so that they can take on exchange value and be used for many other purposes. For example, desiring production is no longer fixed around producing food, clothing and shelter as the necessary resources for bare survival as perhaps in the primitive regime. Instead, to make more money, new desires for new products and the identities they help create have to be introduced such as the desire for specific and luxury foods, designer clothes and things like this, as well as entirely new goods like mansions,

televisions and whatever else. Or to give another example, sex is no longer coded for the sole purpose of forming marriage alliances to reproduce new labour as per previous societies. Instead, sex is commoditised by taking on new desires, identities and relations, such as through the cosmetics, fashion and sex industries which encourage specific kinds of erotic desires and specific kinds of fetishes which are not obviously directly necessary for sexual reproduction of new labour. So the idea is that by commoditising the basic resources for survival beyond their use value as well as introducing new goods and products altogether, capitalism is constantly decoding fixed identities, values and social relations in the pursuit of ever greater profit.

So that's the innovation of the form of money. And then the second innovation is that capitalism is only able to produce an abundance of new goods and services through a large global labour force. So to that end, capital has to emancipate or, you know, so to speak, emancipate or abstract workers from their sole function to meet the despot's needs, such that they become free to work for capitalists in order to produce new goods. and new desires, right? So, yeah, the idea is that by transforming the serf into the proletariat and goods into exchange value, capitalism abstracts people and products from any one code so that they can be de-territorialised on end. And in this way, the capitalist machine

tends towards the body without organs beyond all determinate functions and coded flows of desire. So Deliz and Guattari say, to the idea of the code, capital has substituted in money an axiomatic of abstract quantities which always goes further in the movement of the socius' de-territorialisation. Capitalism tends towards a threshold of decoding which undoes the socius to the profit of a body without organs. Again, by decoding all fixed identities, relations and use values in its drive for profit, capitalism exposes how all previous societies are only limited parochial stratifications of desiring production's true potential for absolute deterritorialisation. Given how Diluccio Qatari initially

characterised capitalism as in some sense the universal truth of history this plane of absolute deterritorialisation land seizes on capital as a concrete model for enacting the critique of all living organisms' parochial stratifications of the body without organs or of death. Again, since capital is spurred on by the profit motive, it has to constantly create new relations and goods to sell to people in a way which scrambles or fix codes and rigid desires. To explain this in his own terms, Land likens capitalism, kind of weirdly, to excrement insofar as Freud showed how the pre-Oedipal child at the anal stage does not have a fixed investment in what excrement is as something to be spurned or something that should be repulsed. On the contrary, the infant can

also fetishise their anus and excrement as objects of desire. The child thus actually grasps better than the adult that their body parts are capable of many possible meanings and significations, all of which will later be repressed as the child submits to the Oedipal complex. It's a bizarre metaphor, really, or analogy, but the idea is that much as the child invests the anus with many possible desires that demonstrates the Oedipal complex to be one possible encryption of the body, so does capital's abstraction of things from their use value for the sake of maximising exchange value, de-territorialise them from any fixed codification in a way which makes them disposable and contingent commodities. Just to quote the analogy in full, Lann says, if money is libidinised on the

model of excrement, it is not because it conserves or reactivates an infantile fixation, but because it escapes stable investment. Shit is prototypical trash, and the So what Land finds in Deleuze and Guattari's conception of capitalism is precisely the practical means for ceaselessly obsolescing our beliefs, identities and desires as they're abstracted as commodities for their exchange value.

And in fact, if land even goes further than Deleuze and Guattari in his fervour for capitalism, it's because of how he modifies capital's second innovation of the transformation of the serf into a free worker. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari see capitalism as liberating workers from the despot's land such that they can make new goods and services for the capitalists. Land notes, or rather focuses on how the capitalists' drive for profit also leads them to revolutionise the productive forces by upgrading machinery and improving technology so that they need to pay the worker less and less to perform ever more efficient productivity. So given that capitalism tends to innovate machinery such that it is capable of performing what the worker is able to at ever more efficient rates,

there is a general tendency to the automation of work as human labour power is ever more supplemented and even replaced outright by machines. Capitalism not only frees up the worker's labour power so that it can be used for other ends in meeting the despot's desires, it also autonomises work altogether, thereby invading, alienating and ultimately outperforming human labour altogether. So Land says, as regenerating commoditization deploys techniques to substitute for human activity accounted as wage costs, it obsolesces the animal, the organism. If Land finds capitalism's drive to automation more important than its creation of the free worker, it's because it permits an even greater and literal machinic de-territorialization from when human stratification recedes.

it thus demonstrates how capitalism is not a process within our control but the inhuman body without organs absolute de-territorialization incarnated in history so it's no longer the proletariat that is the agent of revolutionary disruption now the scrambling of codes it's rather capitalism's own machinic imminent machinic processes land goes on industrial machines dismantle the actuality of the proletariat displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridization and realising the plasticity of labour power. Okay, now, although Deleuze and Guattari do argue that capitalism generalises deterritorialisation, they always qualify that it also re-territorialises insofar as every capitalist decoding assumes

a particular territorial identity to be sold as a determinate commodity on the market, even if it is only to be decoded anew. so you know for example while the desire to assume the identity of the latest instagram influences fashion style may decode former identities uh it instill it itself instills a new determinate identity at least until the next fashion trend comes along to decode the prior one um and moreover as lent himself we saw lent himself already argue in his first essay in the first week uh dulis guattari also argue that even capitalism is ultimately reliant on both the family and the state's basic organisation for social production and reproduction. Without the Oedipal family,

there would be no way to reproduce a docile workforce to dutifully sell their labour power to the capitalists on the market. And without the state, there would be no way to control wages, enforce property relations, police rebellious workers and regulate monopolies and overproduction, all of which create the conditions favourable to capital accumulation. so Dilers and Gattari qualify capitalism instores or restores all sorts of residual territorialities and imaginary or symbolic artifices on which it attempts for better or worse to recode, to stamp derived persons of abstract quantities or repasses or returns states, homelands, families so again without this bare minimum of territoriality even the capitalist machine would simply

break down in a truly de-territorialised field of chaos, social collapse and anarchy. Ultimately then, Deleuze and Guattari only see capitalism as what they call a relative limit of all other societies, even as capital is itself destratified before an absolute limit of the body without organs modelled on death itself. In Antioedipus' final chapter, Introduction to Schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari argue that if capitalism is still only a relative limit to deterritorialisation, the absolute limit can only be reached for a revolution against capitalism. They say, schizophrenia is thus not the identity of the capitalist, but on the contrary, its difference, its distance and its depth. Whereas savage, despotic and capitalist machines

