Capital Form or Flow (Session 4)

Hello and welcome to a full session of our seminar, Capital Form of Flow, with our instructor, Professor Ray Brassier. Please, Ray, you may take it on. Okay, great. Thanks. Okay, so first thing I want to say is that, so I watched the video by Luke and Rodolfo. So, and it was, again, very good. If you want to arrange a meeting to get some feedback, if you email me, and we'll try to arrange a meeting sometime in the coming week. So yeah, if you just send me an email, Luke and Rodolfo, just please email me to fix a meeting.

And then, okay, so we said last week that we would begin today with questions that, you know, from last week, the questions that people didn't have time to ask at the end of last week's presentation. So I think we'll start like that for maybe, I don't know, let's say that takes up the first kind of half hour. So I've shortened, I've tried to have a presentation for today, but I've kind of shortened it. But yes, I wanted to say that I'm still going to, I'm going to focus on the transition from, you know, the territorial socius to the despotic socius.

and not from despotism to capitalism, precisely because I think that there's aspects, really crucial features of the account of capitalism, of the capitalist socius given by the laws of the Atari that can only be understood by understanding the relation between the territorial and the despotic socius. So that's why I'm still covering So in a way, like you've read ahead, so I'm still covering the latter or the middle sections of chapter two. So what I propose then is that we'll continue, we'll have our final sessions on Deleuze and Gautari next week, where we'll kind of talk about the account of capitalism in full, and

we'll kind of compress our discussion of Marx to the final three sessions. So we have five sessions on the Baudnigotswari and then three sessions on Marx. I hope that works. But yes, so please, we should, I guess, start the discussion of the issues that people wanted to raise from last week. I mean, if no one has any, like, okay.

Yeah, sure. So Aaron? Sure. I guess there's a general and a specific one. um first i guess we've all been quite formal do uh how do you prefer to be do you mind being addressed as ray or professor professor ray is fine ray is fine ray or your excellency oh your excellency yeah um but ray no ray please um um so let's just a little bit of like reflection on the approach, I guess, especially because it seems, yeah, we're going to spend another week on anti-Oedipus. I've been wondering a bit, I guess there sort of seems to be a contradiction in the way

that the syllabus is set up, where we're framing what we're evaluating at this claim that Oedipus, anti-Oedipus is an updating of Marx on the one hand, right? But we are beginning with anti-Oedipus and sort of returning to Marx, as it were. I think this has made it a bit, a bit tougher, resulted in some confusion in that though you like sort of briefly addressed the marks that we're bringing is we're supposed to be evaluating this it's not not a hundred percent clear and we're spending a lot of time just sort of working out in very detailed way what we're

what the claim to anti-Oedipus is making and then we're going to go back to Marx with anti-Oedipus in mind and then have to return to anti-Oedipus to critically evaluate it right well actually I I mean, you're right. That's, you know, it's the, I would have preferred, I mean, simply splitting the syllabus into kind of Deleuze-Bosari and Four by Marxist. The truth is, you know, I wanted to shuttle back and forth between Deleuze-Bosari and Marx. It was very difficult to kind of, to do it in a systematic way. I need to kind of, to find the, you know, the relevant sections in Marx that kind of, you know, that corresponded to the references to Marx and Antiochus.

So that's why, I mean, to be honest, it's just like because I had to, the syllabus was quickly assembled. So I didn't have time to construct it as carefully as I would have liked to. So that's, in a way, we've already started bringing Marx into the discussion. And the truth is, I'm not sure how much familiarity people have with Marx. The problem is that this is a very difficult text. And then the bits of Marx that we need to look at are also difficult. So, but I'm happy, I mean, if people prefer to, you know, like if people would like to kind of shift to Marx, like, you know,

more rapidly and then to come back to the Los Ingresari, I mean, I don't mind doing that. If people think that would work better, that would be more clarifying. Yeah, I'm not sure off the top of my head. It just seemed like that issue, we seem to be getting lost in how focused we are. And I think sort of last week at the end when you sort of suddenly brought in the critical perspective, it felt like a sudden shift. We're like, oh, yeah, this is why we're here. But I'll move on to the more specific question I had about last week. But yeah, I did kind of just want to try to think through how we can try to balance that better,

because I've been having trouble also kind of shifting back and forth. The specific question is about this concept of code. and the ways in which I think it would be helpful to talk about how a code is not a language, right, and if you could go a bit more into the ways, like the distinction between sort of merely semantic or signaling and properly linguistic phenomena, what makes sort of the ways in which sort of reducing everything to code leaves a lot out, right? If you're describing a whole reality and social system in terms of code, and your criticism was that

it sort of naturalizes hierarchy as the only form of structure or being that you can even talk about, right? That like the ontology itself is kind of hierarchical. And how do this is different than a linguistic register. Right? So, we are more specific about the ways in which code is not language. Okay. Okay, well, yeah, the question of code is absolutely crucial. I mean, everything, the account of, you know, coding, overcoding, and decoding is the key to the kind of, of the relation between the three sociuses.

So, like last week we saw this kind of, we looked at a couple of sections where they first introduced the concept of code. The problem is this, is that they talk about, these idea of signs as inscribed described in these there are these chains of signs okay but these chains of signs are not yet linguistic these are not linguistic signs okay why not because they are not signs in the sense that they're talking about here are you know ubiquitous in nature they're distributed they're

operatives throughout nature I mean like for instance so Dan Smith in his paper says that you know, the paradigm for Deleuze and Glatari is something like DNA, you know, DNA genetic code. But the problem is that, okay, that's a biological paradigm, you know, exactly what DNA is, you know, you need to be a biologist to really understand the kind of, you know, the relationship between DNA and RNA and, you know, the machinery of, you know, genetic, you know, inscription and genetic transmission. It's a vague, it's an unhelpful analogy because it doesn't explain for a start on what basis you distinguish one sign from another. Okay, so they say that these, so a code

is made up of signs that are not kind of, you know, connected to one another by relations of resemblance or similarity or causal consequence. They are completely, you know, yeah, disconnected from one another. There's no kind of intrinsic relation between them. you know anything can function as you know an element of code for something for some other kind of uh you know feature of reality um and that's the first problem is that because it's one thing philosophers have distinguished between let's say you know natural signs and um you know linguistic

signs or between what's, you know, what Grice, the philosopher of language Grice, called, you know, natural meaning and non-natural meaning. And linguistic meaning is non-natural because the relationship between assertions, well, you know, the key difference is that natural signs are causally related. So for instance, if you say smoke is a sign of fire, the sense in which smoke is a sign of fire is because fire, combustion, generally causes smoke. It's not a kind of an infallible relation, but there's a correlation. There's a correlation between cause and effect. And those kinds of correlation are ubiquitous in nature.

OK, you know, so, you know, objects in the environment can be, you know, can be said to kind of to be related. You know, one object can be the sign of another object or one phenomenon can be the sign of another phenomenon in this sense, the sense that there's a kind of a causal connection. um but then okay but so think about it like so what's the you know smoke does not resemble fire but obviously physics tells you why you know what the connection is physics explains the kind of the you know the connection between those two things um but that's not what the laws and gotari mean

by signs because the signs have to be completely you know they're not causally connected you know they were causally connected they wouldn't be um you know they these these you know they call them signifying sorry go on yeah so here's here's where the confusion is for me right so in in a properly linguistic account you would say that and and this you could either get from from Salsurian linguistics or from the kind of semantic holism of Hegel or Sellers or someone like that, right? Where what you're saying is it's not, there are natural signs which encode

information, right? Smoke to fire, the correlation. We could talk about Sellers robot and the lightning like calculating the speed of sound from observing lightning strikes and thunder. And there are linguistic signs, which are made only in inferential relations to other linguistic signs, right, in relation to compatibility and incompatibility. Code is a kind of arbitrary mediator there, right? You can encode natural signs or linguistic signs. Yes. Right? Cellar's robot can encode the natural causal relations between

smoke and fire, between lightning and thunder. Can it, like when we're encoding properly linguistic signs, which are self-referential to a linguistic system made by sapient language users. How does the notion of code capture that without assuming sapience and language use? Yeah. Right? They're kind of using the notion of code and the freedom, rather, from sign and signifying, it seems to me that that's how they're carrying forward this kind of Salsurian linguistic

structuralism but they're at least it seems to me it's how are they accounting for the difference between yeah the causal relation of natural science and the properly linguistic relation that implies sort of pragmatic embodied concept users sure um no I think that that's a crucial I mean, look, I mean, I take your point to be, and I mean, I agree with you that the account of code is abstracted from signification. in a way, the kind of the concept of code that they use, you know, in this philosophical, you know, this philosophical kind of development they're proposing is, you know, it's in order,

it functions conceptually, but given that it's not the, you know, it's not the physical, it's not a kind of a natural scientific conception of code, because information, for instance, you know, physical information, biological information is encoded and decoding in strictly, you know, the ways that, you know, the processes of encoding and decoding of information are- Maturedity. Yeah, they're understood and they involve kind of law-like, you know, coordination. Yes, so the problem is this, is that they're, but that's not, you know, So nothing is medical for them. Because for them, and also because for them, the notion of code traverses all these domains at once.

