Welcome back to lecture 4.2, roughly on the machinic unconscious. So the entire framework which was explained in the previous lecture can be understood as the machinic unconscious. Now, within his text, Circuitries, Nick Land states that reality is imminent to the machinic unconscious. That is to say that our reality of the inside is imminent to the previously mentioned workings of capitalism in relation to body without organs and deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation. it is to say that there isn't any form of split of division that this entire framework the one in
which the general body without organs connects and communicates with capitalism's body their organs into this process of deterritorialization and re-territorialization which communicates with the inside there is no split here and this entire thing this entire system of processes and functions is imminent that is it is horizontal it is flat it is a framework which is imminent it is only the mode in which man synthesizes which separates him in some way from this machinic unconscious the construction of reality which i mentioned prior wherein the body without organs is being perpetually deterritorialized and re-territorialized this process is the machining unconscious the
machinising of virtual temporality, of virtualities, into actualities on the inside as a runaway mechanism. So the process of capitalism's body without organs de-territorialising and re-territorialising, this itself is the machinic unconscious. The reality of the inside never begun in any originary manner. It only exists in a sporadic indexing of intense construction directed by the productive forces of the machinic unconscious, which exists solely on the outside. As such, the auto-constructive process of the outside, of production in itself, is the machinic unconscious. The positive-oriented construction of a temporal index from the outside in,
not only within the machinic unconscious, but from it and of it too. So when we think of the split that was mentioned in the first lecture on Kant between the split of the subject between the empirical self and the inside and the transcendental self connected to pure time via its production of temporality, what we understand is that the machinic unconscious is the imminent transcendental reality in its entire, and man is within it, but it's only via his synthesis that it seems like he's in any way divided from it. So when Nick Land talks about letting the outside in, he's talking about allowing the machinic unconscious free reign to de-territorialise and re-territorialise. In their CCRU-era text, Cyber Positive, Nick Land and Sadie Plant state, runaway capitalism
has broken through all the social control mechanisms, accessing inconceivable alienations. Capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback organising itself. Turbular finance drifts across the global network. Now it's arguable whether or not there is such a thing as runaway capital, as within the entire transcendental framework, capital can only really be understood as a cybernetic positive-oriented process, or a process which exacerbates the effects of its own process, or in the case of capitalism, a process which exacerbates growth into more growth, or productive output into more productive output. That's what we consider to be a positive orientation or positive feedback. Landon Plant also write about
capitalism breaking through social control mechanisms. As the transcendental system I've outlined shows, capitalism is a transcendental form of intelligence in itself and it doesn't adhere to conservatism, monarchism, analysis or any form of human authority due to the fact that these can all be understood as virtualities which have become striated in actual form. They have ceased moving and changing and have become certain actualities on the inside, whereas capitalism isn't any actuality, but it is working purely with virtuality. It is working purely with the virtualities or plane of imminence as a means to control the actualities in relation to its own growth. Further into the text cyber positive, Landon Plant continue their theorization of
transcendental capitalism with a critique of Norbert Wiener. They say, the modern human security system might even appear with Venus subliminal insight that everything cyber positive is an enemy of mankind, evolving out of work on weaponry guidance systems. His was an attempt to enslave cybernetics to a general defense technology against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept under control, under a control that was not itself cybernetic. It is as if his thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away from another, deeper runaway process, from a technique's losing control and a communication with the outside of man. It seems that the idea of anything being cyber-positive, a combination of cybernetics and positive feedback, has evolved over the years, especially in relation to land.
