Ray Brassier Posthuman Pragmatism Selecting Power Part 1

Thank you. Thanks Sepideh for the invitation. What I'm going to do today is simply present and we summarize the main claims of the chapter which you've read, which, okay, a couple years ago, but this, yeah, this, in a way, this discussion of Deleuze and Guattari deals with topics which I'm very interested in,

and especially the relationship between critiques of representation, philosophies that kind of reject the representational paradigm, and philosophies of practice, or philosophies which connect thinking and practice. And it's this aspect of a thousand platforms that I'm focusing on in particular. So the basic question is, what is the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, expressed in the title of this final concluding plateau of the book?

How do rules relate to machines? and what I want to do is to try to clarify the parameters within which Deleuze and Guattari's book operates in an attempt to answer these questions. So if Deleuze and Guattari are materialists or if they kind of lay claim to materialism, then it's neither a contemplative representation of an objectively existing material reality, but nor does it consist of a series of practical imperatives that presuppose, yet disavow a theoretical representation of material reality.

So in other words, if this is a materialism, you know, beyond representation, then the sense in which the thinking carried out in the book relates to the real or relates to materiality has to be, you know, can't be accounted for in terms of familiar characterizations of philosophical materialism. Okay, and it's not a claim about, it doesn't simply identify being with matter in a kind of traditional pre-Kantian register. and nor does it is it simply about the practice entailed by this commitment to materialism isn't

about you know simply living in accordance with a characterization of you know reality. And in this regard, sorry, for all its idiosyncratic novelty, A Thousand Plateaus conforms to a classical model of philosophizing, where an ontology understood as a counter of what there is, is one with ethics understood as a practice or art of living. It's not to say that it's a traditional conservative work, rather it's a contemporary reactivation of the classical task of philosophizing after the critique of representation. And what are the stakes of this reactivation? It fuses an account of abstract matter. This is what is the kind of,

one of the kind of the principal contentions of the book, where matter is conceived independently of form. So matter is abstract in the sense that it is not subsumed by form, by intelligible form. And this abstract matter is conjoined with a concrete ethics, where action is selected independently of universal law. So how can concrete practices engage formless matter? This is another way of asking about the nature of the distinction between the abstract and the concrete. So again, abstract, I think, in this context must be understood as unformed. But the unformed is endowed with positive traits

of its own. Thus abstract matter is described as constituting a plane of consistency characterized by continuums of intensities, particle signs, and de-territorialized flows. And this tripart positive characterization of abstract matter is consistent throughout the book. It's, you know, across all the, it's an invariant across all the plateaus of the book. Intensities, particle signs, deterioration lies flows. It's the articulation of these, these three facets of abstract matter, that is, you know, that constitutes, you know, the characters, the positive character of what

they call the machinic or assemblage, or assemblage understood as kind of as an activity, assembly. And this is why they say that the plane of consistency must be mon plateau, which opens the boot. They say it's not simply enough to kind of affirm the multiple, you know, and denounce the one or unity or identity. That affirmation remains empty unless the multiple is effectuated in a thinking doing that is not simply a kind of, you know,

that doesn't presuppose a representational concordance between thought and reality. So if the multiple must be made, consistency is not attained through abstraction, but by what they call diagramming, what is most concrete in both thinking and doing. And concrete here means, I think, means practical. So recognizing and releasing the positive traits characteristic of the unformed is a practical matter, but one that is constrained by certain rules. What are these rules? Because real or abstract matter cannot be represented within material reality, the rules or injunctions governing the construction of the real cannot be read off

some pre-existing reality. These rules will be concrete precisely to the extent that they effectuate the abstract. And in this sense, practice and theory are thinking and doing realize one another. Theoretical concepts are effectuated in practice, and practical imperatives are formulated in theory. So this project is a radicalization of philosophical pragmatics wherein neither the agents nor the function of practices can be taken for granted. Thus the reference of the communal we, regularly invoked by traditional pragmatists pragmatists or, you know, neopragmatists such as Rorty, is a starting point whose epistemic

authority and socio-historical coordinates will be gradually disassembled and replaced by another we, that of what Deleuze calls a minoritarian people to come. By the same token, the habitual functions and goals established around this existing we need to be suspended. Normal functioning and established finalities need to be disrupted. This is why, again, just to emphasize, this is what is peculiarly novel about this account of, or this articulation of thinking and practice proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. It's that what thinking, what it is that is being done cannot be predetermined by a representation.

So in other words, the kind of the modalities of doing are not representable in advance and cannot be specified by some kind of, you know, paradigmatic representation of reality and of the possibilities of doing coextensive with that. Okay, so be immediately achieved. Since, according to this familiar delusion injunction, we always start in the middle. We start stratified, organized, subjectified. And the practical challenge is to understand how destratification, disorganization, and desubjectification are possible, but without relapsing into religious self-abnegation.

as they put it, to reach the point not where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether or not one says I. This is also important. The point is simply not to, again, the commitment to imminence, you know, to this non-representational imminence of thinking and doing, means that if the familiar representation of the world is conditioned by these processes of stratification, organization, and subjectification, the point is not simply to, you know, you can't leap out of these material processes.

The constraints of stratification, organization, and subjectification cannot simply be by past or transcended. They have to be worked through. So the point is to find some kind of practical leverage which allows one to destratify, disorganize, and desubjectify through in a rule-governed manner, imminently rather than transcendently. And this is is why, again, this is a kind of a familiar, you know, a familiar concern in Deleuze. This is why, you know, the faithfulness to the imminence of the world, as Deleuze puts it,

if philosophy is to be this worldly, then it cannot simply disavow, you know, stratification, organization and subjectification as you know pathological deformations of some true or ultimate materiality of reality that would still be a kind of a two world that would still you know kind of that would be to regress to the the invocation of a world behind the scenes you know which is the uh you know a characteristic of the aesthetic ideal uh and of you know metaphysician metaphysical asceticism as denounced by Nietzsche. So the plane of eminence, whatever it is, isn't simply

what lies beyond stratification, organization, etc. It has to be kind of effectuated through the constraints of formation, organization, signification, etc. and this is where the concrete rules come in but why would this point of apparent indifference between owning or abnegating one's subjectivity be worth reaching if such a point is worth reaching it cannot be indifferent to this difference okay the difference between you know stratification and de-stratification or you know the or formal function and non-formal functioning in the vocabulary of the book has to be specifiable you know using the the accounts of you know

characterization of structure, form, etc. positively, you know, catalogued in the preceding all the preceding chapters of the book. So something must be retained, something of the subject, something of the sign, something of the organism. And that this is a quote actually from early on in, I think it's from the second, I'm I'm not sure, but it's from the second, either first or second part. They write, that which races or dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the aura of its stratum, an undulation, a memory or tension.

The plane of consistency retains just enough of the strata to extract from them variables that operates in the plane of consistency as its own functions. And what will be retained on the plane of consistency is the torsion of destratified intensities, particles, signs and flows. but because the point of torsion is indiscernible from the vantage of anyone invested in the importance of the distinction between self and not self or personal and impersonal its approach requires caution which is one of the book's famous watchwords you know which is you know

repeated at several crucial junctures in the book. Caution is required for the composition of the plane of consistency. And this is the relevance of concrete rules for its composition. To understand how concrete rules are articulated with abstract machines, we have to understand how the composition of consistency according to rules requires deformalizing stratified functions and subjecting them to the torsion of absolute movement. And this is Deleuze and Guattari's definition of absolute movement. A movement is absolute when whatever its quantity and speed,

it relates a body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it occupies in the manner of a vortex. So this is why the idea of the torque of a vortex is their positive qualitative characterization of absolute movement. um okay um absolute movement is attained through the de-formalization of stratified function and de-formalization ensures the continuity of intensities the emission of particle signs and the combination or conjunction of de-territorialized flows on the plane of

consistency again there's a great consistency to the vocabulary you know there's a technical there's a technical vocabulary that's used in a very kind of precise manner throughout the book you know intensive continuity you know semiotic you know emission and the you know the combination or conjunction of flows. These are, again, they use the same words all the time. Thus abstract means de- or unformed, which I think ultimately means de-stratified. So that stratification then becomes the source of all formalization.

And this is why understanding the role of the account of stratification is crucial to understanding how the construction of the plane of consistency what is stratification um i mean very simply before i go through you know i kind of you know reiterate their or a paraphrase their account i mean i think or the way i understand it is that um when they say they called kind of the strata the judgments of god And when they say that, I think what they're saying is that ideal synthesis, as formulated in Kant's critical philosophy, philosophy, the synthesis of concepts and intuitions through which the object of knowledge

is constructed in Kant's critical philosophy is conditioned by a real synthesis. And stratification is a synthetic operation which is a condition for the representability of reality. So I think that's the role. So stratification is a material phenomenon which unfolds at the physical, biological, and ultimately anthropomorphic levels. and it's the condition for you know the the representational kind of characterization of you know of knowledge and practice or in ethics

but here's a more detailed kind of um paraphrase of their account stratification this double articulation is the condition of all order structure and regularity so it's it's complex both the articulation of contents and that of expression are bifurcated at the elementary physical level content is articulated by splitting material flows into successively coordinated molecular units thus molecular substance is formally coordinated this is what they call the substance and form of content um expression by way of contrast is articulated by establishing

structures and constructing molar compounds onto which these structures are superimposed. Thus, molar compounds are formally structured and this is the substance and form of expression. So this double articulation of content and expression is the fundamental aspect of, you know, stratic synthesis, so real synthesis. Synthesis in the real, not the ideal. So stratified content is formed matter and stratified expression is structured function.

Both these articulations are segmented such that the bi, you know, what they call the bi-univocal relations between segments of contents or informed matters and segments of expressions or structured functions are the source of every real structure, whether physical, biological, or sociopolitical. Thus material reality comprises three fundamental types of strata. The physical chemical, the biological, and the anthropomorphic or allomorphic. Allomorphic I think because the anthropomorphic strata have the power to colonize the others.

