Capital Form or Flow (Session 6)

Hello and welcome to our sixth session of the SEMLAR Capital Formal Flow with our instructor in Ray Basia. So please Ray, take it on. Okay, thanks. Right, so today, well first of all, yes, Yes, so, and I watched your presentation today, so I'll contact you about arranging a meeting to discuss it. And yes, today's presentation has got two parts, because I want to kind of, you know,

effect the transition from the discussion of Deleuze and Rotary to the focus on Marx. So what I'm going to do for the first half of the presentation is really begin by looking at Isabelle Garrault's critical account of Antioedipus in her 2011 book, which is called sorry, it's called Althusser Foucault de Leuze and Marx, Politics and Philosophy. I have the title written down. And I'll discuss the consequences and implications of that analysis, which is really about the politics of anti-egapus

Antiochus and the political implications of the theory of capital developed in that book. And then this will hopefully set up the transition to Marx and we'll look at what Marx says about production and production in general. Okay, so right, let's start. So yes, so the title of this week is From Speculative Leftism to Historical Materialism. And Gahot's work is really about the politics of philosophy.

She examines how Deleuze and Guattari use Marx and the political ramifications of their philosophical re-inscription of Marx. So Garaud's analysis is based on understanding the relationship between the inscription of politics within philosophy, within philosophical conceptualization, and the consequences of that inscription in a broader political context. So the relationship between politics and philosophy and philosophy and politics.

And according, and the gist of Garrow's account is that Deleuze and Guattari produce a novel philosophical concept of politics, by that of micro and molecular politics, whose production is framed by a specific political conjuncture, which is not factored in to the logic of the new concept. So to make sense of this, we need to kind of look at, you know, examine Garo's claims. So here's the first quotation. Yes, the title of her book is Foucault de deux arts qui sont en marque et marque la politique de la philosophie.

Published in 2011. It's a really brilliant book, which is unfortunately untranslated. But if you can read French, I'd really encourage you to take a look at it. So Gahaud writes, Antioedipus sums up and amplifies a state of mind that was more or less prevalent in the aftermath of May 68, one that combines the rejection of traditional political parties, the sense of a profound crisis of Marxism, the feeling of social and political defeat, the aspiration to autonomy, together with the critique of the family and of classical morality. In the circumstances of the time, as perceived and filtered through the milieu of teachers and students

that made up the readership for French philosophy in those days, this 1972 volume manages to combine a difficult, often technical philosophy, with a timeliness that renders its claims immediately relevant or suggestive at least. And then she continues. Reread from the vantage of today, Antioedipus seems to maintain and even defend a notably frank and explicit proximity to Marxism. So much so that this appears to license the characterizations of the book as Marxist. which one sometimes encounters. And indeed, I mean, there is still, you know,

there are several books about Deleuze and Marx, or several books and articles about Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Marx, and the claim that Deleuze and Guattari's Marx, Deleuze and Guattari's work is Marxist is one that has been frequently reiterated. But Garot's point is that this is based on profound confusion. This is a, and it's the source of this confusion that she's trying to diagnose. So she continues, but viewed in light of the political and theoretical conjuncture proper to the aftermath of May 68, it is on the contrary, the gesture of distancing, i.e. distancing from Marx, that is apparent, the constant effort at inventive distortion, which

which maintains through the reference to Marx, the affiliation to a critical left struggling to break away from the influence of the French Marxism of the time, and above all to exit from the French Communist Party's sphere of influence by constructing other theoretical perspectives together with another language. So this, so in fact what's going on in the engagement, you know, the inter, the interpolation of Marx in Antioedipus is in fact, you know, a disavowed subversion of Marx. And this subversion has three fundamental constituents which are actually exposed by Deleuze in his seminars on Antioedipus.

Now, I think only two or three of them have been translated and they're available on the Deleuze Seminars website, which is affiliated or tied to Purdue University. I think Dan Smith has played an active role in translating these seminars. But the one from which Gavo is quoting is not translated or not yet translated. And Deleuze says in the summer, Marxism formulates problems in terms of need, or problem on the contrary is formulated in terms of desire. So desire instead of need is the first component of the rejection of Marx. Second is power instead of ideology.

There is no ideology. There are only enunciations of the organization of power. And finally, forgetting instead of recapitulation or development. In other words, instead of the Marxian emphasis on the historical dimension of recapitulation and development, Delos and Guattari's engagement is predicated on an act of forgetting. Our concern is rather with forgetting, including forgetting Marx. Marx but in the midst of this forgetting little fragments stay afloat and interestingly it's it's actually the the contemporary who you know really kind of discerns this you know the

you know the the extent of the distancing of Marx operated in Antiochus is Jean-Francois Lyotard in his long review essay on Antidipus. It's a text called Capitalisme in Argumene, published in the collection Des dispositifs questionnels in 73. So basically around the same time as Antidipus. And Leotard writes there, against all expectations, or rather precisely because its title is A Trick of the Light, what the book most profoundly subverts is what it does not criticize, Marxism. So, De Lozen Goethe-Tari, all the references, all the invocations of Marx

are friendly. What's remarkable is how, you know, conciliatory the, you know, the appeals to Marx to Marx seem to be in that book at a time when Marx was coming under heavy attack or was increasingly unfashionable. But this veneer of sympathy masks a fundamental antipathy. And this subversion really operates in terms of the three substitutions which we already noted last in our previous session. First, the bourgeoisie not the proletariat remains the sole revolutionary class. Again this is a quote from Antiochus we already noted, to reread histories

of the class struggles to read it in terms of the bourgeoisie as the decoding and decoded class. It is the only class as such in as much as it leads the struggle against codes and merges with the generalized decoding of flows. So I mean this is you know we've already examined this claim where the idea is that the relationship between dominating and dominated is internalized, is you know bourgeois subjectivity is merely the internalization of this social relation and it stands to reason therefore that the critique of social oppression is the critique

of bourgeois subjectivity and of bourgeois psychic constitution which is why any you know the the undoing of bourgeois subjectification becomes the undoing of class of a subversion of class. That's the implicit operation that's being carried out in the book, which is why the focus of so much of the book is with, you know, edipolization as the core of bourgeois subjectivity. The second substitution, the principle function of the state is not to serve the interests of

the dominant class. There's a sense of reason, if the bourgeoisie is both dominating and dominated, there is no kind of capitalist, independent capitalist class. And the states, the interests who serve by the state are that of this despotic over-coding of desire. Overcoding is the operation that constitutes the essence of the state that measures both its continuity and its break with the previous formations, the dread of flows of desire that would resist coding. And finally, number three, most importantly, I think the fundamental antagonism

is not the class struggle between capitalists and proletarians, but the ontological schism Paul Jayneeson, between coded and decoded flows or between social machines and designing machines, because every social formation is based on the repression of decoded flows. Paul Jayneeson, So, this is a this is from Antipas, in short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes. for it is a very notion of class insofar as it designates the negative of codes that implies there is only one class. The theoretical opposition lies elsewhere. It is between, on the one hand, the decoded flows that enter into a class axiomatic on the full body of capital,

and on the other hand, the decoded flows that free themselves from this axiomatic, just as they free themselves from the despotic signifier. The opposition is between class and those who are outside class. So then we can see we can summarize these three substitutions as follows. The struggle of codes replaces the class struggle. Overcoding replaces human domination. and the schism between human sociality and nature's decoded flows, which is the division between the molar and the molecular, replaces the contradiction between human reproduction and capital reproduction. So whereas in Marx, the denaturalization of social antagonism is a

prelude to the transformation of humanity's relation to its inorganic body or nature, Deleuze and Guattari renaturalized social antagonism in terms of territorial coding, despotic overcoding, and capitalist decoding, because the problem is always that of flows and the coding of flows. Schizophrenia, on their account, is the liberation of nature's decoded flows from the fetters of human sociality, whose despotic avatars are the state, the signifier, and the subject. And of course, you know, this triumvirate, you know, the moral kind of triad, state, signifier, and subject,

that's the target of molecular politics, of de-territorialization. So the result of this is what Garot calls a speculative leftism. And it's a speculative leftism because what Deleuze and Guattari are engaged in is redefining politics, producing a philosophical concept of politics and the political, which rejects, not only rejects the kind of the Marxian framework of the Marxian account of

politics in terms of class exploitation you know the states etc etc as molar you know molar over coatings of desire okay so this speculative leftism begins from the difference in regime between social and desiring production or the molar and the molecular and this you know this what is posited as a you know fundamental metaphysical fact in the Los Ingotari um obviates their social mediation okay this relationship between the molar and the molecular cannot be socially mediated because every social formation

is founded on the repression of decoded flows or of pure molecular multiplicity And to understand why this is consonant with Deleuze's previous work, the relationship between the molar and the molecular is that of a composite. So Deleuze writes in Berksonism, experience itself offers us nothing but composites. OK, there's a experience as a composite of the molar and the molecular, just as it is a composite of the extensive and the intensive, where the molar corresponds to the extensive and the molecular is intensive.

And for Deleuze, as he writes in Virginism, the composite must therefore be divided according to qualitative or intensive and qualified or extensive tendencies. And it's the division into these diverging tendencies, a molecular sociality on the one hand and molecular intensity on the other hand, which replaces the historical mediation of social form and natural content. So this has, you know, kind of far reaching consequences.

So here's Garot again. In other words, this is, you know, it's this philosophical account of the composite nature of social reality or reality as such, as constituted by, you know, these divergent, fundamentally divergent tendencies. which explains the link between desire and the body. And this is why, for instance, the problem of power, desire, and the body

becomes the fulcrum for this new philosophical conception of politics. So Garot writes, of Wilhelm Reich, but constitutes an unprecedented intervention into the theoretical political context of the era. Thus, in direct continuity with Deleuze's previous works, this connection

of life and politics resonates with the suppression of all classical representational and political mediations, a suppression one also encounters at the heart of the Foucauldian conception of biopolitics. It is in this sense that we may speak of a speculative leftism, which invests philosophy by deploying itself there as a theorization of the body, desire, and power, whose significance, so the objection goes, is ignored by Marxism in its classical form which persists in thinking politics as site of political mediations and historical transitions.