Because remember, they're not starting off from physics and biology and working up. What is code? Code operates at the level of the intensive, which is the real in itself, which is the dimension of intensive difference. okay and they seem to be saying that intensive differences are constituted by these flows and cuts okay but each these flows and cuts have to be kind of recorded okay so that there are you know this is where the account of the second synthesis of disjunction is that every break in a flow has to be inscribed, inscribed in some other kind of flow or body or kind of, you know, you know,

material surface. So here, this, this account is, you know, it's supposed to give you, it's an ontological account, which is not, not categorical, it's supposed to kind of be operative across all these different levels of reality at once. And they will say that the kind of, you know, the segregation of reality into the physical, the chemical, the biological, you know, et cetera, et cetera, is an artifact of representation. And here following Bergson, okay? This is just all representation. So code is precisely, you know, what's supposed to kind of be the, in a way, the so intensive coding.

these processes of intensive coding are what ultimately kind of, you know, they get implicated in extension, okay, and then they give rise to kind of, you know, to representation. But the problem is this, is that this idea of code, it's not, so for instance, if you use DNA, it's not DNA, okay, that's a very weak metaphor for Deleuze and Guattari's concept of code because DNA, the structure of DNA is, you know, functions at a kind of a single level of reality, okay? It's kind of biological. That's not what they mean by code. Neither, you can say it's the digital, it's kind of, you know, zeros and ones because that's a completely

kind of binary, that's units of information. That would be the worst possible account because a completely binary digital account and the whole point is that um you know breaks and flows can't correspond to zeros and ones otherwise you have a digital metaphysics a digital metaphysics that assumes that you can always distinguish between um you know the the presence or the absence of information so that's no good either um so i think that there's a real problem in you know making sense of the concept of code that they construct to do this work. Okay, it's doing this philosophical work. But it's

really, I mean, you know, I share your kind of your doubts about it, about whether it actually kind of it makes any kind of if you if you press hard on it, I'm not clear that you can kind of get it to work properly. And there's also the other problem is this, is that, remember, at the level of intensity, it's always part objects. There are no constituted unities. There are no molar unities. So on what basis do kind of detached slices from flows, part objects, become inscribed in other flows?

how you need to explain how okay um but if you but you're not told you're just told it happens okay um and but if you're not given and of course we you want a mechanism of inscription but but a mechanism of inscription is precisely what they they can't and will not provide you because then it would be you know it would be a causal kind of you know mechanism which they don't want which which would have to function by representation, right? That's the issue that like code as it works in the natural sign, the information theoretic notion of code functions by mediation by representation. It's a causal process whereby information is mediated

into a simpler format and reduced and then readable again as information. And they're saying no code just is the causal, is just the material process and aligning the difference. Yeah. Right? Yes. Yes, it's part of this code is this. Actually, when they talk about, they talk about kind of, first of all, these flows are always coded. Material flows are always coded. There are no kind of, it's the idea of a decoded flow that is kind of an abstraction. but all the flows are always coded. They're coded, which is to say they're inscribed. But we're told this, but because we're not operating

at the level of representation, we can't appeal to differences in kind that would explain how one part of something becomes inscribed by another part of something. And as soon as you give the, you know, the examples, they're all representational. All the examples you give from biology, ethology, they're all representational. They all involve what we know about, you know, the, you know, the transmission, you know, the encoding and recoding of information, you know, by, you know, physical, biophysical, chemical processes.

So I think there's a real problem is that this, you know, it's a, in a way, and it functions, it's able to have, it has this plasticity, the concept of code has this kind of, it applies to everything, precisely because you can't nail down its actual, you know, the machinery of encryption or decryption of code. And there can't be a machinery because to be a machinery, there would have to be, you know, constituted objects with property, with qualities, you know, that are qualifiable and quantifiable. But quantity and quality only emerge as a consequence of the extensive, you know, explication of intensive coding.

um there's a quick a sign is not a code well a signifier is not a code but codes are made up of signs of a signifying signs they use this expression a signifying sign it's very telling that they have to use a signifying to tell you what the elements of code are because what what word are they going to use if not they have to kind of take the concept of sign we all what a sign is okay and we know what the difference between a kind of a natural sign and a kind of a you know a signifying sign or linguistic sign is okay so they take that you know and then they say but there are these you know a signifying signs okay um there's a negation

if the air tells you yeah but they don't signify these signs okay but then um the In what sense, then, can they be called a sign? Okay. What are the units of code? The problem is that if you think that the concept of unity, molar unity, unity only arises at the molar level. Okay. The level of kind of representation of these statistical averages. So what are the units of code? they use the word sign an a signifying sign you know as a placeholder for an account of the units of code that they can't give because for them all unity is quantitative and qualitative okay so um or okay i mean if someone understands it i mean i'm willing to be if someone does

understand it and I can answer these objections. I'm very happy to hear it, but I personally don't understand. I mean, yeah, I mean, I see how it works. I understand it, but I don't know if there is a point to make my argument here or in my presentation next week. I think maybe it would be better to have it to have the whole argument for next week i don't know whatever you prefer but i can i can tell you now also how i understand it sure do please do yes okay so clearly actually i would like to respond to both uh

questions that are on made the first one regarding the the syllabus um personally i don't mind if you decide to focus on whatever you like professor or your highness because it's uh you know we are all researchers we have our own interests so if you like to focus some specific things and these things changed during the course while we also have a range of pages to read personally it's fine with me also I choose to take the initiative even though I was

supposed to present before today's session as we said that we are talking about the lesson in Guattari for one more session. I said, okay, I took the initiative and I will present next week. So I support this flexibility. The second thing about all these ideas that they really make our lives more difficult. And I think that, and this is something that I expressed the very beginning that this book doesn't really help us to grasp some ideas that seem to be more

refined in a thousand plateaus this is why we are falling all the time on obstacles however because I am reading anti-Oedipus both in the English version and the Greek version I now found in the Greek book and I'm going to translate now because I cannot find it in the book it says there is a code only when there is a full body of anti-production and this body falls to economy which it appropriates so there is this passage from a full body that becomes

part of an economy and the code exists there in this passage and then it says the codal relationship is thus not just an intermediary relationship but it makes the pairings of the single flows. So we see that the code is basically something that organizes the flows. This something doesn't... First of all, Deleuze and Guattari, they explain this idea of the

Again, I highlight that from the very beginning, when we listen or read to the word code, immediately we go to technology, to linguistics, whereas if we see how they define coding and encoding and code, they start from their own definition. And this definition has to do with the organization of flows and the creation of relationalities and connections among the single flows. What does this mean? Is this representational?

I would say not necessarily, because when you organize the flows, this doesn't mean that they create a fixed form. And I will give you an example that I also mentioned in my PhD thesis, and I will mention in my presentation as well. So when we have a music sheet, you know, the musical notation of a piece of music, if we have a classical notation, music notation, this belongs to the realm of representation and the one-to-one relationship between what is noted and what is supposed to be heard.

when the musician plays the notes that they see on the page. But there are other kinds of music notation that they are diagrammatical. For example, the works of Morton Feldman or Yanis Xenakis. In this case, you have a kind of structure, you have a kind of code, You have an organization of flows, but you don't have a representational output. Let me show you an image so that you can have an idea about this diagrammatical approach.

Let me grab my PhD, just a sec. So, just a minute. So basically a code is what I call in my doctoral thesis a protocol. And the protocol is not the same as an instruction or a rule or the law, the father, because

it... Ah, I found it. So can you see it? Yes, yes. So this is a score by Morton Feldman. Okay. You see these squares. The height of the square is the tonality. It's a spectrum of tonality. And the width of the squares is a spectrum of, is a time unit. The point is that the person who executes the score defines what is the time unit and what is the spectrum of tonality of each square.

This means that there is a kind of organization in this musical composition, but there is no representation. It's not a matter of units that, and this is why I argue that anti-Oedipus doesn't really help us to understand the argument because it's like, and this is what I'm going to do in my presentation. I'm going to take some parts of anti-Oedipus and translate them as I understand them because Because the language they use drop us really quickly to representation linguistics and

we lose the argument. So if we go for example to Lyotard, to Klosowski, to this idea of the phantasm and simulacra, all these ideas, they will help us understand what Deleuze and Guattari talk about. So to close this very quick understanding of this book, the code for me is closer to this idea of the protocol, meaning that it organizes the flows, it organizes intra-connectivity without representation.

So a body without organs, for example, doesn't mean that it's an undifferentiated abyss. There is a structure, but this structure is not representational. And when they talk about, at the end of the book, when they talk about capitalism and the limit that capitalism makes and re-territorializes the flows that itself frees, let's say, that liberates. like the moment that capitalism liberates the flows at the same moment it re-territorializes

them and it creates a new kind of faith in an era where there is no religion anymore so they say how is this possible to have faith without religion? In my opinion, this happens because, as also Deloes and Guattari say and imply, because we have images that we grab onto in order to make sense, But these images, they don't correspond to a body without organs, or if we talk with Klosovskian terms, a phantasm, they are rigid images that they don't emanate singularities anymore.

They don't emanate intensities anymore because there is not this relationship between the phantasm and the simulacrum. We have empty simulacra. So this is how I understand this idea of re-territorialization and representation as well. Okay. I don't know if this makes sense. No, it does. That was actually very helpful. But then, okay. No, that was actually very helpful. But can I ask you more about this explanation of code as a protocol and the

contrast between a protocol and an instruction or a rule? So in the example, in the Feldman example, you gave the Feldman diagram where the height and the width of the square correspond to tonality in the time unit. Okay, but then you have, in what sense is the, you know, the height of the square, you know, or the width of the, you know, of the square or rectangles or quadrangles, whatever they are, in what sense are these units of height and width not, and if they're in a correspondence relation to some other dimension, in what sense is this not a representation? It's not a linguistic representation, but of course there's non-linguistic representation.

So, and isn't this a one-to-one correspondence? I mean, if height corresponds to tonality, width corresponds to time? No, I'll tell you. It's not a representation. It's not necessarily a representational and one-to-one relationship because if you If you see it closely, for example, let me find, for example, this one. Okay. If I set the tonality between the low line and the higher line to be Do to Mi, Do, Re, Mi, then this small square here is Re.

But if I say that from here to here is a Do and three octaves or something that cannot be cut in a full note, then the little square that I am supposed to execute as a musician could be a sliding fluid execution of a spectrum of tonalities. Do you get what I'm trying to say? That there is this idea of choice that depending on

the boundaries, the porosity and the width of boundaries that one sets, defines a certain spectrum of choices, but these choices are not one-to-one. So this is why it's not representational. Okay, so I will give you another example from my performance practice, which is something that I will put in my presentation as well. For example, I have a performance artist and I have a series of works where I invite the

audience to touch me after they have signed a contract where I give my consent to be touched after the audience has put on latex gloves. However, I don't define inside the contract how they can touch me, how long, if they will decide to touch me or not, they might not want to. on what part of my body, what intensity this touch might have.

So this contract functions as a morphogenetic structure, as a protocol, as an apparatus that generates areas of probabilities for the emergence of potential events. So this is not representational by any means, but it has a structure. Okay, okay. Okay, well thanks. That's, no, that's very, you know, I'm looking forward to your presentation. Okay, that's a very, you know, that is very helpful.