Only the first of these gives a more expression to molecular content. Consequently, biological and allomorphic contents are not necessarily molecular, and their expressions are not necessarily molar. Okay, it's easy. I don't want to kind of... The terminology can become, you know, oppressive. but the there's another kind of key aspect of the process of stratification in that it's a process of division so what they write that strata shatter the continuums of intensity introducing

breaks between different strata and within each strata so now it's the the paradox of that stratification is both, it's a splitting, it's a splitting of, you know, what they call continuums of intensity, you know, or flows of matter energy, if you want to put it that way, which then institutes, you know, a synthesis, you know, once the, so in other words, strata kind of, split flows of intensity and then institute synthetic relations between form and content

on the basis of this originally splitting. And this division is real, not ideal, as they keep on insisting in other words it's not dialectical so strata both splits and segments but they also conjoin and connect and as i've already said they insist those in guttural insist on the real as opposed to formal distinction between content and expression so stratification is a real synthesis establishing a common route for expressive form and expressed content. So consequently, there is an isomorphism between content and expression.

And quote, their independence does not preclude isomorphism. In other words, the existence of the same kind of constant relations on both sides. and this is and it's this isomorphism which makes a stratification of divine judgment ontological as opposed to cognitive synthesis indeed the significance of the doctrine of synthetic judgment they write is to have demonstrated that there is an a priori link which i hear you know take to mean isomorphism between sentence and figure or the form of expression and the form of content. That's real distinction, reciprocal presupposition,

and isomorphy are the characteristics of stratic synthesis. Okay, so given this account, what follows from this account of, in a way, the logic of stratification? It's that the alternative to stratic synthesis is not analysis, which would be the formal disintegration of the abstract and the concrete. The alternative, rather, is another kind of synthesis, which is to say an alternative intrication of the abstract and the concrete. But this synthesis is not cognitive but practical. okay and i think this is what they mean when they talk about uh the you know the making of the

multiple or the you know the construction of the multiple as consisting of the diagramming diagramming as opposed to you know to representing of the junction between non-formal functions and unformed matters. So here's another quote. This is a, sorry, a lengthy quote, but so what they call, abstract machines consist of unformed matters and non-formal functions. every abstract machine is a consolidated aggregate of diagram this is evidence on a

technological plane such a plane is not made up of made up simply of formed substances for aluminium plastic electric wire etc or organizing forms programs prototypes etc but of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting only degrees of intensity, resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay, induction, transduction, etc. And diagrammatic functions exhibiting only differential equations or more generally tensors. okay um so again just to um what's significant in this passage is um

the claim that you know the uh you know the positive characterization of matter can't rely on in a way of the the opposition between the substantial opposition of form and content. In other words, form and content can't be understood as substantially articulated. The key aspects of a machinic organization or kind of coordination of matter is that it is unformed, which is not to say that its function can be characterized non-formally.

because it consists of intensive differences. Intensities are qualities which can only be understood. It goes back to Deleuze's account of intensity and difference in repetition, where intensive difference is a difference of difference. It's characterized, it's the positive difference. It's the qualitative difference that arises from the difference between two differences in quantity.

And this account of intensity is another constant in Deleuze's thoughts. So this intensive matter, abstract matter, is intensively characterized, and its functioning can't be understood in terms of the extensive properties of substances in which form and content are bound together, ordinarily bound together. The second technical term introduced in this discussion is the tensor. Tensors are the operators of torsion through which deformalization composes intensities

or sine particles and flows on the plane of consistency. Again, the three elements, the intensities, the sine particles, and the flows. So it's these three kinds of, you know, these positive features of abstract matter that are brought together through the tensor. so what they call diagrammatic composition is the identification of these points of torsion but this composition requires concrete rules there are rules rules of planning of diagramming as we will see later on

combinations and conjunctions do not occur just in any fashion. So it's the rules. So they talk about these, you know, rules in French, planification. These rules of, you know, planific or planing would be, I guess, the closest English equivalents that ensure consistency, not simply processes of decoding, deterritorialization or de-certification of such. Again, why is this important? In other words, if you understand the rejection of representation, you understand that deterritorialization doesn't just happen by itself. it's not something that is just kind of ongoing it is the rules it is the construction of the

plane of consistency that's in a way is the condition for the positive accounts of you know decoding deterritorialization destratification etc and it's so in other words it's through these rules, you know, the concrete rules which effectuate, you know, required to kind of, you know, to construct the plane of consistency, that matter is de-formalized, okay, so these rules extract de-formalized functions from the strata. A quote again, the plane of consistency is occupied, drawn by the abstract machine. The abstract machine exists simultaneously developed

on the destratified plane it draws and enveloped in each stratum whose unity of composition it defines. This play of development and envelopment is again crucial to the logic of expression, you know the the expression of you know abstract matter which is at the heart so it's concrete rules that effectuate the abstract and and these concrete rules develop the abstract machines that are enveloped in the strata and this development hinges upon the distinction between stratification and assemblage, agencement in French. Because stratification is

the precondition for every machinic assemblage, and assemblages are at once territorial and deterritorializing, assemblage is the practical condition for the development of the abstract. And the key thing is that agencer is, in French, is a verb. Agencement is, you know, an assembling, a self-assembling. And again, the sense in which, you know, the self that is characteristic of this process of assembling is, again, can't simply be understood. can't simply be juxtaposed or contrasted to, you know, the human subject or the subject of

representation. This is why there has to be, if, you know, these practical rules, you know, or these concrete rules effectuate the abstract, you know, the construction of the plane of consistency, then there's a sense in which, again, you know, the personal and the impersonal, okay, or the so-called, you know, the, you know, the anthropo, you know, the anthropomorphic and the, you know, the inhuman coincide in the composition of the plane of consistency. which is why it's not simply about you know um accessing you know constructing a kind of a

point of consistency isn't simply about uh you know disassembling you know all the the constraints of um you know the constraints that you know characterize humanity um you know subjectified facialized signifying okay so concrete assemblages develop abstract machines so planification or planing is the concrete development of the enveloped abstract it cuts across physical biological and anthropomorphic strata to compose unformed matters anorganic life and non-human becoming these each corresponding to the three you know the the physical chemical strata the biological strata

and you know the anthropomorphic strata so the rules of de-stratification i think are the rules of planification of the development of the of the enveloped and here abstraction becomes a function of variation abstract again this is a quote abstract does not mean universal ideal or eternal it is a function of variation there's no reason to tie the abstract to the universal or the constant or to face the singularity of abstract machines insofar there as they are constructed around variables and variation so concrete rules then are tensors of continuous

variation. The constant is not opposed to the variable, it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other kind of treatment or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules correspond to the first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules, that's the Masumi's translation of the règle facultative concern the construction of a continuum of variation. So that's what a plane of consistency is a continuum of variation. Okay, so So, you know, an assembling then, I think, must be understood as a conjoining of saying and doing.

And they distinguish between, you know, it doesn't go to a distinction between two axes proper to the rules of assemblage. The first consisting of two different sets of questions. The first set of questions is which content, which expression, which they translate as meaning, which regime of science, which system of bodies. In each case, it is necessary to ascertain both what is said and what is done. You know, in each case, you know, in the construction, the concrete construction of the multiple, it's a case of ascertaining, you know, what is said and what is done. The second access, the second access of the rules of assemblage is characterized in terms of these two questions.

What are the cutting edges of deterritorialization and what abstract machines did they effectuate? the concrete rules of assemblage thus operates along these two axis on the one hand what is the territoriality of the assemblage what is the regime of signs in the pragmatic system on the other hand what are the cutting edges of deterritorialization and what abstract machines do the effectuate so i guess the upshot of all this the upshot of these concrete rules for diagramming the plane of eminence and constructing a plane of consistency is that diagramming lets us see to what extent

a line of flight is destratificatory or liberatory for us. Again, and this is why, I mean, I mentioned this in the paper, that it's very interesting how Deleuze and Guattari who are often kind of you know understood as proclaiming the kind of the constrictive status of you know human organization facialization subjectification etc etc here they quite clearly insist that you know if the you know, the practical injunction is that of constructing a plane of consistency,

then there are, you know, they explicitly propose concrete criteria for, you know, constructing a continuum of variation, which is to be, you know, can be evaluated and put into effect in concrete, by human beings in specific circumstances. This is why consistency proceeding by consolidation acts necessarily in the middle, by the middle, and stands opposed to all planes of principle or finality.