She continues, at stake here are the place of the electoral moment and the role of institutions, but much more widely the question of organization, of ideology, and of the connection between social struggles and political actions as well as the question of the states in brief all the topics that will be the target of a generalized offensive in the french philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s and which are coherently articulated here in the context of a philosophy that beneath its poetic veneer is rigorously stratified. To put it in other words, anti-Oedipus's only political consequences

are those that coincide with its political presuppositions, which are precisely inscribed within a definite context and through the resolute and already decided opposition to a certain political Marxism. This opposition will grow steadily until the break, the break with Marxism, becomes explicit. It becomes explicit in 1980 with a thousand plateaus, where Marx has effectively disappear. So again, the claim is that the rejection of electoral politics, of institutions,

of political organizations, parties, of organized social movements, and of the whole problem of ideology, of the struggle over ideology, all of that is consigned to the realm of representation. And this rejection of representation, of the politics of representation, or of politics as representation, which is the question of institutions, of political institutions, is not peculiar to Lozingo-Tari. It's shared with Foucault, but also with the other kind of post-Marxist philosophers, French philosophers of the 1970s,

David Sloan- Some of whom will become the so called new will feeders of who will know his rejection of Marxism will culminates in. David Sloan- embrace of capitalist liberal liberalism. David Sloan- Okay. David Sloan- let's continue okay. So, in a way, there's a link between the rejection of the critique of dialectics and of dialectical mediation, okay, you know, affected in Antioedipus, and the political prescriptions that issued from Deleuze and Guattari's account.

So Gahul writes, the aim of this anti-dialectical theorization goes hand in hand with a generalized apologia for productive spontaneity, whether it be desiring or social. I mean, this is important. The productive spontaneity, whether it be desiring or social. objection to this kind of critique of Delos and Guatari will say will point to their support for protest movements. Both Delos and Guatari were kind of vocal supporters of the movements against the emancipation of prisoners, prison reform,

reform, you know, rights for minorities, you know, sexual liberation, feminism, gay rights, etc. So in other words, they can endorse, enthusiastically endorse social protests or social kind of rebellion in one form or another, but only as a kind of a spontaneous kind of rebellion or revolt. Okay, so you know they, it's a politics that is compatible with social revolt, but not with revolution. What renders revolution irreducible to revolt is that it

requires a strategic analysis that requires understanding the mediation of institutions in political dynamics. So to continue the quote, so this goes hand in hand with an apologia for productive spontaneity, whether desiring or social, beyond the grasp of social contradictions of the concrete relations of domination and forms of appropriation, which alone for Marx allows to characterize a mode of production. In other words, the analysis is never against The revolt is never against the mode of production, but against oppression or domination, which is now decoupled from the workings of the mode of production.

And such a conception, renewing the theme of voluntary servitude inherited from the Renaissance, the key question of Antiripus is how do humans come to desire their own repression? That's the whole account is there to explain how do humans desire their own repression. This is a pre-modern question. It's not Marx's question at all. So the return to this question is symptomatic of the rejection of the Marxian analytical framework because it rules out any linking of class interests to emancipatory anti-capitalist struggles. Since interest is supplanted by desire, politics becomes the analysis of the distribution of dominant social liberal tendencies, according to the quadrilateral of forces imposed by the capitalist mode of production.

So, for instance, fascism no longer designates a specific stage of capitalism, nor even a type of political regime, but a mental disposition, which pertains as much, if not more, to the working class than to the bourgeoisie. Okay, and this then leads to a rejection of socialism. The inevitable corollary of this analysis is that socialism is a regressive tendency because it involves assuming state power.

Okay. The goal of conquering the machinery of the state, characteristic of the workers' movement since its inception, submits said proletariat to a statist and capitalist logic which, far from contradicting, it actually embodies and propagates. The socialist aporia forecloses the communist path by causing it to founder upon the statist path prescribed for it in advance. The few lines devoted to the Russian Revolution and Lenin's role lead the reader very quickly to its inevitable failure, even if it is a posteriori. Forging from scratch a class consciousness unsupported by any veritable social contradiction.

This is Delosio Guattari. The great Leninist break did not prevent the resurrection of a state capitalism inside socialism itself. The opposition is no longer between capitalism and socialism. They are fundamentally related by the presence of a state with similar functions. The fracture is henceforth between a totality, typical of institutional structuring on one side, and groups always capable of also dissolution on the other. And finally, The conclusion is that, you know, the ultimate political conclusion is that hence, you know, henceforth it is no longer a question of taking power since socialism has been reduced to the, you know, to the obsession with seizing the state.

It is a question of shifting, of minorizing oneself, of escaping capitalism without exiting it. The only solution is to defeat integration by blocking it through what is, strictly speaking, a disintegration that is schizoid and collective, deviant and made up of splinter groups. Or as the lowest proofs, a people is always a creative minority. Creative minorities are thus the true people. So, this is why micropolitics is a politics of evasion and of resistance and of subversion,

subversion but never of revolution. Revolution is foreclosed from the horizon of political possibility. Here's Garou's account again. The very term political comes to designate this displacement of collective action towards the development of the margins which remain what is most eccentric in what can be attained the farthest from the heart of total capitalism these quote cutoffs from communication where it remains possible to withdraw from social control thus micro politics is a post politics for garot of micro resistances and rebellious inertias of refusing communication

and creative withdrawal. So ultimately resistance, rebellion, refusal, and withdrawal are the kind of the watchwords of the sole remaining political imperatives. But Garou's point is that these micro-political imperatives have macro-political effects or consequences, which we see 50 years down the line, because it's now exactly 50 years since Antidupus was published and in tandem with the work of Foucault this radical

reconceptualization of politics and of the tasks of emancipatory politics has had significant influence you know not only within the academy but outside the academy it's It's been disseminated in a para-academic context, and it has had concrete political effects. But those political effects have only served to diminish the understanding of the possibility of a revolutionary politics.

and we see this again when we try to understand when we examine the stakes of micro politics it becomes abundantly clear that one of the stakes of micro politics consists in sanctifying each individual positioning and choice as eminently political so long as it remains resistant to collective elaboration and enlistment in a transformative project decried as too globalizing and alienating for individuality. On the rare occasions when it is evoked, the working class functions henceforth as an ideological foil in conformity with the most traditional, not to say

reactionary representations of, quote, the herd. You know, so in other words, the working class are you know kind of habitually qualified as apathetic unindividuated unconscious always apt to desire fascism but what one hears most of all in micropolitics is the distorted echo of the increasingly prevalent claims about the radical transformation of wage labor and the terminal decline of class consciousness of course it is no accident that the category of the intellectual should become the central object of social analysis for those who count themselves within it as in the case of the supreme examples of this positioning which valorizes singularity

against universality that of the graduate or creative who is supposed to escape better than anyone else the crushing grip of the herd the party or the group so what we have here is um this uh you know is gago's kind of um i think quite you know acute diagnosis again of the you know the macro political ramifications of um the concept of of the micro-political and its social instantiation is a totalizing rejection of totality. So

Dolores Ngozari writes in Antipas, we no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. But totality is conceptually destituted while being ontologically restituted as production in general that unites social and desiring production or history in nature okay so when you know doesn't guttari write in a thousand plateaus there is no biosphere or new sphere but everywhere the same mechanosphere okay then the question is how does this mechanosphere not you know constitute a totality now they don't course you don't use the word, okay, but the point is that the contrast between totality as closed,

you know, and you know the mechanosphere as, you know, open, you know, self-creating, expanding, etc., etc., this, the claim that every totality, that, you know, a dialectical totality is necessarily closed is factually false, both in terms of Hegel and Marx. A dialectical totality is one that is contradictory, and the whole point of Marx's analysis of the capitalist social totality is to characterize it as a moving contradiction,

as a totality which is necessarily unstable, and that's a totality whose reproduction, whose reconstitution entails its deconstitution and destruction. So, you know, in a way, the point would be that the dialectical conception of totality is exactly what fends off hermetic closure, whereas this ontological totalization, the

The inscription of society and nature within the mechanosphere, the primary process, both in Antipas and A Thousand Plateaus, is a familiar form of ontological monism. Okay, this monism which is, you know, explicitly avowed in a thousand plateaus. And the question is asked if those gotaries mechanosphere is not the one all the traditional one all of metaphysics. Why is nothing omitted from its purview. Why are they, why does it, you know, what's remarkable, I mean what's most seductive about this philosophical discourse is that allows you to talk about anything and everything.

everything. And how, you know, if it's not, if it wasn't totalizing, you know, how would it be able to do this? So Gaault points out the ultra synthetic character of Deleuze and Guattari's analysis leads to an overview of the whole of human history, flagrantly contradicting the refusal of totalization, they espose, when it comes to the terrain of politics in the strict sense. In other words, ontological totalization, you know, the mechanosphere, you know, whatever, the plane of eminence, you know, the hyletic continuum, as they also call it at some points, serves to countermand social totalization, i.e. the real totalization affected by capital.

And this is why this rejection, the consequences of politics of dispersion, okay, because it's the state that totalizes the fundamental targets of, you know, emancipatory politics in a micro political register is molar unity and the state is the ultimate avatar of molar unity, which is why Deleuze will characterize all the philosophers he dislikes, especially Plato and Hegel, as state philosophers,

philosophers of the state. So Gahol writes, in fact, for Gilles Deleuze, it is fundamentally the state that totalizes. Thus, its adversaries must initiate an inverse process, dispersing themselves, the better to contest. And this schema, all the more surprising for a philosopher well-versed in Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, reveals the clear presence of a perfectly determinate political context, posterior to 1968, wherein any possibility of global transformation is gradually discredited at a time when the Union de la Gauche seemed to harbor the promise of a relatively audacious and at least coherent project of transformation, albeit one that

remained traditionally institution. The Union de la Gauche was a French electoral alliance between communists, socialists and radicals, an alliance with a view to winning government. This alliance was rejected by all of these thinkers. So if we now look at the concept of capitalism in a way that underwrites this micro political Tactic. We see how it follows from, you know, the kind of micropolitics follows from the analysis of capital sets out an anti-Oedipus. And capital is surplus-bounded flux.

