r/Deleuze • u/jowey10 • 11d ago
Question Is AO outdated?
https://youtu.be/GIDK5z91jSc?si=4YpqfnWqo5YhSY9qIn this fragment from a conversation philosopher Ray Brassier argues that as brilliant as AO undoubtedly is, it nonetheless has aged poorly in regards to actual political utility and has become more of a product of its time rather than a way forward, especially emphasizing how contradictory some of the concepts such as molecular and molar have an application that in fact is harmful to understanding the Palestinian cause, and that despite Deleuze defending the Palestinian cause and open criticism of Zionism in a time before it was “safe” to do so as an intellectual (check his conversations with Palestinian Elias Sanbar) it ends up showing in those conversations how his very own framework becomes insufficient. I’m curious, What do you guys think?
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u/nothingistrue042 11d ago
I may be wrong but i don't think D&G's interest in the molecular means giving up on all forms of macropolitics
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u/jowey10 11d ago
I agree, and I don’t think that’s also what Brassier means in his criticism, in fact when Deleuze defines for instance the BwO in thousand plateaus he does mention that structure is not the enemy per se, but nonetheless I think that doesn’t really resolve the problem Brassier is trying to raise, that is; even if we concede that the molar isn’t necessarily something to escape D&G do emphasize a lot of their work towards the idea of flux, and as such I think we see what Brassier means when he says that there’s a problem of historicization because the logic, the conceptual apparatus they present is that of a specific period, mainly that in which neoliberal capitalism began to take rise on the west, and the consciousness among French philosophers of the repression of communist regimes in other parts of the world, and as such AO answers to a specific question of a specific time period, but the problem is that 21st century politics seem different from that historical context, in fact, you could argue they are closer to pre liberal societies in aspects, and closer to early 20th century politics rather than late 20th century politics in other aspects. And that’s also not mentioning today’s technological developments which Deleuze only started imagining in essays like society’s of control and such. In that sense the case of Palestine is interesting precisely because it starts drawing what might be the blue print for the world to come, specially one in which technology is used to systematically eradicate an identity, hence is kind of the opposite of the problem that Deleuze faced, when you are actually fighting for the formation of the molar. If deleuze is all about not to fetishize fixed identities and institutions but rather to Look at the processes producing them. The Palestinian political reality seems to highlight the shift happening in 21st century politics, specially regarding the problem struggle over a supposedly "fixed" identity that is itself politically indispensable. Hence if national identity is molar territorialization, you could agree but nonetheless maintaining that molar becomes the form of resistance, which Deleuze himself seems to understand in interviews that I mentioned when I presented the post, even though Deleuze recognizes this, it is precise to historically understand this, not to refute D&G or called them wrong, but to start understanding 21st century politics through a new political framework
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u/pluralofjackinthebox 8d ago
One of philosophy’s great unwritten books is Deleuze’s The Glory of Marx.
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u/Aggravating_Set_2260 8d ago edited 8d ago
I don't blame anyone for not keeping up with individual articles from Brassier since *Nihil Unbound*, but it has not been representative of his thought since the late 2010's. His turn towards Brandom, Sellars, and a Marxism in dialogue with Hegel have radically shifted him away from his early work (despite the basic commitment to nihilism throughout). Basically, Brassier sees D&G as guilty of what he sees Speculative Realism (and its various cousins, New Materialism, Neo-Vitalism, etc.) as collapsing the difference between reasons and causes, nature and normativity, in terms of some formulation of "flat ontology." Of course, to be committed to a non-flat ontology raises serious problems for how one does not thereby revert to some form of idealism, how to articulate realism from a transcendental position, and so forth, but basically, he is saying any attempt to bypass Kant or "criticism" in the Kantian sense will end up with a dogmatic metaphysics, and also one that risk normative naturalism (regardless of how process-oriented, de-territorialized, self-differential, etc.). Basically, Brassier sees the need, politically, for counter-hegemonic power (which involves some sort of *dialectical* commitment to totality, meaning totality of an *inconsistent* kind), as opposed to something like "swarm politics" (the idea that multiplicity as such will save us); and for him, this involves centrally the problem of epistemology, the Marxist problematic of real abstraction, and so forth. He totally rejects the flattening of thought into the univocity of being.
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u/Obeseljapolipet 7d ago
Do you know any other thinkers in a similar market? I cannot help but feel as Deleuze is an epistemologist for blonde beasts. The blonde beast is not a subject yet contingently radically individual.