And again, I take this to be another kind of reminder of why, you know, the construction, the destratification concomitant with the construction of a plane of consistency is not that of fusing with intensive matter. or of merging with the so-called full de-territorialized body of the earth. That would reinstate a principle of finality. That would be a transcendent and ultimately religious injunction

to simply kind of dismantle oneself and to fuse with the cosmos. But interestingly, this is precisely what Deleuze and Guantari do not say and explicitly kind of reject, especially in this final plateau. and I think it's what they mean by the you know the there's a very interesting kind of positive or you know kind of a majestic characterization of the multiple dimensions that are you know articulated in a continuum of variation in this following quote in this course okay where they

write again it's a long quote but uh but i'll read it um the plane the plane of consistency is like a row of doors um on filad is the words um used by those in glossary and i i an old filad interestingly enough is a series of rooms which are joined by doors so in other words access you know the transition from one room to another is only through the connecting door so an enfilade is precisely you know a series of rooms which can only be you know which are you know

conjoined in space, but which cannot be accessed from the outside. And I take this, you know, again to mean that, you know, the, in other words, there is no exterior corridor connecting the rooms. You can only get from one room to another. You cannot access the rooms. You can't get from one room to another via, by going outside into a corridor. The corridor would be, you know, the extra plane, the plane of transcendence that connects, you know, the, you know, each, the imminent dimension of each room. So the, these, the different dimensions of the plane of imminence are conjoined in this

row-like fashion. And I'll continue to quote, the concrete rules for the construction of the plane obtained to the extent that they exercise a selective role. It is the plane, in other words, the mode of connection that provides the means of eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs, of rejecting the homogenous surfaces that overlay smooth space and neutralizing the lines of death and destruction that divert the line of flight. What is retained and preserved and therefore created, what consists is only that which increases the number of connections at each level of divisional composition, thus in descending as well as ascending order, and that which cannot be divided

without changing in nature or entering into a larger composition without requiring a new criterion of comparison. So this means that there's a whole process of selection of assemblages according to their ability to draw a plane of consistency with an increasing number of connections. And this increasing the number, increasing connectivity is the criterion of selection. It becomes a criterion of selection. This is why the continued schizoanalysis is not only a qualitative analysis

of abstract machines in relation to assemblages, but also a quantitative analysis of the assemblages in relation to a presumably pure abstract machine. And so it's insofar as an assemblages are conjoined in a way which increases the numbers of connection, okay, that they draw the plane of consistency more effectively or more consistently. Okay. Okay, almost done. I won't read this quote. I think, again, just this reiterates, this final quote reiterates the claim that the

alloplastic strata, which they also call the anthropomorphic strata, are particularly propitious for the assemblages. In other words, that it's not just, I mean, I take this, you know, philosophically to mean that, again, it's not just that, you know, humanity, you know, human organization, etc., is constrictive and, you know, disabling vis-à-vis the kind of, you know, the abstract matter, you know, or the

rather precisely that it allows greater reason intensifying it of what is often denounced as a kind of a privileging of the human. In other words, those who are already are saying that it's the peculiar privilege of the human is that it can, it has a greater kind of capacity for assembling. The self-assembling of the plane of consistency

is facilitated precisely by the modes of synthesis and structure, which otherwise, which are, you know, characteristic of the human. It's almost as if there's a, you know, there's a kind of a greater degree of, you know, de-formalization possible in and through the human than there is on, you know, the physical chemical or the biological strata. And

this leads into the, I think, the issue of the problem of selection, which is the conclusion of the chapter, where I'm trying to kind of point out that in a way the humans, in a way because humans, and again, human here is just a kind of a name or a tag. It's not a kind of an essential or metaphysical kind of characterization.

But it's simply the, insofar as the kind of the effectuation of saying and doing carried out by human processes of assembling is also the point at which the plane of eminence effectuates itself. intensifies and multiplies its dimensions, then there's a kind of coincidence of the

abstract and the concrete, which is, you know, kind of peculiar to, which, you know, can't circumvents the contingencies that are operative on the human strata, in the human dimension. So, in other words, the plane selects itself, the plane constructs itself through the, you

know, the human's effectuation, through the human development of the enveloped abstraction. And the consequence is that if the selection of destratified traits, intensities, particle science flows operates according to criteria discernible only from within the anthropomorphic strata, has our composition of consistency not re-enveloped the abstract in the concrete? Have we not absolutely relativized the absolute? Maybe talk about the absolute as a movement, you know not a not a substance or a subject but a movement but the absolute movement

can only be you know concretely effectuated through these rules for constructing the plane of consistency. And then, you know, the question is whether machinic pragmatism can be so kind of confidently contrasted to less, you know, less glamorous or less kind of, you know, a more banal kind of pragmatism. That's the, you know, that's the, in other words, the sophistication with which the Deleuze and Guattari, a naive finalism, which would say that

the point is to kind of simply, you know, the human is a kind of, is a trap, and we have to get out of it, you know, somehow, you know, so the point is to kind of, you know, to undo or to liquidate the human. They avoid that, I think, what they take to be a kind of a metaphysical trap. But then they bring the imminence of the abstract and the concrete means that the process of the selection of intensification

over disintensification and of the injunction to increase the kind of dimensions of intensive qualities doesn't become a kind of I guess a kind of aestheticism really and okay that's it that's just a kind of a rough kind of paraphrase of the movement of the paper so I'll stop there and shall we have a break now

before the discussion or what do you think yeah if you would like we can take a like five minute break okay yeah okay okay yeah okay okay see this Thank you.

Thank you. Amen.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Should we continue, Ray? Yes, yes.

Yes. Thank you so much for the presentation and great talk. I want to start with David, but I'm not sure if he's here right now. I think it's not back yet. So, can you stop your screen sharing? If... Sure. Thank you. Thank you. So, thank you, Ray, and welcome back, everyone.

I would like to begin passing the mic to David Roden to start the discussion. As many of you know, David is the philosopher who led our first study group, and we are really thankful to him for getting this series started. Hi, David. Hi, Sepidane. Hi, Ray. Ray, thanks for a wonderful piece of exegesis. Right, as often as the case, Ray, I think I find the questions I end up asking of you are questions you're already asking of yourself. So it may seem that I'm simply reiterating

particularly your concluding discussion here. I guess my worry, I guess, here is about the relation between, if you like, the ontological level sort of laid out here in terms of the, you know, the stratic synthesis. the way that relates to the virtual dimension the sort of non-individuated multiplicities or the plain inconsistency so there's a kind of very obviously there's a very brilliant and clear sort of

ontological thesis about the emergence of the actual about the emergence of concrete entities, assemblages. And my concern, I guess, is the way the notion of practice can map onto this. In a sense, you've already telegraphed this by contrasting Deleuze and Guattari's kind of pragmatism, some liberal pragmatism of, you know, I guess figures like Rorty or Brandon, if we're bounding names. And yet

it's not clear what's left of the notion of practice if we have a notion of agency which as I think you mentioned and as Deleuze and Gintari also say cuts across all these different ontological domains in the sense it applies as much to the level of the sort of physiochemical interactions to the formation of kind of biological structures as to the socio-political sphere so in sense if there is a notion of agency here it's it it seems to be a genuine genuinely post-humanist one which in a sense can't be identified with the activity of a particular subject so

I guess my worry is well how how how does a how does a kind of practical philosophy or an epics fall out of this ontological articulation. And I guess, yeah, I mean, I'll leave it at that, Ray, because I don't know if you've got any thoughts about that. I mean, I think, yes, I think that, I mean, related to that is the question of of construction here, and I guess the idea of the construction of the plane of consistency, because in a sense, one can understand the plane of consistency as a kind of virtual field, or as a,

I guess, something like a vector field, which is not sort of representable, it's not simply a kind of set of numerical quantities or vectors in a purely mathematical sense, but it has some kind of pre-existent structure as a sort of form of organization. And so the role of the concrete rules or the abstract machine seems to be, again, completely general. It seems to sort of not be in any sense privileging sort of human agency, even if, as Deleuze Guattari said, and as you say, human agencies particularly act to set up various forms of deterritorialization or decoding.

So yeah, I guess my worry is both what is the place of the human, and particularly of practice in this, given the initially post-humanist cast of the ontology, and also when's the injunction to de-territorialize? why have an injunction to de-territorialize at all when in a sense what one is describing are propensities and tendencies of systems and sure perhaps certain systems present certain opportunities by virtue of there being certain critical points within the abstract machine

that's enveloped within the system, why does it follow that we should, why should there be an injunction to, in a sense, tip those critical points or approach them? Why, in a sense, should there be a kind of normative element to this at all? I mean, that, again, always seems to sit uneasily with me with the um with the ontological dimension that you played out okay thanks um i guess that's a key question that's that's you know the point is that's um

the point at which there's no longer there's a it's almost as if there's a point of indiscernible ability between the human and the non-human in the you know the concrete effectuation of the abstract machine the construction of the plane of consistency this is what when they say the point is not is no longer to say i but where it no longer matters whether or not one says I and this is where if you think about it you know like so this is the the self-assembling of the real they say you know the construction of the real to give up representation is to say that kind of there is no you know reality is not out there you know kind

of fixed and determinants and kind of the task the philosophical task is not to give a more adequate representation of the real and therefore the um you know the normative is uh you know what is to be done in thinking and doing um is not answerable to some you know objectively specifiable or representable structures or norms. And in a way that, one of the things they're saying is that the opposition between, you know, freedom and determinism, or between kind of, you know, libertarianism and determinism, is an artifice of representation, of the representational kind of setup. So if you

reject that representational paradigm, then it's not, you know, what's left is not simply an impersonal domain of objective determination, just going on. Determination is also kind of called into question because determination is an effect and not a precondition of stratic synthesis. So structures of causal determination only unfold within stratified kind of structures. So the genesis of stratification is itself not determinable.

It can't be, there's no kind of, you know, there's no way of specifying the way in which strata, strata are the condition for emergence and determination. Therefore, no account of the emergence of determination of strata can be given. That's, I mean, that's the radicality. That's the ontological radicality of this kind of materialism. So abstract matter is precisely not kind of, it's not just that it doesn't consist of, you know, interacting substances. It doesn't have any kind of substantial form whatsoever.

So it's not, you know, the processes unfolding, you know, on this kind of, at the level of, you know, the full body of the earth, the de-territorialized, et cetera, can't be mapped through any kind of sets of, you know, positive, you know, conceptual description. And, you know, that's also, I guess, I think, quite. Although it's always illuminating to unpack the Los Ingotari kind of jargon, using

and the dynamic systems theory and complexity theory. I mean, that's all illuminating, but precisely if that's... I think what they're saying is, you know, their philosophy would describe, you know, the full body resources of... I thought you dropped, you disappeared on us, right? Shall I respond briefly? I don't know if I got all of that. I think there was some bandwidth issue.