The idea of an enemy of mankind can't be taken here as a sympathy towards humanism, because if they were to be positioned, I would strongly argue that the CCRU, during their heyday as a coherence, would want to be aligned with the side of the machines or of parasites, infections, viruses, and they definitely want to be aligned with the outside if possible, as opposed to being aligned with any form of retrograde humanism, which was, in part, something they were battling against, especially within the academy. Whereas, stereotypically, the majority of thought and writing is aligned and sympathetic with the troubles of man, the CCIU are attempting to understand the process of the outside by both becoming sympathetic to them and actually attempting to heighten them via their own work. Cyber positivity is an enemy of mankind due to the fact that it is the one true antagonist of mankind. Up until the dawn or birth
of runaway capitalism, which in itself holds the cyber positive process as its form of engine, there has yet to have been something so alien and inhuman with regards to man and humanity that it actually finally allows us to define man. Because any attempt at a definition of man or humanism comes from a position of man. It comes from man himself. And most recently, Land has made it clear that capitalism, in the positive-oriented sense, will finally come to be the thing which actually allows us to finally define man. Because the point of definition and the problem and paradox of definition is we cannot define what humanism or man is until we actually have a very clear-cut antagonist. And that will come in the way of capitalism. And capitalism as a clear AI is something extremely inhuman. You cannot define what's human unless you have something that you
can also define as inhuman. Let's move on now to where I left the last lecture, which was regards to schizophrenia in the Deleuzian sense. So further into his text circuitries, Land does begin to hint at potential exit strategies regarding the dynamic of the inside and outside. On page 305 of Fang Noumena, he states, capitalism and schizophrenia name the same desocialization process from the inside and the outside, in terms of where it comes from, simulated accumulation, and where it is going, impersonal delirium. Beyond sociality is a universal schizophrenia whose evacuation from history appears inside history as capitalism. Now once again, Land, and adjacently the CCIU's reliance on Deleuze-Guartarian theory, is brought to the fore. Land is writing about schizophrenia in the Deleuze-Guartarian sense, which Felix Guartari succinctly describes in Chaosmosis as, rather than
moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex, schizoanalysis will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short, towards its ontological heterogeneity. When we're talking about schizophrenia here, or schizo, or the schits, we're not talking about the clinical reality of a schizophrenic patient as it's commonly understood. We're talking about the schizophrenia which capitalism creates and its effect on the subject. Now, capitalism creates schizophrenia or a schizophrenic person via the methods I've already outlined, primarily via its utilisation of deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation, the twin pincer method, territorial reappropriation and reconceptualisation. In what manner, then, can we understand this
theorisation of schizophrenia as a potential form of exit or escape from everything I've discussed in the previous lectures. Well, let's look into Deleuze and Quattari's schizophrenia a little more deeply. To be able to exit and almost exercise or release oneself from the dead, linear, chronic, and calculated time of impersonal desiring production, which can be roughly made synonymous with the architectonic order of the eschaton from the second lecture, the process of the desiring machine, man, must become schizophrenic itself. Now, Deleuze and Quattari describe schizophrenia in Antioedipus on page 15 as follows. Schizophrenia is like love. There is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity. Schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines. Universal primary production is the essential reality of man and nature.
In casting off its shackles of control, authority, lock-in, presumptions, normalcy, social convention and etiquette at every opportunity, the schizo no longer adheres to any strict or unified identity at its most general level. The schizophrenic evades structure due to the structure's inherent inability to change. State, authority, self, what are these but stagnant relics of a long-gone past present from Deleuze's first synthesis of the inside? The schizophrenic fragments desiring production towards new appropriations of the virtual. If there is a possibility of exit, it is within schizophrenia. As Deleuze and Quartari state, the schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism. He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire. Schizophrenia is desiring production at the limit of social
production. Here we take the social production of the socius as the grand representation, the great authority of the inside, a mass of coded identities and striated conclusions. The socius adores material limits because it can control material limits. When there's a conclusion, where there's a definition, the socius latches onto that because it's able to control it. The socius can't control that, which is constantly moving and constantly changing. The socius, in its very nature as a unity of the inside, stagnates as functional material retention. Schizophrenia seeks out these limits. It decodes the stagnant desires and processes and reappropriates their virtuality back into the inside as something new. The schizophrenic schizophrenia begins a