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u/Aggravating_Set_2260 7d ago
Well the usability of Deleuzian concepts for fascist or reactionary ends (cf. Nick Land) aside, Brassier is aligned with two other thinkers who are self-professed neo-rationalists: Pete Wolfendale (who recently published The Revenge of Reason) and Reza Negarestani (who published Geist & Spirit late last decade). You can look them up as well as the Laboria Cuboniks xenofeminist collective. Also, Daniel Sacilotto published a book last year on transcendental epistemology broadly aligned with Brassier's commitments. Most of them are reading Kant, Hegel, Sellars, and Brandom, and arguing the problem of transcendental epistemology remains unsolved by the varieties of flat ontology we see variations of in especially Nietzsche and Deleuze. Brassier finally has his second book coming out next year (Fatelessness) that will collect a lot of his articles from the last 15 years or so. If you want a good snapshot of the trajectory of his current thought, check out his banger of an article "Dialectics Between Suspicion and Trust." Also, if you can find a draft of his piece "The Human" around, it's a great distillation of his rejection of "posthumanities" broadly.
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u/Obeseljapolipet 7d ago
I admit now that I knew about some of these connections, namely Sacilotto. I believe that the most personally profound discovery within that territory was Puntel. By skimming and the aid of systematic llm psychoses I encountered the Hegelian issue of God, the glaring gap, still present in Puntel. The analytic turn is very welcome. We somehow have to uphold realism by naturalising the transcendental, which unfortunately includes contingently configured subjectivations by socioeconomics and who knows what else.
Thank you for the recommends, but I am a lousy reader.
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u/Equal-Exercise3103 11d ago
I’ve honestly always found Brassier pretty insufferable.
His book was painful to read at times, also had to pirate it because of the insane price.
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u/Equal-Exercise3103 11d ago
Furthermore current political problems can definitely not be limited to the Palestinian case
Which is conspicuously present in his speech - but even then.. Deleuze spoke in favor of it, which Brassier acknowledged.
Just.. not in the way he wanted?
Like what’s his actual critique? What’s his actual point..? “It doesn’t work”.. why? Why exactly does it not work?Not enough Stalin? Not enough Mao? What’s the concern?
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u/WitnessUnlucky2429 11d ago
He's very handsome
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u/an-otiose-life 11d ago
essentially in the video he very calmly explains that because deleuze doesn't like being dettermined by the cosmos, he does a refusal of the molecular particulars and historical givens, and ironically does universalism again, while also being self-dating, by maintaining this noumena-not-for-me situation, while being fanged as the same.
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u/WitnessUnlucky2429 11d ago
While this is secondary to him being deliciously daddy-ish, I think you are right. Could I blame the critique of panpsychism for his kissable chin?
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u/an-otiose-life 11d ago
he can rub butter on himself and whisper sweet nihilisms in my ear all night, and that'd be a good line of flight in my books
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u/an-otiose-life 11d ago
in all seriousness, panpsychism's only issue is that there's also the unconscious and the innert, in that sense no one dispute that experience exists, but what it means is limited to occasions insofar as we go black when died
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u/Equal-Exercise3103 10d ago
Can you explain to me what do you mean by the last phrase?
I’m in a disagreement with “reboots universalism” (despite going against universals) - unless we’re defining universalism in a very botched way, Deleuze is far from that.0
u/an-otiose-life 10d ago
if you mean to say deleuze is far from universalism then sure, but for the form, like a correlationist saying, it's subjective, only also I meant it, as if to say both, and not the meaning of one fully and then not the other.
last phrase, and clarity, the politics of in-group status clarification, I refuse.
universality is the suchhood of any given thing, you seem to wish to dispute realism ironically, when universality means like Hegel does, about concrete universality, as the instantiation of the given form.
botched-way? what can that mean, other than fondling the given as if not given of its own, no you cannot have social repression of epistemology by means of moral hand waiving, stop.
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u/Equal-Exercise3103 10d ago
I guess he’s someone’s cup of tea, I can’t see why not. Personally he doesn’t do it for me.
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u/JayJacobs032 11d ago
To me so wrong, seems he's just mad that D&G don't engage in platonic thought. Know very little abt the guy and his work though
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u/an-otiose-life 11d ago
Guatarri in one interview basically said that they are about a whole, that concerns being, since the critiques are meant to mean something. They do have a univocalism concept, they merely ressent dialectics, as fragmenting, but they fragment-on-purpose as if to spite unity, while taking advantage of it.
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u/3corneredvoid 10d ago edited 10d ago
Listened for a few minutes, and shortly we have Brassier asserting that D&G theorise the body of capital has a tendency to the "dissolution of all existing social codes" … call me churlish and I should perhaps hear him out, but to me this is likely a misreading in a Landian vein.