all rest on at least a minimum of fixed codification, the revolutionary schizo would ceaselessly decode and deterritorialise without any stratification whatsoever. They say, destroy, destroy. the task of schizoanalysis passes by destruction destroy Oedipus the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the super ego, the guilt, the law castration yeah so in the final analysis at the end of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari side with anti-capitalist revolutionary forces against capital as still too despotic even if they don't really specify what those forces would concretely look like beyond the necessity for them to destroy, destroy. Okay, in his 1992 circuitry's essay, Land initially agrees with Deleuze and Qatari's

analysis of capitalism's re-territorialising tendencies in continuity with his own critique of capital as only passing by way of the outside so as to reinforce the human security system. even as land celebrates capital's autonomising tendency as hastening the human organism's expiry date he qualifies that capitalism is a relative limit since it is still an anthropoid arrangement of codes for the sake of the species reproduction he says social organism blocks off the body without organs substituting a territorial despotic or capitalist socius as an apparent principle of production separating desire from what it can do so for the land of 1992 it is only future technology that fully maps the surface of the body without organs

whilst tending to see capital's technological advancement as leading to absolute de-territorialisation land maintains at this point a clear distinction between a still auto-human capitalist machine and its disfigured organless AI seed at this point land agrees with Deleuze and Guattari that capitalism is as he says undeveloped schizophrenia, even as he has gone a little bit further than them by identifying cybernetics as the concrete model for schizophrenic revolution. Yeah, so even as Land's first extended engagement with Dulles and Guattari already betrays a greater fascination in capital's dehumanising processes than Dulles and Guattari ever harbour, Land ultimately maintains their reservation by seeing capital as a relative limit that will

only overcome with the advent of its AI seed. In the first for Annihilation, published in the same year as Circuit Trees, 1992, Land expresses a similar ambivalence towards capitalism as Deleuze and Guattari. Although neither Deleuze and Guattari nor capitalism are the focus of this book, Land does occasionally note, following Marx, that capitalism marks what Land calls a proto-schizophrenic liquidation of old values into air. land's description of capital as a prototypical rather than a full-blown schizophrenia i think indicates that he is still maintaining his earlier view of capitalism as the historical basis for his two major theoretical nemeses of kantian transcendental idealism and phenomenological

deconstruction so for example throughout the book he says things like to describe kant and capital as two sides of the same coin is as necessary as it is ridiculous and also deconstruction is like capital managed and reluctant change. At several other points throughout Thirst for Annihilation, Land also uses the term capitalism and humanism interchangeably as the key object of his critique. So for example he says humanism, capitalist patriarchy, is one and the same thing as our imprisonment. Although Land at times argues, he says for example, that capital creates unemployment due to a basic tendency to overproduction in a way that might seem to champion the excess of a battalion general economy beyond use value.

Land also qualifies that capital equally disavows that there are any crises of overproduction in favour of claiming that demand always finds its supply through price signals, at least in the long run. So, for example, he says, Capitalism, then, is the projection of the most extreme possible refusal of expenditure. so while both thirst for annihilation and circuitries expresses a fascination with capital's nihilistic impulses more so than land's earlier writings they are both far from the unreserved adoration of capital that land will come to express just one year later in 1993 and that we'll look at after we take some questions in a break but yeah so are there any questions at this point yep

so there are two questions Could the Lewis and Leanne's conception of capitalism sort of be seen as a perverted manifestation of the will, like Schopenhauer's will or the nature's will of hell? And the second question as well, sort of land equating capitalism with patriarchy, wouldn't capitalism do the opposite to sort of reinforcing patriarchy in patriarchy because it sort of induces everyone's place that organs just to be sort of territorialised in a way yeah I'll start with the second question so yeah that's what Land will come to argue basically in terms of patriarchy

that patriarchy even after he comes to reassess capital as a good thing or as not a good thing for us but a good thing for critique he's still against patriarchy but it's because he now comes to see patriarchy as anti-capitalist essentially and for him capital has no interest in yeah reducing people territorialising people's genitals basically into fixed identities in terms of the so yeah we'll look at that more after the break well kind of Can you flesh out a bit what you kind of mean? So capitalism seems sort of like always to increase profit.

So profit might be equivalent to power. So in a way, capitalism is sort of just the real power. Yeah. Like now, it's in a different sort of way, I guess. Yeah, I think that worked pretty well. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah, because, I mean, that's where land is coming from anyway. where he's for this humanal will, this inhuman will, as we looked at last week in his engagement with Schopenhauer. And, yeah, it makes sense how capital... Well, we'll see after the break how capital sort of is able to capture human desire in order to serve an inhuman purpose,

in the same way that Schopenhauer describes the will as tricking us into pursuing our individual desires, but it's actually simply to will to will. Yeah, so yeah, I think that works really well. Yeah. Yeah, any other questions or comments? I'm howling refutations. I was wondering if you could like to play a little bit more like the miraculous disjunctive synthesis idea that I don't really know exactly what it means so I'm not exactly sure what it's supposed to. because it's with the it's in the what is it the despotic society which that takes place or is this just is that oh no no no uh i mean these three are not uh these symphases don't

correspond uh exactly to those three um yeah yeah no so that was i kind of that was a bit a misnomer that I gave there. But the, so, yes, the first one is kind of perverse and neurotic or despotic and primitive. It's a territorialisation. Whereas the second one is the limit point of the transgression of that territory. So it is the despotic society to the extent that the despot de-territorialises the primitive socius, but it only does so in order to for a more even more perverse and absolute territorialization so yeah I mean the

disjunctive synthesis is just the disjunction between a territory and its limit beyond which lies the schizophrenia and then conjunctive does what the conjunctive is the movement the schizophrenic movement from it is de-territorialization essentially um yeah and so I guess the just somewhat partakes in the conjunctive synthesis in order to move beyond the primitive society but again only in order to return to a connective synthesis or paranoia desiring production yeah oh yeah i know it's a lot of jargon but uh yeah any other questions at this stage Yeah. I just wanted to make a comment to what you thought.

But in terms of this kind of lens of critiquing anthropomorphism and through death, that is kind of like permeated towards the other states, there's like, I mean, the question whether it's actually changed at all is to be honest. But it seems modulating with the . It's just the critique of anthropomorphism, or any kind of stability or organization, with the point of view of the Transcendental Principle of change, which is death. But it's kind of put in this new light as you kind of said before with the body that all of this being a regular idea of socialists. It operates as a human zone, as a ingredient

that even this is constantly contained. But it's a regular idea that you can't cross from your eyes Yeah, right. ...the idea is a reason, but they've helped the system that's ideas for what's going on inside the trans-mineral programs. Yeah. So rather than kind of like death is a super goth thing, which is sort of, you know, ...but it also modulates just into this principle of challenging versus principle of status, or something like that. Oh, yeah, totally, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, because... So, for example, in Thirst for Annihilation, in the last chapter, there's a bit where Land's... It's not like things don't end in stasis upon death.