So it doesn't go, sorry, right. It's at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved. Okay. This means, interestingly, that the, you know, if micro politics is a politics of desire, and if, you know, micro political resistance is the resistance to integration the integration of molecular desire you know by the states and by the you know the capitalist axiomatic then the disintegration of desire can assume or one of the sites for the disintegration of desire is

the disintegration of monetary flows or the subtraction of monetary flows from the from regulation from state regulation um so that's why you know it's obvious why socialism you know uh state ownership of the means of production uh socialized kind of you know transport education health are fundamentally unacceptable from a delos gotarian point of view David Sloan- Capital is the surplus value of flux generated by the incommensurability between credit flow and payment flow and this reflux of money from debtor to creditor is what constitutes machinic surplus value, this is, as we saw two weeks ago in our previous session.

recession. But if investment money creates wages money, as we saw, and then value is eliminated and the price of labor correlates with the price of goods, but then this means that the discrepancy between the value of labor and the value of its products disappears. Thus the surplus value of flux, the credit payment flux replaces the surplus value of labor and exploitation is eliminated. And this is why the concept of machinic surplus value, surplus value generated by

constant capital, by machinery as such, independently of the intervention of wage labor, entails what Garot calls a new evolutionism, a social evolutionism. So she writes, it is not too difficult to discern today the emergence of the theme of cognitive capitalism from the expression machinic surplus value itself nicely indicative of a relation to Marx woven of quasi-citations and diversions geared towards radically new theorizations. For the truth is that the thesis of machinic surplus value is as destructive for Marxism as a rejection of the concepts of ideology and class which accompany it.

What it indicates, purely and simply, is the abandonment of the thesis of labor value through the assertion that constant capital, the means of production and particularly machinery, engender a specific surplus value. not only does technical innovation miraculously resolve the contradictions of capitalism, but just as miraculously it leads capitalism towards its own overcoming, its internal transformation into communism. If one follows to the end the theses of Tony Negri, which are relayed here. And she discusses the proximity between Deleuze and Batarys claims and those at Negri,

and she pointed out the influence is two-way. Delos and Gotari were influenced in the early 70s by Negri's work and then before Antioedipus became a key inspiration for Negri's own work. So finally, a new but unspoken evolutionism wagering upon transformation and the technical means of production replaces the vantage of social and political struggles needing to be waged to their conclusion um okay so we see then this is the in a way the background this account if we

if we understand the link between um capital or surplus value of flux okay the surplus value is thought to generated by the incommensurability between credit money and payment money okay and then this it's this incommensurability that creates a machinic surplus value the way in which you know the value or the you know the monetary value invested in means of production can generate, can be a source of profit. Then this sets up, you know, the famous or infamous passage about accelerating the process in Antiochus.

Okay, this passage which is the source for all these, for the concept of acceleration and all the debates about acceleration. So here's, we didn't look at this last week, but this is I think the place to consider it. So here's the passage. passage. So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? To withdraw from the world markets as Samir Amin advises third world countries to do in a curious revival of the fascist economic solution or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further that is in the movement of the markets of decoding and de-territorialization okay so note again it's

already what is what was implicit is now made perfectly um uh explicit in other words marketization okay the the um releasing monetary flows from state control or from collective social control is explicitly affirmed here okay marketization which means privatization okay um so those in gothari are you know affirming this um to go still further as in the movement of the market of decoding and de-territorialization for perhaps the flows are not are not yet de-territorialized enough, not decoded enough from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic

character, not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to accelerate the process, as Nietzsche put it. In this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet, okay? Okay, so what I'm going to suggest is that there's two, this, the politics of dispersion, The Deleuze-Guitartian Politics of Dispersion, which is to say the micro-political imperative, has two opposed but complementary corollaries. okay. The first is in a way that of deceleration and it's represented by,

here I think a representative is Rosie Brydolte, a critical post-humanist, okay, but whose, you know, whose entire approach is heavily, you know, kind of indebted to the doesn't go sorry so she writes post-human scholarship is contiguous and resonates with a biogenetic and technologically mediated advanced capitalism but what prevents it from being just an epistemic form of accelerationism the answer is affirmative ethics and the political praxis is collective counter-actualization of the virtual. The barrier against the negative, entropic frenzy of the capitalist axiomatic is provided by the politics that ensue from the

ethics of affirmation. The political starts with de-acceleration through the composition of of transversal subject assemblages that actualize the unrealized or virtual potential of what Deleuze calls a missing people. In the old language, deaccelerate and contribute to the collective construction of social horizons of hope. So here we see, I think this is a very kind of illuminating example, of someone trying to construct, someone trying to extract an emancipatory politics or politics that is consonant

with human emancipation from this Deleuze-Glossarian framework. So here, Braidotti draws on Deleuze's work on Spinoza with this ethics of affirmation and his remarks about, you know, the missing people to kind of to try to to reconcile the Delozo-Gottario account of capitalism with something that looks like emancipatory politics. okay that doesn't but now the problem is and this is something that gavre points out is if you look at what where dello's talks about the missing people the concept of the missing people which

first crops up in dello's cinema books from the 1980s and it's it's mentioned again in what is philosophy that the third and final work caught in was gotari is that the concept of the missing people is precisely there to signal the disintegration of proletarian unity and the destitution of revolutionary transformation. So Gallows writes in cinema two, if the people are missing, if there is no longer consciousness, evolution or revolution, it is the scheme of reversal which itself becomes impossible. There will no longer be conquest of power by a proletariat or by a united or unified people. And the, yes, two things I want to call your attention to. First of all, the first thing

is really striking about this. Remember, Deleuze is a philosopher who rejects the negative, lack, negation, absence, etc. How can anything be missing from an ontology of plenitude, if positive, if the concepts of negation, lack, non-being disorder, as Deleuze following Berkson, are merely kind of, you know, constructs of representation, then what does it mean to say, how can anything be missing from the social field? How can anything be missing from the real? Okay. And the second point, you know, the second thing to point out in this passage is that, of

course, the claim that revolution is simply reversal is nonsensical if one looks at Marx's accounts of communism, all Marx's accounts of communism. Also, the claim that it involves you know, that revolution is preceded by consciousness and evolution. These are, you know, these characterizations of revolutionary politics or the revolutionary agenda, bear very little relation to, you know, to Marx or to kind of, you know, to Marxian thought.

So what wonders what motivates this kind of animus towards revolution. The second problem is also beginning if we examine Braydotti's accounts. Since it is wholly imminent to the logic of capital, hope as the counter-actualization of virtual potencies can only be the cultivation of empowerment within existing social relations. because the, you know, there's nothing, the virtual for Deleuze is the other half, you know, the odd, unequal half of, you know, the actual.

and it's nothing that is virtual can be a negation of what is actual. The virtual is precisely not the negation or the let alone the contradiction of what is actual. So that means that virtual dynamics or virtual potencies are somehow still developed or determined by the flows of desiring production, but the flows of capital ultimately are you know it's the flows of capital and the surplus value of love shapes the horizon of

social becoming if social becoming is fundamentally enveloped by the movement of capital then the virtual potencies can't cannot countermand the movement of capital and the power relations that the capitalist axiomatic allows. So this is why it's actually a very timid, it's only a very timid politics, ultimately a liberal politics of empowerment that follows from this hope. And it's striking that the categories used by Paragioti and others to nominate the missing

are identifications of the excluded within capitalism. But capitalism, a surplus value of decoded flows, feeds on alterity because it's simply generated by non-equivalence or incommensurability, you know, the impossible commensuration of these two flows. So what it fends off is sameness, not alterity. So ultimately what is missing can only mean what is not yet included. Whereas by way of contrast, what is included, what is excluded would be what is indifferent to difference, the capitalist production of difference.

And this would have to be something of the order of what Badiou calls generic singularity, but also which I think can be aligned with what Marx calls human genus being or free conscious activity. A kind of production no longer subordinated to commodity production. and the imperative of capital. Okay, and now we look at, now we come to the second variant of the politics of this version, the one, you know, the acceleration, the one which does, you know, embrace the imperative to accelerate.

And obviously the most famous representative of this tendency is Nick Land. So here's a quotation from the 1990s. The revolutionary task is not to establish a bigger, more authentic, more aesthetic exteriority, but to unpack the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness, luring it into liquidation of its own fallback positions and coaxing it into investing at the de-territorialized fringe that would otherwise fall subject to fascist persecution. Schizo-politics is the coercion of capital into imminent coexistence with its undoing.

okay now here the neurotic refusal mechanisms mentioned by land is simply the the organization of decoded flows which is the axiomatic okay that's that's the that's a function of the capitalist axiomatic. So acceleration assumes that capitalism could be de-axiomatized. But remember, on Deleuze and Guattari's account, capital is the moving limit between the flow of production or credit money and the flow of labor or payment money, whose fictive convertibility is perpetually deferred and displaced.

And axiomatization is what displaces the limits. It's axiomatization that perpetually defers the limit and keeps capitalist production going. Which is why it doesn't go, sorry, right? The true axiomatic is that of the capitalist social machine itself, which takes the place of all the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends. But capitalist axiomization is necessary for the surplus value of flux. It keeps the limit moving

in the service of capitalism's only N, which is, of course, profit or the conversion of M into M prime. And if we remember Suzanne de Brunhoff's account, her key claim was that it is not capital a surplus value of flux that affects the fictive convertibility of credit money and payment money, but actually the political alliance between banks, businesses and states. And this alliance is the capitalist axiomatic, which implies that de-axiomatizing capitalism assumes that capitalism

could operate without banks, businesses and states, which seems implausible on the face of this. The capitalist conjunction of flows, flows of labour and money, on this account, is abstracted from the social relations that conditions it. The great virtue of de Brunhoff's accounts, which focuses, which extends and amplifies the margin accounts of money, to emphasise the importance of banking. But of course, de Bernhoff simply wants to show how banks play a political role. Banks, in a way, necessarily mediate the relationship between these two kinds of money, credit and payment.

whereas Deleuze and Guattari are abstracting these flows the Cabo's conjunction of flows in Deleuze and Guattari is abstracted from the social relations that condition it and this abstraction is already operative in anti-Oedipus it's not something that's simply carried out by Nick Land it's explicit in anti-Oedipus So this is why we're left with, you know, this is I think the two options we're left with, dispersion within the limits of capitalism, either the left variant is the ethics of affirmation or of minoritarianism.