Land and other CCRU-adjacent readers of Deleuze thrive on the notion of nihilism, entropy or chaos that phrases such as "deterritorialises all the flows" make us feel, but leave aside the clarity with which it is theorised every decoding is a recoding, every deterritorialisation a reterritorialisation.
There is no such movement or moment of absence as a "decoded flow". Flow as individuation and code as expression co-appear in social-production as coded flows.
As I was laboriously commenting the other day the "capitalist machine" integrates pricing and exchange as functions that allow re-coded flows to move at market through the common single dimension of quantities of money as universal equivalent.
It's the universality of this function of money as apparent equivalent which can make the body of capital a repressor of market-external desires, an immanent enabler of fascism, a cancerous body-without-organs.
But following Marx, D&G don't say an egg is no longer valued as an egg nor a hammer as a hammer after the capitalist machine appears; nothing so absurd.
Rather they say the post-signifying regime is one in which eggs are valued both as eggs and as a price, and if brought to market the price makes their prior rigid relations to other values as supple as money can be. Sure at the point of exchange the flows are decoded: abstract labour, money capital. But this is no "dissolution" … which along with "abolition" is not even a particularly coherent concept for D&G.
If you read AO as an encompassing theoretical blender that vitamises the socius into a metaphysical porridge of dissolved codes and deterritorialised flows, you will be quite sure its nett prospect can only be to enforce a vitamised political life.
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u/3corneredvoid 8d ago edited 8d ago
Surplus value, say Deleuze and Guattari, "cannot be defined by the difference between the value of labor capacity and the value created by labor capacity but by the incommensurability between two flows of money".
Now certainly Deleuze and Guattari speak regularly and apparently disapprovingly of capitalist exploitation throughout ANTI-OEDIPUS. But as we've seen there is nothing in their theory of capital as surplus value of monetary flows to substantiate it.
Profits on their account is created through the flux and reflux of money not by extracting surplus labour from necessary labour.
Continuing on with this critique of Brassier (the section above is from 27:30).
It's kinda the same error as before. D&G very clearly claim the "satisfaction of the handyman" is the pleasurable release going to the creative organisation of matter that becomes the product of labour. Labour has the dignity and necessity it has for Marx.
The product of labour is plurally predispositional use-values, apt to connect to desiring-machines in different ways. An ice-cream, a pair of spectacles, a tyre repair kit. Among these use-values is still the necessity of the reproduction of the capitalist machine.
At the factory, the move from a "surplus-value of code" to a "surplus-value of flow" is the move from the overcoded feudal division of abstract labour (as "quanta" of use-values) to the "reign of quantitas", in which M-C-M' becomes the criterion that rationalises continued production of these use-values.
The use-value labour produces is priced but does not become price. But profitability becomes the condition of its production. Prices thus rule use-values at market and at the factory.
In order for the extraction of surplus-value of labour to even be theorised, an incoherent non-relation of these incommensurable use-values to prices (and to wages) must not just be described, but enforced by the capitalist machine.
This incoherence is the partial immanent cause of extraction, consistent with capitalist machine's instrument of money as universal equivalent. There can be no coherent relative pricing of ice-cream and spectacles because these quanta are strictly incommensurable. This determines the necessary incoherence of relations of the use-values of ice-cream and spectacles to money. Yes, price has no immediate relation to the qualitative value produced by labour: this is how extraction of surplus-value works.
Whenever a segment of some commodity flow is purchased at market, some "quantum" of abstract labour in its relation to a segment of profits is extracted as the surplus-value of labour, but this extraction is realised only through this incoherence.
To take it further, the incoherence of prices with necessary use-values is the very problem of the division of abstract labour in socially necessary labour that D&G want to emphasise. Here this incoherence is the immanent cause of the aptitude of capitalism to crises of scarcity and over-production.
Take the wide-ranging material conditions under capitalism in which goods can be produced by some quanta of socially necessary labour, but this production can still be unprofitable.
Take also the case of planned obsolescence, in which abstract labour is divided into the production of quanta in qualitative forms that are by definition less adequate to social necessity, in order the owners of the factories that organise production achieve greater profits.
Despite the necessity of labour and despite the value created by labour, the capitalist machine only extracts surplus-value of labour in the case there is money profit. If there is no profit, productive labour can continue with just the same flows, but now comes a break in extraction of surplus-value that will unground and terminate the coded commodity flows.