I guess I think I can accept that for Deloes and Cataria it rather reminds me of Nancy Cartwright's philosophy of science here that causal regularities are in a sense constructed by by, if you like, by assemblages, by, for example, screening out certain influences, amplifying other influences. So, yeah, they're not sort of traditional realists

in the sense that they're presenting us with a universe to fixed objects with fixed potentialities. and fixed dispositions. At the same time, the processes of actualization whereby these mechanisms come into being are essentially impersonal. Or at least they can have, obviously, a human role, have a human participation that in the socio-cultural they need not be. So they are some, Deleuze and Qatari do seem to be some kind of realists. They seem to be talking about processes which, at least in principle,

can be mind-independent. So I guess while I can see that there can be a role for the human in all this, and I'm kind of in agreement with you that you shouldn't simply flatten or level human-non-human distinction here. At the categorical level, it doesn't seem to me, it seems to me problematic still to talk about a privileged role for practice if by practice we mean something like the sort of things that people do,

whether collectively or individually, since the process of stratic synthesis itself, the process of actualization, are themselves not mind-dependent, not human-dependent. And I was trying to be careful about mapping dynamic systems analysis onto the virtual. I realise that there's some subtleties there. And I agree that you need to be cautious. But it still seems to me that the virtual is something essentially impersonal

or independent of the personal or the human. So I guess I'm still worried about how we fit practice, how we map practice onto this ontological level, and also where the injunction comes from. I mean, after all, there's an idea I use in my work on post-humanism called functional autonomy, and it's very much, in a sense, like the capacity to affect and be affected. um it's it's in a sense you increase functional autonomy by increasing your ability to kind of connect with other systems and increasing the range of systems over if you like the latitude

of your interactions with the world um and that's certainly something that can happen it's something you can do by for example learning to ride a bike you know something as simple as that um there seems to be at best the imperative to increase functional autonomy is hypothetical rather than categorical there seems to be no inherent worth in it so i'm still kind of worried about this you know there's a suggestion that that somehow there is an injunction to to um to de-territorialize if if if if if you could understand increasing functional autonomy is like to territorialization. It seems to fall out of nowhere.

But I'll shut up, because I realize I've probably gone on a bit too long. No, thanks. That's, I mean, I think, yeah, that's, I mean, should I respond, or, Sepeda, or do you want to, you know, are there other questions? Or, I mean, I could quickly respond to David. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's, again, I think the claim is that, you know, these optional rules, so it's not, you know, the claim that ultimately this is a kind of, this collaborative centric.

It's more interesting than that because it calls into quest between the inhuman and the non-human. I think part of what they're saying is that they're providing you with the conceptual resources in terms of which you no longer have to think about. in those terms and the proposing for the construction of the planar consistency, they say they're optional, that means that there's no kind of transcendent injunction, you know, to realize

or to produce anything. That would be falling back into the kind of traditional kind of models of agency, which they're kind of explicitly disavowing, in this suggestion that the impersonal and the personal become indiscernible. So the point is that the human, in a way, is, you know, the grip or the constraints of the human is optimally loosened when you, you know, think about, you know, intensifying, you know.

to think about kind of uh amplifying um and intensifying the uh as you put it the kind of the uh the modalities of you know affecting and being affected that is straightforward kind of spin is this they kind of but but look this the refrain in the book that constructivism and expressionism must coincide this is one of the methodological kind of uh refrains in the book the points if you ditch representation you can understand construction and expression as coinciding And that means that the abstract matter expresses itself through its construction. And the agent of construction is itself constructed through this process.

that's what it means to get rid of representation. It's not, there's no longer kind of an object, a substance, personal domain expressing itself, you know, on the subjective pole, nor is there a kind of, you know, an individual subject, you know, expressing itself in the objective domain. It's that the, you know, the agency is distilled and effectuated through this through these processes which can't be um you know which depend on contingent uh selections and can't be

To say that they're unrepresentable is to say that they can't be mapped. They can't be objectively mapped. So I think what's really striking about this book is how it's very, very unlike something like new materialism, although it doesn't go to a kind of align with new materialism. But this rejection of representation means that you can't just talk about matter as if it was out there. So it's not about circumventing subjectivity to realize that subjectivity was preventing you from seeing all these intensive processes going on.

And this is actually why I think even the distinction between virtual and actual is no longer operative in this book. And there's a footnote. At one point in the Plato Memoirs of a Sorcerer, they contrast the plane of consistency, the plane of imminence and the plane of transcendence. And it's almost as if the plane of transcendence, the virtual-actual disjunction and the whole problem of actualization, is again to kind of presupposes this, you know, what they think is, it's still too beholden to the, you know, the premises of representation. The idea that there is this surplus or excess

that has to be, you know, that is only kind of residually actualized. So that's another kind of, you know, important difference between, that's why construction is at the heart of the book, and not actualization. but no I understand I mean yeah it's very you know I think it's that undermines the kind of the premises upon which you know you could and anyway that's we can we should take more questions, I think.

Yeah. Marcus has a question, but please, after this, just unmute yourself. Go ahead, ask your questions. Yes, thank you very much. Yes, my question is also related now to this topic about subjectivity. There is this early essay by Felix Guattari about machine structure. This is just a title from 1969. And this is very interesting because he refers very affirmative to a concept of representation and saying we could also say that the revolution, the revolutionary stage includes a time in in which the machine is able to represent the structure of social subjectivity.

And the other way around, that in the stage of oppression, the stage of stagnation would be the stage in which the superstructure is not able to represent the effects of the machine. And this is a very interesting quote for what we discuss right now, because this would mean the revolutionary stage in what what Guattari describes here as a revolutionary stage has to be able to represent what he calls social subjectivity so the revolutionary subject but but this would mean that there has to be a difference between subjectivity and and the machine but the machine has to be able at least in the revolutionary stage so right now obviously we are not in the

revolutionary stage. So the machine is not able to represent the effects of the machine. So when we think on the machinery fragment by Marx, he has the same thought when he says the machine becomes more and more like the artist or the craftsman and the worker become more and more like the machinery itself in the production. This is why the machine can do it by his own, as Marx says. Andreas Bieler- So, so this would mean this is exactly a stage of Andreas Bieler- What he calls repression here, there has to be a different stage revolutionary stage where the machine or the difference between machine and subjectivity could be presented or represented in the machine itself.

And this is an interesting thought. So how would you think the, let's say, role or function of subjectivity in this kind of representation? Do you think then that the machine is able or could be able to represent subjectivity? And of course, what subjectivity is defined here is not very clear. It's the revolutionary subjectivity. So it means a transformation, of course, of subjectivity. But at least Guattari in this essay thinks the machine has to be able to represent subjectivity, at least in the revolutionary stage.

Okay, thanks. That's really, really interesting, actually. should I um in a way I mean it's I don't know if I can really I need to kind of you know think a lot you know a lot not it would take me a long time to kind of figure out a plausible kind of response but quickly I mean in a way um you know the machine representing subjectivity is part of what they call, you know, when they talk about the machinic agencement and in French, like agencement is like a verb

it's like a doing agence is like, you know, a doing and in a way it's like, you know, the agencement is the kind of, you know, the machine representing representing the subject but representing its own kind of uh you know its own subjectivation although so the category of you know subject is obviously rejected by those and but sorry because they you know it's kantian hegelian i guess even phenomenologicals and they want no truck with that but what's really interesting I mean is that they it's not a naive objectivism

and Deleuze they're two kind of philosophically they want to displace the primacy or the priority of the subject without falling back into a naive objectivism a naive representationism So in other words, they want to kind of, what the book is doing is describing the resources through which, you know, as they put, you know, the kind of the real assembles itself and represents itself. And so this is why the kind of the whole kind of the articulation of saying and doing, you know, both at the opening of the book, you know, and at the close of the book is really, really struck me.

And it's, so the point is that this, you know, assembling, machinic assembling is not kind of, it doesn't kind of unfold through, it can't be channeled through subjectivity as traditionally understood. traditionally sorry understood doesn't involve our perception doesn't involve self-consciousness um you know ontological pre-understanding um but there is in a way there is a kind of um a latent um you know the uh although they don't use the word i mean it still seems that there is a kind of you know again the point of coincidence between construction

and expression is the self-assembling of, you know, the plane of eminence. Okay, so it assembles itself, and the self at issue is precisely, you know, can't be, it's not the kind of the individual kind of you know it's not the individual or is it the rational cognizing self it's some other kind of it's some it's another self you know a machinic you know a machinic

subject if you want. But that's, but again, one in which the process, you know, the workings of the machine are not, the difference between a machine and a mechanism in this whole account is that machines are self-assembling and they you know their their functioning you know undermines the kinds of you know the finalities the recognizable finalities in terms of which the operation is usually described

so that's why yeah I mean just so I don't know if I can really yeah but that's a really interesting kind of you know I must reread that essay but there's a close relation in a way structure in a way structure is always a consequence of stratification and what they want to say is that you know machinic assembling is a kind of um is a is a model of it's supposed to kind of it's a way of accounting not for um the genesis of structure but it provides the resources

for um it it does the work that is you know traditionally relegated to structure in a representational philosophy. So in other words, if you say that the world consists of these structures, these structures are these characteristics, and then you oppose kind of structure and subject. Well, they're kind of bypassing that opposition by saying if we can articulate, we find this point, this point in the middle where there's always, there's stratification and destratification, and this is where machinic assembling unfolds,

you know, at the kind of the junction of stratification and destratification, and machinic assembling then allows you to make the selections and discriminations for which structure was traditionally invoked. And that's, so that's, so this is kind of the power, I mean, the philosophy, the ingenuity of the book. But yes, it's where you end up once you've made these moves. that's that's what is um um puzzling i guess um

yeah thank you that helps okay um I'd like to ask a question. Sure. Going off Marx's last question, in Balance Street for Desiring, well, I guess what I really want to ask is, in assembling the machine, right, where do you see Desire playing into any of this? as an objectivity. Yes, yeah. Well, desiring production, I mean, in a way, the, you know, assembling, agencement, is, it seems to kind of do the work of, you know,

desiring production that, you know, desiring production did in Antioedipus. So, clearly, kind of, desire is, I don't know why I mean, I'm not sure why, I don't think the word desire but I think that, look I think that in a way the kind of desire for intensification, for amplification you know, the amplifying one's capacity to affect and be not one, okay the capacity to affect and be affected is, you know, how desire would be kind of cashed out.