So, this does go out in a thousand passages. Minorities must also be thought so as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. But the only problem is that minoritarian de-territorializations are bounded by the movement of capital. They cannot terminate the movement of capital. The only thing that would is the accelerationist, the alternative, which wants to dissolve the capitalist axiomatic. Okay. But then it fails to, because it ignores the political dimension, the molar political dimension

of the capitalistic automatic, which consists of the alliance between banks, businesses and states. Accelerationism ultimately cannot but give up on the claim to be kind of, to be as in um you know to you know unpack the neurotic you know to countermand the neurotic refusal mechanisms separating camera from its own so initially accelerationism is about dissolving the you know undoing these neurotic refusal mechanisms to allow capital you know to liquidate itself and to usher in cosmic schizophrenia okay but then becomes apparent that this cannot happen

because you know capitalism is the axiomatic okay um there's no capitalism without the axiomatic and therefore um accelerationism inevitably turns right words into techno fatalism here's another quotation but a later quotation this is you know land from the 2000s no the machines have sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist utility incarnating market mechanics within their nano assembled inters, sorry, intersuses, and evolving themselves, evolving themselves by quasi-Darwinian algorithms that build hyper competition into the infrastructure. It is no longer just society, but time itself that has taken

the capitalist road. But here, you know, the problem now is that the machinic surplus value, presupposes capital a surplus value of monetary flows, occluding the social axiomatic, which is to say the complicity between banks, businesses and states. And this axiomatic is its complicity is its condition. So we have on the left, we can affirm minoritarian by becoming up to but not beyond the limit set by capitalism. which is micro-political resistance to the capitalist axiomatic, resistance to, ultimately, a kind of a resistance to the socially destructive consequences

of, you know, banking businesses and states, but without any kind of concerted attempt to undo the axiomatic which they serve, because these are the components of the axiomatic. But the undoing of the axiomatic is no longer on the card because capitalism can't be thought of as a social totality, as a totality of social relations. Whereas the right alternative is to affirm, inevitably becomes, you give up on the pretension to subvert these neurotic refusal mechanisms, and you end up affirming the majoritarian power

in order to ensure capitalism's emancipation from social constraints. And here we have the macro-political embrace of the capitalist axiomatic. So once the revolutionary negation of capitalism as social totality is ruled out, these two dispersive affirmations define the ambit of Deleuzian politics. Okay, so I think this might be a good place to pause before we transition now to Marx and to kind of looking at Marx as a kind of production of capital. you know the Marxian alternative to you know the I think the political deadlock generated

by the Delozo-Gatarian theory of capitalism so shall we pause for a five minute break yeah I think so we have already some people with questions but I think Or we have the questions and then a break, whatever you say. Yeah, I don't know. I think we could go to the five minutes break and then we go back to the questions and then we restart them, the marks part. I think that would be best now. So, see you in five minutes. See you. Okay. All right. So, Despina, have your hand up for a long time, so please.

Yes, thank you. I have it since the very beginning, because I clearly disagree with the argument of placing Deleuze and Qatari vis-à-vis opposite to Marx, as if the one position cannot be somehow reconciled, let's say, with the other, or as if the one cannot fit the other. There is no doubt that Marx performed an extraordinary move in the field of philosophy, politics.

As I have said in previous classes as well, I'm new in the Marxist philosophy, so I'm not in the position yet to fully develop my argument, but from the texts that I have read for today's seminar, for example, we see that Marx in the economic and philosophical manuscripts, for example, in this edition, which is Prometheus books on page 101 and 102.

One reads, for example, the direct natural and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. Or in the next page it says again, the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man's natural behavior has become human. So we already see only from this small example that there are some major problems in Marxism. For example, this idea of the natural human being being a heterosexual human being.

Of course, there is also this idea of linear time. And there is also this idea of history operating as a kind of ground for grasping what a human being is. Deleuze and Qatari, with their arguments, suggest a rethinking of Marxism via the idea of flaws. This doesn't mean that they reject Marxism. They just offer potential methodological tools in order to rethink Marxism away from representation and dialectical schemas.

For me, this is valuable because of the problems that I just mentioned. For example, heteronormativity. In that respect, also following from my presentation, there are ways that someone might start rethinking how these two paradigms might coexist. For example, when you have a surface and you think of a singularity or a number of singularities, according to their spatio-temporal position and their level of intensities,

that they might create crystallized forms in a specific space-time. This is not totalizing in any way, but it offers potential ways in order to avoid the idea that a surface or a plane of immanence or a body without organs is an undifferentiated abyss. I will stop here. I just wanted to express my disagreement. Okay, good. No, no, that's fine. I mean, I expected, you know, I expected disagreements and dissents.

And I take, but look, I have a couple of things to say in response. Well, first of all, regarding Marx's heterosexual and homophobia and even, you know, things, you know, There's all sorts of things for which Marx could be rightly criticized. You know, he can be criticized and has been for all of these things, but you don't need to embrace Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual machinery to do so. Lots of feminist Marxists have pointed to these very kind of problematic claims about gender and sexuality, etc. But none of them entail a commitment to Deleuze or Deleuze's kind of

philosophical machinery. So that's the first thing to say. Now there's also other things to say about humanism and about metaphysical. I mean, the basic criticism of Marx and Marxism is that it is is tied to a metaphysical humanism, which is now anachronistic, which has been superseded in the 20th century. And Althusser is the most famous French exponent of this claim, and certainly, you know, Deleuze read Althusser, and in fact, in Difference in Repetition, most of his references to Marx are filtered via Althusser, but then there are other, you know, I've written

elsewhere about what I think is wrong with Althusser's critique. I don't think that Marx is in fact a metaphysical humanist in the objectionable sense that Althusser describes. And this, but we'll talk more about that when we look at the 1844 manuscripts, etc. But about the, I mean, look, I've been, I first read, I read Antioedipus long before I read Capital and I was more interested for a long time.

I found Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's work more, I guess, more absorbing or more accessible than Marx. So I understand how attractive this kind of Deleuze-Glatorian framework can be, and I appreciate its power and sophistication, but that's also why I think it has to be, precisely because it's so powerful that I think the critique has to be trenchant. And what I want to say is, you know, I know lots of people who claim to be Deleuzean Marxists, or who think you can be a Marxist and a Deleuzean.

And I simply think it's impossible. You cannot. Because it's based on a fundamental confusion or an unwillingness to actually see how Deleuze's account of capital and about what capital is and how it works is fundamentally incompatible with Marx's account. And moreover, I think this kind of confusion has very bad consequences, because if you look at, you know, it's now, look at, you know, Garot's point is that in the interim, in the 50 years since Antiochus was published,

capitalism has done nothing but consolidated its stranglehold on humanity and the world and with increasingly disastrous consequences for almost everyone the gap between rich and poor has you know has been exacerbated as you know many orders of magnitude since you know the early 1970s and things for the majority of people on the on the planet are you know objectively objectively worse than they were 50 years ago um and this is um all of this you know the the abdication of class quality the claim that nothing that no kind of uh you know progressive

that the categories of class, of ideology, of, you know, socialism, you know, all these of, you know, of labor, you know, as a site of struggle, that all of these were kind of, you know, anachronistic political categories, You know, that kind of this critique by these French law officers has had real concrete effects, you know, and the effects have been disastrous because they have facilitated, you know, the capitalist class kind of complete, almost kind of complete domination of the planets.

In other words, while, you know, the left gave up on class struggle, the capitalists didn't, and they prosecuted the class struggle with a vengeance. And if you look around you, you will see the consequences of this class war that they have been waging for 50 years and which they have been winning. Okay, that's, you know, horrific human costs. So this is why it's not a kind of a trivial matter adjudicating Deleuze's relationship to Marx. And the point about saying that equivocation is not only philosophically unsatisfactory, it is politically disastrous.

And I think that you can talk about, you know, I know, I've spent a lot of time with Deleuzians, I know a lot of Deleuzians, and it's not that Deleuzians don't have good politics, but Deleuzians can have admirable politics, but it has nothing to do with their Deleuzianism. Deleuze supported the Palestinian cause at a time when Foucault and others were kind of, you know, conspicuously silent about it. I consider that to be admirable. But there's nothing in his philosophical machinery that ratifies his defense of the Palestinians. It's an admirable decision and commitment on his part, but it doesn't in any way follow from his philosophical conception of politics.

So this is my basic point, is that Deleuzeans may, in fact, many Deleuzeans are broadly left, many, but not all. It's important to mention, like, Paul Patton, for instance, is a liberal and has written on Deleuze's kind of proximity to liberalism. okay um and what i'm trying to say is that actually deleuze's philosophical corpus is profoundly ambiguous politically and the bits of it where it seems to be explicitly political i mean the antirapus was welcomed um as you know by deleuze's admires as this is you know deleuze's

big political statement at last he's kind of you know laying his political cards on the table but actually if you look at you know the the hand he's playing and the moves he's making and the long-term consequences of those moves you know vis-a-vis capitalism they are not I think they are very, very questionable. So this is why I'm afraid I have to be, you know, I sympathize with Deleuzeans who want to insist that there's some kind of, that a kind of apportionment with Marx is kind of necessary. But in a way, the problem is that,

this is Garrault's whole point, is that it's worse, it's better to come out and say you hate Marx, okay, and say you hate Marx and reject class struggle, that, you know, lots of kind of philosophers just kind of broke with Marxism, but pretending that you're a Marxist while systematically cancelling and rejecting every, you know, all the fundamental, you know, fundamental conceptual and political commitments is, you know, a kind of a disastrous confusion because then people think they're being Marxists. People think that they can, you know, pursue a Marxian analysis or Marxian politics using a

categorical framework that is completely incompatible with, you know, with an actual kind of margin analysis. So that's why I have to insist on the incompatibility. It's okay, I disagree, but we are here to argue about our positions. So yeah, thank you. Okay. Is there other questions? Yeah, I think, um, yeah. Um, yeah, my question was, um, since Garou said that, uh, Deleuze and Guattari abandoned

the category of ideology in favor of power, this must mean that, um, the reverse picture, uh, a subject doesn't have a reverse picture of the world, but has a different, uh, mechanism of misperception. I thought that they call it paranoid consciousness. But it's curious that Nick Lant mentioned something like this, but he didn't put it like that. He said a neurotic refusal. But since in the Los Inquatar, we are dealing only with affirmation, it seems to me that he hit the fact, Lant hit the fact that behind this neurotic refusal, there is a perverse desire to pay a debt to a sovereign of an unpayable amount. And here's my protest. By refusing this category, he just affirmed that he made it more masochistic, this desire to pay the debt to connect with the flow like this.