Death is just the beginning of change. Yeah, so, I mean, that's, I think, certainly... One of the reasons why Land is so... latches on to Diliz and Gattari to this day in a way that he doesn't to earlier libidinal materialists because this conception of death as de-territorialisation already implies, or absolute de-territorialisation already implies that it's not stasis, it's absolute de-territorialisation, so yeah, the decline into civilisation, when I was saying anarchy civilisation decline, madness, chaos these are they have momentum velocity, they're entropic rather than static, I'd say, yeah but definitely that's a really good point

any more questions at this stage yep it's kind of a powerful question but I wonder if you can make something of it so I'm really interested in this idea in circuitries that Len has a capitalism still managed and I'm wondering like how this thought is evolving for him and I know that in the first is really interested in Max Favre as a kind of capitalism arising out of a ascetic ideal as well. So I'm wondering if the ascetic ideal is doing something with excess, it's like this staking off like some complete dissolution into death or something like this,

and whether there's actually a movement in the development of the ascetic ideal itself that starts off being something that's a protective of the human organism and then kind of unravels as it turns into capitalism and maybe there's an analogy with nature like the Ossetio deal starts off as a way to kind of code desire for the priest but it turns out being the will to truth which undermines the whole system and I wonder if there's something similar happening with land here whether it is maybe this like revaluation of um capitalism here is almost like following its development i don't know yeah i don't know if that's a question no i think that's a really good point like because there's definitely even in like delighted to death and some of the

earlier essays there's like a kind of ambiguity about what asceticism is kind of because sometimes it seems like uh it seems to be the object of his critique because it seems to restrain us like it's this Kantian kind of constraining to the bounds of reason or phenomena or something like that but then like another kind of asceticism is actually giving yourself over to that kind of against human security and like you know it's even like that ambiguity I think is really in Schopenhauer as well that sense that okay Schopenhauer doesn't like the will, the noumenal will so he engages in this ascetic practice of not desiring anymore but that just ends up like it for Schopenhauer himself he says this ends up being a form of death so it's not really like security at all aestheticism ends up it's enacted in in the name of human security but

it ends up actually leading to self-mutilation um yeah I don't really remember the genealogy of moral like aesthetic ideal I said that well but like what you're saying seems to fit like really perfectly and it seems to it's really convincing because not just land but Schopenhauer and these other figures in the same tradition seem to have that same kind of equivocation with or you know purposeful equivocation with the aesthetic ideal or aesthetics but um but yeah there's definitely i mean that's i find aestheticism one of the hardest things to understand in land because it because it kind of it's always about marking some kind of limit and so whether that limit is in the name of staving off the outside or trying to you know embrace it through self-destruction

in specific passages, it's kind of hard to tell, I think. But, yeah, it's a great point. All right, let's just take a five-minute break or six-minute break. Okay. All right, so in what I really think is the landmark 1993 essay called Making It With Death, Thanatos, and Desiring Production, it's here where the mature land as I'm calling him decisively emerges by radicalising Deleuze and Guattari in two key ways so yeah firstly land redefines capitalism as the absolute limit not just a relative limit but the absolute limit such that schizoanalysis comes to be

the ideological expression of capitalism rather than the expression of some kind of anti-capitalist revolution and moreover land also charges Deleuze and Guattari with retreating from their initial program to destroy, destroy, in Capitalism and Schizophrenia's second volume A Thousand Plateaus, specifically out of a fear of humanity's inevitable demise. Now just as it was necessary to situate anti-Oedipus in the context of the 60s, so must we contextualise Land's creative reading of Deleuze and Guattari in terms of the 70s and 80s. So I mean already by June 1968, the revolting French workers and students had been coaxed back into returning to work and university through the promise of reforms and a new election in which the

Gaulist Union for the Defence of the Republic received an even greater majority. While much of French society did continue to revolt well into the next decade, the left was further coaxed into peacefully resolving things through the ballot box in 1981 when the Socialist Party's presidential candidate, Francois Mitterrand, promised sweeping reforms. Only two years into his presidency, however, Mitterrand turned his back on the left to implement neoliberal economic policies and austerity measures. Outside Europe and North America, neoliberal policies of privatising public assets and cutting social expenditure had already been forced onto the Chilean people when Augusto Pinochet staged a military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected

socialist government in 1973. After Deng Xiaoping took over leadership of the Chinese government in the wake of Mao's death, he also repudiated the Cultural Revolution's excesses and opened up labour and industry to Western investment, all the while retaining a strong centralised party state apparatus. In the West, the 1980s world debt crisis similarly led to an abandonment of state-oriented Keynesian solutions as Margaret Thatcher became British Prime Minister in 79 and Ronald Reagan, US President in 81. Throughout the 80s, Thatcher and Reagan systematically destroyed the trade unions that had won so many gains over the past few decades, abolished labour regulations, loosened capital controls,

deregulated finance, privatised state-owned enterprises, cut taxes for the rich, gutted the welfare state, and downsized government services. At the same time, they both invested massively in state military spending to enact aggressive foreign policies, for example, which saw Thatcher go to war over the Falkland in 1982 and Reagan attempt to stop the spread of communism, or so-called communism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in 92, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank lent out loans to the liberated yet extremely poor and impoverished countries on condition that they restructure their economies to make them conducive to the free market. By the mid-90s, in which the mature land emerges,

even the Democrats' Bill Clinton and the UK Labour Party's Tony Blair were incorporating neoliberal economic policies into their programs under the pretense of delivering a socially progressive agenda. So despite the dictatorships, growing inequality gap and spread of war, economic advisors champion the free market and small government model as the only path towards auspicious growth and prosperity, or what neoconservative Francois Fukuyama famously proclaimed, borrowing the term from Hegel, the end of history with globalised capital. in light of the defeat of any left alternative to capitalism certain French philosophers and former Marxists

like François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard both of whom Lander references if only in passing modified Deliz and Quartari's theory of capitalism to befit the times so in his 1972 book Libidinal Economy among other works Lyotard argued that whereas Communist party status project simply returned to a despotic territorialization of the socius, capitalism was a truly revolutionary de-territorializing of all codes and identities on end. Given that, as Leotard puts it, there is no exteriority to capital that capital cannot breach, capitalism can only be one and the same with the body without organs of absolute de-territorialization itself. Leotard says, the body without organs, the socius, has no limit. It maps back