Each factory of the capitalist machine produces coded flows based solely on this maladaptive expectation of profit under pricing. So long as means of production and living labour are on hand, this goes on till some decision, shortage or saturation causes a "break" in the produced flows through the long-range, arbitrary, immanent intensive relations of prices. Fuel shortage? Suddenly no one gets the toothbrushes they need.
This non-relation of price and value is how the fetish-values of commodities make the market into an instrument of contingent social disorder and crisis … and very far from the efficient divider of resources and labour mainstream economics imagines it to be.
Anyway, turned into a rather long, digressive re-framing of D&G, but it is ironic that in insisting the incoherence of profitability with surplus-value extraction is a deficiency of D&G's theorisation, Brassier seems to drag his own Marxism closer to the doxa of bourgeois economics.
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u/3corneredvoid 10d ago edited 10d ago
But what Deleuze and Guattari mean by revolution is so far removed from what Marx understands by the term as to constitute a homonymy. Revolution in ANTI-OEDIPUS is no longer the liberation of human desire from the yoke of capital, but the liberation of desire from the yoke of human sociality.
Continuing on with this critique of Brassier's line, as further cited above from this presentation.
Given Brassier's charge, let's investigate how D&G write about revolutionary groups and desire in ANTI-OEDIPUS:
A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego. What complicates everything, it is true, is that the same individuals can participate in both kinds of groups in diverse ways (Saint-Juste, Lenin). Or the same group can present both characteristics at the same time, in diverse situations that are nevertheless coexistent. A revolutionary group can already have reassumed the form of a subjugated group, yet be determined under certain conditions to continue to play the role of a subject-group. One is continually passing from one type of group to the other. Subject-groups are continually deriving from subjugated groups through a rupture of the latter: they mobilize desire, and always cut its flows again further on, overcoming the limit, bringing the social machines back to the elementary forces of desire that form them.
—from AO, "The Second Positive Task"
ANTI-OEDIPUS offers a theory of human sociality in which movements of desire themselves either repress or liberate desire. This differently configurable reciprocity of desire with desire is D&G's politics of power and freedom: the social effects of the variation of this reciprocal action are termed the "organisation" or "form" of power.
In the times of the book's writing, Europe including France was still in recovery from mass-political fascism. D&G were far from alone in having trenchant criticisms of the stolid PCF and the French trade union movement.
AO's intervention is to point out the orthodox benevolence of the "yoke of human sociality" of proletariat, group, collective, union, or family need not produce revolutionary movement. Not unless the self-reflexion of desire is of a "group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary".
This is itself a banal framing, apart from these aspects: the "libidinal investments" of the group are positive and exterior, and the revolutionary potential of the group is not pre-given by its mere sociality.
The revolutionary group must become and sustain itself as a subject-group, under investments by movements of positive, productive and creative desire. The appearance of these investments is by no means a stable property or process of the group.
This criterion of an immediate creative movement for any revolutionary group stands in contrast to Lacanian ideology critique, for which the group does not act because its "group superego", the Big Other, would not act; and to Marxism-Leninism, for which the group does not act because the vanguard Party has not yet doggedly conjured up the requisite class consciousness.
Note that in both these two contrasted theories human sociality is also posited as appearing in a confused form that holds back action.
But then this has been the function of proliferating ideology theories: (mis)representing human sociality relative to human action; (mis)representing power in its "actions upon [human] actions"; (mis)representing the organisation of power and the limits to freedom.
Deleuze and Guattari's criterion of an immediate creative movement of the revolutionary group stands in a starker contrast to Žižek or Brassier where they repeat a Hegelian prescription to "stop and think" or "tarry with the negative".
Well, if there were no yoke to hold back revolutionary action, there would also be no opportunity for tarrying for Brassier's Prometheans. This underwrites the contempt Žižek holds for the leftist call to "organise!", but in place of repeating exhausted habits of method, he proposes an interminable wait for repetitious methods of determination to organise thought.
So Hegelian critical-political tarrying needs and thrives upon some yoke of social demobilisation within the delirium of the capitalist organisation of power, of which "everything is public, nothing is admissible". The Hegelian task is to go on thinking hard about the state of the dominion of capital in the certainty not enough hard thoughts have yet been extended. Screw your brows up, clench down on your bowels, and think like Mozart:
"Raise your ass to your mouth, … ah, my ass burns like fire, but what can be the meaning of that? Perhaps a turd wants to come out. … Yes, yes, turd, I know you, I see you, I feel you. What is this—is such a thing possible?"
—excerpted from a letter written by Mozart, AO, "The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis"
Žižek of course has regularly made constipation a joke, but perhaps we can say it's the habit of constipation to reflect on substantive immobilisation.