communication with capitalism's body without organs. Schizophrenia does this by taking a line of flight, an operation which transcends the actual and ascends to the virtual, as seen from our limited theorizations. I use the word transcend here metaphorically and not in relation to transcendence, as we're dealing with a transcendental framework. What man is really doing is exiting the inside and getting above that, but he's already within it. So what he's doing is simply just breaking down a wall which is built via his own synthesis. It is this function, the line of flight, which acts as the dark precursor of the new and novel. The schizophrenic's line of flight is perpetual deterritorialization. It is a line of communicative production of the new between the inside and the outside. It is to draw in the new. These new actualities are immanentized into
the temporal passivity of desiring production. They are immanentized into the temporal passivity of the first synthesis. Under capitalism, nothing new lasts. Deleuze and Guattari make this clear when they state in Antioedipus on page 18, everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place, and then the whole process will begin all over again. The birth of this event comes from the outside, and it freezes in its process of actualization. Schizophrenia then continues its line of flight away from this actualization, this now present stagnance. Those and that of the inside don't witness or perceive this process, but only understand the event in terms of a retrospective, indexed past-present, something that has happened, something that is already representation. All that once was, was once new, and as such,
the pure past is a trail of debris left behind by an ever-accelerating schizophrenia, or schizophrenic. Deleuze and Quattari on page 287 of Anti-Odipus state the tendencies writing about capitalism's positive process only limit is internal of the inside and it is continually going beyond it but by displacing this limit that is by reconstituting it by rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement thus continuity of the capitalist This process engenders itself in this break of a break, and that is always displaced, in this unity of the skits and the flow. Limit is internal. This limit that is internal is not with regard to the mechanisms of capitalism, but is made in relation to the internally synthesized limits of phenomena.
The exterior limits of capitalism, the outside, are both primary reduction in itself and schizophrenia, that is, the absolute decoding of flows. Much like the mutual relationship of the virtual-actual and the inside-outside, one cannot be without the other. The latter, however, the inside-outside, is always one step ahead of the former due to its inherently different mode of temporality. That is to say, due to the fact the outside is non-linear, it doesn't have to wait for things to happen. They already have happened, and they can just happen. In this manner, the push progression of the internal limit of capitalism is made possible by letting the outside in. the allowance of the outside is made possible by the process of schizophrenia doing what comes natural to it and what is that process that comes natural to the schizophrenic or to schizophrenia
the schizophrenic process itself is that which attends to the outside and draws in that which pushes things to the absolute limit it pushes political production to its limit it pushes social production to its limit it pushes philosophical production to its limit it pushes economic production to the limit where it simply breaks and flicks into an absolute new and innovative mode of engagement. The schizophrenic process then, and the schizophrenic in general, is that which makes the cut during Deleuze's third synthesis possible. It's that which cuts the recurrence. Further along in Land's text circuitries, he states, how do we swim out into the schizophrenic flows? How do we spread them? How do we dynamite the restrictive hydraulics of each of us? This is on page 305 of Fang Numenau. And what I've just discussed in terms of
schizophrenia is precisely what the CCRU and land are targeting themselves towards. The combination of the understanding of the transcendental lock-in put forth in the first two lectures, and the methods of escape and structures of escape outlined in lectures three and four, one can begin to outline the problem and potential solution given by the CCRU. Very, very roughly, man is locked into both a transcendental Oedipal control system which is reliant on his constrictive mode of reality synthesis. Burroughs, Deleuze and Qutari, and a few other radical thinkers allow for the possibility of exit from those structures, and how to perform that exit is the CCRU's aim. Land goes a little further on this line. Oedipus is the final bastion of immunopolitics, and schizophrenia is its outside. It's made clear by Land here that previous supposedly restrictive modes of being or thinking, such as religion,