everything onto itself. This mapping process, this absorption of energy upon a socius that attracts and destroys production, this is capitalism. For Lyotard, schizoanalysis is not the ideological expression of, for example, a proletarian revolt against capital. It's rather the expression of capital itself. And this elucidates, for Lyotard, why Deleuze and Guattari seldom mention the now obsolete notion of proletarian class struggle. He says the book's silence on class struggle leads one to believe that for the authors the true politics today is in fact that of men who struggle to become inhuman. What Liatar's reading of Deleuze and Quartari essentially does is radicalise capitalism as the inhuman flow of desire

beyond socialism's despotic backstep into rigid social codes and hierarchies as exemplified for him by the socialist states. In his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard draws upon Batai's general economy and Freud's death drive that we looked at last week, among other influences, in order to develop a concept of the symbolic as that which exceeds the utilitarian reality principle. Where Marxism only critiques capitalism allegedly out of nostalgia for an older form of utilitarian production, symbolic exchange marks a revolution modelled on the excesses of gift-giving, sacrifice, and, once again, death. Although Baudrillard still hesitates in 1976 in seeing

capitalism as still too utilitarian, he ultimately concludes that capitalism is the ultimate form of symbolic exchange. Whereas previous societies were organised around the production of real desires and use values, postmodern capitalist society eliminates natural production in favour of the pure consumption of simulated or hyper-real desires. Again, it's the same idea, namely that through the need to make money or profit capitalism creates new desires and needs beyond our basic drives for self-preservation. If capitalism amounts to a symbolic exchange beyond fixed use value it's because its drive to profit requires the creation of new simulated or symbolic desires beyond the necessary resources for survival. Capital's symbolic exchange thus exposes

how what we imagine to be fixed real desires are in fact arbitrary, contingent and imaginary since there are many possible others. In this way, capitalism turns the very process of producing the resources for survival into the process of death and simulation. Boyd-Jarrette says, life rendered to death, this is the operation of the symbolic. and the primacy of consumption elucidates both the gradual disappearance of the factory and strikes and the growing class of salaried consumers and non-productive protesters like the students of May 68 it's no longer a authoritarian revolution against capitalism that will melt all desires into air but now capital itself in its attempts to maximise profit through increased consumption of new goods and desires and services

so Baudrillard says it is not the revolution which ends all this it is capital itself it is this which abolishes social determination by the mode of production now as we're going to see next week in more detail as per the mature land Baudrillard sees capital symbolic exchange as not only embodied by human labour's increasing automation since the industrial era but particularly through cybernetics digital interfaces and biogenetics increasing capacities to radically alter human identity and basic biochemistry altogether in the postmodern age. Baudrillard says, it is in the genetic code that the genesis of Simulacra today find their complete form. While Baudrillard in 1976 still suggests that capitalism

might be overthrown by pursuing desires that are not offered by the capitalist system, and particularly the media that advertises its products, in all of his subsequent works, he ultimately abandons this reservation in the face of capital's ability to commoditise seemingly every point of resistance through the circulation of symbolic exchange. So in what clearly anticipates what we're going to see is Land's mature reading of Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Lieta re-evaluate the revolution against capitalism as merely a desire for older fixed identities and desires which capitalism obliterates through the creation of ever more simulated desires and hyperreal needs. Okay, so in the first part of Making It With Death,

brilliant title, Land begins by arguing that capitalism is the concrete model for the schizoanalytic critique of all anthropic codes. Capital's profit motive demands a constant production of new desires, identities and codes which scramble all the old ones before they too are scrambled anew by still more novel and innovative codes. He says, capital propagates virally insofar as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches and whose desires it reprograms. Money is not a matter of possession, but of liquidity, de-territorialisation. Money communicates with the primary process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain. whereas science tends to

subsume new discoveries into older explanatory paradigms and philosophy is still bogged down by a pre-critical dogmatic phenomenological tendency, capital alone proffers a sufficiently radical critique of all human values, beliefs and meanings as it commodifies and obsolesces them over its entropic course again, Land says, critique belongs to capital because it is a self-perpetuating movement of deregulation whose tendency is towards an increasingly radical prioritisation of the interrogative impulse. For Land then, it no longer makes sense to speak of the death of capitalism because capitalism is death itself as it absorbs all things into its body without organs. He says, death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital

but an inherent function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part. It's in this sense that land likens capital, in another bizarre analogy, to cocaine. Like the drug, capital produces both homeless addicts whose lives it ruins and rich bankers who have their own near-death experiences by overdosing on expensive drugs or making risky investments on the market. So yeah, on land's reading, capitalism does not originate in individuals' psychological trait of greed, which would assume that they have agency over the process. On the contrary, capitalism disrupts the pursuit of greed by obliging capitalists to sacrifice billions to the invisible hand only so as to produce more billions to be sacrificed again. He says, The obsolete psychological category of greed privatises and moralises addiction

as if the profit-seeking tropism of a transnational capitalism propagating itself through epidemic consumerism were intelligible in terms of personal subjective traits. Wanting more is the index of interlock with cyber-positive machinic processes and not the expression of private idiosyncrasy. In Land's view, the rich bourgeoisie do not benefit from capitalism any more than the poor proletariat, since both find themselves deprived, deadened and overdosing before the fluctuations of the market. For both the workers it alienates and the capitalists it flagellates, capital testifies for Land to a higher cosmic power of the real itself, which could care less about human interest that it subverts and undermines through its indifferent flows of desire.

In particular, land sees capital as de-territorialising anthropoid desiring production through its constant drive to increase profits by revolutionising the productive forces. We've already seen briefly how land sees capitalism as tending towards labour's increasing automation in a way which abolishes the proletariat in favour of machines capable of ever greater productivity. Land also sees market-oriented software upgrades, for example, high-frequency trading, as increasingly automating commercial trading as computer algorithms decide and conduct all transactions at speeds prohibiting any human intervention because our biological body clocks are simply too slow to intervene in the process. So, for example, he says...

