r/Deleuze

I illustrated the first two pages of ao. i figured drawing what i read might be a good way to motivate myself while reading

beside each diagram is a figure number with a reference to the page number and line being interpreted

I'm very curious, I started reading Deleuze in this year, so has there been a trend in the last cirka 2 years? And why so much in 2004?

I am reading more into Lacan and not much into Deleuze, but my main focal point is everything in philosophy that was written on Kafka...

(inspired by Postscript on the Societies of Control, you could argue this is more Kafka's ideas but whatever)

"Their first book was written primarily through letters. This approach to writing completely upset Guattari’s daily life, because it forced him to work alone, which was not his habit, as he had been used to directing his groups. Deleuze expected Guattari to wake up and get to his desk right away, to outline his ideas on paper (he had three ideas per minute), and, without rereading or reworking what he had written, to mail his daily draft. He imposed what he considered to be a necessary process for getting over writer’s block. Guattari followed the rules faithfully and withdrew into his office, where he worked slavishly until four o’clock in the afternoon every day, after which he went to La Borde to quickly make his rounds before returning to Dhuizon, generally around six o’clock. [...] Arlette Donati even brought him his lunch every day because he did not stop working to eat."

- François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 7.

Video: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, episode 5.
Audio: Glare - Void in Blue

This was probably funnier in my head. Wanted to mostly do a meme with the Deleuze waking Guattari up and this anecdote from their biography.

Hi there,

I’m a harpist-pianist-composer/academic in the philosophical-esoteric milieu, about to finish my doctorate. I’ve written about Deleuze a lot in my doctorate and have some published papers on his ideas. So I created an organ-harp-piano music video that is also an experimental film that incorporates Deleuzian ideas. It’s an original philosophical manifesto, and if you are familiar with Deleuze’s ideas, particularly the Difference and Repetition stuff, you’ll notice how I both employ Deleuze’s ideas and transform them.

It's about an oneiric musical language of spiritual hieroglyphs.  And I also combine ideas from Novalis (I’m probably most known as a Novalis scholar in the academic world currently), Schelling, Giordano Bruno, Rudolf Steiner, Boehme, Walter Benjamin (and Kabbalah), also the work of Dianna Reed Slattery.

No AI was used in the making of this song, video, or philosophical text; it is 100% human-created art.

I also created a lot of hand-made animations for it, mainly ancient Egyptian and alchemical motifs.
Hope you enjoy!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh_xwUMb0LY

I've recently been exploring Brassier's writing. See for an example the excellent albeit still-mystifying "Politics of the Rift: On Théorie Communiste".

I wanted to find the final word of Brassier's critique of Deleuze and Guattari, so I read the final chapter Brassier contributed to A THOUSAND PLATEAUS AND PHILOSOPHY, which is a critical survey of "Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines" from ATP.

"Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus" is a powerful piece of writing that goes the distance with its critique of Deleuze and Guattari, but it finds a very particular way of being unable to defeat the object of its critique. So its concluding complaint is that D&G's metaphysics of stratification is both affirmed and necessary to their thought at each turn, but remains undetermined.

Reading it, I agreed with most of the views the essay puts forward. It's a brilliant and technical survey. But where I couldn't catch the vibe was where it came to the gloomy feelings Brassier oozes in his conclusion:

>How do they know? Why should we believe reality is really like that? Dismissing these questions as Kantian hang-ups is a facile rhetorical manoeuvre, unworthy of the seriousness of the book's philosophical ambition. Without stratification, the consistency of A Thousand Plateaus unravels: it is the single thread tying together its fantastically intricate lines of thought. Yet it is the thread that cannot be verifiably tethered to anything outside the book.

Throughout his survey, Brassier identifies each moment of Deleuzo-Guattarian passive synthesis at which the reciprocal action of content and expression fails to achieve the ostensibly "absolute" movement of the plane of consistency or immanence:

>The development or consolidation of consistency is inherently selective. As we know, it is concrete rules that operate the selection and ensure the consolidation.

>Selection becomes creation as participation in the auto-construction of the real. Thus it is the plane (i.e., the mode of connection) that selects itself through the concrete rules of assemblage: connection (consolidation) is the selection of connection. This is a-subjective agency insofar as every selection operated by concrete rules within an assemblage is also the self-selection or auto-consolidation of the plane itself.

—from "Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus" (emphasis mine)

But how do D&G write about the plane of consistency in "Conclusion"?

>The plane of consistency … is opposed to the plane of organization and development. Organization and development concern form and substance: at once the development of form and the formation of substance or a subject. But the plane of consistency knows nothing of substance and form: haecceities, which are inscribed on this plane, are precisely modes of individuation proceeding neither by form nor by the subject … consistency concretely ties together heterogeneous, disparate elements as such: it assures the consolidation of fuzzy aggregates, in other words, multiplicities of the rhizome type. In effect, consistency, proceeding by consolidation, acts necessarily in the middle, by the middle, and stands opposed to all planes of principle or finality.

>The assemblage is tetravalent: (1) content and expression; (2) territoriality and deterritorialization

—from ATP, "Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines"

It's the concrete rules that are said to cause the pragmatic development of the abstract machine or diagram which sustains the phases of qualitatively distinctive "partial consistency" of the singular life of the assemblage, during which it appears to develop according to determinable and determining principles: to express itself scientifically.

