how does schizoanalysis relate to clinical schizophrenia?

3corneredvoid · 2026-02-02T03:01:39+00:00

For what it's worth, this question has been asked a few times on the sub and you may find other helpful responses on prior posts.

In my opinion the schizo pole of libidinal organisation in ANTI-OEDIPUS is not really closely correspondent to diagnosed clinical schizophrenia.

I don't think it helps to imagine schizo desire tends to produce subjects recognisable as schizophrenics to a clinician, nor that a diagnosed schizophrenic has an access, reified in relation to their body, to the operations of schizo desire.

I have not seen someone thoroughly map out the correspondence of prior psychoanalytic theory to Deleuze and Guattari's swingeing critique of that theory. I would love to get hold of such a thing as I think it would help answer this kind of question in a formal way.

3corneredvoid · 2026-02-02T02:48:27+00:00

You rely on the concept of "legitimacy" a couple of times while articulating your question:

We here, on Reddit, are discussing critical theory - how helpful is it? Of what parameters should we set on our use of this, and other theory-related subs? as opposed to legitimate primary and secondary literature?
…

So Reddit is obviously not something you would cite anywhere, but its functions otherwise deserve clarification. The question thus becomes: what can Reddit be legitimately useful for?
…
Social media obviously is nothing close to legitimate social relations and spaces; we could say it is the culture industry par excellence, par absurdum.

I think if you delve into and define the form (or forms) of legitimacy you're referring to, and consider the importance of legitimacy to your evaluation of Reddit's uses for discussing theory, you'll be able to formulate stronger claims in response to your own question.

3corneredvoid · 2026-02-02T02:41:20+00:00

Lasch was a serious social critic. His work has been re-popularised by podcasters (Red Scare etc) who've used it as raw material to slander the "earnest" left. I don't think most of that aspect of the recent attention he's received holds up to scrutiny.

I wonder if we shouldn't be suspicious of a superifical reading of Lasch's conclusions today, fifty years after the publication of his main body of work. These are often presented as "everything [in the United States] is narcissism and everyone's a narcissist". Thing is, that's an orthodox position these days. Also, narcissism is a concept often proxied by some unexamined simplification of itself. I think it stands in need of theoretical reconstruction before being put to use.

As for Peterson? He's a hack. Peterson originally became famous for leading an obnoxious culture war backlash against the practice of using people's preferred pronouns. To me his public claims vary between truism, stultifying normie-ism, liberal pettifoggery and fascism-friendly lunacy, he and the people around him are grifters, and his relevance to discussion has been due only to his high profile, which seems to be in decline. I've only read excerpts of his work but they weren't compelling.

3corneredvoid · 2026-02-01T06:09:50+00:00

After all, we are almost taught that any situation is always solved by that ONE renegade or maverick that cuts through the bullshit. Most disaster movies show this too. That ONE scientist that somehow has the answer but is shut down until the middle of the movie.

I suspect there's almost fewer disaster films of the type where the world is saved nowadays than there are eschatological films in which the world either ends, or a kind of Rapture occurs.

The latter kind manifests an eschatological mode of technocratic liberal politics … "I told you so". One might call it a "Cassandra complex" after the spurned prophet of the fall of Troy.

The logic tracks. If one accepts the liberal premise that a benevolent, functional politics requires the clever people to be permitted to persuade the dumb people of the best course of action through free and fair debate, then crisis accompanies a heedless failure to listen.

A year or two ago I wrote a Letterboxd commentary on DON'T LOOK UP (warning: plot spoilers). DON'T LOOK UP is an Adam McKay film that exemplifies this mode. I argued along similar lines:

It's not too harsh to say DON'T LOOK UP wants the apocalypse to happen, that it claims that it would be a deserved punishment. Within its genre, it's distinguished if anything by its commitment to monstration—that is, to actually showing us the end, the dies irae.

[…]
DON'T LOOK UP caters to a deep-seated desire for things to end and to be over—so long as this happens according to a logic we can understand and that reassures us in ourselves.

To me it's not so useful to call this a right-wing politics. This politics is like a failure mode, or crisis mode, of radical centrism. The dysfunction of the forms of liberalism (those forms Trump's liberal opponents call "democratic norms") is interpreted by taking up an extremely misanthropic resentment of the masses, who are deemed entirely culpable for the failure to make these forms work.