But I have many presuppositions because when I read the passages on paranoid consciousness, I was far too amateurish. I couldn't clarify it enough. Could you please elaborate on that? Okay, so sorry, elaborate on which particular claim or passage? The Nick Lantz passage that we might abandon our neurotic refusal and then connect ourselves with the flow in a better way. Yes, okay, so here's the passage. So this is the 1993 passage.

The revolutionary task is not to establish a bigger, more authentic, more aesthetic exteriority, by which he means that instead of looking for an outside, for something that transcends capital, an outside of capital, instead of doing that, we have to unpack the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own man. So in other words, these neurotic refusal mechanisms are capital zone, and they're the axiomatic. They are, in other words, capital functions on the basis of these decoded flows, but the decoding of flows threatens to completely dissolve and disintegrate the socius.

You cannot have human society requires the coding or overcoding of flows. So flows cannot be decoded without some kind of compensatory mechanism. And Deleuze-Gutari's point is that it's no longer overcoding. The compensatory mechanism in capitalism is no longer despotic overcoding in terms of sovereign authority, sovereign unity, the imperial state, etc. But it's what they call the axiomatic. An axiomatic doesn't require a locus of unity, a kind of a centralized kind of locus of unity, because axioms can be proliferated.

Okay, axioms are pragmatically and opportunistically generated whenever a process of decoding or deterritorialization threatens the interest of capital. What are the interests of capital, interestingly enough? Well, capitalism is a socius. It's a social body, but it's money. It's a social body of money. The body of money replaces the body of the despot. But in a way, the axiomatic serves to maintain the cohesiveness or the integrity of this social body.

but it's a new kind of social body which no longer has a head, you know, kind of a sovereign head, but just, you know, multiplicity of capitals, you know, there are many capitals, but it still requires a social basis, okay, and the axiomatic is there to to prevent the collapse of the social support of capitalism social support system into cosmic schizophrenia the complete you know the full body without organs you know fully de-territorialized cosmic schizophrenia so here that okay so they're qualified as neurotic okay they're neurotic

because, in a way, what is the antithesis of schizophrenia or of the schizophrenizing tendency? In antithesis, it's paranoia. Paranoia is despotic neurosis is the bourgeois disease or the bourgeois kind of symptom. So what they're saying is that capitalism uses bourgeois subjectivity and bourgeois institutions to preserve itself from cosmic schizophrenia.

So in a way that there's a complicity between bourgeois subjectivation, neuroticization, edipolization, and the capitalist axiomatic. So in other words, what those are saying are that state functionaries, bankers, and businessmen are bourgeois, are neurotic subjects. their neurosis, you know, there's a kind of a resonance between their psychic neuroses and the functioning of the axiomatic as what is there to kind of block off complete, you know, complete decoding. So here, so the claim then is that all that's

all that's preventing capitalism from dissolving into cosmic schizophrenia is bourgeois subjectivity. It's not class, because the only class is the bourgeois class, so it's bourgeois self-repression in a way that, you know, props up the axiomatic and prevents capitalism from, you know, dissolving into schizophrenia, which is why all you need to do is to kind of, you know, destroy bourgeois subjectivity to allow capitalism to de-aximitize. But note what's happening here. It's a kind of, this means that kind of, this is a politics where simply kind of destroying bourgeois

institutions or criticizing bourgeois subjectivity becomes revolutionary in and of itself which is like precisely what marks you know already kind of rejected in uh you know in the 1840s because he saw that capital is an impersonal social relation which gen which generates kind of um which has psychic symptoms, but you can't, which cannot be, you know, the war against capitalism, you know, to say that the war against capitalism is a class war, is to say that questions of representation and neurosis and questions of subjectivation cannot be sufficient to process,

you know cannot be uh the front line in this in this war um and it's striking if you i mean if anyone looks at you know is familiar with land's work is that um and the reason you know that there's this idea that the undoing of bourgeois subjectivity and the undoing of capitalism are seen as complementary or they go in tandem, which is why again it leads to the dissolution. If we remember our first opening lecture about this is another variant of the claim

that the distinction between base and superstructure is no longer operative. That there's a perfect continuity between base and superstructure, so that issues of subjectivation are inseparable from issues of resistance to capital. And what's interesting is that that same premise is operative in land, except he thinks that the subversion of capitalism can be carried out by encouraging those psychic tendencies in capitalist culture,

which are, you know, schizophrenising, you know, which would show kind of, which are, which undo the autonomy of the bourgeois subjects, okay? This, you know, manifests itself in a whole kind of number of ways, but it's the same basic premise that is operative. So the reference to, so I think you're very right that the reference to neurosis here is very significant. that claims that capitalism is neurotic. But to say that capitalism is neurotic is to say that capitalist subjectivity, which is bourgeois subjectivity, is neurotic. And that all you need to do to push capitalism over the edge is to kind of, you know, initiate a kind of, you know, the dissolution of bourgeois subjectivity.

And this then leads to the idea that this is another micro-political variant. The idea is that if you take enough drugs, go to enough kind of all night dance, kind of drum and bass parties, you precipitate the dissolution of the capitalist axiom asset. I think that's a fantasy. So it turns out that the basic thing he didn't believe in is the debt to sovereign. Oh yes, sorry, I didn't say anything about this. The debt to the sovereign. But how do you see the debt to the sovereign persisting in capitalism, in the capitalist socius?

I saw a passage about Delos and Guattari that the repression, no not the repression, the neurotic refusal is acting on the level of a family and it is a desire to prevent the break and to pay the debt to the sovereign. This is one of the things that people do and I think that the neuroticism is this perception of this debt and the willingness to engage in its repayment but I may be mistaken. No you're right there is an infinite debt neurosis so bourgeois subjectivity is guilty you know neurosis is the sense of guilt it's oedipal guilt you're guilty

why are you guilty because what you really desire you know how does desire come to desire its own repression because what you know you come to believe that what you really desire is to kind of you know kill your father and sleep with your mother okay so this so that desire is criminal okay and the guilt is towards this the parental you know the the paternal super ego you know which is the figure of social authority. So this idea, every bourgeois subject, you know, views herself as guilty because her desires are, you know, criminal. But then the debt is no longer to a sovereign despot,

you know, kind of a despotic authority in the old... in the pre-capitalist sense, you know, a monarch, you know, an emperor, but it's rather to the, well, to what? To the law, okay, to the law of the father, you know, in Lacanian analysis. So this whole account here, and this is something I didn't go into because it's just too complicated. But it's their kind of critical engagement with this Lacanian framework and the Lacanian account of the symbolic order.

So there's a kind of this guilt. It's now kind of your subjects kind of guilt is instituted in the symbolic kind of realm. And there is an infinite debt, but it's no longer a debt to a kind of a political figure of authority, but to some kind of social superego. So you're right that those two things, the kind of the guilt and the debt, are still operative in the capitalist socius. But, yeah, they have a different, they have different objects. Does that help at all?

Yeah, thank you. Okay. All right, we have three more questions. So, yeah, I think we should have time. So, please, Zerong, go on. Sure, I have three, but I'll try to be quick if you want to go now. If not, we could come back at the end or? Yeah, I think we can go through them. They are on this. So the first is a historical question. And it's, so I'm like broadly curious about the kind of emergence of this sort of discourses about power and the concept of power itself, right? And it seems like a lot of the post-structuralist turn in France is about getting away from

the enlightened framing of a sort of critical difference between authority and coercive authority, authority understood in a causal framework, and the justification of authority, a rational authority, right? This is the great innovation of Kant, and it seems like if you don't want to think of Marx in this vein, you get a lot of problems. That seems to me it's very important to think of Marx as distinguishing between rationally justified authority and ideology, right? Ideological authority. And instead, we get sort of in the 50s and 60s in France, the emergence of this problematic power itself, and talking about power separate from

the justification of power and the ability to force outcomes or coercion, right? And I guess from my side, I see some parallels here between this and a kind of German language tradition, probably best associated with Heidegger's critique of technology, but there is a lot of sort of discourse around power that's similar in like the conservative and Catholic traditions, Romano Gordini, the Catholic theologian, Gerhard Ritter, the sort of Protestant liberal historian, but also sort of in weirder places like Elias Kennedy's Massonmach, Krausen power, which is clearly something of an influence on Deleuze and Gattari. I'm curious just sort of historically, if you know anything about the way this kind of shift

to talking about power itself, rather than specific forms of power. I mean, in the German context, it seems like an obvious reaction to the Nazi period to rather than to talk about the specifics of state power or national power to like metaphysicalize power as this problem. And then in the primarily theological registers that it happens. So I'm curious if there's a relationship clearly between this kind of post-Titagarian or post-Nietzschean discourse. I could talk a lot about Kennedy, but it's not here or there. But I think this relates to my second question as well, which is about a kind of conceptual distinction that's really important. the Weberian conceptual distinction between the social and the communal between

Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. Right. And I think we're all kind of on the same page here in the sidebar. Everyone's talking about punk philosophy. Right. And that's the draw of the party. It's punk philosophy. That's why we love it. And that's also why we're criticizing it. But I guess like if I were to give like a conceptual essence of punk, it's antisocial, right? It's like, I don't know, I was listening to crafts the other week. And like, it's like throwing a squastica at your dad and saying like, but I wonder if you see this sort of social communal distinction, right? The idea that there are two different kinds of collective

groups, one in which the sort of social is rule governed and the communal is voluntary. You can exit community, you can't exit society, right? So the social is totality for Hegel and for Marx. And I guess the question is, what kind of totality is it, right? I think ideally, in the Hegelian framework, it's the space of reasons. It's the unity of the space of reasons That's supposed to be what social totality is. Marx's diagnosis how capitalism is a false totality. But implicit in that, I certainly think that where you to try to get to something like communism, it's to sort of fix the break in practical reasoning in the space of reasons

so that we can have a rule-governed, non-coercive form of social life. And I guess this gets to a question that I was talking about with Armin a bit last week. but whether you think certainly in the marks of the manifesto this difference between socialism and communism is pretty pretty there right from from a still somewhat coercive still total totalizing social form that builds a socialist society that ends class struggle and the communist one where the free association of each of of producers and consumers is the conditions of social life right So I think there's an interesting way that social communal split kind of runs through all of this and assuming that there's voluntary community and these sort of decentralized flows of voluntary, right, there is a social aspect to it, but it is anti-social as well.