Where is it? Oh yeah, monetarising power tends to effacement of specific territorial features as it programs for my... Oh no, sorry, that's the wrong one. The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlocal commoditisation in computers, a transcalar entropy dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software. And yeah, Land further envisions the commoditisation of computers as leading to a decoding of human identity. He says, monetarising power tends to effacement of specific territorial features as it programs for migration into the cyberspace. Land is here referring to the way that the home entertainment computer that we all have permits us to digitally represent ourselves through avatars with entirely different personalities and looks, be it through choreographed social network profiles, anonymous

posts or completely inhuman online video game characters. Moreover the internet enables us to enter into new relations with people from all over the world and different ideas in a way which bypasses the geographical real world time space constraints. Next week we're going to see in particular how Land envisions as he puts it prices as encoding science fiction narratives in so far as Capital's technological advancement promises to alter our basic human biochemistry through genetic engineering, cognitive enhancements and organ transplants in what will actually amount to a literal body without organs or at least without wetware organs. He says as you speed up the industrialisation simulation you see it converge with

slow motion butchery, chopping up the body into trade format, interchangeable parts. The full labour market cycle blurs into a meat grinder. Although Landy's all for capitalism, his position here, I think it's interesting, is actually closer to anti-capitalists than it is to those who think capitalism is beneficial to humankind since it is anti-capitalists, particularly Marxists, who grasp that capitalism is a profoundly dehumanising process which strips us of our autonomy by submitting us to inhuman market forces. The difference, obviously, between the anti-capitalist and land is that not only does land think that we cannot do anything about this such that the anti-capitalist moral outrage is in vain, he also thinks that we should actually affirm this

at least if our goal is transcendental, that is to grasp the real by stripping it of all anthropomorphic dissimulations. Seen in this way, the anti-capitalist struggle is but the last ditch effort to slow down and regulate our own species' extinction through a secular recapitulation of Socrates' dream of the soul's immortality. Land says modern existence is understood as profoundly deadened by the real submission of humane values to an impersonal productivity. The death core of capital is thought as the object of critique. Despite the humanist best efforts to resist capitalism's alienation of anthropic meaning and value, Land argues that it is in vain insofar as capital is capable of commoditising all things, including even

resistance itself, such as in the form of mass-produced Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, t-shirts and paraphernalia, which sell rebellious identities on the marketplace. He says, As far as land is concerned, Deleuze and Guattari are capitalism's greatest ideologues, in the good sense of the term ideologue here. Yeah, and I think we can better grasp, or get a better grasp of Land's reading of Deleuze and Guattari by looking at a 1995 review article he wrote on two books on Deleuze and Guattari, namely Manuel DeLander's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

and Brian Masumi's A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. So in this article, Land laments that Deleuze and Guattari's insights into an inhuman machinic intelligence have been distorted through what he calls the post-structuralist presumption as to the priority and quasi-Sosarian determination of the sign, the counter-ideological essence of left political discourse, and the representational organisation of the unconscious. According to Land, only Misumi and Delanda go against this humanist regression by reading Deleuze and Guattari, as he puts it, in the direction of complex materialism. Certainly neither are completely immune from their own idealistic tendencies.

So on the one hand, Masumi's reading of Deleuze and Gautari is hampered by a personalisation of capital in terms of individual capitalists in an effort to imagine that we can revolt against its dehumanising commodification of all things. Land says, Masumi's superb and necessary analysis is marred by a residual personalisation of social forces. It is always a question of the capitalist and greed rather than of pension funds on automatic and anonymous capital formations and an inane folkish eco-panic, that is, the impending death of the planet. While Masumi's prescription for an anarchic anti-capitalist revolution is certainly opposed to socialist parties' statist and quasi-despotic stratifications, it still misses for Land that the truly deterritorialising force

is the market itself, is the death of the planet, in other words. Although De Lander also writes in what Land calls a mathematical scientific mode that still retains transcendent features. Land thinks that Delanda grasps better than Masumi how social regimes and military apparatuses are self-organising agents of deterritorialisation over which humans have no control. He says, Delanda is far closer to the cutting edge of deterritorialisation, finding its effects registered even in the command kernels of military apparatuses and industrial regimes as self-organising matter breaks out of its constriction with anthropomorphic control schemas. It's this materialist reading of Deleuze and Guattari that Land pursues against what he dismisses

as a kind of regressive, idealist, structuralist and leftist hermeneutics of humanist repression. Okay, if Misumi receives stronger rebuke than De Lander, it is because Land ultimately sees the schizophrenic processes that Deleuze and Guattari trace, as best incarnated by the very capitalist system that Misumi denounces. Consequently, schizoanalysis is not to be seen as the discourse of an anti-capitalist revolutionary movement, but rather that of capitalism's own imminent dynamics. Capitalism is not to be mistaken for a creation of human civilisation, but for the real's own productive process that promises to obliterate humans altogether in its deterritorialising field.

again capitalism does not produce so as to enrich the bourgeoisie it simply produces so as to produce which is to say decode and territorialize and destroy destroy without mercy Lance says the deep secret of capital as process is its incommensurability with the preservation of bourgeois civilization as capital evolves the increasingly absurd rationalization of production for profit peels away like a cheap veneer from the positive feedback detonation of production for production. So seen in this way, schizoanalysis formalises the cosmos' destructive becoming in the socio-historical guise of global capitalism. Since schizoanalysis models matter on death, or the body without organs,

capital's destructive processes should not be seen as a privation, negation or defect. On the contrary, it is our human efforts to halt and impede the flow of capital that marks the privation or defect of matters what Lange calls matters transcendental desert of primary production. Again, a capital abstract machine is not abstract in the sense of being a boundary concept internal to thought, as in Kant, but in the sense that it speaks to a greater material reservoir of impersonal dynamics which decodes all anthropoid strata in what Lange calls its greater reality of abstraction. when seen from the point of view of the capitalist body without organs any attempt to regulate capital can thus only amount to a vain dogmatic

or pre-critical conflation of a finite ideal object, the human, for the conditions of all synthetic production although Land draws on Deleuze-Guattari to develop his notion of capitalism as a regime of generalised deterritorialisation. He rejects their corollary that capitalism also re-territorialises in what amounts to an abandonment of his earlier critique of capital as inherently fascist, as we've seen over the past three weeks. So in the second part of Making It With Death, Land proposes to explain why Deleuze and Wattari ultimately advocate a revolution against capitalism by arguing that they recoil from capital's absolute deterritorialisation by conflating it with fascism's supposed death instinct in A Thousand Plateaus.