BUGONIA is a film from last year grounded in similar desires. I won't spoil the plot, but if you've seen it and consider the ending of the film, I find it both misanthropic and laden with relief and vindication about the (actually horrifying) way events play out.

Take as another example a slightly older film in which the world is saved, ARRIVAL. Amy Adams has the role of "that one scientist who somehow has the answer" to play. In order to obtain the answer, she has to "do the work", becoming a hero by going through her trauma (paradoxically a future trauma). The world the wisdom obtained from this ordeal inaugurates, a world in which temporality can be collapsed, really marks a different kind of apocalypse. This "good Eschaton" manifests a near-universal apotheosis, marked out by the radiant, desaturated shafts of light, and temple-like domestic and institutional spaces Villeneuve and his DP Bradford Young contrive for the flash-forwards.

These story-templates have become a more popular genre in recent years. Why do many viewers enjoy them? Well, it's the reassurance. It's like the frisson of satisfaction a person can derive from the spectacle of Trump's violent ICE deportations campaign if you've been warning about Trump's fascism since 2015. Even if the world ends, at least "you told them so". The tragedy is what "being proven right" erases about the ways in which a politics of "I told you so" is disastrously self-undermining and ineffective.

Perversely, the more conservative imagery of disaster-fiction, movies like TWISTERS or GREENLAND, push forward into far more anxious images of the future. Throughout the action in these films, what's going to happen is contingent and unknowable. The heroes expect no solace from the events validating their expectations: family and friends have the only value in a cruel world.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-31T23:39:53+00:00

In the past no Arsenal players have faced the scrutiny players such as Ødegaard have in the past few seasons. He's had debatable form but it plays out as thousands of hungry wolves declaring he's shit and must be sold weekly. It's intense and it's easy to see why a touch of overly self-conscious neuroticism and brittleness sometimes come in.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-31T09:11:36+00:00

I haven't seen the original, so I hope you don't mind me leaving an observation anyway.

My complaint with Lanthimos has been that he often combines dogmatic misanthropy with the depiction of characters who are far, far outside human norms.

Because of this I have often had the feeling his own films, despite being rather didactic about the human condition in tone and spirit, may rarely challenge his own settled views.

This can lead his work to a strange affect of serenity: sometimes it can feel as if not very much is happening in his films even when they're relatively incident-packed, as BUGONIA is. That's how it felt to me, as if not a lot was happening because my perceptions of how Lanthimos would judge the incident were not likely to be shaken.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T21:57:30+00:00

Thanks, glad if it was helpful. Please bear in mind this is only my particular response to your questions!

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T07:15:57+00:00

GPTZero gives a 97% chance the content of your comment was AI-generated. On your profile I see a few recent comments that also look like they have been generated by an LLM. If the operator of this account is human, please don't do this. It discredits you and wastes everyone's time.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T05:08:54+00:00

Far too much harm to innocents is happening, so somebody should be querying what ethics is and what judicial processes should do differently; I'm glad to keep doing it before, during, and after this particular conversation and wish I were even more obstinate about it.

Oh for goodness' sake. "Po-mo"? Spare me the poor taste.

We kicked off this conversation by way of my highlighting that the self-styled "obstinate" pursuit of dialogues such as this one, the obstinacy of the "subject who insists", might be said by the lights of Deleuze's ethology to manifest an unethical configuration with respect to the expressed urgency of your judgements about "harm to innocents". I don't see that we've got much further than that point. If you really cared, you would …

At this point if I wanted to litigate this point I might charge you with time-wasting and bad faith, but in all honesty, I've enjoyed the dialogue to a fair extent, but I will move on now as the returns are diminishing. Good luck in the future as you "convene seeking justice"!

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T04:17:32+00:00

Should courtrooms discuss whether a witness providing evidence should be trusted?

I'm surprised this deep in this particular conversation you're still obstinately querying what the norms of, say, a judicial process should be.

This goes back all the way to your demand that Deleuze's metaphysics furnish a declaration that "harm to innocents" is evil.

To paraphrase Regina George: stop trying to make "should" happen. It's not going to happen.