I mean, I have questions, but I think people are saying, yeah, we should probably kind of try to kind of, you know, move or have a few other kind of questions. But thank you. That was actually, you know, that moved the kind of the discussion forward in a kind of a productive way. So, and I will return to this when we discuss your presentation next week. I think so. I assume that there's a lot, I haven't been able to keep up with all the comments. Is there anyone else who wants to follow up with a question about code? Obviously, this is, you know, there's lots and lots to say, but anyone else want to make an intervention now on the issue of code and coding?

uh yes william yes yes you go ahead ask ask a question um if you can't uh you can type your question if uh if you're not able to to speak or to be heard? Matthias, is there something preventing? Yes, I was looking forward to, I think.

Y'all hear me now? Oh, right. Yes. Oh, great. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I just have a quick question. like trying to sort of understand the sort of like high level project that that's going on in in the sort of like I guess like this is schizoanalytic project on the one hand that's ostensibly like a negative position and then also a positive position or whatever and they elaborate like schizoanalysis the positive tasks of schizoanalysis, but also it's premised on this sort of like critique. And this is not, I'm not, my question is about Hegel, and I really, I don't know much about

Hegel, and I'm not really like a trained philosopher or anything like that, but I just wonder, and this is based off reading basically like just the preface and introduction of the Hegel's Phenomenology. So that's sort of like the limit. But I guess what my question is, is basically the way I read it is that, and I've read this book before, but not very seriously. But my question is, like, essentially, it seems like what Deleuze and Guattari are doing are talking about like social and historical experience without wanting to sort of over rely or be over determined by the position of individuality. And they do that with these sort

of like metaphors and concepts, which are obviously extremely complicated, which, which y'all have already talked about today, but of like body without organs and the socius and this sort of view of like the social environment that is like substantive in some way. um and and and then and it seems like they really sort of get get into the weeds by talking about sexuality and sort of contrasting the accounts of freud um or their own accounts with like freud and then and reich and and and and all these sort of interlocutors um and

talking about like libido and sort of like uh having this pretension towards uh like non-anthropomorphic sexuality and within that sort of within that this sort of like concept of disjunction and the way that the social fabric or whatever is is is not necessarily continuous but it is still sexually productive but I guess the question that I have is how this is necessarily different from a Hegelian

project because Hegel already is sort of taking the idea of spirit as as this sort of social historical like meta sphere thing that the individual can kind of have a dynamic with through which individuality is sort of not overdetermined by itself and humanity can sort of like level up or whatever. And I guess I'm just not entirely sure how doos and guatari are even through their sort of like discourse on sex um how how they are not necessarily just pursuing the sort of like totalizing

um not necessarily teleological but still like uh sort of like exploration of spirit or whatever And yeah, I sort of put it, it's actually I don't think that complicated of a question, because it's really just about like, the sort of like totality to which Deleuze and Natari are addressing their strategic intervention. And sort of how is that not just sort of reinstating an idea of spirit or geist or something. And then also sort of like, along with that is, is, is, is, is that I guess the question of social relation and like how they have a positive view of social relation um and how it can sort of elaborate something like solidarity without a pretension

to a higher order of spirit that we're all joining in on but how can we actually have interactions with one another um that have a positive element um you know sort of in itself And maybe the answer is actually going to these questions about code and sex and whatnot. But I don't know. Okay, well, let me try to let me try to respond. Just a little about, you know, those in guitar and Hegel. Sorry if that's too wild question. It is hard to get a sense of the holistic project that goes on. Sure. I mean, there is, look, they're also writing something which is a universal history.

They call it a negative universal history. and obviously hegel's phenomenology of spirit is the kind of the paradigmatic instance of a you know universal history uh in a philosophical register but except here it's you know the uh it's desiring production in a way that is what you could say although they you know they would never kind of um um what what is hegel's universal history it's the becoming subject of substance It's the emergence of spirit from being or substance as self-relating negativity. Here, how does Deleuze and Guattari's account work? Well, it's this account of desiring production, but in a way, the kind of the different degrees

of the psychic repression and social suppression of desiring production. So you could say, and in a way, what they call the schizophrenia, you know, the full body of the dictatorialized, which is the kind of, you know, the liminal kind of endpoints of history for them would be the kind of you know, It's something like the reinstating of, you know, the, in a way, it's like a parody of the becoming subject of substance. You could say that Deleuze and Gosari are parodying Hegel. And the claim is that social, you know, the social suppression of desiring production is also, insofar as it's also compelled by the, you know, the machinery.

of desiring production itself eventually overcomes itself. So that there's ultimately kind of a dissolution of, you know, the mechanisms, the molar mechanisms of the repression of desire. Okay. David Sloan, And the what they call you know and all these know when they talk about those kind of infinite passages when they're talking about kind of accelerating the process like going through going through capitalist de-territorialization. territorialization, you know, breaking, you know, the capitalism's re-axiomatization of decoded flows to unleash something like, you know, cosmic schizophrenia, that is like a parody of the

Hegelian negation of the negation, okay? There's this primary repression at the beginning, desiring production kind of represses itself, institutes the socius, okay? And then with with capitalism you've got the possibility of the supersession of social suppression and this kind of you know the release of you know the unleashing of desiring production no except the desiring production is that this you know is the you know the subject object distinction you know isn't opposite at all at the level of the relationship between you know the molecular and the molar as those in glatari which is the distinction that runs through

this universal history for them um so there is i mean you ask questions about um i mean look in terms of the the second half of your question about sociality for hegel spirit is social okay because self-conscious um you can only be you know spirit emerges from self-consciousness and self-consciousness involves the relationship between two subjects okay you need you know you need to relate to another self-consciousness in order to be self-consciousness and the sociality of reason is in a way kind of encapsulated in this proposition that self-consciousness isn't just the relationship to an object,

but to another subject. So that the community of self-consciousnesses constitute spirit. And because spirit seeks freedom, the idea is that spiritual freedom can only be socially realized. It's socially, you know, it's socially realized in the state for Hegel, but for Marx, only through the kind of, you know, the dissolution of the state. Now, freedom in Deleuze and Guattari's account, and this is also something I was going to, you know, mention today, it's, you know, they claim, well, there's no connection, first of all, you know, they rarely use the term, they rarely use the term, but it does crop up occasionally and it's very telling that

you know because you know if human history is the history of the repression of desire, then there's a sense in which you know each socius, each kind of stage of the the socialization of desire is in a way a kind of, because it involves kind of repression and suppression, it inhibits desire. you take desire to be because if if if productive desire is the cipher for freedom here then sociality and freedom are incompatible on delloz and guattari's account okay it's quite striking

there is there can be no intensive sociality um because these um you know the coding over coding and decoding are all kind of forms of, you know, the extensive, you know, the, you know, the inhibition of unfair or desiring production. So this is why there's a kind of, you know, does not go, sorry, can and have been read to be saying that freedom consists in kind of the dissolution of the socius. Because what is the territorial socius, the despotic socius, and the capitalist socius

are what inhibits designing production. And there are several junctures in the book where they effectively say this. So you get a completely different account. So this account of freedom is antithetical to Hegel's because it doesn't involve sociality. And why not? Because the relationship between interpersonal relations, social relations, are a consequence of molar organization and the segregation and segmentation of the flows of desire. And Oedipal triangulation, I mean, the critique of Oedipus is well taken.

There's lots of aspects of the critique of familialism which are perfectly, you know, which are correct and any kind of leftist should accept. But the problem is that it's not clear that there's any positive account of sociality that can remain from their account of, you know, of universal history. And in that regard, it's very unlike Hegel, who thinks that freedom, concrete, human freedom is attainable here and now. It can't be postponed. Hegel's a critic of noumenal freedom in the Kantian sense. He thinks that human freedom must be realizable on earth in human societies.

And it's not clear that Deleuze and Guattari think that that is the case. So there's a really stark contrast between Deleuze and Guattari and Hegel on this. Not to mention the fact that obviously Hegel is the great... Delos has nice things to say about Kant on occasion, but he never has anything nice to say about Hegel. You know, it's quite striking. And even in the seminars, there's some quite comical passages where he's very irked when someone mentions Hegel. And yeah, so that's what I would, obviously, yeah, there's all sorts of ways in which you

can kind of map the Deleuze-Hagel relation, but that's the best I can do for now. Okay. Right. Any other questions? um ray i think i think i'd suggest that perhaps we should have a pause now sure okay let's come back and go to the presentation yeah okay all right sure okay okay fine um so see you all in five minutes and we're back Okay, right. So I guess I'll proceed with the presentation. Again, I've got PowerPoint,

which I'm sure sorry. Okay, so here it is. Okay, so as I said, like, you know, yeah, I really just once again we last week we talked about surplus value of code okay so now i really want to focus on you know the the role of over coding of what the dozen gozari call over coding in the transition from what they call you know the uh you know the primitive territorial machine or the earth to the kind of, you know, the barbaric imperial machine, you know, of the despot. Okay, so again, the relation between the intensive and the extensive is key to understanding

the emergence of each social formation and its internal organization. The way in which it kind of coordinates the syntheses of design production, connection, disjunction, conjunction. So we know already that this, in a way, the intensive extension distinction maps on to the molecular molar distinction. okay um so at the intensive level of flows and cuts we have connections which yield part objects disjunctions which are always inclusive and conjunctions which always which generate a pre

individual um subject you know the subject of sensation or the larval subjects as de laus calls in difference in repetition but in a way this is an eye an eye that feels or that kind of registers a kind of an intensity okay but it's not yet a self at the extensive level quantity and quality only emerge you know at the extensive level and here the syntheses connect holes okay they connect whole objects not just their parts. Disjunction is always exclusive okay it's not it's either or okay and not an or or where the two poles of the of the opposition are you know in a way

interpenetrate as they do in inclusive disjunction and finally conjunction yields an individual self There is the self, the individuated personal or familial self emerges with conjunction in extensity. But the key idea here is that the intensive domain is implicated in the extensive, which then explicates it as quantity and quality, also a subject and object and a whole bunch of other kind of molar distinctions.

Okay. So the idea is that intense, you know, and when I say intensive, you know, obviously intensity, but coding is like, you know, the coding of intensities is also what is part of the intensive domain, which is implicated. So the idea is that flows and codes and surplus value of code is also always part of what is intensively implicated in extension. Okay, so what is this? This means that the um um what is repre you know social production involves the repression of desiring production okay

um what is repressed in social production is desiring production it is the part of this production that does not enter into social production or reproduction it is what would introduce disorder and revolution into the socius the non-coded flows of desire so in a way social coding is necessary in order to have is a condition of you know social reproduction and to the extent that desiring production threatens to kind of you know to explode this you know to to you know to dissolve these coding procedures that it has to be repressed okay Okay. However, having said this, so in a way, you know, universal history is the history of

the repression of desiring production. You know, they talk about refoulement is the word they use, but the earth, the despot, and the capital, earth, despot, and capital represent different degrees of the implication of intensity and extensity, such that degrees of implication correspond to stages of repression. And Deleuze and Guattari make this explicit when they say, you know, the germinal influx of intensity conditions all representation. The germinal influx is what has to be repressed at level of the so-called primitive territorial socius. It is the representative of desire.