So desire is productive in the sense that, you know, kind of desire is, you know, the principle of, you know, machinic assembling, which involves intensifying and increasing dimensions of sensation. I think that when they're talking about this process of intensification and of amplifying

ones, you know, the modalities of not only one's power of acting, but one's power of being acted upon. This is desire. This is a kind of another kind of a word for what they call desire in Antioedipus. But, yeah, but I think here, I think why they reject the Lacanian model of desire, because I think it's too simple to say, and here this is also like, I'm unconvinced by the claim that desire, you know, psychoanalytic desire is all about lack and castration. And I'm not really, I entirely agree. I'm unconvinced by that. And in a way,

I mean yeah you could this is what you know if you kind of there's something yeah if you give this entirely positive or what you think is an entirely positive kind of characterization of desire as productive amplificatory intensifying etc weirdly it's it becomes aestheticized I think can you turn off your camera maybe helps with the quality of the room sure can I ask a question

yes is that okay let me start with a comment I really love the work of Deleuze as well as Deleuze and Guattari but sometimes it's really easy to get lost in the sauce of the terminological swirls and so what I would like to do was to back up in the history of Deleuze's work in order to address the relationship between what you've been discussing

and the concerns for ethics that both you and David were addressing to each other. So we know that Deleuze was really influenced by Solomon Maimon's critique of the Kantian manifold. And if you remember, the manifold is an extension that has lots of different forms. in Euclid, in calculus, and in phase space.

When Maimon dismantles Kant's manifold in order to insist that time and space in a relational grid is not a prairie in the intuition. But that difference is the fundamental a prairie. And that time is the way in which differences unfold. now what's pretty clear even in Solomon Maimon and definitely true in

in Deleuze is that when one takes into account difference in the context of time and then space, that there are lots of different kinds of mathematics, and specifically geometries, that can be placed in the manifold. and for example in leibnitz um infinitesimals and differentials come out of his philosophy and then enter into his mathematics um

And in Solomon Maimon, you can see the shift from Euclidean models of the manifold to the calculus of Newton and Leibniz. Now, the language of Deleuze in difference in repetition on seems to embrace phase space. And so the references to plane of consistency and the variable condition of striated or smooth space associated with that suggests an instability

whereby one moves back towards a model based on the striations of infinitesimal calculus or more towards the smooth space of phase space. Now, if you look at the language that Deleuze brings to bear when he's talking about hierarchy, modality striations, it's pretty clear that he's using the language of calculus, whereas when he's talking about individuation,

when he's talking about aggregation, he's referring to the ways in which emergent systems get modeled in phase space now it seems to me that what you've been describing is the way he delineates between the mind's tendency towards the kind of differentiation that we associate with calculus versus the kind of aggregation that we associate with phase space. And I'm

simplifying things just in order to be able to shut up sooner than I would like to. But it seems to me that they're building a system by which their readers will be able to construct an ethics of cognition, which is a term I coined a long time ago, with reference to smooth and striated space. And so one could consider this as a manual of use for constructing a manifold that is smooth instead of striated.

So the question is, since this language of phase space and calculus applies to the world of physiochemical actions, but that Deleuze and Guattari like Seamunden seem to want to have that drift into not just percepts but concepts in other words not just our attempts to to grapple with the real but also with ideal. And so I'm wondering, the references that clearly point to trans-individuality,

pre-individuality, which is both applying to social cognition, which is someone had just raised, as well as individual cognition. What are your fundamental objections to the reference to something that, on the one hand, people have dismissed as a kind of panpsychism, but which I suggest is material in the sense of a new materialism that Deleuze and Guattari themselves have identified with, for example, individuation,

which is the same thing as bifurcation in physical systems and phase space. So the question is, given how invested that Deleuze and Guattari are into the fact that this notion of a manifold as plain, as smooth space, applies to both our cognition of the world as well as the operations of our cognitive properties themselves. How do you object to that concept, and on what grounds? okay um let me and i i mean i i don't know your work real well but i i do know that

this seems to be one of your fundamental objections to those in guattari as well as as well as the simon them uh actually yes i guess that's you know that's that's uh That's fair, yes. Why do I, what's my problem with, you know, kind of, you know, aligning the smoothing, smooth space as an ontological category and I think you said smoothing as a, you know, smoothing. It's also an epistemological category, and I'm making the suggestion it's also an ethical category.

Yeah, I just don't think it's possible to align ethics, epistemology, and ontology in this way. And I guess I'm suspicious of philosophies that do this, that align them in this way. And that's why, you know, I mean, look, here's one way of, you mentioned, you know, the contrast between, you know, kind of the, the kind of space on the one hand and kind of, you know, differential kind of striation. The question, you know, on what, okay, that's a kind of, that distinction is intramathematical.

So the conditions under which you generalize it and say that it's a kind of, it's a fundamental, you know, it can be used to kind of, you know, to distinguish two species of phenomena, as well as two ways of describing those phenomena um i mean yeah you can do this but i mean i think that that's in a way you know but the but maiman identifies the uh this is new emina this is how new eminem create relations among objects and concepts and this is something that clearly um de leuze borrows yes and and and what i'm suggesting is

that a thousand plateaus and anti-odipus are except in a sense horrible metaphor but exfoliates um um no i get that's very i mean i think you're you're probably right but then the question is well, couldn't you do this, the points, you know, this point of articulation for, you know, kind of, for, you know, the object and the concept, I mean, if this point, you know, couldn't any other, you could do it in, you know, you could do any other kind of set of oppositions could also be proposed as a candidate, you know, as the joint or the hinge between, you know, the conceptual

and, you know, the objective or, you know, or between the phenomenal and the noumenal. And let me just interrupt for one second that this has been the complaint, for example, in the world of philosophy of science, particularly with reference to metaphor theory. The question, is this metaphorical or is this real? And so we run up against the complaint that metaphor cannot cut the world at its joints, which was the metaphor that I think you were just using. But on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of thing that Poincaré says in his famous essay on creativity and method, science and method.

I cannot explain it in any other way. let's get back to this underlying field which is time and which is contingent unidirectional and upon which we superimpose differences in order to establish relations and make sense of both the world and of concepts yes but the problem is you know which you know how the characterization of time

is itself like you know which what what data is provides the starting point for the characterization of time. Well, Deleuze clearly establishes that difference as the eternal return of difference sense of the world, which is how he turns Kant on his head and how he transforms the differential into pure contingency the differential of of solomon maimon into pure contingency

no i i no i take i take your point i guess my look it's bergson you know deleuze you know draws on Bergson and Bergson you know Bergson claims you know the immediate data you know of consciousness is the kind of the experience of duration you know the the qualitative differentiation of time and I think you know Deleuze's whole account of intensity is closely connected to this account, this ontologization of duration. But then the problem is that the claims that, you know, these intensive differences, you know, are simply kind of are accessible on this,

in this kind of, you know, sub representational element, you know, you experience the qualitative differentiation of duration, you know, as time in itself, independently of representing, categorizing, conceptualizing. I just don't believe that. I think that the, you know, the contrast between intensive and extensive is conceptual. And I think that Bergson substitutes a conceptual construction, you know, a kind of a registering of qualitative difference, you know, in the place of where this allegedly kind of, you know, immediate, you know, intuitive, preconceptual experience of the thing itself, of time itself unfolding in consciousness,

is supposed to happen. And, you know, this is where, like, the Kantian questions about, you know, Kant's point is that even our own experience is mediated by representation. We We can't, you know, what we know about the features of our, you know, our own kind of, you know, the features of our own experience, you know, requires the machinery of judgment. and everyone I know that you know obviously Deleuzians will reject this and in a way this book in particular is I think Deleuz's most sophisticated attempt to kind of to work out the consequences of that rejecting by explaining you know by coming up with an account of you know

the how there's a there's a judgment in the real that conditions you know ideal judgment or subjective epistemological judgment. But the problem is that the characterization of this judgment in the real, i.e. stratic synthesis, is a conceptual construction, which, you know, your point about the jargon was, actually, it's a very important point. Whenever one is trying to explain, one is trying to explain Deleuze's account of stratification, as I was, one faces a chance. So I end up kind of just paraphrasing using this terminology. The problem is this, is that if philosophy is conceptual creation, then there's a problem.

If you simply try to translate the concepts into, you know, to make them crisper and more precise using, let's say, like an empirical science, you know, dynamical systems theory, complexity theory, kind of, you know, et cetera, et cetera, then it's no longer a conceptual creation. If Deleuze's accounts of all these kinds of processes and the real can simply be converted, translated without loss, using the vocabulary of autonomous kind of physical and mathematical sciences. That's the problem of metaphor. I agree with that. But then we're up against what Poincaré said

is I don't know how to do it any other way. So is there a more rigorous way? You know, this is something, this is a problem for transdisciplinarity in any way. We know that because it's so difficult to do what Maimon talks about in terms of building coalitions among different philosophers or what many of us have been trying to do by juxtaposing different disciplines like Deleuze and Guattari exhort us to do when he says in order to know really anything we have to balance scientific percepts with scientific concepts with artistic constructs the way I've been at it recently is by filtering

these concepts through problems like what's the relationship between individual and collective cognition in a jazz ensemble while performing. For example, that's one of the ways which I try to bring these questions to the fore. And I get, you know, I think transdisciplinarity is really powerful. But how do we do it rigorously? What I'm saying, and I think you're resisting, is that Deleuze is pretty much bought into transdisciplinary inquiry by constructing coalitions, by constructing aggregations of conceptual frameworks from different disciplinary

striations and hierarchies. So the question is, what objection ontologically as well as epistemologically do you have to the mathematical as well as conceptual application of smooth space in both the physical world and in the world of ideation.