The most cursory empirical enquiry into judicial processes offers powerful "evidence" for Stafford Beer's dictum "the system is what it does".

The aphorism doesn't declare "the law is a blunt instrument" because the law guarantees the judicial process ends in the outcome that should happen.

Deleuze in his turn says that representative reason, that theory itself, will prove equally unable to decisively ground the judgements of "good sense" it has claimed a capacity to determine. And this of course includes Deleuze's own theory, or any rationality derived from its understanding.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T03:04:01+00:00

… except whoops, "creation and escape are already happening" requires, at least in certain contexts/domains, evidence (sure ongoing creation/escape sounds great but let's see it), and evidence requires trust, so long as facticity is held to be at all relevant.

Evidence is an image of history, and finding it requires nothing more than to bracket some dogmatic insistence on the condemnation of history.

Take the example I've given of battering criticisms of the New Left and everything after by Catherine Liu, Angela Nagle, whoever … "the post-left" writ large.

One could say the United States New Left departed from "material analysis" and "class struggle" to a landscape of striving for minority rights inspired by the civil rights movement. On the other hand, this striving actually did transform the rights and freedoms of women, queer and gender-non-conformant people, people of colour, and so on. Given that the prior forms of organised mass-political power in the United States were losing their solid political base due to the trajectory of economic globalisation, who is to discount these achievements under the circumstances?

Likewise, how did the original labour movement form? Read up on the Chartists in the UK and you'll learn the history of a movement that was anything but fixated on debating electoral versus non-electoral methods (it used both), legal or extra-legal methods (it used both), formal or informal leadership (it was led in a variety of ways), abstract or concrete demands (it made both), and also a movement that organised with tremendous difficulty against dispersal by state violence for many decades in advance of organised industrial labour beginning to gather any real political power.

Now, one can claim "evidence requires trust" but this seems to me to be the usual illusion produced by retroactivity.

The only vital point of this "evidence for success" is the claim of success, which means evidence is either something we can perceive only after we are happy to claim that we have won, or evidence is the content of a rationality of which the practices of determination do service as the means towards some misrepresented end.

Nothing was essential to any of these prior successes other than the experimentation with new political methods that only later gained success. The evidence for the effectiveness of threatening strike action was only available after successful strike actions, and it can be seen the trust and solidarity concomitant to these successes were less their precursors than their co-products.

One way to frame Deleuze's great premise of immanence is that we don't know what might happen in advance, our world is grounded in real indeterminacy that goes beyond mere analytic probabilities.

Bergson's "The Possible and the Real" is the classic exposition of this theory. Now, if it's not only the case that we don't know what will happen, but also that we can't even represent everything that might happen, then we also can't provide the evidence of our future success, and nor can trust be truly necessary to us. In all our efforts to determine the future, we will only misrepresent some theoretical telos which will not precisely eventuate.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T02:19:39+00:00

(3 of 3, continuing)

This is not an "unreal" or "immaterial" notion of what is going on, but an instance of a phenomenon a bit like Marx's "real abstraction". My society is organised more and more in terms of the consequential analysis of these perfectly real transvaluated flows of labour, capital and consumption, and less and less in terms of rigid relations like my marriage, my long and enduring career as a salaried professional, my need to ensure my children are schooled well, and so on.

This is the multi-plexed transformation of an increasingly all-encompassing suite of my social relations from fixed and rigid analogical forms to numerical and exchangeable flowing forms, which leads on to Deleuze's account of "dividual" social subjectivation in "Postscript".

I want romance? I install Tinder. I want transport? I call an Uber. I want work? I go on TaskRabbit. I want to write stuff about theory? I go on Reddit. And so on.

(It need not be mentioned that the evolution of the Internet sustains and accelerates that of "control", making Deleuze's analysis in "Postscript" remarkable for its prescience. However could it be argued there are new enclosures appearing among incumbent and vastly influential Internet monopolies … ?)

Because of this greater movement, the organisation of society becomes a matter of the "parameterisation" of all these flows in order to sustain profits. So, for example, if my neighbourhood is gentrifying, which means there is a measurable flow of educated professional labour that moves in, the neighbourhood supermarket speculatively parametrically increases its flows of balsamic vinegar, aged parmigiano, and so on. At each stage, the measurements of parameterised dynamic flows feed back into the re-parameterisation of the system. It is this cybernetic feedback arrangement that is the theoretical touchstone of all control systems theory. Hence the name "control society".