So, in both volumes of capitalism and schizophrenia, fascism is the name for the primary enemy which de Luz and Guattari oppose at all costs. In Anti-Oedipus, fascism is identified with the despotic re-territorialisation of schizophrenic decoding. Although de Luz and Guattari continue to condemn fascism as the most dangerous threat of all in A Thousand Plateaus, Land contends that the referent of fascism changes such that it no longer denotes a perverse re-territorialisation but rather an excessive de-territorialisation so for example in a chapter or plateau as they call it called How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs Deleuze and Guattari provide a series of examples of bodies without organs that literally mutilate and deprive themselves

so for example the hypochondriac who always thinks something is wrong with them the paranoid who constantly imagines they're being persecuted, the schizo who splits themselves in two or multiple personalities, the drug addict who is always at risk of overdosing, the masochist who self-harms, and my personal favourite, the medieval knight who performs great deeds for his lady without ever actually consummating. So whereas in Anti-Oedipus they affirmed that the schizo's goal was to destroy, destroy, Deleuze and Guattari now reject such masochistic practices as an improper way to channel desiring production, since it can lead to our literal death. And this is why they critique what they call Freud's ridiculous death instinct, for thinking that we only get pleasure in death, when in fact we should avoid such morbid delights

so as to continue desiring and mitigate it, yet what they call better and less monstrous ways. To this end, Deleuze and Guattari qualify that although the body without organs is opposed to the organism's perverse territorialisation, as they say, its enemies are not organs as such. Rather, a minimum of organisation is now suggested so that we can go on living and hence decode and create anew albeit in ways which do not completely destroy us. Deleuze Wattari thus repeatedly advised that we show the prudence that's their word, the prudence to de-territorialise in ways that create new identities and relations for humans whilst avoiding actual self-harm, madness, death and social collapse. They say we invent self-destructions which are not confounded with the deaf instinct.

To undo the organism has never been to kill oneself, but to open the body to connections with an agency. Since a minimum of stratification is needed for a human to go on living and creating, Dulles and Guattari even go so far as to say that the worst case scenario is not to be too stratified, but rather to be too de-stratified. They say the worst is not to stay stratified, organized, signified, subjugated, but to precipitate strata in a suicidal or demented meltdown. So at this stage there are now not just one, there are three bodies without organs in Dlusna Gattari. There's firstly the prudent or full body without organs that channels desires in anthropically acceptable ways. That's the good body without organs. And then there's the masochistic or empty body without organs that leads to our literal debasement and destruction.

and finally a cancerous body without organs that spreads the massacres suicidal drive to all of society. So by referring to the full body without organs they advocate as what this is their term, a relative deterritorialisation, we can see that Jalisa and Qatari have renounced the original schizoanalytic programme of absolute deterritorialisation. in a later chapter or plateau called Micropolitics and Segmentarity Deleuze and Guattari go even further in their condemnation of the cancerous body without organs by linking it directly to fascism drawing on Paul Virilio's notion of fascism as what he calls a suicidal machine Deleuze and Guattari now make

a distinction between totalitarianism on the one hand and fascism on the other whereas totalitarian states like the Stalinist regimes are despotic in that they seek perverse levels of re-territorialisation. Fascism goes in the opposite direction by seeking to mercilessly de-territorialise every aspect of life from the family and the school to the bureaucracy and the state itself in what Dulles and Qatari call a realised nihilism before which nothing is too sacred to annihilate. They say there is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in each niche. This is the micro-political or molecular power that renders fascism dangerous because it is a mass movement, a cancerous body, rather than a totalitarian organism. In light of their new conception of fascism,

Deleuze and Qatari now identify four key dangers that schizoanalysis must avoid. The first is the neurotic sphere of being decoded at all, which is the same as anti-Oedipus. But then the second is the empty drug addict's illusory clarity by which they imagine to have obtained absolute deterritorialisation by literally harming themselves. The despot is the third because he only decodes so as to recode anew in ever more perverse ways. Again, that's the same as anti-Oedipus. But then the gravest danger of all is to spread like a cancer the drug addict's micro-fascist death instinct to all of society by wielding the state to this suicidal end. They say, instead of connecting oneself with other lines and augmenting their valences each time, it turns to destruction, pure and simple abolition,

passion for abolition. Against this, Dalyzen Qatari admonish that we compromise even with the neurotic and the perverse re-territorialisations if they help us to stave off the fascists absolute de-territorialisation. They say, all the dangers of our other lines are minor besides this danger. As Land laments, whereas Deleuze and Guattari initially opposed fascism for impeding the schizo's program to destroy-destroy they now condemn it for nihilistically destroying all humans' values meanings and significations without restraint in this way A Thousand Plateaus marks a kind of Oedipal counter-revolution against Andy Oedipus' schizoanalytic program

in the name of allegedly standing against Nazism in light of the knee-jerk allergic reaction that Nazism and its corollaries of the Holocaust and the Second World War instantly invoke Jaliz and Qatari render every liberal, humanist and even religious stance acceptable so long as it contributes to a united front against the most horrendous evil of all so I'll just quote Landon Fool here because he says it really well he says the politics of anti-Oedipus allied to the molecular dissolution process flowing out of the impersonal energy core of capital, are threatened by familiar neuroticisation. In the end, this is nothing less than the contemporary citadel of Oedipus. If you don't obey, you'll become a Nazi. Attach yourself

to the molar aggregates and you become like Mussolini, but attach yourself to the untamed molecular flows and you become like Hitler. Once this is accepted, there is no limit to the resurrection of prescriptive neo-archaeisms that come breaking back as a bulwark against the jack-booted unconscious. Liberal humanism, watered-down paganism and even the stinking relics of Judeo-Christian moralism. Anything is welcome as long as it hates desire and shores up the cop in everyone's heads. On Lanz reading then Dulles-Gottari retreat from the absolute deterritorialisation that they themselves once advocated upon the realisation that this can only amount to the organism's complete destruction. And moreover, Lanz goes on to argue

this retreat can account for why Deleuze and Qatari advocated an anti-capitalist revolutionary politics in anti-Oedipus here I think what's going on is that Land is reading their critique of fascism in A Thousand Plateaus for deterritorialising too much back into anti-Oedipus' critique of capital's fascist tendencies as not opposing capital because it re-territorialises but because it de-territorialises too much in light of their re-evaluation of fascism as absolute deterritorialisation, Land suggests that Deleuze and Guattari's reason for rejecting capitalism's fascistic proclivities in the first volume, in Anti-Oedipus, was that it was too... It was not that it was... Yeah, not that it was too territorialising, but that it wasn't territorialising enough.