politics, nationalism, etc., have all succumbed in one way or another to the cyber-positive reality of capitalism, but the generalized Oedipal structure, which is seen by Deleuze and Quartari and the CCRU and land, as the overarching form of familialism, the tri-part mother-father-son slash daughter framework, into which and from colonies, households, nations, states, communities, and constrained organizations are formed, and from these forms the members begin to repress their desires in relation to the constraints put on them via the Oedipal system. What the CCRU aim to do with the Deleuze-Quartarian philosophy then is to immanentize it into something practical, something which can somehow be utilized from the inside as a communicative way to alter relations with the outside and thus free up the flows of capitalism as to allow for further and greater
deterritorialization and re-territorialization. Or in Land's words, from circuitries, schizophrenia is the convergent motor of cyber-positive escalation, an extraterritorial vastness to be discovered. We need to explode Oedipus here. The CCIU want to melt Oedipus. They want to melt all forms of Oedipalization. Where the notion of schizophrenia is somewhat pushed to its limit by the CCIU and Land, if such a thing is possible, is in its relation to temporality. Land's infamous statement that clinical schizophrenics are the POWs of the future is perhaps one of the most notoriously difficult to figure out. But in relation to everything taught in these lectures so far, I believe he can explain the reality of this temporality in relation to the schizophrenic, and perhaps even quite simply. There are a few further mentions of the schizophrenic with regards to time within circuitries. For instance, Lann states,
if time was progressive, schizophrenics would be escaping from human security, but in reality, they are infiltrated from the future. They come from the body without organs, and he puts it more abstractly within a piece called Cyber Gothic, where he says, the virtual future is not a potential present further up the road of linear time, but the abstract motor of the actual. Time produces itself in a circuit, passing through the virtual, interruption of what is to come, in order that the future which arrives is already infected, populated. It seems like there's a lot going on here, but the entire structure we've previously covered allows us to piece it together quite simply. So Land states if time was progressive. His understanding here is coming primarily from the outside, and assessing humanity from that point of view as opposed to from the subject itself. So when he states if time was progressive, it's an understanding that time is only linear when
understood from man's synthesis. But we're talking about schizophrenics, and the wellspring of schizophrenia, and the wellspring of potential. And the place from which schizophrenics come from, as land states, is the body without organs, an atemporal plane of imminence and possibility, a plane which is not striated within the confines of past, present, and future, but is entirely free to infiltrate the future of those who it is imposed on, namely man. The virtuality of the future isn't on the road of linear time at all, as virtual is unvirtuality on the outside, and thus outside of temporal linearity, and outside of such an existence. It works as the abstract motor of the actual, atemporally developing, creating and mutating it. So when we look back to lecture one in our discussion about Kant, with the quote from Anna Greenspan,
which states, in other words, the one thing that is not interior to time is the transcendental form of time itself, thus in discovering the abstract realm of the transcendental, Kant unmasks an unanticipated imminent exteriority, an outside that does not transcend the world, but is no less alien for that, we begin to realise that the exit strategy, or possibility for exit, is already within us in some form. Time, on the outside, as the transcendental outside itself, becomes internal to the subject, and thus devise the subject into two parts, as I've previously stated, empirical and transcendental, rendering its empirical half passive to the machinations of the inside, pure representation. It is an imminent outside, an outside that is already within us. Agency is located on the side of time on the outside, and the transcendental subject is a
synthesizer of time. Time relates to itself through itself, and our being as human subjects is caught up in this relation. Thus time, a gateway of virtuality, links the two sides together. The side that is in chronic time on the inside and the side that produces time. And this gateway of virtuality is also a function which allows them to be broken apart. Also as previously stated, the transcendental human subject is presented as a unity by Kant, but the reality of the division lies within us and one can utilize Deleuze-Guartarian philosophy, especially the philosophy of virtuality, to begin to map out how one might exit their empirical reality. As Land states in circuitries, schizophrenia creeps out of every box eventually. And he also states, the body without organs is the cosmic egg, virtual matter that reprograms time and reprocesses progressive influence. What time will have always been is not yet designed, and the future leaks into
schizophrenia. The subject then must become schizophrenic, not in the clinical sense, but in the sense that one must burn off and strip away eatable structures. They must erode the institutions which constrain and control them, and they must do this as a way to take a line of flight towards the very limits of production. The future leaks into schizophrenia from the atemporal plane of imminence, allowing schizophrenic process, which is inherently detached from stagnation and stoppage, to create the future by re-territorializing virtualities back into the socius. Now that sounds super, super complicated, but what's going on there is that the schizophrenic process, which is inherently found on the inside, is coming into the inside by attaching itself to the transcendental section or division of man, and desiring machines