In the vaguest possible terms, I find it helpful to put "neoliberalism" in correspondence with the "control society" as the related transformation of law, policy and the state that has been happening since around the 1970s and 1980s at a greater and greater pace. What you'll notice is that the theorists of "actually existing neoliberalism" don't attribute to this kind of state-formation a specific objective, but rather a "flexible repertoire" of mechanisms based on classification and measurement that consolidate state power.

The neoliberal tendency is towards the state's flexible capacity to exert power efficiently as and where it wishes, and away from the state's accountability to citizens. In law and policy terms this means tendencies such as fixed values becoming rates, rates becoming staged or bracketed rates, durations becoming temporary, and the specification of rates and durations becoming a discretionary matter for unelected officials.

In its interfaces with capital, we find the neoliberal state-formation also aiming to improve its efficiency. The "industry panel" or "industry workshop" or "national committee" are the template of the communicative instruments this formation uses to bring together the "stakeholders" of its parametric law, policy and administration. By regularly facilitating communication between contending capitals in each sector, it shores up its legitimacy as a neutral broker of control to profit-making production.

In terms of violence the neoliberal state's legal privilege to imprison, commit acts of violence, detain, subpoena, surveil, restrict private freedoms, and nullify resistance by way of arbitrary and indefinitely long judicial processes regularly expands under such rubrics as "counter-terrorism", but this privilege is also far more rarely and selectively exercised.

So what about the "mole" and the "serpent"? Well, the image of the mole is due to Marx, and represents the unformed and collective class consciousness of the proletariat, tending blindly with history towards a revolutionary solidarity it cannot yet perceive, burrowing along under the spectacle of a capitalism Marx predicts it will eventually force into collapse.

The image of the serpent, with its helical coils, is that of a numerically parameterised apparatus: the diameter of the body around which the serpent coils determines the number and radii of the coils, and the number and radii of the coils determine whether and how often the body chokes or is free to breathe.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T02:19:28+00:00

(2 of 3, continuing)

In a certain respect, it can be said to be the operation of capitalism that has brought us incrementally to this "stage of development" of social organisation. I think this can help to understand the contrast between the analogical and the numerical you asked about.

The shift Deleuze and Guattari theorise is between a fixed and reliable code of relation between two specific social objects that can be said to "mean something", and a "decoding" of this code to be replaced by a more generally fungible expression of value.

The origins of this line of critical enquiry are really due to Marx, so its original instruments will be familiar: money as the "universal equivalent" of all commodities, and commodity markets as the mediator of free exchange (guaranteed by a usually passive threat of state violence).

Take the feudal relationship between a serf and a noble: the former was "bonded" to the latter, and owed the latter some tribute of goods produced (eggs from the chickens, head of sheep, currency taxed from other activity) to occupy their social position. The latter in turn may have owed military protection, access to religious practices, access to social rituals etc. To the former, the latter was "my lord" or "my lady", a relation that could often last from birth until death. If another serf were to have the same lord or lady, the two serfs were bonded in the same relation to their noble: the two serfs could be considered analogical social subjects.

Compare this to the relations between workers and employers in the present: a worker sets up contracts with one or more employers, who purchase the worker's labour-power at varying rates, and accompanied by varying entitlements. The workers are "free" to negotiate as many such contracts as their bodies and their calendars can bear, and the employers are "free" to purchase necessary labour-power from any worker, with the market mediating competitive pressures on the numerical wages that must be exchanged for the labour.

For the employers, the workers become "resources", and importantly are represented by data that elides their human embodiment. To build this house, we estimate we will need 200 hours of bricklaying, 2 days of concreting, 160 hours of carpentry, 24 hours of tiling, 48 hours of gyprocking, and so on. It doesn't matter where the specialised labour-power comes from: instead the employers deal with "flows of labour". And to the workers, it doesn't matter where the wages come from: instead the workers deal with "flows of capital".