But if it is termed representative, this is because it is equivalent to the non-codable, non-coded or decoded flows. In this sense, it implies in its own way the socius's limit, the limits or the negative of every socius. The suppression, and here they use the word you know, the suppression of this limit is possible only to the extent that the representative itself undergoes a repression and the representative of, you know, design production is this germinal influx in the territorial socius. So this is what must be repressed. This repression determines

what part of the influx will pass through and what will not in the system in extension what will remain blocked or stocked in the extended affiliations and on the contrary what will move and flow following the relations of alliance in such a way that the systematic coding of the flows will be carried out we call this second instance the repressing representation alliance since the affiliations become extended only in terms of lateral alliances that measure their variable segments okay so remember the two flows of social production on the territorial

associates are affiliation and alliance you know vertical affiliation kind of descent okay and lateral alliance okay which is a political you know political and economic and in a way it's the kind of the coordination of filiation and alliance that is always the uh you know the problem for the uh the socius this is what you know the socius has to kind of somehow um you know as they put a decline or articulate affiliation and alliance okay but here it's um It's alliance, and it's alliance, which is properly social and political, or alliance is properly political and economic, and alliance is the repressing representation.

um so what what can we kind of you know infer from this first that you know the the so-called intensive surplus you know it's the also called the germany influx is the condition of representation it's the representative of desire it's what has to be um repressed in all social production okay representation is the coding of this surplus to determine what will pass in alliance and what will be blocked in filiation remember kind of letting you know um letting things flow and preventing things from flowing or what every social formation has to kind of negotiate okay

Alliance is the repressing representation which reduces the representative to what is blocked in this system. And what is blocked by the territorial socius is the conjunction of filiation and alliance. And this conjunction is represented by incest. okay so the figure of oedipus the son who kills his father and marries his mother is the displaced represented or the limits of sociality that enters into its interior oedipus is what must be suppressed in order for desire to be repressed so oedipus represents the kind of you know the crossing

of affiliation and alliance in a way which would explode the kind of you know social organization So that is what must be kind of prevented from happening. It's the, you know, the displaced represented. But then they distinguish three limits, three senses in which the socius or each socius has a limit. There's what they call the absolute limit, which is the decoded flows in the body without organs. There's the relative limits, which they identify with capitalism. with what they will describe, as we'll see next week, the quantifying axiomatization of decoded flows. And quantity here, I think, it's money that will be the quantifier,

the quantifying instance here under capitalism. And finally, the real limits. And every socius has a real limit. And the real limit is what it must stave off in order to persist. So the real limits for the territorial socius is overcoding. The real limit for the despotic socius is decoding. And the real limit for capitalism is schizophrenia. But here's the passage, I think, that suggests that there can be, you know, sociality involves in a way the kind of, you know,

the intrication of social and desiring production. Desiring production is implicated in social production, but it also has to be repressed, okay? Every social organization, all forms of social production are conditioned by the repression of desiring production, because desiring production produces this uncodable, this surplus, this excess, which would actually prevent you know the organization, social organization, and the different forms of organization in the The territorial associates, the despotic associates and the capitalist associates. So they write for the flows to be codable, their energy must allow itself to be quantified and qualified.

It is necessary that selections from the flows be made in relation to detachments from the chain. Something must pass through, but something must also be blocked and something must block and cause to pass through. Now, this is possible only in the system in extension that renders persons discernible, that makes a determinate use of signs, an exclusive use of the disjunctive synthesis, and a conjugal use of the connective syntheses. So what allows the passage of a flow, what allows something to pass is conjugal connection in the territorial sources.

What blocks a passage is filiative disjunction. And in a way, what brings together passing and blocking is conjunctive alliance. In other words, an alliance with another clan or tribe or family, where you can, in a way, you can bring together filiation and alliance without exploding the system, without exploding the coordination. that is the condition of social organization.

Okay. But this, you know, the third, you know, the conjunctive alliance, okay, when you bring together, you know, when you block in order to let something pass, that's the moment of surplus value, okay? That is the moment of the extraction of surplus value from the coding of these social flows. So what passes through leads to, as compensation for what is blocked, a veritable surplus value of code. What is prolonged in connection, what comes to a halt in disjunction, and what is detached from a signifying chain in

conjoined with a deduction from a flow and the different relationships according to which these actions and passions are distributed help us understand the formation mechanism of the surplus value of code as an indispensable element of any coding of flows in other words so all social coding is conditioned by surplus value surplus value extracting surplus value is a condition of social coding. And remember, what is surplus value? Well, surplus value is an asymmetry or irreversibility or inequality in the conjunction of two coded flows.

Okay. The extraction of surplus value is what allows you in a way to kind of to commensurate heterogeneous flows. And this is why Deleuze and Guattari insist that every social formation is organized around disequilibrium or excess or surplus, but never order and equilibrium. Okay, it's one of the strengths of their account that they say, you know, it's, you know, asymmetry, irreversibility and inequality are the conditions of social order. And it's actually, you know, the cancellation that has to be explained that is anomalous in each case.

So, so now we also see how, in what sense, alliance is the key operative of, you know, the. of representational repression, the repression, the primary repression that makes social organization possible. So they write, debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flows of desire and that by means of debt creates for man a memory of words. It is alliance that represses the great intense mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the non-coded flows of desire

capable of submerging everything. It is debt that articulates the alliances with the filiations that have become extended in order to form and to forge a system in extension or representation based on the repression of nocturnal intensities. The alliance debt answers to what Nietzsche described as humanity's prehistoric labor, the use of the cruelest mimo-technics in naked flesh to impose a memory of words founded on the ancient biocosmic memory that is why it is so important to see debt as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process instead of making

it and the inscriptions themselves into an indirect means of universal exchange okay so here what What they're rejecting is what they call the exchangeist paradigm of social organization. So what they're saying is that humans is that alliance is not based on exchange, the exchange of equivalence. On the contrary, alliance is rooted in debt, in indebting, on being indebted to another. this uh you know the indebtedness involves an asymmetry there's also an asymmetry in the creditor debtor relation um that is missing in the exchange relation according to thousands

or sorry because debt is unexchangeable so they say desire knows nothing of exchange it knows only theft and gift the primitive market operates through bargaining rather than by fixing an equivalent that would lead to a decoding of flows and a collapse of the mode of inscription on the socius in other words you know um the monetary equivalence you know which is the condition of exchange of economic exchange um only arises with a despotic socius okay and it's it's it's a It's a means of overcoding, of overcoding the debt relation. We are brought back to our point of departure.

The fact that exchange is inhibited and exercised by no means attests to its primary reality, but demonstrates on the contrary that the essential process is not exchanging, but inscribing or marking. So what they're saying is that in the territorial socius, it's the inscribing or marking of debt that is the primary kind of, you know, units of social coding, for instance, of social coding. And this inscription involves the coordination of the organs.

What is inscribed on the territorial socius are relations amongst organs. Okay. The voice, the hand, and the eye. Okay. The primitive socius covers itself in this manner with a network, wherein one is continually jumping from words to things and from bodies to appellations, according to the extensive requirements of the system in its length and its width. What we call the order of connotation is an order in which the word as a vocal sign designates something, but where the thing designated is no less a sign because it is furrowed by a graphism that is connoted in conjunction with the voice.

the heterogeneity the divergence the disequilibrium of the two elements vocal and graphic is resolved by a third element the visual the eye it might be said of this eye that it sees the word it sees it but it does not read it insofar as it evaluates the suffering caused by the graphism Okay, now, just in relation to the conversation we were having earlier, okay, it's striking here that they want to say that the word, in this order of connotation, that is, you know, fundamental to the territorial socius, the word is a vocal sign,

which designates but it doesn't designate an object okay it doesn't designate an object what it designates is a body which also functions as a sign in other words there's no distinction between words and things okay the distinction between words and things only you know kicks in with signification you know and representation but what's striking is that they think that connotation can be you know installed independently of signification or designation okay and it's right so they think that you it's possible to kind of for a word a single word to connote a body or an aspect of a body independently of the signifier okay and also independently of

something like assertion or signification in the sense that you know Kantian philosophers want to talk about that's something to kind of to consider here so what falls in from this coordination of voice hand and eye is that you know the coordination of voice and addition is the condition of alliance okay the coordination of of you know of hand and graphics of the hand and you know the inscribing hand is uh the condition of filiation or what expresses filiation and the eye you know which you know registers which sees pain extracts surplus value from in a way the uh you know the

The conjunction of alliance and affiliation. Okay, so they write between these two elements of the code. Pain is like the surplus value that the eye extracts taking hold of the effect of active speech on the body, but also of the reaction of the body in so far as it is acted upon. And this is how what they call the terrible equation of debt is instituted. So this triangulation of voice, hand and eye or of the, you know, of. Of audition of inscription and of of pain, OK?

The terrible equation of debt is the equation of the injury done with pain to be suffered. Debt makes alliance possible by rearing humans to keep promises. This is an elaboration on Nietzsche's claim. How do you rear an animal capable of making promises? Nietzsche's answer in the genealogy of Marx is very simple. Through torture. Okay, through a protracted system of torture, which forces the human animal to remember the consequences of infraction or failing to keep a promise.

Okay, this is how you enforce alliance. OK, so. The equation injury equals pain has nothing exchanges devoted, and it shows in this extreme case that the debt itself had nothing to do with exchange. Nothing is exchanged in debt. Simply stated, the eye extracts from the pain it is contemplating a surplus value of code that compensates the broken relationship between the voice of alliance that the criminal has wronged and the mark that had not sufficiently penetrated his body. So on this account, the I extracts a surplus value of code that conjoins incommensurables, which is to say the injury done and the pain suffered.