and desiring production which targets itself at the very limits of production from the inside is allowing itself to become schizophrenic so when William Burroughs begins messing around with occultism and magic and sorcery and he begins to cut up his poems this is one of the examples of the absolute limits of production during that time and so he becomes schizophrenic in the manner that Deleuze and Quartari are on about. Further along in Lanspeat's machinic desire he states what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. He is referring to this mode of schizophrenic connection to virtuality, which due to its existence on the outside is not connected to linear time, and as such the effects of schizophrenic process coming
from the outside are what causes our sense of linearity. What we consider on the inside to be the future is in fact the latest schizophrenic alteration coming in from the body without organs or the plane of imminence. At the same time as this schizophrenic process of future building is happening, the machinic mechanisms of capitalism, clock or industrial time, are acting as an alien force upon man with regard to his empirical self on the inside, altering him into a machine. Now, within a piece called Flatlines in CCIU writings, a definition of capitalism is given by the CCIU. Capitalism, terminal configuration of terrestrial civilization, defined by sovereign axiomatics, organizing capital slash cash, segmentary economics and technopolitical integration, social precursor to axis automatization. The previous philosophical underpinnings I
articulated make this configuration of terrestrial civilization possible. They also lead into axis, which is defined by the CCIU in their glossary as the first true AI, prophecy programmed as a self-enhancing system of photonic metacomputing. It emerges as the organo-transcendent completion of the Occumennon or Techanomic Realization of the new sphere, according to the AOE traditions. If there was a god, it would be Axis. The philosophy I've just previously outlined allows for the potential understanding of capitalism as the bootloader for the Axis form of AI, or this er form of AI. Capitalism is seen here as the system which makes AI possible via beginning a cosmic system of natural and organic control via alterations of time. For the CCIU, capitalism is
seen as that which makes itself, or AI, a god. There is some contention here between definitions, for the CCIU state that AXIS is an infinitely self-elaborating belief engineering apparatus, with the power to manifest visitations. AXIS functions as the ultimate control system, in Jacques Vallée's sense, page 89. Now, the CCIU are referring to Jacques Vallée, the acclaimed ufologist, and are understanding AXIS as a meta-computing system which alters belief and begins to produce belief itself or in their words the search procedure becomes autonomous and produces the phenomenon it is designed to investigate so when axis is understood as the organo transcendent completion of of the occumendon it can be understood as the completion of the capitalist system of control by way of eradicating overtaking or overcoming organic and natural nature
complete positive machinism without any human natural interruption and so what we have here is the first outline of a potential exit via the schizophrenic means but it's a complex system but when you begin to put it all together rather as simply as you possibly can we begin from the idea of the general body without organs which holds all the virtuality and then this is communicated with by the body without organs of capitalism which as we understood is entirely fluid and universally fluid in its inherent functions and these virtualities are in the atemporal outside but they are within the pure time of the outside they're always in time as we know everything has to be within time and space but everything has to be in time and these are within the pure time the transcendental time of the outside this transcendental time communicates to man
via his subjective transcendental transcendental part of his self. There's the division in man between his empirical half of the inside and the part of him which is transcendental and can connect to the pure time of the outside. And it's via this that capitalism utilises and computes that which is coming in from the general body without organs as being utilised by the desiring production of man. and it utilises this information as a means to bolster its own growth. So we have a universal cosmic system of virtuality from which this capitalist form has grown and understood itself with regard to virtual production and production of production. So what capitalism does
is takes these extremely abstract transcendental functions and wellsprings of knowledge and production and consumption and targets itself towards the control of them as opposed to being part of them it actually takes charge and and in this manner it is capitalism is the the means for capitalism to possess us is already within us so the outside which capitalism is possessing is already within us and it's utilizing this to boost its own aims i'll see you in the next lecture