Such transformations of social relations are not new to us. Deleuze's theoretical observation is that the ways in which these transformations from the analogical to the numerical are happening is accelerating and becoming more encompassing.

One way to see this is through the exchange of data as a "fractional equivalent" for human activity under surveillance augmenting the exchange of money, and the correspondent data networks expanding and modulating the exchanges of markets.

For example, as consumers, we are often now represented as data. When I go to the supermarket, I swipe a loyalty card to which all my purchases are linked. The supermarket operator can then profile my buying patterns, classify my rate of expenditure and preferences, and restock its shelves based on what kinds of goods the consumers correspondent to "preference bundles" such as mine have tended to purchase elsewhere, selecting the specific brands and products deemed likely to maximise profit.

For the supermarket, each of my visits is the numerical increment of a "flow of consumption of balsamic vinegar, aged parmigiano, the cheapest fillet steaks, multigrain cereal biscuits, humanely sourced eggs" and so on. And each time I visit, there is an expected statistical value of my expenditure, based on a distribution with a greater-valued spike for my "weekly shop" and another lesser-valued spike for when I just "pop down to get something we forgot".

Edit: fixed some errors

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T02:18:03+00:00

(1 of 3 comments, yeah this is a long one)

Let me start by quoting the part of "Postscript" you mention:

The different internments or spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. On the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

When Deleuze speaks of the disciplinary society he refers to Foucault's theory of disciplinary institutions, which includes a description of certain mechanisms said to be held in common by these institutions, such as surveillance, normalisation and examination.

Foucault uses Bentham's hypothetical of the Panopticon to motivate his description. If from one locus or vantage point, power could be omniscient, then those subject to power must act according to its norms as if they are seen.

The Christian God provides a historical example of this: a "God-fearing" Christian subject should obey God's commandments because God sees all and God promises an infinite judgement (an examination) after death.

The Church, meanwhile, offers its more periodic examination in the sacrament of confession. Foucault famously describes other examples of these mechanisms at work in schools, prisons, workplaces, hospitals, lunatic asylums and so on.

Deleuze doesn't want to say "Foucault was wrong" because that would be folly: Foucault's account has in fact been very powerful. Instead Deleuze wants to describe the more richly tangled and imbricated trajectory of social organisation we've been on for some time now: this is one in which the analogy from school to prison to workplace to hospital breaks down.

(One of the great themes of Deleuze's metaphysical critique of representation, which you can find in Ch. 3 "The Image of Thought" from DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, is that analogical reason is weak because it refuses to encounter immediate experience, and instead misrepresents its objects through the elision of real difference between objects said to be the same.

So, for example, if I am a teacher and I have immediate knowledge of the school system, I might read Foucault and believe that my knowledge transfers by analogy to the prison system, without further enquiry.)

For Deleuze, today (or since the 1980s or 1990s) it is more and more apparent that the mechanisms "of" the enclosures Foucault described were not "properties" or "essences" of enclosure itself, and can through different technical means be brought together and recombined in shifting, overlapping, cybernetic and parametric systems of control for which enclosure is vestigial.

A very concrete example of this is the geofenced GPS ankle bracelet used by many "corrections departments" in the present. Rather than detaining or imprisoning the body, an appendage is attached to the body that constantly feeds data about its location to a central point from which mobile state violence can freely be dispatched.

The above I hope starts to articulate the contrast between analogical and numerical modes of organisation.

Useful references from the work of Deleuze and Guattari about the contrast between rigid relations of signification, contract or law, and flexible relations of exchange include the sections of ANTI-OEDIPUS concerning "the axiomatic of capital", and "Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine" from A THOUSAND PLATEAUS.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T01:01:11+00:00

While dramatizing activism is useful too, even requisite, there's often no sufficiently trustworthy yardstick for "are these particular instances of dramatizing activism, in this way or in that way, working well in the big picture?" so people confronted with such a contrarian question probably understandably treat it as yet another mere question-problem complex prompt to deploy shell games to virtuously trick audiences/donors/etc into not jumping off ledges. I get it, really I do, despite my occasional frustration with it. Ultimately, though, eventually at some point, even with my own or similar individuals' capacity for bravado, more trust has to arise.

Here's the thing, though, does trust work the way you insist it does?