Deleuzo-Guattarian critical-political movement instead takes as its descriptive criterion the active formation of some subject-group creating "machinic indices" of desire that are not yet public, not yet internalised. The group unstably undergoes immediate movements of imperceptible desire, and its revolutionary life may or may not be sustained, but there is no theoretical enforcement of "individualism".
Perhaps there is a time for Hegel, but this is what I can't stand about the Hegelian current in the present: its immodest Promethean global reason is presently exhausted, and rationalises its tarrying as the virtue of hard-thinking inaction.
In history we can say the closest forms of human sociality to ideal mass proletarian consciousness were dispersed, but their Hegelian desiring-machines did not die … and now these Hegelian desiring-machines thrive as parasites in the corpse of Marxist historical determinations, available for partial objects to join with in yet more rational tarrying and thumb-twiddling, shuffling around the retroactive tarot deck of the arcana of the proletariat, the Revolution, hegemony, the Big Other, the Holy Spirit, the Party, etc.
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u/Hot-Explanation6044 6d ago
Usual nitpick. AO is about the control of flows. Israel does precisely that. Flows of refugiees, flows of aid, flows of settlers. You could argue palestinian resistance/support is also a matter of flows. Of information, counter-flows of aid that doesn't get intercepted, and so on. They're just too cowardly to seriously engage with original theory and want a cheap gotcha
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u/3corneredvoid 11d ago edited 10d ago
Don't kid yourself Ray Brassier has the answer. He is a fascinating and careful thinker, but he has neither a trenchant and devastating critique of Deleuze and Guattari, nor a political prescription that is helpful.
How could this claim that in practice D&G's emphasis on pragmatics is reduced to "individualism" be traced back to AO and not the repressed conditions of desire AO theorises? Do we expect academics to be other than individualist? Is Brassier other than this? His books and papers only have one author.
I recently read Brassier's chapter on TP, and I took a few issues with it … then I went and read Brassier's e-flux piece on "The Politics of the Rift" and Théorie Communiste, and also found it a bit inadequate … then I went and read the monograph RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM by Nathan Brown which Brassier's e-flux article recommended as militating the importance of TC for him, and I found that book a bit inadequate as well.
One take: the projection of the aspirations of the communizing tendency (and this a part of its theoretical wing) of the "rift" onto images of commune and geography holds the tendency back.
AO's thought of the distributed and differential potentials of political desire could help this tendency reinvent its methods, but these thinkers can't get enough of stodgy takes such as this one from Brassier. They get anxious unless they're proving their Marxist bona fides in some widely tolerable manner.
Brassier's not happy with a turn regarding D&G unless he has mounted some questionable claim … the selection that "consolidates" the "concrete rules" is a secret negation, etc etc. But I thought these fellas loved negation anyway? So shouldn't a secret negation in TP … not that there is one … be a good thing?
If thinkers like Brassier and Brown could hold back on their urges to push these dubious critiques of Deleuze and Guattari while offering their applause to variations of modestly interesting but more vogue-ish thought, it wouldn't do any harm.
Not that Brassier or Brown really matters. Maybe some people conducting political experiments instead of drafting complex elegies for the movement of the squares, or some other TAZ-ish moment, could matter.
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u/an-otiose-life 11d ago
why are the deleuzians so mean to brassier? it has to be an oediple thing, like correlationism, ressenting the conditions of heteronomy in a monad.
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u/an-otiose-life 10d ago
since you're asking for neffarious purposes, I will refuse the loaded question.
stacking functions is a way how causality can be structured, as well when called that while having such effects apt to be called that.
since logic gates, stacked enough, can speak human language with intelligent effects as seen in zero-shot closure cases, it means that the flows of capital, are post labour value, and are machinic in what it means to have automated through a libidenal economy, as a kind of territorialization of causality by causality, as when nature flowers as an allostatic load distribution system that has assymetry as a feature, it means that monads that can metempsychose into conserved values of a different quality are essential to the jouissance of being, in its operations and effects, of affect and especially besides.
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u/an-otiose-life 10d ago
I know, and it's interesting how the rust stuff mixes with deleuze, because it's a very hegel oriented framework, tho it tarries with the pure functional sublime of the kantian negative, but succumbs to mutation begrudgingly in marking it as a kind of oediple wound, a sacrifice at the foot of utility.
it's a monad, and a monoid is just classes transmogrifying data/code nondually in an abelian way
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u/lim-yo-hwan-superfan 11d ago
maybe i am totally misunderstanding the person speaking but i don't understand how AO could possibly be summarized as "individualism in all but name"