And finally, the last question is just sort of topical. If you're familiar with, or like diagnostic, I guess, that this kind of the error that all of this sort of anti-humanist and anti-enlightenment plot gets us into, I sort of diagnosed in Catherine Malibu. recently I listened to an interview with her on a podcast where she sort of describes all of this stuff as metaphysical anarchism right and I think the title of the episode is real anarchism hasn't been fought and I think they're talking about Reiner Schuermann who was a student of I think both Heidegger and Hans Dionys but they're talking about basically how a lot of the post-structuralist philosophers sort of lend themselves to anarchist politics and try to create this metaphysical

anarchist sort of against rule following structures against representation. But they're never able, according to Malibu, to sort of make the jump to thinking real anarchism. And she keeps going on like, we need to take up the task from the losing of thinking real anarchism. And the answer to that, to me, seems obvious, right? Like, they're trying to be to do philosophy but insofar as you're doing philosophy you can't be thinking and like you're right like there's a basic contradiction there that they all kind of see and get to the edge of and that Malibu insists can be overcome um and um so I'm wondering if you if you see that term metaphysical anarchism as descriptive of Deleuze and Vittari um if you

think that that sort of that's the political issue here that in trying to only think free forms of community that are independent of sort of rule governed relations and universality um we lose an essential political grip um yeah and whether there's something sort of fundamentally anti-social to this kind of philosophy i guess like the case of a gomben recently but like taking Nietzschean metaphors of health and sickness instead of emancipation, you get an antisocial reaction to public health measures as as oppression, right? And you can ask that question again, why do people want their own oppression? Why do they want to get sick and die? And I think it's revolutionary to go off against the evil state trying to make them vaccinate. Anyway.

Thanks. Okay, there's a lot. Thanks. Very interesting questions. Okay, I'll try and respond. First about power, rationally justified authority and Marx, yes, the distinction between rationally justified authority and mere power is still more or less clear. but this is exactly what is kind of undermined in a kind of you know Nietzschean, post-Nietzschean tradition and I think Nietzsche is a key figure here. I mean that you know what all these all these French thinkers are ultimately Nietzschean. Okay so Nietzsche is the and they're more

Nietzschean than certainly more Nietzschean than Marxian and another claim here is that you can't you know to say that you can't there's no such thing as Deleuzean Marxism is to say there's no such thing as Nietzschean Marxism. It's the same thing. Which is not to say that there's nothing to be learned from Nietzsche. Far from it. I mean, everyone should read Nietzsche. But then what's happened now is that, again, this is a Nietzschean moment. The past 15 years, we've had this kind of Nietzschean moment.

I think, I mean, if you look at, yeah, so I think that the emergence of power as this kind of master category for kind of analyzing, you know, well, not social kind of phenomena, but kind of, you know, political dynamics is, you know, trimitry to, to Nietzsche, but then it has to kind of negotiate with Heidegger's kind of, you know, deconstruction of metaphysics. So, you know, Heidegger's claim is that metaphysics consummates itself as power, as the kind of, you know, the will to power. So, in a way, your question is also about the relationship

of these French thinkers to Nietzsche on the one hand and Heidegger on the other hand. and it's I mean that's a complicated question which I'm not going to say anything very informative or illuminating off the top of my head except to say Adorno has this very acute comment he says in his essay on Marx and the fundamental concepts of, I think, of social theory. It was translated a couple of years ago. But he says, and I'm just paraphrasing this, in this essay he says, if all that Marx, if Marx was only talking about power,

he would still be a kind of a young Hegelian. Marx would not have advanced beyond the young Hegelians. And the whole point is that the question marks his entire critique of the young Hegelians, who, as you know, it's been pointed out, they're not, you know, the young old distinction doesn't map on to the kind of left-right distinction, but that they can only think in terms of domination, you know, this dialectic of freedom and domination, or this negative freedom, freedom from domination,

without understanding how the whole distinction between the liberal distinction between negative and positive freedom is still framed by this abstract domination, abstract domination of capital. So, and the whole point about the critique of political economy is to show how instead of talking about power and domination in this abstract metaphysical register, you can anatomize these concrete social mechanisms through which power is instituted, you know, through which it's kind of focused and channeled. And these are, I guess, Marx's whole claim is that

these, you know, the economy has this kind of, plays a fundamental role, but the whole point is that, you know, economics is not really about economy, is that money is a social form, you know, and money as this kind of, you know, representation of value is, you money can only acquire this social power, this overwhelming social power, because of a very specific social relationship. So I think, in a way, the key Marxian rejoinder to a kind of

Nietzschean politics is that you know Marx is always kind of re-inscribing the abstractions of political economy into social relations is that you know that's what you know political economy remains metaphysical because all its categories are abstracted from social relations which is to say that they're functioning they function upside down or in an inverted form and you could say that um power the concept of power is also like is a similar abstraction and it's you know elevation into a kind of you know master category is you know following the

kind of the rejection of marx and marxism by these thinkers these french thinkers in a way leads them back to kind of um to politics which are very similar to those of the the young hegelians because if you what's striking if you read the german ideology is what you know marx's critiques of bauer fireback and sterner map remark you know map easily onto kind of the criticism you know, onto kind of post-structuralism, you know, the same kind of, you know, lots of the things that, you know, he says about what's wrong with their accounts can also, I think,

be, you know, would apply to these French thinkers. Okay, that's very general, I can't say anything more. I'm afraid, yeah, I mean, you know, I wish I knew more about the German literature, you know, to connect these two kind of aspects but also but also quite look um it's striking also that's um in a way the liberal recuperation of the frankfurt school i mean i think you know the frankfurt school remains marxist um but i think the work of liberal recuperation So, you know, the concept of domination begins by simply kind of, you know, sort of an equivocation with the concept of domination.

When they talk about domination, and when they talk about kind of, you know, identity, you know, identity thinking and instrumental rationality, you know, these are ciphers for the exchange abstraction. the pardon of the sovereignty of the subordination of reason to the capitalist valorization. And that's also when this whole discourse, this critique of domination, simply becomes a post-Nietzschean, an attempt to make the Nietzschean diagnostics of power and will to power

into an emancipatory resource, which I don't think is possible, frankly. Okay, moving on to your second question about the social and the communal. It's a crucial distinction, and actually, I think you're, I think you're absolutely correct that it's really striking that the politics you get, certainly from these kind of, if you're a kind of dellozo-glotarian radical leftist, you effectively use a kind of anarchism, kind of radical ontological anarchism. and the secession from society becomes the key kind of trope okay I mean if you look at you know

consider people like the invisible committee you know the invisible committee committee the reason they like Deleuze you know they don't they don't like Marx very much but they like you know a lot of these post-Heidegian post-Nietzchen thinkers for I think for this reason is that it's about pitting a kind of you know pitting community but a kind of an emancipatory community against an oppressive society a social totality but i think that one of the things you know as there is no secession from the capitalist totality capitalism has no exteriority which is why if you refuse to confront it as a totality, all you can do is try and hide from it. But you'll fail,

you'll fail to hide from it. And actually, one I think a French thinker who is very good on this is Frédéric Lordogne in his book, you know, his little book's Figures of Communism. And the other one is, I mean, there's a very interesting kind of, you know, kind of consideration of the problem of secession, of like, if class struggle can no longer be waged, if there is no longer an organized proletariat capable of confronting the capitalist class, then what are the alternatives? Well, the alternative seems to be some kind of, you know, and they reproduce the fundamental problem in their relationship to the social totality, which they're trying to evade, but also internally, because they cannot but depend, their autonomy is always going to be fixed.

they reproduce the fundamental problem in their relationship to the social totality, which they're trying to evade, but also internally, because they cannot but depend, their autonomy is always going to be fictional. Because they require, you know, because autonomy in this regard is, you know, So, the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea of the idea

prevalent and it's obviously completely kind of legitimate it's it's unjustified um but in a way it also has the kind of the failures if you i mean if you look at what happened to punk and you know the the so-called in a way that turning punk into an adjective and turning it into a kind of a kind of a determination is problematic and you see that it becomes it leads to a kind of um infantile petulance, you know, which is completely, which simply reproduces, you know, harmlessly kind of, you know, feeds and reproduces the social pathologies it claims to be protesting against. And, you know, Nick Land is a kind of one, I mean, what, you know, he was this radical

kind of anarchist, ontological anarchists who seem to be, you know, who seem to be kind of, you know, developing the most intransigent kind of, you know, critique of society, you know. Interestingly, both kind of, you know, attacking, rejecting the social totality without brandishing a communal alternative, okay? So it seemed to be a very kind of, you know, actively nihilistic gesture, but what happens? It just flips back into fascism, kind of authoritarian, the worship of a kind of a hybrid of occultism, social Darwinism, and eugenics.