Okay. But here, you know, the question is how, how does the eye extract it? How does, how does the equation injury equals pain compensate, which is the word they use, how does it compensate for the imbalance between debts and credits? Why is this optical operation and the valuation of codes, which is to say an extraction of surplus value from incommensurable codes and not an interpretation of science? I think that's a really important question. Okay, but now here's a passage in when I think we can see in what sense there are degrees of repression.

why every form of social recording involves a repression of desiring production. But it seems under those and Guattari's account that there are stages of repression, or rather degrees of repression. So they write the inscription on the Socius is in fact the agent of a secondary psychic repression, or repression in the proper sense of the term, that is necessarily situated in relation to the desiring inscription of the body without organs and in relation to the primary repression that the latter already performs in the domain of desire, a relation that is essentially variable. There is always social repression, but the apparatus of

repression varies depending in particular on what plays the role of the representative on which the repression is brought to bear. In other words, in each socius, you know, the earth, the despot, and capital, there's a different representative of desire. In In the primitive territorial socius, the representative of desire is the germinal influx. In the despotic socius, it's incest.

And in the capitalist socius, it's the complete, absolute territorialization or intensive death. In this sense, it is possible that the primitive codes, at the moment they are acting on the flows of desire with a maximum of vigilance and extension, binding them in a system of cruelty, maintain an infinitely greater affinity with desiring machines than does the capitalist axiomatic, which nonetheless liberates the decoded flows. This is a really striking assertion on their part. They say that the territorial calling, territorial inscription, pre-civilized kind of social organization,

maintains an infinitely greater affinity with desiring machines than does the capitalist axiomatic, but also the despotic, as we'll see in their account of the despotic socius. it's already, it introduces all the elements that will further displace, you know, the representative of desire and further kind of, you know, repress primary desire in production. and they and they say the reason why the primitive solcius is closer is because it in the primitive solcius desire is not yet trapped not yet introduced into a set of impasses

the flows have lost none of their polyvocacy and the simple represented in representation or has not yet taken the place of the representative, the germinal influx. In order to evaluate in every instance the nature of the apparatus and its effects on desiring production, it is therefore necessary to take into account not only the elements of representation, as they are organized in depth, but the manner in which representation itself is organized at the surface, on the inscription surface of the socius. And actually, this contrast they make here between representational depth and the surface or inscription, horizontal inscription,

is crucial to the contrast between eminence and transcendence. What they say, Delors is famous as a philosopher of eminence. What he means by eminence is eminence to the primary process of desiring production. and the territorial solcius, in a way, is closer to the earth as the full body without organs because it has not yet introduced transcendence. It hasn't yet introduced all the components of molar transcendence, which will end up displacing and distorting the positivity of desire altogether.

So the claim about closer, I mean, it's deliberately pictorial. There's this idea of this, you know, there's imminence to the earth, imminence to the earth, territorial inscription, and the kind of the coordination, affiliation, and alliance on the surface of the earth. Okay? And then this kind of, you know, The despotic socius introduces this vertical transcendence, this vertical dimension of transcendent, transcendent representation into this otherwise kind of second order territorial eminence.

But this is why, for George and Qatari, I mean, human history is the history of territorial cruelty, despotic terror and capitalist cynicism. Cruelty, terror and cynicism are the are ineradicable. Every kind of, you know, these three fundamental social formations are characterized by these affects. affect um um okay so now we begin with a transition towards um you know despotism okay and here this is where um you know it's despotism that introduces the state okay and what the doesn't gotori called the ur states is this kind of uh in a way is this paradigmatic kind of um you know

structure which is uh is common to every um every every kind of state every species of state uh they write spiritual spiritual or temporal tyrannical or democratic capitalist or socialist It's very telling. There's no kind of capitalist or socialist. There has never been but a single state. Nietzsche suggests how this new socius proceeds. a terror without precedent in comparison with which the ancient system of cruelty, the forms of primitive regimentation and punishment are nothing. A concerted destruction of all the primitive codings or worse yet, their derisory preservation, their reduction to the condition of secondary parts in the new machine and the new apparatus of repression.

Richard Streitz, PhD.: All that constituted the essential elements of the primitive inscription machine, the blocks of mobile open finite debts, the parcels of destiny, finds itself taken into an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite and no longer forms anything but one and the same crushing fate. fate. So, this, you know, the despotic over-coding by the state, so the state, in a way, is the instrument of what they call despotic over-coding, and the elements of this over-coding are signification, which we already said a little bit about, I think, last week or the week before,

objectivation and subjectivation, okay? These are the three, signification, objectivation, subjectivation of the three are instituted with despotic overcoding and the contrast here is with the earth is with territorial coding on the earth where we have marking voicing and seeing okay as these you know as these fundamental actions and passions okay and with the emergence of the state there's a new coordination of alliance and filiation. We have a new alliance and a direct filiation. The despot challenges the lateral alliances and the extended filiations of the

old community, you know, because filiation in the territorial socius involves, proceeds, proceeds, you know, through, is socially extended. It kind of proceeds beyond the family, to the extended family, and even to kind of to other groups or clans. And despotism, in a way, closes down, completely kind of constricts affiliative extension. The despot imposes a new alliance system and places himself in direct filiation with the deity.

So the despot claims to be descended from God, or he derives his, it's usually a he, but it could be a she, but I'm not sure. but the despot derives his authority from God, and the people must fall. For the first time, something has been withdrawn from life and from the earth that will make it possible to judge life and to survey the earth from above. A first principle of paranoia, acknowledge the whole relative play of alliances alliances and filiations is carried to the absolute in this new alliance and this direct

relation the new alliance between the despot and his people and the direct filiation um you know through from god to the despot and to the uh you know the successors of the despot or the ears of the despot um okay and here There's an interesting rapprochement with Marx. It is exactly in this way that Marx defines Asiatic production. A higher unity of the state establishes itself on the foundations of the primitive rural communities which keep their ownership of the soil while the state becomes the true owner in conformity with the apparent objective movement that attributes the surplus

product to the state, assigns the productive forces to it in the great projects undertaken, and makes it appear as the cause of the collective conditions of appropriation. So we've already heard several times how the solcius, there's a kind of falling back of the instruments of production onto the surface of the solcius. Anyway so the solcius must appropriate the results of production. But here, with the despotic socius, it's all social production.

And in a way, the surplus of social production becomes the property of the despot. You know, the king, the emperor, whatever. The full body of socius has ceased to be the earth. It has become the body of the despot, the despot himself or his god. The prescriptions and prohibitions that often render him almost incapable of acting make of him a body without organs. He is the sole quasi-cause, the source and fountainhead and estuary of the apparent objective movement.

Okay, you know, the despot doesn't produce or generate or do anything, but every product, you know, everything created, you know, every act is, you know, belongs to him, you know, is appropriated by him. He is the sole quasi cause, the source and final head and estuary of the apparent objective movement. In place of mobile detachments from a signifying chain, a detached object has jumped outside the chain. Note that they use the word signifying chain here. What they mean, again, what they mean is these blocks of code.

Okay, these blocks of code that are detached from signifying chains in the territorial socius. Now this detachment becomes impossible. What is detached is an object, an object, you know, the signified object that jumps outside the chain. In place of flow selections, all the flows converge into a great river that constitutes the sovereign's consumption, a radical change of regimes in the fetish or the symbol. sorry um so what what's happening in this transition from territory to state is that

instead of mobile detachments of sign mobile detachments of signs you know of the so-called a signifying signs we have a detached object signifier okay um instead of multiple deductions of flows, you know, filiative flows, we have a single flow of consumption such that filiative stocks become the object of accumulation or surplus stock. Okay, it's the state, the pharaoh or the despot commandeers production so that the social surplus the surplus of production belongs to you know the the despot and blocks of debts

or alliances become a single infinite debt which is the tribute owed to the sovereign and the surplus value of code which falls from the asymmetry or inequality in the conjunction affiliation and alliance becomes an object of appropriation now okay um so now it's appropriated by the despot and this is the sense in which despotism involves de-territorialization okay far from seeing in the states the principle of a territorialization that would inscribe people according to their residence, we should see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement

of deterritorialization that divides the earth as an object and subjects men to the new imperial inscription, to the new full body, to the new socius. And I think what they mean here is that It's with despotism in a way that the territory, the surface of the earth, is carved up, divided into regions, kind of enclaves of the empire, territories that belong to the emperor or the despot.

And this objective division of territory corresponds to the inscription of subjects. So now once you kind of carve out a previously kind of undifferentiated or kind of non-segregated territory into these discrete kind of national units, nations, or peoples inhabiting kind of different regions, then you also have the inscription of subject. You have subjectivation. You become subject to the law and the authority of the despot or emperor. And this is the new alliance.

OK, so this is how they describe this new alliance. This new alliance, this new alliance between the despot and his subjects, you know, the emperor and his subjects, is something altogether different from a treaty or a contract. What is suppressed is not the former regime of lateral alliances and extended affiliations, but merely their determining character. They subsist, more or less modified, more or less harnessed by the great paranoiacs, since they furnish the material of surplus value. In point of fact, that is what forms the specific character of Asiatic production.

The autonomous rural communities subsist and continue to produce, inscribe and consume. In effect, they are the state's sole concern. The wheels of the territorial lineage machine subsist, but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the state machine. The objects, the organs, the persons and the groups retain at least a part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the former regime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that appropriates surplus value.

The old inscription remains but is bricked over by and in the inscription of the states. The blocks subsist. The affiliative blocks subsist but have become encasted and embedded bricks not having only a controlled mobility. The territorial alliances are not replaced, but are merely allied with the new alliance. The territorial affiliations are not replaced, but are merely affiliated with the direct filiation. Okay, so I think it's, you know, so the bit, I think this is important to emphasize is that, in a way, the accounts that Los Inglaterra are giving is not simply chronological, but kind of

Synchronic too, because the point is that despotic overcoding maintains territorial coding. You can only overcode what has already been coded. So in a way, kind of despotism presupposes territorial coding, territoriality. And similarly, when, you know, capitalist decoding, you know, supplants despotic overcoding, that doesn't mean that despotism will be cancelled, you know, or negated altogether. It persists as the material. What is decoded becomes, you know, recoded in another register.