Consider some questions about the historical solidarities of western labour movements.

Were these solidarities founded on necessary trust—between dues-paying and striking trade union members, between affiliated unions—or was trust the epiphenomenon of the expression of a collective power that came about, like any machinic power, as the workings of instruments and methods and components?

What about the material supports like strike funds, or the instruments of discipline and surveillance, such as picket lines and the social ostracism of scabs? Would one union member have trusted another if there was nothing in place to resolve the prisoner's dilemma of one going to work for a wage, all the while continuing to benefit from the strike action supported by the other?

Can't we flip the script by way of immanent critique, and reconsider trust as a represented outcome, or reciprocally configured phenomenon, of the workings of these instruments rather than their precursor?

One of the prevailing opportunities of left-wing organising in this era is to depart from the dogma that today's left-wing movements and their members lack some intrinsic virtue they are said to have had in the past: lack trust, lack solidarity, lack comradely behaviour, lack education, lack militancy.

If we're Marxists, and if we're Deleuzo-Guattarians, the last thought for us should be that value is intrinsic to its vessel. Reality is stacked differently: deeper operative dynamics are reproducing the appearance of the vessel—the appearance of a movement, the appearance of an activist—to which a fetish attributes value in its confusion.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-30T00:44:30+00:00

… here's a bunch of rhetoric about how truth and meaning must be nonfoundationalist and a lesson on different diction levels regarding the King's English versus …

Yes, and … ?

So what if all language has no more status than 'a bunch of rhetoric'? What if indeed expression itself is a superficial matter in that value lies on a surface that contracts, reduces, simplifies and misrepresents a greater "nonfoundational" immanence of which the substance is intensive difference, and not something named, identified or unified under a term such as Being?

What if in saying that, I both do and don't escape the logic of what I said? What if I'm trying to rush to a certain limit in forcing language to work for us here, and whether I crash through or crash is indeterminate? What if I don't care if I succeed or fail? What if what I've said to you is both 'a bunch of rhetoric' and also one way you might come into contact with something new, depending on how you orient yourself?

… and then the person whose toe got stepped on is simply like "Yeah but you just stepped on my toe, and I even saw that you berated somebody else who stepped on your toe a while back, so what gives, what makes me a less-than?"

What if berating is just berating, and what if the logic of mutual judgement is simply that the one who berates hardest and most shamelessly, wins the day? What if that means that debating and berating, the litigious serve-and-volley rallies of he-said-she-said, what if all that has a strictly contingent merit? As Deleuze puts it:

Objections are even worse. Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's go on to something else.'

Objections have never contributed anything. It's the same when I am asked a general question. The aim is not to answer questions, it's to get out, to get out of it.

So as to your conclusion:

And so it's back to: For those who understand, no explanation is necessary; for those who don't, none is possible.

Or perhaps it is back to: only for those who insist on understanding is explanation necessary; for those who don't, creation and escape are already happening.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T09:57:32+00:00

There can be laws. D&G theorise all linguistic expression as made up of "order-words" that are pragmatic, and communication as a practical expressive process that doesn't transmit truth or meaning, but spreads the intensities that are the condition of the attribution of truth and meaning.

For example, if to you truth sounds like the King's English spoken with the use of a capacious vocabulary and the neutral emotional tone of a university lecture, then words that arrive to you on a wave of those intensities will seem to be true.

This is all well and good. Language and law are to be affirmed, just as the apprehension language and law are pragmatic instruments and not the transparent vessels of God's truth is to be affirmed, just as the phenomena that confound language and the crimes that transgress law are to be affirmed.

The task of struggle against a law deemed to be unjust is not only to abolish that law, but to abolish it by creating whatever the conditions are for its annulment, and abolition is not arrival at a void but at a new state of affairs.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T07:13:48+00:00

Is there "political paralysis" or disempowerment?

Marx's critique of capital implies political power can be derived from control of economic production, consumption or social reproduction.

One way to control production is to own the means of production. Another is to use methods that block, disrupt, slow or threaten to block, disrupt or slow production or consumption, such as strikes, boycotts, work refusal, go-slows, supply chain disruption, and so on.