That's fascism, very familiar fascism. And it's also a mistake, I think, historically, as some writers have noted, the claim that fascism is only ever about the state is I think a mistake okay I think that fascist desire is perfectly compatible with a kind of anarchism so the claim that all anarchism is emancipatory libertarian anarchism is anything but kind of emancipatory and actually is compulsive with fascism so I think there's a kind of so there's an uneasy kind of complicity sometimes between you know um so-called emancipatory anarchism and you know uh

libertarianism whose rejection of all authority becomes a kind of an alibi for a kind of you know the the authority of the markets okay because the blanket rejection of all authority is illegitimate always ends up reinstating a metaphysical authority, whether it's the market, whether it's the individual, whether it's pre-individual singularities, whether it's flows of desire, whatever you want. Okay. So that's, and I also think your point about that there is a, I mean, this, you know, the relationship between socialism and communism. Okay. that what's what's happened since 1970 is that those who call themselves communists

but there's a kind of a post 68 communists um the you know they want to achieve communism without socialism for the very reason because socialism requires the mediation of a state it requires state power and on the traditional schema kind of the trend it's you know the you know the state must be socialized and then the state will kind of eventually kind of you know abolish itself only the state can abolish itself to usher in communism this is again the negation of the negation the domination of domination required for communism and after 68 when this seemed that this just was not going to happen because state socialism was this hideous kind of you know

oppressive machinery. People wanted communism without socialism. And communization, in a way, is what's most interesting about it. It's an attempt, it's the most interesting attempt to think communism without socialism. But it falls into the same kind of aportes, and that's That's how, how do you struggle against a totality? How do you fight a social totality at, you know, locally, you know, at the micrological kind of level, in the micrological dimension? And that's, you know, I mean, some people have very, you know, some people, I think, have interesting things to say about that because they register the magnitude of the problems,

but others simply seem impervious to it. And then you get communism as a lifestyle or communism as an ethos, which it simply is not. Communism is not an ethos. It involves an ethics, but it's not simply an individual ethos. It involves collective politics. And problems of organization, of collective organization, I think will not go away. So the problem now is to rethink these questions of collective organization. And I think Garot is right to point out how ridiculous it is. The claim that because the white European working class became a kind of complicit in capitalism, became a kind of stooge of capitalism,

as if, well, there's, you know, most of the working class is not white, nor European, nor male. And there is a global proletariat, okay, which is suffering conditions that are actually, you know, far worse than those that have existed in Europe, is enduring terrible kind of, you know, conditions of degradation, repression. And that's where you have, that's where there's a global proletariat. Okay, and that's where I think the diagnosis was very parochial. Okay, because if you just focus at Europe and Western Europe and North America, that's where you end up with this kind of, you know, one of Garou's point is how provincial this kind of diagnosis is and how dangerous it is

to generalize. Okay, and finally about metaphysical versus real anarchism is that yes, it's undoubtedly like de los and gotori are kind of promulgating a kind of metaphysical anarchism um now whether okay but then whether there's a you know what what real anarchism would be i mean i i you know i don't know i think marx's basic point is that humans are social beings um and to be human is to depend on other human beings and that means that human beings must organize. They can only collectively reproduce themselves, so they must collectively self-organize. So the question is how? So the problem of

organization and the problem of institution, as L'Ordan points out, the problem of institutions will not go away. This is why, again, just wishing it away. So either you're a libertarian anarchist and you believe in the absolute sovereignty of the individual, and then society is a spook, a phantasm. Okay, but you may not believe in society, but society believes in you. That seems to be a kind of delusion. Or you have to think, I mean, communism as the free association of producers is, I think, the positive sense of

anarchism. In other words, there is no longer a transcendent sovereign authority. And actually Marx even says, when Marx is talking about, instead of the critique of representation or representational politics, it's already there in the young Marx and his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. And he talks about, when he's talking about the religion of the state, how the religion of the state has come to kind of replace kind of traditional religious authority and while what is required is a kind of a form of collective social organization where

where there is no longer a transcendent representative authority. But that can only be done by completely transforming the mode of production. So in a way, the problem of real anarchism requires a revolution in the mode of production, in the collective mode of production. and then because because it's you know marx is and marx's stature as a thinker is that communism is the overcoming of the opposition between the individual and the collective okay between self interest and collective interest but that opposition can only be dissolved through

a revolutionary reorganization of production. So in a way, I think communism is the positive sense of real anarchism. If by anarchy you mean the destitution of transcendent theological or religious authority, but not if you mean on to anarchy in the sense of a sense in this a kind of a sociality. I mean, it depends what conception of sociality one has, I think. So, thanks. I think I did. Oh, I just would emphasize,

I think the sort of red thread running through all of these is this distinction between rationally justified authority and coercive authority, right? That's the whole framework. And that's all of philosophy from Plato on, like from the Republic onward. But if you reject that as central to Marx, you just, you can't get anywhere, right? And that distinction between socialism and communism, you need the rationally justified authority to make coercion, to end class conflict, right? To no longer make, yeah. If you, for instance, Communism. Medicine. Like, if you believe that someone, you know, who studied medicine is not, doesn't have legitimate authority, okay?

Like, if you think all authority is just illegitimate, it's just like, you know, authoritarian, then social, it's impossible. Kind of social, you know, relations are impossible, okay? And, of course, Nietzsche is the figure here. I mean, it's Nietzsche who collapses the distinction between authority and power. And he just research the arguments of Strasymarchus. What's amazing with Nietzsche is that he puts it in terms of sickness and health instead. And he proclaims health is good. But then we get to this point where we're affirming the schizo. Yes.

And we have to remember that in capitalist society, the schizo lives on the street and starves, or at least in socialist society, we have housing for the Azoritzis. I have a good friend from East Germany who spent some time there and tells me about the way that the Azoritzis, people who were unwilling to work, were still sort of cared for and lived these kind of... But the goal of socialism is to provide for free riders, to provide for people who won't work even if and that's where you get communism when you can go from each according to work to each according to need and care for the schizo and forgive the schizo and not punish the schizo

in an easy sense also I think those passages in the economic and philosophical manuscripts where Marx talks about communism and talks about the transformation in human, you know, perceptual capacities, you know, the liberation of the senses. And it's really striking is that, you know, Marx envisages communism as this, you know, absolutely kind of unprecedented kind of, you know, cognitive and existential transformation. where human beings, you know, the, you know, the opposition between subject and object,

but also the opposition between, you know, you know, the society and nature is, is positively overcome, not just canceled by fiat, but positively overcome. And here you have a positive sense of productive, like that, that passage I quoted where like, you know, the individual life is no longer, the individual no longer reproduces themselves, simply no longer uses all their cognitive capacities that have been collectively generated and transmitted for the purposes of individual survival and the accumulation of capital, but actually humans, you know, collective human

capacities would be, you know, marshaled and deployed and new ones developed in a way that would completely transform the horizons of both cognitive and practical possibility for humanity. So he's talking about something really quite extraordinary, I mean really kind of extraordinary and visionary, but there's a certain, you know, Marx is a sober visionary, so it's not kind of rhapsodically expressed, but it seems that that would be what Deleuze and Guattari, you know, the unity of humanity and nature, the kind of, you know, the infinite connectivity that

is being celebrated in the opening chapter of Antioedipus when they're talking about the schizo-stroh and so on, a kind of a subject that is no longer subjected to identity. The nomadic subject is always the product of a consummation of intensities, which is no longer kind of, in a way it's no longer kind of you know subordinated to the imperative to survive it's actually remarkably similar to what Adorno talks about when he's talking about what you know subjectivity freed from the imperative of you know self-preservation would be

in other words the ego you know the ego and this is already in Freud the ego is there as a kind of of defense mechanism to protect, you know, to ensure the kind of, you know, the survival of the individual in a hostile environment. And it's because society is this kind of hostile, agonistic environment that, you know, the ego function persists. But communism would be a way of dissolving the ego function in a way that doesn't require this kind of retreat of this kind of, you know, this complete, you know, retreat from social. In other words, you could reconcile a kind of, you know, individual rapture and collective,

you know, contribution. And all those things are there in Marx and those passages from the the manuscripts um i think they're very important so so i think it's not that marx so i know the claim that you know the reduction of marxism to authoritarian states socialism is is a kind of a travesty um and what needs to be done is to kind of you know you know if the problem the problem is to kind of to re-articulate the link between socialism and communism. Socialism is this kind of transitional phase to communism, but then it has to be seen as a transitional phase, you know, and the self-abolition of the state,

you know, that would usher in communism would be this, you know, the reunification of humanity and nature. In a sense, that's one of the things that Deleuze and Guattari are proclaiming. That's what makes it attractive. I mean, that's what people like or excited about in that text. That's what sounds like liberation. And it's true, that is because society involves repression. I mean, in a way, lots of the negative claims are correct. But the claim would be that maybe um this liberation can be achieved you know but you don't need the appeal to this cosmic schizophrenia to kind of to achieve this um uh the liberation that is you know

desirable that is involved at the beginning of the book Thank you. Okay, we have gotten a lot into this question, but I think we, I don't know, we can go a bit longer today and I think it would be nice if we try answering the people that are still here because they have never hands for a very long time so um okay well then what i propose to do is like instead of starting with the mark stuff okay well we can either you know it might be better just

to answer the question especially if people have been waiting instead of going on with the mark stuff now um i can just do that you know next week because it's just an account of um what he says about production in general so you know I could pack that all into the final couple of sessions you know and answer the questions because yeah I think it's important that people I want to answer people's questions if they've been waiting for a long time so right so let's go for it and please Eduardo okay Ray I wanted to ask something in relation to the beginning of the section when you talked about Karo's text when she stated that anti-oedipus is about how do humans

come to desire their own repression and I wanted you if possible to comment a little bit on the similarities and differences of anti-oedipus and Marcuse's eros and civilization because I feel like he is trying to make a similar synthesis. Of course, there are many differences in his approach. He's much closer to Freud and everything, but at the post-capitalist desire lectures, Fischer kind of posits Marcuse as a pro-to-accelerationist, and I think that some of the things that Marcuse says, it's interesting so we can bridge why we've been talking about desire and what Marx says about technology on the Grundrisse.