Okay, so there's this sense in which the three sociuses and the three kind of registers of social inscription are simultaneous, you know, they're kind of they're superimposed upon one another and not merely successive. Okay, now we come to money and debts. OK, and OK, this is where I'm. So I wanted to go through all this because I think it's important to understand how the account of filiation of territorial filiation and alliance feeds into the account where alliance is involves the creditor involves in a way kind of indebtedness.

okay alliance involves indebtedness okay and in a way it's the over coding of territorial alliance by the despotic states um that introduces money okay money is the instrument of this despotic over coding of territorial alliance okay um because now the new um in in the new alliance between subjects and the despot, it's no longer the debt becomes infinite. In other words, what the subject owes to the despot is infinite, can never properly be replayed. That's why you remain subject from birth to death.

You're born subject to the will of the emperor, and you will die subject to the will of the emperor. and everything that you produce, create, distribute, is susceptible to appropriation by the despot. And money then is required in order to mediate this new alliance. Money becomes the medium in a way of parceling out an otherwise infinite debt. So they write, the role of money in commerce hinges less on commerce itself than on its control by the state. Commerce's relationship with money is synthetic, not analytical.

And money is fundamentally inseparable not from commerce, but from taxes as the maintenance of the apparatus of the state. I mean, you owe tax, you know, the subject must pay taxes to the desk box, okay um regardless of any kind of other um exchange you engage in in a word money the circulation of money is the means for rendering the debt infinite and that is what is concealed in the two acts of the state the residence or territoriality of the state inaugurates the great movement of deterritorialization that subordinates all the primitive affiliations to the despotic

machine or you know the so-called agrarian problem while the abolition of debts or their accountable transformation initiates the duty of an interminable service to the state that subordinates all the primitive alliances to itself, the problem of debts. The infinite creditor and infinite credits have replaced the blocks of mobile and finite debts. There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism. The debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves. So here, in a way, the subject's indebtedness to the despot or the sovereign is conditioned by the sovereign's representation of God.

The sovereign's right, the sovereign's power and authority derive from God. And this is why the debt is infinite. It can never be repaid. Okay, now here, we need to kind of take a quick detour, or I think it's valuable to kind of make a detour. There's a kind of a source, an important source for Deleuze and Guattari's accounts of the function of money. And this is a historian, a French historian called Edouard Ville, I think. I'm not sure how you pronounce it.

And this paper that he wrote in 1954 called Concerning the Ethical Aspects of the Greek Origins of Money. And they, and D'Ossi-Goutari mention it in passing. They only mention it once, I think. they don't kind of you know give a gloss on it but it's it's actually worth kind of quickly summarizing Will's arguments okay so the claim is that in its original function money commensurates needs and not labor okay money is again money for the Greeks or in the in the Greek states okay and the claim is that this generalizes to kind of to the function of money in any state

is the evaluative instrument for retributive social justice okay the normos um you know the normos the law you know um is the hierarchy of values recognized by the social body but also the concrete actions that this body imposes. So here's a quotation from Vidal. To render our thought more precise, it seems to us that the substantive nomisma, before designating the moneyed metal coin itself, i.e. the official yardstick for a definite value, first served to express the value officially attributed to this coin, its stock, so to speak.

And just as Aristophanes speaks of the nomisma of cotiles or cups, one perhaps spoke before and after the 5th century of the nomisma of the drachma. We find an excellent parallel in German where gelten, to be worth, ended up fixing its substantive gelt, onto monetary instruments okay um and will continues okay if money no misma or the german muncer okay is for us no more than the indispensable instrument of the technique of evaluation or of retribution and exchange um it is not from its current status that we ought to judge its starting point originally we detect a moral exigency in it the aspiration to a guarantee

of justice in social relations envisaged from a very general viewpoint to guarantee justice i.e to assure an appreciation of the value of an action or a good which conforms to the principles of equality and proportion to judge an action or fix the price of a good ie to invoke a measure admitted by all by virtue of a convention founded upon equity normal measure or no misma measure um okay um so

Will's account suggests that money as a measure of value, and here value means money is a kind of a means of evaluation, but the value of goods or acts or of actions is judged according to the law, the normals, what is right. and relations of credit or what citizens owe to one another is determined by the law the law determines what citizens owe to one another and money becomes the medium in which

these relations of credit and debt can be you know resolved or kind of, you know, adjudicated. But the substance, but now if we go back to the Deleuze-Gotarian attempts, the substance of monetary value comes from the over-coding of affiliates of stock and associated debt. The wealth of the states and the tribute to the despot. In other words, the wealth of the states and the tribute to the despots, Okay, money is inaugurated to kind of, you know, to parcel out, to measure and distribute the wealth of the states and, you know, what is owed to the despot.

But this wealth and tribute derive originally from, you know, the territorial associates and from the over-coding of affiliative stock and associative debts. In other words, remember, it's the extraction of surplus value in the conjunction of stock and debt, credit and debt, that yields worth. Okay, rank status value, social value, and it's kind of originally form comes from this territorial overcoding. Okay. And this is what the despotic stock state appropriates. Okay. And then, you know, parcels out and measures using money. Okay, but the substance of value is this

comes from affiliates of stock and associates of debt. So what is overcoded by the state are the codes of territorial affiliation and alliance. Finite stocks of credit and finite debts in alliance. So now we understand a little bit better, I think, what Delos and Gautari mean by overcoding. okay the imperial inscription um and then with the inscription of value in money you know in in the coin counter-sects all the alliances and affiliations prolongs them makes them converge into the direct affiliation of the despot with the deity and the new alliance of the despot with the

people that's why the you know the despot's head is on the coin okay uh you know the desperate or the the you know it's either the despot or the deity in a way who underwrite the value of money all the coded flows of the primitive machine are now forced into a bottleneck where the despotic machine over codes them over coding is the operation that constitutes the essence of the state and that measures both its continuity and its break with the previous formations. The dread of flows of desire that would resist coding but also the establishment of a new inscription that over codes and that makes desire into the property of the sovereign,

even though he be the death instinct itself. The castes are insacrable from this over coding and imply the existence of dominant classes that do not yet manifest themselves as classes but are merged with a state's apparatus and so it's very interesting at this point that Dawson was right we'll say that the emergence of caste with the despotic socius or between you know the the fundamental distinction between dominating and dominated or ruler and ruled is encoded in money the money form in a way transmits this fundamental hierarchy, this hierarchy of caste. Okay, why? Because it's the ruled, you know, the villagers, the farmers, etc.

who have an infinite debt to the rulers and to the despot, the emperor, and they pay this, you know, they pay off this debt, you know, using money as the measure and the medium of this debt. So surplus value affiliative credits or associative debt yields territorial status, while overcoding through divine affiliation and the despotic alliance of the subject and the sovereign yields imperial caste. the ancestor of the master of the mobile and finite blocks finds himself dismissed by the deity the immobile organizers of the bricks

and of their infinite circuits there's also a suggestion here I think that the abstraction the monotheistic abstraction of power as a pure transcendence is also encoded in money. Money as, you know, and this here, this is akin to what Marx says about money as this, you know, divine power of commensurating incommensurables or, you know, fraternizing, fraternizing possibilities. So the idea is that it's with the homogeneity of money and of the magnitudes of money as universal equivalent.

Money is universal equivalent in a way as a cipher for the qualitative infinity of a monotheistic God. Okay, so now this has implications for how we understand the substance of value. Social coding, which is to say affiliative credit and debt of alliance, is the source of value overcoded by the state. So it's social coding in the territorial socius is the source of the value, which is then which is appropriated by the despots and overcoded by the states.

And money codifies the flow of infinite credits from the states, you know, the Institute of Nomos, as well as the flow of infinite debt towards the despots. And okay, at this point it's important to see how this connects with the Marxian accounts of value. So here we have an account in which value derives not from labor, but from the surplus value of code. The surplus value of code, you could say, is the substance of value in the territorial socios.

And it's this value then which is overcoded in despotism. Now, Marx's question in capital is why does labor express itself as value and why is value measured by money? OK. in other words Marx okay the infamous labor theory of value you know which Marx is still reproached and in a way which doesn't go sorry still partially reproach him for uh for cleaving to is um actually you know Marx um thinks that it's only under capitalism that um you know labor necessarily

expresses itself as value because it's abstract labor which is a substance of value. So Marx writes, political economy has never once asked the question of why this content labor has assumed that particular form value. That is why labor is expressed in value and why the measurement of labor by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product okay what's very interesting in this quote is that marx is saying that the question the key question in the uh the relationship of labor and value or understanding why labor expresses itself as value

is why a particular content assumes a particular form. So it's also a form-content articulation. But in a way, the key Marxian point is that the content, which is the substance of social value under capitalism, is itself is not doesn't you know emerge or arise from some kind of um you know substratum okay from some substratum uh the whole point is that this content is itself um you know necessarily socially formed and that in a way you cannot give an account and this is why the sense in which

Marx desubstantializes labor, you can't give an account of the transformation of, you know, there's no straightforward account of the linear transformation of useful work into valuable labor. And this is something, you know, I think important to note here. So for Marx, value is socially necessary abstract labor time. The capitalist function of money as measure of value, medium of exchange and index of price presupposes a class relation, the separation of producers from the means of production. This separation, it's this separation that conditions the abstraction of labor as substance of value. It's only under capitalism that labor as such becomes this general social category.

The commensuration of abstract labor and value desubstantializes while formalizing both, which is to say that they are social forms and not flows. Okay, so this is why, so the contrast I'm drawing here is between an account of the articulation of form and content, okay, which, you know, which is not reducible to any, you know, non-social, you know, non-social or purely natural elements.