Because the concept of smooth space seems to me to be arbitrary. And you can cash it out in terms of phase spaces, but then you get this problem of like, well, then if when they're talking about smooth space, they just mean kind of face spaces, then it becomes metaphorical. And the problem is the conviction that ontology is necessary, which increasingly my view is that ontology, again, as I said,

already said, I think that the rehabilitation of ontology in the 20th century is problematic. and if you're no longer doing ontology as interpreting the meaning of being and if you're no longer doing ontology, you know, it's not simply enough to say all we need to do, you know, to renovate ontology is not to identify being with substance, okay? We'll identify being with process, with becoming. But, you know, the pre-Socratics did that, okay? So like simply kind of talking about process and becoming instead of, you know, substance and form is not a kind of a convincing kind of justification.

Let me just, if I could just say, I deeply empathetic toward your position. and the ways in which your system is built on that deeply admire that I just wonder for example where we get the idea that substance and process are different? In other words,

is it either being or becoming? If you have a smooth space in Deleuze and Guattari's presentation, and and that space can either be striated or smooth and that the how that happens there's a certain element of contingency involved that suggests that there are two aspects of the same thing that striations and aggregation and becoming are two aspects of the same continuum

and and that's really and that's for example that's you know what a lot of people including someone who figures into this discussion a lot with reference to bergson and and prigogine is i'm bergson and de leuze is prigogine who is a very philosophical fellow, by the way. And so I'm, you know, I'm confronting this particular issue, not to confront you, but because I think it's really important in how we evaluate Delos and Groteri. No, no, I appreciate, no, I think, you know,

I understand what you're saying. I think it would, I take your point. Yeah, I think it would take us a lot longer to kind of, you know, work through, I think there's a fundamental disagreement about the starting point for it. Right. Yeah, yeah. And that is, I think it's possible to talk about that. Okay. And I'll stop there. I'll stop there. Sorry. It's okay. Just trying to get everybody's question. So, who else has a question? I think David. Yeah, go ahead. Excuse me Martha, sorry. Should I read the question? Okay, yes. Okay, so I'll read David's question.

In relation to my paper, does a stratified ontology constitute a flat ontology? And if If it's not the case, what kind of relation exists between them? Because as far as I understand it, a stratified ontology would refuse or at least modify thesis three about the subject-object relation, and four about the ontological non-hierarchy or flattening all entities on the same plane of existence, which you consider to entail a flat ontology, thus constituting neither a flat nor a hierarchical ontology. okay yes the words the way in which the word stratification is used in the paper you're referring

to that's that's Roy Baskar says when he talks about stratified ontologies it's like a layer cake ontology, which is precisely the way it seems to me that the account of stratification can't be understood either in terms of a hierarchy of levels, nor simply a kind of a de-leveling, of flattening and that's what makes it very very interesting so the point is

that these yeah there's no in a way what what does it give you is this kind of you know in a way it's like you know trying to kind of And the strata and the three fundamental types of strata, I guess, would correspond to the three fundamental joints of being, if metaphysics is about carving nature of the joints. but you know on their account they can't be

or at least it doesn't it wouldn't make sense simply to understand the strata as you know sedimentations or cumulative layers because then if Or if that's the case, then that means that the kind of, you know, the strata, each of these three types of strata are connected to one another according to principles. you know, something like a metastratic synthesis would be necessary to articulate the three,

you know, layers of stratification. And I might be wrong, but I, you know, I'm not sure that that's, that, that, that is the case, or that they give such account. However, it's clear that what they call, you know, the, the plane of consistency involves a kind of a cut, what they call kind of detailed socialization involves cutting through the three kind of types of strata. So now it's a cut through these three levels. But then, yes, you don't have a...

This is what kind of produces something new. And at least it's not… Yes, it can't simply be understood in terms of the opposition between flattening or leveling and de-leveling. discussed in this um you know uh in the paper um so in other words i don't think that the los and gottari have a flat ontology um in the sense you know in this sense um and the reason is

because it's not sure like it's the earth look if stratification and destratification are kind of you know you know indissociable in a sense you start in the middle you start in between you know what's stratified and destratified or between you know the the abstract machine and it's kind of the concrete assemblage, then it's the de-territorialized, the full body of the earth, is the residue of de-stratification.

It's not as if it's there first. okay the mistake the representational error will be to think that you've got the full body of the earth the de-territorialized and then stratification then you get stratification sedimentation layering okay and then de-territorialization involves kind of you know getting back towards this the originally earth the de-territorialized but in fact what they're suggesting is that you know It's, you know, the de-territorialized, there's nothing but absolute movement is generated through the, you know, what they call, you know, the talk of absolute movement. The absolute is a quality of movement and not a substance or an entity.

Nor is it even pure becoming in this kind of, you know, nebulous metaphysical sense. so that's why I think you can't characterize their work in terms of a flat ontology where it assumes that the kind of the univocal plane of being of ontological equivalence is somehow given whereas their whole point is that it has to be you know, constructed. So I don't know if that answers your question, but... There's a question from Blisero.

Do you want to go ahead and ask a question? Hi, sir. Good evening. Do you guys hear me, by the way? Yes. That was a very interesting reading of the chapter. Very much enjoyable, thank you for that. What strikes me the most, and part of your reading from the chapter, is that as if there's a parallel between the project of those angles that are here, and the kind of empiricist project that has been present in philosophy since Hume maybe, or even before that.

In a sense that if in difference and reputation, if I remember correctly, there's this concept of particular difference, and the idols persist that in contradiction or abstract difference if I remember the name correctly or the jargon correctly we come to contradiction which is the most different thing that can be and it's just a construct of the kind of conceptualization that the enlightenment reason does or the enlightenment science does to make the sense of the word or has attraction on the world

so he wants to remain with the skepticism of Hume but in a very strange way in a very I don't know maybe in tors to tors to way in a way that we have difference and repetition there is some kind of abstraction in nature and in in the whole itself in the god or nature itself there is a kind of abstract machine that subjectivity and all kind of abstraction that a subjectivity or a human does or a reason human reason does is actually arrived from this abstract machine that produce the plane of can produce the plane of consistency and what human subjects must do is aspire to do the same, to realize the plane of consistency

outside of the quote-unquote Enlightenment or Kantian reason, and what we should do is extending the project of empiricism in a way that we can arrive at that. And that's one point. I don't know if I can articulate myself clearly. And what else, one more point that I wanted to make was that the non-formal content on the unformed matter, which is as if their project of pragmatism is this, in this contention that what human does, what in through the virality or I don't know,

live matter, living matter of language or sign particles is to entail some kind of unformed, unformal content on an unformed matter. And what we do in semantics is not necessarily what analytic philosophy wants us to do, but it's a very more dirty work. So what we do is almost non tractable as if it's a bit bit can stay in point. If I understand all these that I heard about from you from this video. So if that is true, then my final question is their understanding of the plane of consistency what difference is there is between the plane of consistency and say something like the process of

synthetic unity of a perception of a Kantian understanding. There is difference between them, is the material consistent, is the scientific material incompatibility of Kantian system and on the other hand some more, I don't know, nomadic, metallurgical materiality of Dodo Zangottari. Thank you. Could you just repeat the closing formulation, the question? Because I'm not sure I got everything, but if you could just repeat that your closing question, that would be helpful. sorry if i rumbled on and it wasn't clear no no it's uh there's a lot in what you said so um yes

yes i'm sorry um then the last part was that the plane of consistency what is the difference between uh some process of protecting a plane of consistency and a process like synthetic unity of a perception that consists it is supposed to be anti-kantian plane of consistency because of what the rumbling that I was about. I think it wasn't clear. But at the end, it's not clear to my head that what is the difference. The only difference that I can see is the claim that he makes in the difference in repetition. That the conceptual difference, which has contradiction and has dialects, is just a human relic, something you read from them,

actually, if I understand you correctly, something you read from them in this um i don't know now do you understand me or uh if i i'm unclear if i'm unclear i let it go sorry i think okay let me try to respond and if what i say you know doesn't you know if what i say doesn't connect with what you're trying to say then you can correct me and push me towards you know, your concern. But I think you're asking about, you know, when you mentioned kind of Deleuze's kind of critique of, you know, the primacy of contradiction in the difference of repetition, the claim that he wants a philosophy of difference, he wants a concept of difference

that would not be reducible to a difference in the concept. So, and his rejection of kind of both of kantianism and hegelianism is that um it substitutes uh you know movements in the concept you know exchanges of conceptual determination for real movements you know um um and yes and that's and then the you know that's that's a very deep problem the problem is this is that um you know, how does one, if one is a philosopher, as Deleuze says, one is, you know, committed to the concept and to using the resources of the concept, you know, to grasp the non-conceptual,

you know, a reality that is not conceptual. And the problem then is, on the one hand, the critique of, you know, the relegation of difference to conceptual difference, or the claim that every difference is ultimately conceptual, is, is that there are, there must be, there are differences in the real, that can't be, that don't map on to either kind of opposition or contradiction.

But then it's also that, but it's not simply that concepts are psychological categories, because the de-psychologization of the concept happens with Kant and Hegel So the claim then is a dispute about which concepts are most adequate to grasping real movement or real difference. but then but then hegel's problem is about how do you tell the difference between the difference in the concept and the real difference that is elided by or irreducible to the difference in

the concept and then you're back to the standpoint between concepts and intuitions It seems to me what you can't do is resort to intuition and say we intuit real differences. And once we've intuited real differences in being, the task is to construct concepts that are, you know, uniquely tailored to grasping, you know, individual, you know, the difference of individuation, for instance, you know, pre-individual singularities. So it seems to me that Deleuze's account of conceptual construction is Bergsonian.

It's Bergson who says that representation, the categories of representation are too loose and baggy to track the real differences, which are singularities that can't be pincered between universal and particularity. But then the construction of concepts that express singularities, pre-individual singularities, is carried out on the basis of this preconceptual intuition of being singular expressions.