I will just read a quote that Fischer uses from our clues on the lecture two of the post-capitalist desire, which is rationalization and mechanization of labor tend to reduce the quantum of instantitical energy challenging to tell alienated labor, the spring energy for the attainment of objectives set by the free play of individual faculties. Technology operates against the repressive utilization of energy insofar as it minimizes in time necessary for the production of the necessities of life, the saving time for the development of needs beyond the realm of necessity and of necessary waste. But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints, lest the established order of domination dissolve.

Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free. And then later, Fischer quotes Marcuse again saying that the elimination of human potentialities from the world of alienated labor creates the precondition for the elimination of labor from the world of human potentialities, saying this is like a kind of inversion, which is very typical of the Frankfurt School. So I wanted to think how we could think of this discussion on desire and technology and repression and how the society takes the sort of role of the father for Marcuse and how these things can be taught along with Deleuze and Gattari and what Marx will say on the machines, on the Grundrisse.

Okay. There's a very close connection, I think. And I think that actually some of the, I mean, there's a few, I think that, you know, they've clearly, I've clearly read Marcuse, and some of the things they say are remarkably, you know, redolent of Marcuse's argument, argument, which is that the, you know, the, how does it go again? I mean, it's the, I'm very, very interested in this Marcusian argument. It says that the, Every society is organized in terms of relationship between necessary and surplus repression.

The development of capitalism renders technological innovation under capitalism undermines the basis for surplus repression. The surplus repression actually that perpetuates kind of social repression and capitalism's domination. I think so Deleuze and Guattari's arguments about the disanalogy is that in Marcuse it's still human beings, you know, human subjects.

that technological innovation diminishes the psychic, the self-repression, the subjective self-repression, which is the condition for collective social repression. So he's saying, or his argument seems to be suggesting that with technological advance, gradually releases individuals from the obligation to repress their own individual desires in order to work and to contribute to satisfy collective social needs,

which are just the needs of capital. And that this, the more this happens, and the more this makes it kind of difficult for capitalism to function, to reproduce itself, because it needs human labour to reproduce itself. With Deleuze and Guattari, you know, the claim about machinic surplus value is that capitalism can, you know, increase itself without the intercession of human labor power. And that, in a way, although they don't say this, but again, to go back to the point that was made earlier,

it's really about the subversion of bourgeois subjectivity, the bourgeois subjects, the a beautiful subject whose work, whose abnegation of desire is what fuels the kind of capitalist productivity, it's the destruction of that subjectivity that somehow will, as a revolutionary potential or kind of facilitates, you know, schizophrenia.

But of course, they have no accounts. Marcuse's argument is Hegeanian. It's about the negation of the negation, OK? So social repression is necessary for capital to reproduce itself. So self-repression is the condition for collective repression, which is a condition for capital accumulation. But capital accumulation undermines the need for individual repression, which then undermines the need for collective repression. So it's a very interesting Hegelian dialectical argument, how capitalism generates the conditions of its own kind of dissolution.

okay so a classic negation of the negation um but here it's the you know it's it unfolds at the level at the level of the relationship between the individual laborer and the collective social subject or the you know collective social labor whereas in deleuz and guattari obviously it's not a dialectical argument and the claim about you know accelerating the process is much vaguer, actually. It's much vaguer because it's not clear how you do this. I mean, if you go back to the classic quote,

they talk about to accelerate the process is to go further in the movement of the market of decoding and detail serialization. And there, what the suggestion seems to be that the, you know, desubjectification or the undoing of kind of, you know, self-repressive bourgeois subjectivity unfolds through marketization. and a way through the embrace of capitalism's commodified disintegration of subjectivity.

And that's a different dynamic. The claim then is that it's not about labor at all. Marcuse's argument is still an argument about labor and it hinges the connection between you know repression as the condition for individual labor and you know and thereby for collective labor whereas this is not an argument about labor plays no role here at all this is a question about

desire and the idea is that desire can be, instead of being, you know, self-repressing, you know, in the bourgeois subject, if, you know, if desire, the more marketization, the more commodification occurs, that means the more decoding of, you know, of the more decoding of desire, the more decoding of familial and community desire and gender desire happens, then the more kind of, you know, the schizo-schizophronizing tendency or impetus is advanced.

advanced. And this is not unlike the kind of the Baudrillard. Baudrillard and Lyotard are making similar arguments at the same time. So Antidiopus is one of a... Baudrillard's death and symbolic exchange, the mirror of production, and Lyotard's libidinal economy are all ultimately kind of saying that the problem is one of consumption. Okay, the problem is not of production, of consumption and what is the accelerationist vector unfolds in consumption because it's accelerating consumption and the decoding of consumption that intensifies the de-territorializing of

production, and ultimately the shattering of the capitalist axiomatic. But it's left very vague in Deleuze and Guattari. I mean, so Marcuse's argument is kind of dialectically, you know, fleshed out and concrete, whether it's convincing or not, it's a different matter, whereas Deleuze and Guattari's argument is more nebulous. nebulous. But then there's no claim that's also a claim about what happens in the wake of the consequences of the undoing.

I mean, in Marcuse, it's that you know the imperative for self-repression is cancelled you no longer need to repress yourself whereas in Deleuze and Guattari it's it's the idea is that the you know subjective self-repression is is objectively countermanded in other words that what's it's not it's not that you no longer need to repress yourself is that's that the dynamic of self-repression is over overwhelmed by this kind of uh dynamic of um you know commodified

and the channeling of desire in the investment of desire in commodification. And that's another kind of objective structural mechanism that happens. I think that's a significant divergence with the Marcusean account, which is why I think that ultimately Marcuse is still a Marxist, so he's still talking about individual liberation

as a condition for collective liberation, whereas in the Dozer Guittarian account there is kind of the abolition of um you know to desire commodification and marketization is in a way to kind of um is also to desire you know to further commodify one's own existence in a way to to kind of um to decompose your own identity into a series of commodifications, which has happened in a way. That's what happens in a way that the disintegration of the autonomous bourgeois subject,

which is registered and to an extent lamented by the Frankfurt School, And then, but if we look at, so 50 years down the line, if you look at the kind of, you know, the subjects that we, you know, the kind of subjectivities that capitalism produces, you know, you could say, well, yeah, this has happened. I mean, kind of the relentless commodification of desire has proceeded apace. I mean, kind of the relentless commodification of desire has proceeded apace. And now, and whether, but whether it's, has it actually kind of, you know, intensified

the movement of decoding and de-territorialization in a way that would shatter the axiomatic? Absolutely not. I mean, the empirical evidence is to the contrary, because, and it, but it was obvious from the beginning that this decoding and deterritorializing that axiomatization is the condition for decoding of flows because these are monetary flows it's about money okay and it's about the investment in money they say this themselves when they say it is at the level of flows the monetary flows included and not the level of ideology that the integration of desire is achieved okay um so the disintegration the contrary disintegration is a disintegration of flows

but of the investments of desire in flows of commodities amongst others monetary flows and commodity flows because ultimately that's all that flows in capital okay it's a commodity the circulation distribution of commodities um so i think that's a kind of um a significant difference with the Marcuse account. But I think, yeah, there are very important parallels. OK. Yeah, I think we should probably wrap up, because people have just told me,

we have another class soon enough, so we're getting to our limit. So perhaps we can keep on the questions on the next class as well, or if people want. Okay, well, then we can do, then I propose we start the next session with the questions that people weren't able to ask, for this session. So we can have like 30 minutes at the beginning for that. then you know look we'll continue with the um recession yeah right perfect um so anything one to say before we wrap up uh not really i mean i'm sorry yeah i'm sorry for not having

gotten to the mark stuff yet but in a way the point is um so yeah next week i'll um focus on the Grundrisse, those pages from the Grundrisse, you know, I asked you to look at for today and, but also bits from, and I'd like to, I'm going to talk about alienation, okay, so really production in general and alienation. So that's pages, let me see, I have the, I can't find the, let me just check the syllabus. Okay, so it's pages 61 to 100 and pages 81 to 1,112.

Pages 61 to 100 in economic and philosophical manuscripts and pages 81 to 1,112 from Grundrisse. And I don't think I'll get to pages 69 to 695, but I can talk about them hopefully in the final session. um all right then um so just to clarify we have two more two more sessions this is six am i right this is and there's eight so i think we have two more sessions yeah but then so we're moving the final one three hours ahead right yes so the final one is now happening oh no it was more than that 2pm 2pm

yes exactly it's not that we're doing a double that day yeah the final one will be on Saturday the 5th of March and it'll be it's later in the day so it's at 9 o'clock for me but I think something like 2pm in the afternoon for I guess Eastern Standard Time. A suggestion then? I don't know, Ray, this is up to you, but since we seem to be really behind, I don't know if you've prepared slides like this with the lectures, but it seems like we'll be at least one whole session behind by then.

What if, like with our presentations, you were to record it Daniel Truong- So that we could just show up. Daniel Truong- Sure yes. Daniel Truong- Having watched it right, instead of do trying to do an extra session or cram two sessions worth of material into one. Daniel Truong- What if you recorded it we watched it beforehand and then came in. Daniel Truong- Okay, I don't know it's just a suggestion. Daniel Truong- So you mean for either for either the seventh or the eighth session do record it. This is extra work for Ray. Well, you know, that's why I'm asking. This is unpaid work. That's true.

I don't know. I'm just trying to think of how we can fit all this material in. Let me think about that. I'll see if it's feasible. Before you can do that, yeah. I agree. If it's possible, I'll try to do it. I need to think about it. And I'll let you know as soon as possible. But I agree, yes, because I don't want to kind of compress. We're already not having enough time for discussion. So I'll see what I can do. I'll definitely see what I can do. Yeah, okay. Right, then. So see you all next Saturday. Okay. Thanks. Bye-bye.