But this celestial scientific procession occurs along only one of two bivalent axes of the "tetravalent" assemblage: the axis of content and expression (and so of stratification).

It's along the second axis, the axis of "territoriality and deterritorialisation", that the selection of creative connections causes this game to earn its sense as "the game in which each move changes the rules". These connections are the creative potential of passive synthesis that Brassier's selective survey abrades.

For an assemblage that is said to continue living, these are the moments of the dynamic "cuts" of ANTI-OEDIPUS: the value-destroying « coupures-détachements » of relative deterritorialisation, as flows disappear from an a-subjective consciousness undergoing organisation; the subjectivating or value-creating « coupures-restes » of relative territorialisation, as flows are conjoined with an a-subjective consciousness undergoing organisation.

These cuts, it is emphasised in ANTI-OEDIPUS, are the creative operations of an otherwise drearily determined synthetic dyad of connection–selection: habit, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. Cuts and breakdowns of the flows of desire transform the concrete rules (the conditions of desire) of each assemblage that is said upon the cut to go on living.

Cuts and breakdowns of desire are thus the "production of production" and are the moments of Brassier's "real autoproduction". Rather than dogmatic or habitual selections among the transformations already possible for the abstract machine, these cuts and breakdowns are the contingent real events that force the reproduction of real life as difference for some a-subjective "divine judgement".

So where Brassier asks "How do [D&G] know?" we can answer: they don't.

Deleuze and Guattari's "absolute" of immanence is within its "relative" and vice versa, and this non-orientability is Deleuze's critique of good sense, reinforced within "Geology of Morals":

>The different figures of content and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by considering the strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the standpoint of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order can be reversed …

—from ATP, "Geology of Morals"

ATP's "paeans to the primacy of exteriority", as Brassier terms them, concern its manner: this prior exteriority of relations relates to contingent life in a way that confuses any determination of an orderly living interior.

The plane of consistency is not an absolute, but an absolute manner of the immersion of a relativity of content and expression in some greater immanent multiplicity. The strata always come at least in pairs: if you discover or access a new plane, this plane functions only with some other plane. There can be no stratification of expression without the "basement" of content, but any such basement is not given as the "ground floor" or bedrock of the real.

One terrific example of this non-oriented stratification is given by Deleuze and Guattari as the relative limit of the axiomatic of capital (abstract machine) with reference to the absolute limit of the body of capital (the concrete conditions of capitalist social-reproduction: the BwO of the capitalist socius).

Can the developing determinations of the axiomatic of capital fall to the creative potentials of capitalist social life? Can we imagine the end of capitalism? They don't know—and nor does western Marxism.

Where, as Brassier cites a few times, D&G write that a body (an assemblage) has "irreducible parts" that "occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex" (ATP 509), the "vortex" to which D&G refer is precisely expressed by the thermodynamics of Prigogine as the relative movement of a dissipative structure. Such a structure is a "sustainable" maelstrom of relative order that lives with an autopoeisis extracting apparently formless energies from its immanent substrate, by way of which it fashions and refashions the metastable appearance of structured values: the assemblages of its milieu.

Relative to this stratification, D&G's contention with their theory of the abstract machine could be said to be that every such apparently structuring order takes its contingently sustainable life as a relative movement of the absolute movement of the second law of thermodynamics.

So where Brassier asks "Why should we believe reality is really like that?" we could answer: because we can. Where Nick Bostrom can posit a "simulation theory" in which the apparent contingency of a universe which limits scientific observation could be the effect of some difficult-to-imagine, inaccessible and immanent computation, we can act like scientists and affirm: if the Universe is an effect, it appears to us as a contingent effect, and an effect of which the causes do not completely appear to us.

Why should we believe that is the contingent and finite speed of light? Because so far we cannot seem to reliably make the machines run any faster.

Brassier writes, in relation to this "indiscernible" separation of absolute and relative:

>In order to stave off this indiscernibility, it must be possible to measure degrees of deterritorialisation relative to an absolute movement …

But what would this intend and why would we want to stave it off?

Let's say what science says, give or take: the Universe is a contingency of which the incrementally deterritorialising or sustained thermodynamic life appears to us, where dissipative structures are not sustaining order, to develop according to the abstract machinery of the absolute movement of the second law of thermodynamics, and to be approaching some zero intensity at the limit of material formlessness: entropic heat death.

But this zero intensity, too, remains relative to any hypothesis of an absolute zero. This hypothesis abides absent any empirical negation. The sciences do not claim to reliably predict a final equilibrium temperature of the Universe. There is the ongoing confusion of theories of dark matter, but science does tend to agree any equilibrium temperature will not be 0° K, but instead some fractional but non-zero tepid equilibrium warmth that may remain imperfectly quantified right up to some non-negated non-end in the predicted dreary, soupy habits of a contingent thermal asymptosis of reality.

So again, where it is asked "Why should we believe reality is really like that?" the answer can be not only because we can, but also because it appears to be unethical not to believe reality is really like that. It could be said the groundless affirmation of absolutely ungrounded contingency has been the most serious ambition open to philosophy for some time … and the rest has been a relative science. We have to find reasons to believe in this world ...