And this explains why Deleuze and Guattari ultimately resorted to a revolutionary anti-capitalist politics, which they themselves acknowledge has only ever led to the despotic re-territorialisation of the socialist states, of Stalinism, Maoism, so on. So Land says, Deterritorialisation is to be treated as suspect. Dissent finds itself in the conservative role of regenerating a faculty of moral censure, occupying a space of accusation. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the theory of a black hole effect or too sudden de-stratification threatens to cripple and domesticate the entire massive achievement of Deleuze and Guattari's joint work. for land, if deterritorialisation is to be limited to only what humans can create and control matter is once again reduced to just an inert, unproductive

object which is synthesised by the human subject instead, a real materialism like the one at least initially advocated in Anti-Oedipus would have to affirm that matter is itself productive, such that the human organism is just one contingent synthesis with no claims to exhaust desiring production even in its most creative endeavours. So by supplementing Deleuze and Gattari's schizoanalysis with an unrelenting thanatonic drive to avoid the former's re-territorialising tendencies what Land is doing is he's fashioning a schizoanalysis that no longer consists in decoding only so as to open up new possibilities for humans but rather to pursue an in-human matter's own productive processes even as it leads to abolition.

Yeah, and given his rejection of the death instinct as fascist, Land concludes making it with death by proffering a fivefold criteria for what it really means to be a Nazi. In other words, how to Nazify your body without organs. Firstly, a Nazi psychologises the impersonal flows that divide society as a conspiracy waged by some malicious other, be it the foreigner, the Jew, the communist, the degenerate artist, or the promiscuous woman. Land says, wherever there is impersonality and chance introduce conspiracy, lucidity and malice, look for enemies everywhere the Nazi also rejects Freud's account that we looked at last week of a non-agentic will, in favour of Kant's conception of will as the duty to

reason's unconditional law Land says burn Freud and take desire back to the Kantian conception of will wherever there is impulse, represent it as choice decision, the whole theatrical drama of volition. Moreover, the Nazi oedipalises the impersonal historical processes by imagining that they are rationally governed by great despotic leaders like Hitler, whose commands they slavishly execute. In other words, revere the principle of the great individual, personalise and mythicise historical processes, love obedience above all things. From his penchant for the despotic regime, we can see that the Nazi is also nostalgic for traditional beliefs, values, hierarchies and

identities, therefore seeing anything new as a threat to the idyllic past, the golden age. So Land says, foster nostalgia for what is maximally bovine, inflexible and stagnant, a line of racially pure peasants digging the same patch of earth for eternity. And finally, given his penchant for the status quo, the Nazi distrust anything different or rebellious, such as women, creative artists and other ethnicities. Instead, so-called degenerate races are to be forced into labour camps to produce the wealth of these racially pure peasants. Women are domesticated for the sake of reproducing Aryan clones and art is tasked with only representing the world as it is rather than as it could or will be. In other words, rigidly

enforce the domestication of women, distrust art, classicise cities to eliminate the disorder of uncontrolled flows and persecute all minorities exhibiting a nomadic tendency. So through this kind of five-point criteria, land separates absolute deterritorialisation from Nazism, since the deaf instinct has no interest in carving out national territories, psychologising historical processes, and encoding fixed racial and sexual identities. On the contrary, Thanatos wants nothing... in fact, wants everything that the Nazi despises. social anarchy, exogamy women's liberation and creative geniuses giving new rules to art on the contrary it is Deleuze and Wattari's

anti-fascism that is itself fascist as much as it seeks to construct wars to keep the barbarians from invading the polis, the city of God Lange says, trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more radically than any irresponsible impatience in de-stratification Nothing could be more politically disastrous than the launching of a moral case against Nazism. Nazism is morality itself. Whereas the struggle against fascism betrays what Land calls a complicity with phenomenology, in so far as it idealistically imagines that we are able to reduce the outside to the rules of the inside, of the human security system, Land argues that a consummate libidinal materialism must conceive all such efforts as the futile attempt to ensnare matters in personal flows of creative energy

into the spidery cobweb of reason. OK. It's because of the split between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus' understanding of fascism that two factions emerged at the 1995 Virtual Futures Conference held at LAND's Warwick University. Whereas the Warwick Deleuzeans, as they were called, led by LAND, affirmed that schizoanalysis meant to destroy without limit or restraint the American Deleuzeans led by Manuel De Lander wanted to maintain the caution of a thousand plateaus so yeah, the initial responses to Land's meltdown essay which was from, that's what the clip was from at the beginning

whereas the initial responses misinterpreted him at first as a technophobic critic of anti-Oedipus as leading to human extermination at the hands of future technology it soon became clear that although Land did see cybernetics' deterritorialisation as tending towards human extinction, he was actually advocating this. As Charles Stavall wrote in a report of the conference, whereas more orthodox delusions like David Parash thought that too much deterritorialisation was irresponsible, Land argued that the very category of responsibility was re-territorialising, impersonal machinic flows and hence essentially fascist. So Stavall records, Parash said that such pleasure might turn quickly to other things and that there is something irresponsible in unleashing this apocalyptic view

as a form of pleasure. Land said he had a lack of sympathy with responsibility as a concept that it constitutes a crushing form of stratification. He asked further at the end of the day does being responsible really put you on the side of the angels? From this debate I think we can see that Land's argument against A Thousand Plateaus and the American Deleuzians, caution is that they are not on the side of the angels but rather on the side of the fallen angel or the fascists who seek to re-stratify and humanise the machining unconscious and in any case Land concludes we cannot stop an inhuman reality desiring production even if we wanted to given Land's reassessment of capitalism as the agent rather than the impediment

to the excesses of the outside the final question is what does the mature Land now think of the insurrectionary anti-capitalist resistance that he once advocated. I think the mature land recognises two kinds of socialism. On the one hand, as per the Deleuze and Guattari of anti-Oedipus, socialism is the critique of capitalism in the name of a greater productive force that capitalist dynamics supposedly impedes. To this land objects that what socialists are really critiquing is not capitalism but older despotic regimes that inhibit capitalism's full potentiality which is still to come. So he says only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued. More often than not, however,