And that's where the problem comes in. Like, how do you know, you know, a Hegelian will just say, well, look, you know, you can't, you know, you need to, you need to explain, you know, how you're able to intuit, how you have this non-conceptual intuition of real difference, on the basis of which you can disqualify, let's say, contradiction as a merely conceptual difference, and then propose this idea of concepts as, you know, and yeah, the problem is that every,

I don't see how you can kind of, you know, given that I don't think there is any access to, you know, it's one thing to say that there is no cognitive access to the real without concepts is not to say that reality is intrinsically conceptual. It's just to say, as Hegel already said, that the difference between the real and the ideal, or the conceptual and the non-conceptual, can only be tracked using the resources of the concept. But it's not to ontologize concepts. And if you reject that, it seems that you can't reject it because it's clear that what a concept is for Hegel, it's not a psychological state. You can't

psychologize it. So whatever your, you know, your reason for rejecting this, if you, you know, admit that it's not, you know, concepts of psychological representations, then, you know, your reason for rejecting, you know, for claiming that this, these concepts are inadequate can't, has got to be something other than claiming that you have this preconceptual intuition because it seems that there is you know you have to answer Kant's questions how do you know okay and it seems to me I don't see how you know Bergson or Deleuze get around this this problem um because simply because I think that you know experience however

you describe it the kind of uh you know the qualitative particularities of experience no matter how rich and complex and dynamic, do not kind of simply present themselves to the experiencer and deliver a criterion of adequacy that would allow you to kind of, you know, to distinguish between adequate and inadequate concepts. So that's my attempt to, I don't know if I've really answered your question, but that's my attempt to respond. Yes, you actually answered perfectly. I have a further question, but I'll stop now

because I think other people have questions. If it was any time, I would ask it. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Okay. Are there any more questions? So should we continue with the previous question that you had? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. I'm so lucky that you have something to say. Anyway, my further question is that, if I understand you correctly, what you said just now, my further question is, what is the core

what is the supposed base for the correlation of our use of concepts and what is real a quote unquote what is real. If I understand either Kant or Hegel or Deleuze or I don't know even Frege correctly or ever Karna, the way to point is to the relation of concepts, either particular classes of concepts that must be according to or must have some correlation with. the relation that particularities or holds of, again, quote unquote, real stands to each other.

So if we have these parallality between two principles, principles of rule governing in nature or real or God or whatever, and principle of laws of thoughts in our thoughts, in these two parallel mapping as if of the concept. So, but in Deleuze's picture, what makes possible this unity of these or this parallelity of these two principles that I just named, what makes it possible is the plane of consistency, if I understand it correctly. again the plane of consistency is there there is no as you put it perfectly there's no corridor

you cannot actually transcend or descend from plane of consistency plane of consistency in a platonic sense if we as if we would have to arrive at it something like that this plane of consistency at the end is supposed to bring all the concepts of of human and inhuman anything uh and real processes in the nature all together, if I understand again correctly. So by this, at this point, something that they could say from how could I say that there is a particular difference other outside of the conceptual difference, maybe is that to point to morphological, you know, you know something in a chaotic theory and complex theory had a very

had a very strong effect. Morphological understanding, or as Dr. Martin Rosenberg put it, metaphors or linguistic tropes or things like these that are non-formal content, if that's the pragmatic of Deleuze and Gautier, non-formal content on unformed materiality. So it is as if they're trying to do this but what I cannot understand and I cannot I didn't see I haven't got an answer from what you what just said maybe I just lost it but what can I what I cannot understand is then how could you how could you in fact go beyond analytic truth you know what is

What is logical truth and is obvious and then the truth that we have about the word but is not in the abstract motion and given. What if every human activity then would be meaningless or something like that. Was it clear or was it just in the blue again? Sorry. Okay, you need to help me a bit to kind of, so you said there's a, I think at one point, so you were asking about what, you know, Delozingo-Tari's kind of plane of consistency, and I think you were asking or, you know, querying whether it's an attempt to coordinate,

you know the um i guess the subjective and the objective or the uh you know the conceptual and the real um is that what you were asking hello sorry sorry uh yes um um somehow yes um i'm i'm i'm uncomfortable with the whole thing i think i was i'm getting everybody bored and nobody nobody understand what i'm saying no no it's No, you said a lot, and what you said was really, you're trying to kind of say something difficult and uncomplicated.

No, no, so I want to respond. And, well, look, I was going to say this, is that precisely what they call the plane of consistency is not what, for instance, the subject-object identity or the point of indifference in Schelling, for instance. Okay. Precisely because it's what, you know, the plane of consistency is this kind of, you know, transversal diagonal, okay, that cuts through the strata and that creates, you know, something, you know, something new, you know, generates kind of, you know, ontological novelty. And it's precisely not this point of equilibrium or correspondence between the conceptual and the real.

And in a way, what they're saying is that the correlation between the conceptual, the ideal, let's say, the ideal and the real, is itself is guaranteed by stratification. Stratic synthesis is the condition for real synthesis. Or, you know, the real synthesis, stratic synthesis is a condition for epistemological synthesis in the Kantian sense. So the point is that the opposition between the real and the ideal, or between the conceptual and the objective, is a consequence of stratification or of stratic synthesis.

And what they're trying to, you know, in a way, you know, the idealism, the kind of, you know, philosophical idealism would be an attempt to kind of reconcile, you know, the ideal and the real without asking about the conditions under which this kind of disjunction is generated. And what they're doing is saying that this opposition comes about through these processes of differentiation, which are themselves, you know, can't be, you know, I mean, they're real, but in a sense, they're real in a sense which can't simply be juxtaposed to the ideal.

Okay? So then, and that's why, as I've been trying to insist, is that they don't start off, this is why they start in the middle. They don't start off by saying, in the beginning was the full body, the de-territorialized, the full body without organs, and then stratification came. If that's what they were saying, it would be completely theological and idealist. What they're saying instead is that, you know, we kind of, they want to kind of describe, you know, they want to kind of, you know, to think and produce the, you know, the distinctions whose, in a way,

that can be whose diagonalization or whose traversal produces the, you know, the, the unrepresentable, the kind of, you know, the, the becoming, the movement of becoming that they're interested in, you know, the point is that becoming is, you know, If you start with becoming, you're still in the ambit of representation. And I think that the plane of consistency is the movement of becoming, but it has to be constructed. And it has to be constructed by understanding that everything is locked in between identity and difference or becoming and unbecoming.

or stability and disorder. So in that sense, what's striking is that, although they're often criticized for thinking, for having a kind of, you know, for regenerating a dualism, I think a careful reading shows that they're, you know, they're very careful about each, you know, kind of contrast, or kind of so-called opposition is simply kind of generated to produce the moment of its traversal, or of its diagonalization. And that's why

it's almost as if they want to say that it's only by you know undoing you know you you kind of uh you orchestrate these distinctions and these oppositions in such a way as to allow them to generate their own undoing okay their own kind of uh their own undoing but in a positive sense in a way you know because what lies beyond them isn't simply this ineffable kind of transcendence it's this positively characterisable movement, which they tell you a lot about. So, okay, I don't know if...

I have a question. Yes. On intuition, so those in Gutari, earth metaphysics aside, what forms of intuition would be valid to you? like just you know independent of those in guitar like like in a Kantian sense what forms of intuition would be valid to you um well okay I'm here I think you know there is a kind of form of conceptual intuition in a way a kind of um um there is uh you know an apprehension of particulars, of concretely determined particulars, but this is still, it still involves conceptual mediation.

I'm just, this is just following sellers here, like this. So there's an intuition of a this such, which can then be predicatively characterized. but I think that I mean I think that the kind of you know there is the distinction between intuition and judgment holds that obviously we're not always judging you know we don't we have not every kind of component of our experience is a product of judgment there has to be something about which to judge something to kind of to predatively characterize Christ. So there is an intuition, but it's a conceptual intuition. It's a this-such,

in this kind of Aristotelian sense, which is already formed, conceptually formed, and which can then be further propositionally determined. And, okay, I mean, I know that like with German idealism there's a complicated you know there is a kind of i don't want 50 and shelling there's a a re you know a kind of a defense of of intellectual intuition um so it's possible that i'm too kantian um so yes maybe there is a version of intellectual intuition that is kind of um you know that can be defended against these Kantian objections.

I'm just not familiar enough with it, I guess. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Are there any more questions? I could ask a question. but you know I'm a bit I don't want to drag us too far off topic off topic because I wanted to ask Ray about sort of the epistemic reading of the commodity form that we were talking about in Marx as a possible alternative to this sort of you know plane of imminence. Ray do you think

this is the right time to ask a question like that would you be interested in taking it or um sure okay uh i'm gonna have to go soon i can take yeah um if if uh yes yes okay well i i guess um so last time we talked about this and i raised the issue of um son Rethel's work as a possible way of maybe avoiding, you know, a kind of relapse into a more traditional sort of Kantian posture, right? In terms of how we attempt to safeguard ourselves, right? You know, from this sort of ontological adventurism, if you will.