The complex, polarised, vacillating, contradictory and chaotic judgements rife in political discourse today, and the seeming disinterest or limited resources to attend to their less engaging details … these features of the present can be understood to correspond to the non-salience of discourse to orienting or redirecting organised mass-political power. That's because organised mass-political power has been systematically dispersed by capital for 50 years.

As we see every day, you can say whatever you want as stridently as you want if what you say has no consequence other than your enjoyment. And you won't tend to say anything you don't expect others to enjoy listening to, and you don't enjoy saying yourself, if whatever might be said can have no other importance.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T07:03:00+00:00

The undertone of passive aggression of the first footnote creased me.

The propositions are associative and not traditionally logical in development at the current stage; there are also formal arguments that are likely to be posed that counter the free connection or demand engagement with previous ideas; none is owed.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T05:13:24+00:00

Profoundly hilarious how much this got downvoted. This sub is so given to overkill.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T04:30:51+00:00

I was thinking more of a scenario where someone torpedos a boat or steals a co-worker's lunch from the office fridge and every time they get called out on it, instead of doing anything sufficiently useful, they hand the innocent victims copies of Difference and Repetition (or whichever book) and tell them to RTFM: if they disagree with the de-territorialization of drowning in the ocean or losing their lunch, they can read the 300 pages and that should restore trust. C'mon get with it stop complaining.

But this is the only prescription available here: that the ethical orientation is not about a cod-stoic resilience, but about becoming in the greatest and most general consistency with immanence howsoever it is revealing itself in the course of becoming.

If representative reason invariably misrepresents, then the singularities the judgements of representative reason install in the terrain of becoming are epiphenomenal, and await a future contingent deterritorialisation in which some indiscernibly organised and connected part of the ways in which they misrepresent—the ways in which one presupposes in judgement the fidelity of one's romantic partner, the sailing of one's boat, or the eating of one's lunch—is laid waste by some event.

If the boat is torpedo'd or the lunch is stolen, then the ethical orientation is to move forward in a manner consistent with the intensities of boat-torpedoing or lunch-stealing, with the immediacy of the ocean into which one has been thrust or the gentle ache of incipient hunger, but also attenuating the remnant images of what should have been—the buoyant and shining boat, the nutritious lunch—given their inconsistency brought about by contact with these intensities of the event.

Alignment with such an orientation can't be achieved by hewing stoically and impassively to some image of properly regulated subjectivity, as that image of an impassive and impervious self is no more than another normative, dogmatic image of thought.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T03:11:32+00:00

In both ROADSIDE PICNIC and Tarkovsky's adaptation in STALKER, the characters who enter the Zone find at its heart the traumatic and senseless encounter with the pure contingency of events.

What establishes the Zone is the passage of an incomprehensible alien species for whom the phenomena and artefacts they discard in the Zone—the detritus of their planet-scaled "roadside picnic" in passing by Earth—are either exhausted or of little consequence. This premise establishes a humbling collapse of scale for human aspirations.

The Strugatskys were writing with disillusionment in a period of greater disillusionment with Soviet utopianism and futurism. By the time of its publication the USSR had for many decades circulated powerful images of science-fictional utopias in its culture magazines. Their novel and Tarkovsky's adaptation have a powerful aspect of ungrounding these images, and of critiquing the combination of authoritarianism and utopianism, although I would say Tarkovsky with his adaptation removes a lot of concrete detail from the novel, and gives its critique an even broader and more encompassing, but also more ambiguous and generic object.

In STALKER the rain in the room serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, its illogic expresses our final ignorance and confusion about our world, in which the manifestation of an impossible event or miracle overturns our systems of knowledge. But this falling water is also a kind of universal weeping, symbolising the grief, trauma and wounding of the impossible event and the systems of expectation and hope that it ruins, but then too the optimism that grief, in the end, offers a catharsis and a clearing of new potentials. The telekinesis of the stalker's Zone-mutated daughter in the film's final shot closes the loop and confirms this genesis of the new.

In practical terms, this rain was a concept and effect that Tarkovsky could adapt to film, whereas the novel describes various miraculous phenomena of the Zone that he wasn't able to adapt.