So in Marx, the kind of both labor and value are social forms. But the whole point is that we have to understand how one form can become the content of another form, okay? Whereas in the Deleuze-Guattana account, in a way, you have this supposedly radical material account where in a way form social form emerges from it's a bottom-up account of the emergence of social organization social form etc but it relies on this account of value on this account of the emergence of value and the emergence of money as you know a measure of value

um in the uh despotic overcoding unifies nomos as infinite debt and credit flowing to and from the despot and makes nomisma the instrument of this overcoding everything comes from the despot and everything is over to him money is this despotic overcoding of previously separated flows of credit and debt. So despotic over-coding prepares the conditions under which labor and money will become unified as separate social flows. And this is the condition for the emergence of capitalism, remember. So for capitalism, capitalism is the conjunction of these two flows, a flow of labor and a flow of money. So in a way, so we have to understand how these flows become,

you know kind of um you know first of all unitary flows and how they become separated um um okay now maybe i could stop here actually i was going to kind of go on back to kind of um the account of um voice and writing but actually i think this could be saved for next because given the time it's quite i didn't realize it was so late so actually maybe should just pause and stop here and then you know all this stuff about voice emerging can be saved for next week okay okay all right so I think we may have time for one or two questions so

So yes, please Matthew. Hey there. Thank you. That was very interesting. I guess my question has to do with the role of the finite infinite dyad in the movement from the territorial machine to the state. It seems like part of what's happening there is you have this relational finitude kind of combinatory structure in the territorial machine that through the introduction of money is kind of like totalized or unified in the in the kind of transcendent body of the despot as like almost like a movement of infinite mediation right so you have like this kind of like universality of money um like over coding these kind of particularized finite relations

and that is what makes the move to the to the kind of the transcendent despotic um kind of level of this of this account of history i guess my question then and maybe this is like kind of jumping ahead to next week is like what does capitalism do with this finite infinite dyad like what what is is it does it kind of like um try and does it somehow move out of this this kind of like classical uh this kind of classical metaphysical dyad and also maybe like does the does the infinite play an important role for marx as well in this kind of commensuration of uh particularity okay um well it's actually difficult i mean because i was um i'm not right now i mean because it's actually once since i've read it so um

So what happens then to the finite infinite diodes in the transition from despotism to capitalism is actually, I can't, you know, I don't know because I can't remember what they say about it. So the, I mean, the two things to say is that infinite, so Deleuze and Guillaume use this contrast between kind of finite and infinite, you know, loosely, I mean it's not a philosophical, you know, they're using, I think they're using the

term, you know, they mean a purely, well the sense, it's both qualitative and quantitative, The sense in which a debt, if you are infinitely indebted to something, initially it's qualitative. Your debt, you know, debt is qualitative to begin with, okay? Debt is always qualitative. When you're, you know, what you owe to someone is determined by qualities, okay? so debt is kind of determined in terms of quality I think when the debt becomes infinite is the point at which

yes it means that your quality and quantity are brought together And in a way, that's what money is supposed to, you know, all qualities are commensurable through money as this universal medium of exchange. And this universal exchangeability, which money represents, is the, you know, represents the power of the despot, the divine authority of the sovereign. Okay, so under capitalism, money retains this power of commensurating incommensurables.

And money is, so it has both this kind of qualitative and quantitative infinity. Like it's just money, especially with capital, money kind of has to keep accumulating and reproducing itself. But the way in which it's done is, well, OK, very simply, I mean, you can already guess what they're going to say, is that money is, you know, is no longer subordinated to the authority of the despot in the state. That's why they say that kind of the body of money, you know, takes over, supersedes the body of the despot.

and money itself kind of assumes a kind of well it doesn't I was going to say it doesn't assume a despotic power in a way because it's it becomes well I'm just going to jump in on this sure sure go on go on maybe part of it is that in moving from money as a medium for infinite overcoding so like coming where that that coding is mediated by transcendence and the unity or totalization of the despot to money as a kind of like infinite abstract decoding right so it's like it's almost like an account of infinity that doesn't rely on totalization but is actually like almost like almost equivalent or at least

like reaching the the threshold of absolute deterioration in some way like it's like it's like changing the changing the relation to totality excellent that's it i think that's it that's exactly it and um you could say that um capital the interesting question so is capital one or many and it's both it's the thing to remember is that you know marx's book is called capital um but capital is necessarily plural there are many capitals um but these capitals can never kind of, you know, compete with one another. Each capital strives to kind of, you know, to expand and outcompete the others. But capitals can never fuse into a single capital.

So that's why, in a way, capital is de-totalizing. That's why capital has a kind of an uneasy alliance with the state. It's a mistake to think that capitalism dissolves the power and authority of the state. On the contrary, it uses the power and authority, the totalizing power of the state. But now this totalization in and through the state is subordinated to the self-expanding capital. So now totalization becomes an instrument for this de-totalizing kind of power. which is the power of money to kind of uh which is money's desire to you know to to keep reproducing

and you know augmenting itself um and but this is a much more insidious form of in a way this um you know the the decoding um of terror of sorry of despotic unity of the totality of the state and the authority you know the decoding of law the decoding of um of value um the decoding of all i guess you know fixed territorialities becomes this um you know releases becomes something that is um

more oppressive, you know, more in a way that, you know, they say this doesn't kind of get us, you know, it doesn't, it's another turn of the screw that makes desiring production, even that pushes desiring production even further away, while also reintroducing it at the heart of the capitalist societies. This is why capitalism has this point of converging. It's this line of relative deterritorialization

which staves off absolutely territorialization through axiomatics, which are these, you know, axiomatics of quantities of money. So in other words, quantification in terms of monetary sums, sums of money are there to ward off, you know, the threats of absolutely territorialization. So you decode everything through money, but money itself must require constant axiomatization to preserve its decoding power.

So in a way, so the kind of, so here, this is a sentence which de-totalization becomes well as they say it doesn't yield in you know it dissolves the terror of the despotic socius but by introducing cynicism this generalized cynicism in which everything is equivalent to everything else and nothing is really worth anything um and this cynicism i think in delloz and guassari is even more libidinally incapacitating than either cruelty or terror. But no, you're absolutely right, I think. I need to reread those. Next week, we'll go over the kind of the transition

from despotism to capitalism. But right now, I'm still kind of vague on the details. But I think you put it exactly right. What you said was completely right. Great, thanks. So, Arman, do you want to make your question? I have a few minutes. I want to ask something about the abstraction of labor to the homogeneity of human labor and the abstraction of the value to homogeneity of money. and ask you that if you think Marx's account differs actually from the Luzanguotari account on the idea of money, that for Marx, money shares something of the necessity of homogeneity of labor.

But in Luzanguotari's account, money is the historical contingency of a form of state. because if you don't have a despotic if you wouldn't have a despotic state it is possible that you wouldn't have any money but i think that is questionable don't you think yeah i mean so yeah they're insisting on their account it's it's a state that introduces money and because it as a taxing you know the first money says money doesn't arise through commerce through trade, it emerges through the state which requires tributes and taxation. And here, I'm not sure about, I mean, this is where you need history, you need to read up on

the history of money. I'm not sure, you know, I mean, so the song rental said, you know, money is introduced what round about you know the fifth century bc so the states you know the hellenic states is already kind of you know up and running um yeah i'm i'm not at all sure whether or not you know um money any instances of money were you know can money be functional or must be substantial that is uh can something uh play the role or the function of money for a society exactly at this level of decoding or de-territorializing particularities of consumption or production?

Or are we talking about just this coin that have the despotic heads on them? Of course. Because I think we can read Marx as he's talking about actually about the function of money. of these two parallel or similar abstraction from human labor and from use value, from human labor to duration of useful labor and from use value to, as Revin, I think, was talking about, to the infinity of money. So these two dualities, I think, in Marx are very interestingly entangled but here I couldn't make sense of it because I think

despoticism of course has something to do with money and money has something to do with despoticism but seems a bit more complex a bit more due to the necessity of for example huge populations or or something like that, not necessarily a state. Ah, well, it's a difficult question to answer. I mean, on the one hand, so those in Gotari's account, okay, it makes a kind of intuitive sense. You can say, well, look, you know, the imperial despotism, you know, precisely because it's now kind of, it's rule over a heterogeneous population.

It's no longer kind of a clan or a tribe. It's a kind of a vast population which is scattered in space and may speak different languages and have kind of different practices and customs. So the idea that money, so money is universal equivalent. It makes, you need a universal equivalent, a universal measure of value. The... the difference i mean when marx talks about you know there's controversy over where the accounts i mean i think it's clearly i think that the you know the the account of the the money form and the relationship between the money form the commodities form and the value form in in

capital i mean it's clear that in a way what marx is saying is that these forms are all Paul Krugman, Interdependent. Why? Because money is the commodity Paul Krugman, that expresses the exchange ability of every other commodity. So in other words, you need Paul Krugman, you know, kind of commodity exchange, commodity production needs to be kind of operative in order for money to function as a measure of value and medium of exchange. And obviously, it's also money that brings together use value and exchange value, because in a way, every commodity is either usable or exchangeable.

But as Son Rettel rests its whole argument under this junction of use and exchange, but money is precisely what you use by exchanging. So for Marx, the disjunction of use and exchange is, you know, sublated in money, which you use by exchanging. And then the circulation of money is always tied back to a social relation, because like before you have, you know, Now, you know, before, you know, you have electronic currency. Before that, you've got paper money. Before paper money, you've got coin. Before the coin, you have, you know, silver or gold, you know, precious. You know, money originally is a commodity.

Okay, it's a valuable commodity. It's a commodity that expresses the value of every other commodity. So hence gold. But the point is that gold, value as such, and the embodiment of value or the representation of generic value by a commodity presupposes a determinate social relation for Marx. And I think the difference between the accounts. So this is where there's a discontinuity between the account proposed by Will, you know, and the Marxian account, because Marx's whole point is that

is that the value expressed and quantified by money has got nothing to do with law, with nomos, with any value that can be kind of culturally qualified or kind of determined. It's a pure abstraction of value. So in this sense, this is why Marx's point is that money functions, the function of money in capitalism can't be, he says, you know, money is medium of exchange, obviously pre-exists capitalism, but it's only in capitalism that it functions in this very, very kind of specific way, such that all human relations are mediated by money.

There's no kind of, and that is the kind of, you know, it's material relations between producers are transplanted into social relations between products. And these social relations between products are quantified in money, our relations are monetary relations. And that kind of transposition and inversion only happens with capitalism for Marx. So there's a discontinuity in the functioning of money, what money is and what it does. And I think, okay, why is this important?