um and i didn't we didn't engage in a long conversation about it but i think what you did say was that you were a little bit conscious of the way that uh son rathal potentially because we were talking about a book by alfred son rathal intellectual and manual labor how he reifies um certain categories which are more uh specific uh to the context of capitalism right like the category of labor, how his sort of trans-historical use of the exchange analysis in order to explain dualism isn't adequate, right, because of that. But I just, one thing I didn't get to say last time, I guess, is that, you know, I mean, I think one thing about that is that it's dependent on

quite a specific uh sort of value form reading remarks right that you find in like the work of um you know robert curse or or moish postone or people like that um which is this idea that um you know uh the i guess what postone calls the um uh the i think it's the the social form of of uh or the commodity form of social production it's this idea that it kind of emerges like dynku, right? That you have capitalism, which comes about or begins to be generated in the late Middle Ages. And there's no change in the domain of production or no significant effect really, that's exerted by the commodity form in the field of

social reality prior to that. But what's interesting is that I think this actually goes against the grain of a lot of what Marx actually writes, right? When he talks about the emergence of, you know, subsequent historical modes of production. You know, even when he talks about, you know, absolute surplus value being the goal within the context of the early stage of capitalism, he points out that, you know, this is just a radicalization of a tendency towards, you know, the appropriation of, you know, time as social surplus product, which was already very much there, right, in earlier modes of production. So I guess my, I think there are problems for sure with Son Rethel's reification of the category of labor. And I don't think you can take this idea

of the labor synthesis and say, well, we just have to, you know, get to this physical world in which we understand that everything's kind of produced by humans in this immediate way. I don't think that's an adequate solution. But I do think that there's the possibility of trying to understand you know kind of the the phenomenon of dualism or the phenomenon of what what son rathal calls non-empirical abstraction through adopting a more developmental view of how the the commodity form proceeds so i just wanted to ask you i mean do you think that that could be a possible like because again my concern sort of is that um i think that when you when you kind of make

the human in its finitude um sort of the center right of your project in a way and we were talking before about niggeristani inhumanism and so forth which is against anti-humanism um that it that position itself i think potentially reifies um certain social categories which are far more specific to modernity than the commodity form itself, right? You know, if you look at sort of like the Cartesian turn, if you look at, you know, kind of this evolution, you know, hypochemon on, you know, subject, subjectum, and how this develops. I mean, do you think that that's possible, that it'd be a valid philosophical approach to try to pursue that kind of analysis? um you mean a uh a more developmental account of the um the genesis of um

uh the role of commodity exchange in generating real abstraction uh yeah yeah like a more broadly historical like if you adopt the developmental role do you think that could be used to explain um you know again um kind of dualism what son ratham refers to as non-empirical abstraction and so forth? Well, look, I mean, it's a difficult question, but Marx, this famous line of Marx, kind of, the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape, is precisely to say that, I mean, I take that to mean that it's only from within the ambit of the capitalist mode of production

that we can try to kind of retroject the conditions of its development. The mistake would be to think that it's possible to generate a developmental narrative about the evolution of modes of productions and of the basic categories concomitant with these different modes of production and then show how they kind of, you know, they somehow culminate in capital and in the, you know, the social forms proper to capitalism. That would be, yeah, it seems to me that that's precisely what Marx rejects, because he says, in a way, that that's exactly what classical political economy does.

It doesn't understand how categories like production, labor, wealth, etc. are, you know, generated, you know, through the self-consciousness of a historically specific, you know, mode of production. and you cannot simply kind of project them back onto pre-capitalist modes of production, as if they were always there, as if every mode of production can be understood in terms of these invariant features or categories. but nevertheless he says we can talk about something like you know you know we can talk

about production he says you know there's no such thing as production in general but we can you know come up with a viable category of production because our whole kind of society you know cap you know is coordinated around commodity production and then try to kind of to see to chart the extent to which this social category, this historically specific social category, was incompletely or partly operative in these pre-capitalist formations. So I think Marx, the historicity,

or historical consciousness is to be aware that obviously capital is a contingent result of a long kind of historical process of transformation. and we have to try to understand this process without, you know, eternalizing, you know, the categories that are really kind of, you know, specific to capitalism.

And I think it's so that's the challenge. That's what Marx does. He tries to kind of, you know, show how, you know, the, in a way, I mean, it's, you know, that famous kind of, you know, the introduction to the Grundrisse, this kind of, you know, the method of political economy, when he says that it's in a more kind of concretely different, I'm paraphrasing, but more concretely differentiated kind of society. So labor, for instance, labor becomes this common feature of a vast array of distinct human activities in a society like ours, which is more differentiated and has a

greater degree of complexity than previous societies. But nevertheless, we can still see, we can still use this category to understand pre-capitalist societies, so long as we, you know, we don't think that they were all coordinated around labor, okay? In other words, like, for instance, like, if you think about, you know, the distinction between concrete and abstract labor. It's striking that it's only in our society that these otherwise incommensurable types of activities, types of human activities, can all count as forms of labor. They can all

be subsumed under this general category of labor. Things that from programming, you know, writing software to, I don't know, to kind of, to coal mining, okay? What does software, what does software programming and coal mining or metal work have in common in terms of their, you know, they, you know, you could say that, well, they're both, you know, simply to say that they're kind of exerting kind of you know physical and cognitive capacities is kind of you know too general I mean it's it's there's no reason it's like saying that you know but you know by that count like a zebra and a molecule you know have could be kind of commensurated it seems it seems

a completely abstract standard of commensuration. But the fact that all these qualitatively disparate types of activities can be counted as instances of labor shows the kind of, you know, the actuality of abstract labor as a category. So that even in before the instantiation of abstract labor, human beings did things, okay, Okay? Tanning, weaving, navigating, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You could list all the kind of the activities that human beings were engaged in, but only, you know, a relatively small subset of them would have counted as labor within that society.

Okay? And that's the point I think that Marx is making. So it's a mistake to think that even, you know, that concrete labor, the category of concrete labor, that all these qualitatively distinct human activities were all already forms of concrete labor. That's the kind of the ahistorical error that Marx is kind of, you know, I think rejecting. So, you know, I don't want to, you know, and perhaps I sounded too dismissive of, I'm still trying to figure out, you know, I mean, I think Son Rettel's account is, you know, brilliant, but I think there's a problem about saying that, you know, the categories that there's a kind of a, there's a set of categories of conceptual abstraction that are simply kind of, you know, conditioned or determined.

determined by the exchange abstraction. It's just a bit, it seems a bit too simple. I mean, it's a complicated, you know, I haven't, I mean, so I haven't figured out the answer. So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to deny, I wouldn't go so far as, you know, Postone would say, you know there's a sense in which like i'm not sure but like you know i've heard you know there's even a sense in which you could say that the category of class is only peculiar to historically specific to capitalism because if the capitalist class relation is a condition of originary accumulation and of you know then which is a valorization process you could say that it's

illegitimate, for instance, to say that class and class struggle was already kind of operative in pre-capitalist societies. But again, I think that's going too far. I mean, you know, if you can, actually, there's a really good paper by, on this, about the difference between caste and class and how important it is to kind of, to distinguish between these. You could say that the kind of, the Marxian category of class as a structural category, you know, emerges, is, you know, already kind of allows us to understand retrospectively the dynamics of caste in

pre-capitalist societies. But it's a mistake to, you know, to kind of to elide, you know, the distinction between them. So, in other words, you don't want to say, you know, there was no class struggle before capitalism. You want to say that there were like antagonisms of, you know, there was a social stratification, not in a Deleuzean sense, but there were these antagonisms of caste, okay, which then kind of prefigure the radical kind of, you know, the kind of the class antagonism in capitalism. Yeah, I mean, I think also I should just add quickly to that.

I mean, when you're talking about the, if I can, when you're talking about the subsumption of different forms of labor, let's say, under the sort of the rubric of exchange, it's very interesting because, of course, as we know today, you know, most, you know, and of course, we can use the term labor in different senses, right? But most labor isn't necessarily labor that's being performed for value, right? So that shows you how highly equivocal the commodity form is in terms of its operation. It's not like, you know, if you look at what's called sort of unwaged labor, right, or socially reproductive labor, it shows you how highly equivocal the commodity form is, you know, as a general process in that we can't just juxtapose a domain, you know, of today in which everything is subsumed,

you know, with a state in the past in which, you know, far fewer things were subsumed. And in fact, we would have to say that, you know, and Jason Moore and others have went further in this direction, that there's a necessary relationship between exchange and use value, whereby use value in a certain way has to remain use value, or has there has to be a domain of use or excrescence for capitalism or for capital to draw freely from, right? Like to give an archetypal example, like nature is something that is not commodified, right? So, you know, you have people who are kind of reformists on this issue will say, well, we have to commodify nature, right? But it also seems clear that if capitalism really had to pay, sure, yeah, if capitalism really had to pay

for the costs of, you know, natural appropriation, that it probably wouldn't be very functional as a system. One other small note I just want to add is that in Sonrethel's presentation, I think one risk is that early on in intellectual and manual labor, he lays out sort of what he perceives as being the relationship between the exchange analysis or the exchange abstraction and Kant's categories a priori, right? Which leads, I think, many people when they read the book to think, oh, well, you know, he's just saying that the exchange abstraction arrives in these categories are embedded within it. I think the process is a little bit more like actually the one of retroaction that you're describing, which is characteristic of Marx, in the sense that he throughout the book, he chronicles how the exchange abstraction develops historically.

right um you know how it sort of collapses in the middle ages and and is revived you know in quite a radical sense um you know after the foundation of the borgs and with capitalism um and i think in a way um he sees uh cons categories a priori or you know what he thinks of as the epistemologization of the commodity form um as being the consequence of this whole historical process right or insofar as those traits were perhaps latent in it in some way, that they did not, that this historical process was absolutely necessary for that articulation to occur, so that they could be seen retrospectively, right? So I'm not saying you're wrong, you know, in terms of how you present that. I just think it's quite, even in Son Rethel's account, I think that's quite nuanced

as well. Okay, thanks. That's very helpful. Yeah, no, I need to, as I say, I don't have a kind of a ready-made kind of response. So, no, I need to, what you said is actually very helpful. But I'm afraid, yeah, I'm going to have to go now. I'm sorry. I have to call it a day. What I propose is that I'll try to respond to the other questions in the comments next week, perhaps, if we can copy the yeah sure thank you so much this was a really great talk

and thank you everyone for coming today and for your questions and comments thanks Ray thanks thanks again thanks again thanks sure so looking forward to next week's session which is titled human from subversion to compassion hope to see you there all right okay thanks thank you bye