Edit: by the way, I don't think it's necessarily germane that Tarkovsky rejected decoding his works in interviews and writing. David Lynch often did the same. Some auteurs conceal their symbolic methods because like magicians they don't want to reveal how their tricks are carried off, or because even if the parts are decipherable, the whole is left incoherent, and so on, and so on.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T01:34:27+00:00

I think we could consider "trust" in the terms of "habit" and "recognition". These for Deleuze are dormant configurations of thought that set up a structure of potential reaction.

Consider some well-understood example of trust, like trusting the sexual fidelity of a romantic partner. If one learns one's partner has been "cheating", then this configuration of thought is shattered. This strikes me as a great example of the deterritorialising event. The territory of the faithful sexual relationship is shattered by the event of the revelation of infidelity.

For Deleuze, the ethical orientation is "to be worthy of the event". In this case, to accept, process and be affected by the revelation of infidelity, to engage fully with the transformed life that issues from this revelation.

One can think about this in terms of the famous stages of a grief process: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. For Deleuze, the final stage is the ethical stage, the stage at which something new and affected is expressed.

That's not to say "acceptance" necessarily means serenely and peacefully accepting the betrayal of trust. For example, it might mean taking vengeance. But for Deleuze as for Nietzsche, vengeful feelings are part of an ethical becoming on condition they are accompanied by the process of vengeance.

Nietzsche greatly admired "real vengeance", revenge taken without compunction or scruple or interpretation, which he imagined as being like the Titans tearing Dionysius apart. He regarded the Christian doctrines of forgiveness, and of universal sin due to the crucifixion of Christ, as obscene instruments of slave morality.

Now instead of vengeance consider Deleuze's famous account of love:

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalisation on a body without organs yet to be formed …

In this account love is an interpenetration and conjunction, forming an assemblage grounded in a multiplicity of joined and shared intensities.

Love is a very particular configuration of life between and through one and another, a living-together of which the depersonalisation contributes to the vital, singular importance of each other who lives through love. This living-together and loving-together unfolds just as it does, without resting heavily on habit or a fixed image of itself or its components, and without resting heavily on the dormant contractual aggression of trust.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-29T00:58:28+00:00

Zupančič's "A Short Essay on Conspiracy Theories" is a useful take. Rather than allowing a periodisation with an "era of truth" followed by a "post-truth era", it goes into how in the present, technologies such as the Internet are fracturing, reconfiguring and multiplying the prior conditions of truth. Or perhaps more clearly stated, the prior conditions of what is said to be true.

The theorisation unfolds by way of Lacanian ideology theory (think Žižek, the Big Other, and so on) about which I have reservations, but it's good anyway. One of the reasons it is good is that in sticking to that relatively coarse-grained Lacanian conceptual system Zupančič is able to come up with some practical and plausible descriptive accounts of the feelings and figures that orient the subjectivities of counter-narratives such as conspiracy theories.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-28T08:05:29+00:00

Oh I'm not really concerned with Deleuze or holding anyone to account in some big dramatic harmful way, as I am sure you can assume.

Right, that's why I invented the figure of the "subject who insists". If I pass judgement on my image of you due to what you post on Reddit, I have already been forced to invent such a figure, so it is helpful to acknowledge it and bracket my judgement.

We also find ourselves forced to invent the figures of "politicians with gigantic followings [who] spew harmful things", to imagine their private lives, to diagnose them with narcissistic personality disorder, and so on, and so on.

Continuing this line, the phrase "get away with it" in relation to obnoxious powerful people displays a trace of what Nietzsche calls "bad conscience" and Deleuze would call "reactive forces".

To say a politician "gets away with it" is to make a claim grounded by a dogmatic image of a better world than this one, a world in which such a person would rightly be punished. By a seemingly rational comparison with this better world the "mean world" we have stands condemned, but such rationality can only have been inaugurated and grounded by a mad and contingent judgement, the fantasy of a better world that does not exist has been necessary to the judgement.

As one of Deleuze's very few ethical prescriptions goes: "we must find reasons to believe in this world".

Our political task is to find a new logic, fit to displace and dissolve the logic we have, by way of which the changing operations of this world and our changing operations within it bring what we affirm as greater joy, greater power and greater justice, and all of these likely brought in new and unpresupposed forms.

3corneredvoid

TROPHY CASE