It's important because then the relationship between, for instance, money and labor. So if money, money as measure of value measures, you know, socially necessary abstract labor time. That's why kind of labor is a substance of money, too. Whereas it's not, it's absolutely not for the laws and the laws of the time. Okay. Value has got nothing to do with labor. It comes from, you know, debts, surplus value of code and indebtedness. And this involves, you know, kind of coding and extracting a surplus value of code. And this is where the issue of code becomes really important because, you know, unless we understand exactly what Deleuze and Guattari mean by coding, you know,

You know, what the kind of, you know, we need to be very clear about what coding is and how it works in order to understand what value is. And this is why there's a problem in saying, because then when you say that so money is instituted under the despots, but then with capitalism, money becomes a decoded flow. Money becomes a decoded flow. Well, the problem is that if the substance of money was already, you know, a kind of derived from coding, you know, from surplus, you know, surplus value of coding and then the overcoding of the surplus value,

then the substance of money or the value that is measured and distributed by money ultimately has its source in code and coding on the Glauza-Ghattarin account. account um whereas and that that's completely you know that's completely unlike then the uh the marxian account um so i think a lot hinges on this this question about um what it is that money is measuring and quantifying Do we have time? Because another person is raising his... I can ask another time. I think

that would be better because I have something to say, but let's forget it for now. Well, perhaps... Thank you. Okay, if after the other... we can take another question and then if... I mean, we've still got... I mean, it's not too late. I mean, people can leave any time, but if you want to... I'll take this question and then if there's still time you can follow up with your second question. What was the next question? Yeah, I think Claudia said she had a comment on this. Oh, I put my hand up and forgot to put it down because I think it was Armand who was just talking.

yep okay yeah um he was asking a question about money that i kind of like the role of money that i kind of answered in the chat um but i've been reading milton freeman and i think that the idea of like the money as the commodity that you know underlies the exchange value of all other commodities. I just wanted to say that I think modern economics kind of complicates this view. And I listed some examples in the chat. I can read them off. Like globalization, which imposes Forex markets and different valuations of different monies. Debt buying, where you treat

the absence of money as like a whole flow. Derivatives markets, where you can pay money to speculate on things in like crazy crazy ways uh petrodollars bonds and crypto markets I think like money as like an abstract reified commodity where like oh this thing that totally exists that underlies the exchange value of you know like every exchange I think that money is like kind of a language and it's much more contextual than that sort of like you know I went to Mexico and like I can pay in pesos or you know for a silly exchange rate in certain regions where people are in a certain kind of poverty I could pay with dollars too um or like in the

airport like it's it's I think it's much like you should look at money and derivatives markets as an exchange not like this reified thing where it is one thing and it has this very specific role and it's not like alive and it's not interacting with people I think Marx just has like a oiled down view of money and like the sovereign's role with respect to money and i think that reading friedman's monetary history of the united states is really useful for this and also just like looking at financial markets um sorry to go on a rant okay no thanks um amanda do you want to to respond or to thanks no that's that's that's very i know nothing about uh monetary theory or

finance so but that's obviously very you know it needs to be taken into account. I think it's useful because it kind of like I don't know if it like I don't I'm not smart enough about Marx to say whether like this impacts any like which parts of Marx this impacts but it certainly complicates a very very very important underlying part and also ties into the fact that everyone's a capitalist nowadays you you can invest your savings and get like a couple percent interest rate and that you know also like kind of deconstructs the line between capitalist and not capitalist it makes it not such a harsh binary anymore so i don't know like i think there's a lot of italian people who have

done a lot of like good writing about finance and debt-based capitalism like i'm thinking of lazerado right now but i'm not again like i'm not an expert so i i just like wanted to bring that into the discussion because it sounded like we were talking in like a simplified way about money okay i'm not sure about the last point about the um you know the fluidity um of the difference between capitalists and uh non-capitalists no i think that like that's where i disagree and i think that that is uh i mean the fact that people can you know make there's all sorts of ways in which you can make money now, besides selling your labor power, doesn't nullify the fundamental, the structural difference between capitalists and wage laborers. But that's a separate issue.

But I'm both at the same time. I have to sell my labor in decreasing amounts as I have increasing savings and I'm able to increasingly live off returns. If I'm a smart investor, I can be more of a capitalist and less of a wage labor. I have friends who work less. I think it's just like the, oh, you have to sell your labor instead of making other people work, it becomes a spectrum when you have participatory funds capital. I think this is a good place to respond to this very idea of to sell my labor. I think by smart investment already, We are doing something in a holistic form. It is not that labor, it is a substantial doing in the world that we can point out.

I think proletariat or doing labor for capitalism is actually a place of not being. That is, we have a relation of production, but we don't have enough labor for it. If we have a production that needs not human labor, we wouldn't use human labor anymore. The proletariat that at this moment exists is the proletariat that actually fills the body without organs of capitalism, that is the capital, that cannot have this flow that has right now that you go to another place and use your local money and you'll be okay without this idea of proletariat.

and proletariat need not be something that is in the history, fixed in the history forever. We at this moment, we're doing something that never looked like labor anywhere, never looked like labor anywhere in the history of human being, can be proletariat at this moment, we don't know it, in my opinion, at least that's my understanding. But about money, I just want to say something about the exchange value and the relation of exchange value and money, because in a logical sort of way, I don't understand this triad between this use value and exchange value and money, because use value is very, let's say, personal or particular. And I understand money is completely on the base of absolute or, let's say, smooth state.

and there remains exchange value that we cannot get rid of. When exchange value is fused with money, then despotism is possible. But when exchange value divorce itself from money, then another kind of state becomes possible, in my opinion, again, as much as I understand it. This possibility of having exchange value mediating between money and use value is something that I think we see in socialist ideas of, let's say, forget it, the example is not important.

Anyway, I'm not going to talk and talk. Thank you. Sorry. I think I talk a little too loud and maybe sometimes it's like I'm sorry for the voice. It's okay. No, no, it's okay. It's okay. Well, I'll just say, I mean, obviously we can, I'll just say no, use value is not particular. Use value is objectively determined. A commodity is something, the use value of a commodity is, you know, part of, is an objective determination that it has. It was produced to possess this use value, and it is bought and consumed on the basis of its possessing this use value.

Of course, every commodity, you can use a commodity in ways for which it was not designed to be used, But that doesn't kind of, the point is that in a capitalist economy, what is capitalism? It is a mode of production in which what human beings produce are commodities, okay? And a commodity is something whose use value is subordinated to its exchange value. In other words, its usefulness is there, but only in a way as a medium to transmit its exchange value, which is to say ultimately its monetary value and its price.

There's nothing in a capitalist society, nothing is free. You can't get anything that you don't pay for in one way or the other. Okay. And I don't see how any of that challenges the Marx's account of commodification. As for capitalism, a capitalist owns the means of production. Okay. Capitalism is not about, you know, a worker can make money, you know, outside the workplace. They can invest money, they can save money, they can make money on their investments. That doesn't make them a capitalist. A capitalist is someone who owns the means of production and produces in order to accumulate surplus value, which they can convert into profits.

Very simple. That's how stockholders work, too. I'm founding a startup right now. now what so yeah sure I'm like a capitalist but I'm like not investing my own funds I am going to sell little 10 chunks of like equity in my company to eight or nine different people none of my own funds are going into this and then I'm gonna walk away with it hopefully if you know we end up profitable with a lot of money so like the my like token holders my like stockholders are like going to actually own the means of production and that, you know, buy a bunch of like financial ETFs and various, various means of investing. That means that like some guy on the street who has the

Robinhood app on his phone is to some extent owning the means of production, like at a tiny fractional extent. And that's why I think that like participatory finance capital, like really, really blurs this. There is no capitalist that you can point to that owns Google. I own Google. like i own a tiny chunk of google and so to probably like four or five people in this class like then okay but that's really important to recognize that yeah but you don't get i mean i don't know who the uh ceo of google is but like um whatever return you get on your investment in Google is insignificant next to what the CEO of Google gets. So in what sense? He owns Google in a sense in which you don't.

Do you mind if I comment? Sure. Yes. Yes, please. Yeah. I would say that that's important. Sorry. Yeah. So I think we should start wrapping up. We were already more than 20 minutes late. So I don't know. maybe some final remarks from whoever wants to but really we should be wrapping up by now so sorry guys okay i mean i'm not gonna i mean iron if you just want to finish your comments you know say you can i would say here the question of ownership isn't so important i i mean these are are tiny fractions of stock.

And at the end of the day, there are numbers in the ether or on a silicon chip. This is where an account of capitalist production and social production that doesn't, or that sort of jettisons purposiveness and purposive activity from Marx's account starts to not make sense, right? The important thing to talk about with capitalism, and I think also with this relation between, right, why we were bringing up the relation between social norms or nomos and money, is that money was thought originally to express the customary value of the good or activity that was purchased. And in Marx's account, this is what

we're calling real subsumption, right? Money in the exchange relation ends up really changing the customary values and practices around which things are produced and the reasons why they're produced for different ends, to the end of accumulating surplus value and not to the end of whatever you assume they are, right? This is why you can build a house, let it sit empty, accrue value on it, and it doesn't matter whether anyone ever lives in it. It's an investment. And this is Marx's core point, that it transforms the things that we think we're doing, like building computers, and systematically sort of transforms the norms and practices of building computers so that we build computers that generate the most profit, and not build computers that would best fulfill the needs that we need in a computer, right?

Like my MacBook screen flippers. It's only two years old. I'm going to need to get a new MacBook because it'll cost more to replace the screen. And I can't start a computer company and build computers with modular parts that aren't proprietary because Apple will destroy me. And we couldn't get enough software engineers in the world together to do that. David Olusogaertsingale.com

all of that is just how I'd wrap it up, right? Yeah. So then the, and so just the final quote, is that so an account, so then in a way the junk saying that, well, purposiveness is not the point. Obviously the Deleuze-Guattara account wants to get, you know, get rid of purposiveness and say that's not the point. But then you have to ask yourself, well, yeah, but the kind of this negation of purposiveness obviously is, I mean, capital accumulation is purposeless in exactly this sense, you know, it's just endless, it has no telos, it does, you know, it's the negation of purpose, meaning, value, transcendent, all the things that, you know, gets rid of all the things that kind of,

you know Nietzscheans want to get rid of but it's this you know is if you want to I mean you really think it's that interesting this is this you know doesn't seem to me to be a kind of an interesting overcoming of purpose meaning and value okay I think I think we have to stop but hopefully you know I'm sure we're going to carry on discussing these issues next week. So, yeah, so finally, we will do the final sections on the section on capitalism, the final section on capitalism

in the chapter three, and maybe little bits from the final chapter. But that's basically the kind of the last 50 pages from chapter three we're going to be looking at next week. okay okay all right then um so see you all next week and i think uh well yeah we have some some presentations for next week as well i think then the ones ending up um our parts in a discussion in the list so please guys just um yeah post it on on the folder and for everybody who is um full of libidin investment in all our discussions we can keep going in the discord

as in in the discord or our google classroom so yeah thanks everybody that's it okay thank you Thanks. See you next week.