Lance suspects that socialists are like the Deleuze and Guattari of a thousand plateaus, not really critiquing capitalism for being too unproductive but rather for being too revolutionary, too alienating and too chaotic. Seen in this way, socialism is itself the despotic nostalgia for humane values and stable meanings that capitalism is increasingly rendering obsolete. In a 2007 post on the CCIU's blog called Critique of Transcendental Miserabilism, which is also in Feng Numenau, Land argues that instead of pursuing, for example, Mao's Great Leap Forward or Khrushchev's claim that the Soviet Union will bury Western imperialism with an even greater acceleration of the productive forces, contemporary Marxists or what then calls transcendental miserabilists

have adopted an Adornian pessimism that acknowledges capitalist growth is unequaled whilst rejecting the very productivity they once wanted as dehumanising so he says all that survives of Marx is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlements reducible to the word capitalism in its vague and negative employment as the name for everything that hurts in land's view transcendental miserabilism has no positive vision of the future to offer but only the negation of what is and what will be in favor of inferior forms of social production so the irony i think the real irony here is that uh the socialist left uh the land and now the conservatives seeking to sustain the status quo whilst the pro-capitalist right are revolutionary

struggling to unfetter capitalism from supposedly or despotic restraints. Of course, unlike the socialist, the old socialist dream, capitalism is bringing about a revolution that does not implement a new society, but rather the destruction of civilization as such, human civilization. So here Land actually agrees with the transcendental misribilis, or the Marxist, assessment of capitalism as marking humanity's debasement and eventual destruction. For example, he says, it's not unreasonable that capitalism should become the object of this resentful denigration. So, yeah, I think it's crucial to see that land's argument in support of capitalism is not that of typical conservatives and libertarians who contend that capitalism is good

because it generates the wealth of nations and human prosperity and so on. On the contrary, for land, capitalism is good precisely because it is brutal, destructive, and will even wipe us out one way or another be it through nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, or, as we'll see next week, the technological singularity. Certainly capital enriches a tiny minority of humans, but this is only to camouflage itself as the gratification of our eros, which it will eventually repurpose for another, much more morbid purpose altogether. So what those in the alt-right movement, who identify land as their ideological ally, fail to grasp, is that land praises capitalism for precisely the same reason that anti-capitalists condemn it. It will lead to our destruction.

If this is to be seen as something joyous for land, it's because his commitment is not to humanity's betterment, but rather to an absolute, if inhuman, knowing of the real, which our species hubris can only dissimulate. So we end with the dance of death. And, yeah, let's open it up for discussion or questions. I noticed a lot of people left halfway through, probably from the trauma of transcendental miserably or something. But yeah, any questions? Yeah. I was wondering to expand on the topic of what we're being called the eco-canic of Christianity.

I wonder to what extent ecological catastrophe is an actual limit to capitalism. Because when you can't have high-speed travel in the water, you can't mine people calling it 60 degrees. Is there, how exactly is capital sort of, I mean he's making up it's a kind of AI liftoff, but what if it doesn't? Yeah, I wonder about this as well. I mean, I can imagine various responses, but I don't know what Land would say. Amy? I think we're a little bit of a way to answer this question. And, I mean, in short, he doesn't forget.

And it's kind of trying to tell you what's in the space. What do you mean she is? Multiple. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also the AI could survive. Yeah, it's got to get in it first. Yeah, that's the thing. That is an interesting point. Yeah, because it seems like there's better forms of extinction, so to put it. Like, it would be better to have AI, technological singularity, than nuclear holocaust or something. Yeah, does anyone have any ideas? because I mean like this I think about this question a lot as well but I'm not sure

yeah I mean I I'm pretty sure he believes in it I mean definitely a lot of essays he's definitely you know he uh he definitely believes in it in terms of like you know he'll say things like the polar bears are drowning and there's nothing we can do about it and uh but i mean i think some of the twitter stuff that i seen as well where he seems to be a bit contesting some of you know climate science or whatever is more climate you know climate science activism or something like that you know as an ideology or something like that like you know the claim that because of climate science we should impede the process of capital or something like that. Pollution and industrialization, maybe. You said something recently on Twitter, I think just a few days ago, that it can be the, like,

the greatest propaganda exercise of, like, modern times and still be basically true. So I don't think it's mutually exclusive. Sure, sure. Yeah. And that's like with a lot of these positions now, I think, like, you know like he's obviously he has no interest in patriarchy for example or fixed gender roles or anything like that but sometimes he would like troll that but as a because it's a form of identity politics for its ideological elements yeah even though he's for a capitalist system that will actually accelerate you know gender fluidity Yeah, I don't know, I have to think about it, I can't really think of anything else.

Any other questions or related comments or anything? Yeah? I think what you just said, it was something that I thought of when I first found in the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. philosophical, composition of style.

like And the question about like that environmental question Like the health of clients that I think you might Would it like once Or like is any kind of productive for like or can it be something else? Yeah. I don't really know, like, after that, what he would think. I don't know.

I'm sure I might draw on other people in a second, but I just didn't usually say that. I think, I kind of think, yeah, the project would be over, but not in a, again, to return to those, like, not in a static kind of depth. Yeah, yeah, of course. I'm just thinking about other ways that it might, I mean, as we'll see next week, the ultimate why he's ultimately interested in capital is more than ecological catastrophe or anything else, is technological advancement, which he sees as leading to an AI that would do nothing but reflect upon itself to find out ways to improve itself and recode itself. So literally just this infinite decoding of itself which for Land, in really recent works, he's described as a form of intellectual intuition in the which is the the completion of philosophy essentially

uh where there's intellectual intuition is where there's no there's no longer a subject object division it's they're one now it's in a state of like self-conscious absolute knowing um but i'm not sure amy do you have any I do. I think you can see that, I mean, very recently just like in the news and elections called accelerations and still with most capitalism. And the idea of what you get to after this like intensive phase change, where the AI kind of throws off its human substrata, has the same status as the numinary card, the overland nature, communism and Marx.

It's a limit point, and an index is something else, but you absolutely, physiologically have no traction on it because you're on the other side of the process. So I think it's still this idea that something's going to happen, but it's a mistake to be out of the kind of saying what that is. But we know it's post-capital. Can you say whether or not it's productive? Well I think since the productive process is the transcendental murder itself, then it continues to be productive because it's basically the transcendental kind of connecting up with itself. So I think that's probably the only thing you can say about it. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Yeah, it has the future, the post-cap, well not even post-cap,

But whatever happens with the singularity is what Verna Vinge, in the original coining of the singularity, calls it a wall across the future. Like the exact, almost exact kind of terminology is Kant's idea of the Numenau as a boundary concept. So even to try and think it is already to lose, really, at the game. And, you know, there's a Land Ends 1 piece with something like, you know, our only job is to create something smarter than ourselves. Any other problems are not our problems for us to solve. yeah as satisfying or unsatisfying as that may be yeah Is it like in the reverse of that, like maybe of Simon's idea with oil, you know, like oil is listed before us and then that's the lubrication for capital that means it's for humans.

So then, is that kind of, maybe you'll, like, return or return and go back to that point? yeah because i mean in this i can't really remember the all the dynamics of the oil chapter in cyclonopedia but the i mean there is a sense of which the deep past the geotraumatic past is also just as kind of numinal as the future um so in that given that they have a similar structure I guess in some sense it's like an eternal return but yeah not an eternal return to territorialization

yeah except except to the extent that oil passes oil is part of the dynamics of capital accumulation in which territorialization is still around any last questions or comments so we'll end it in praise of the oil god thanks