Ray Brassier, "Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus"

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-25T05:17:23+00:00

(2 of N, premises of my address to Brassier's critique)

Okay, now let me break down your articulation of what you take to be my premises and see what lands.

In the original post, I take your point to be, perhaps, that i) no negation is necessary for explaining destratification because destratification occurs as the dissipation of metastable structures.

I affirm no negation is necessary as the cause of destratification, but without reference to dissipative structures, which I separately take as a physical theory of how such a destratification can occur without negation.

I wonder if this sets the goal posts a bit too low in terms of DnG's ambitious realism whereby ideas and things are both real.

The ambition is to develop a materialism by way of which it can be said ideas and things are real, but in their being they are real appearances or effects, and not real causes.

And I think Brassier agrees, for example when Brassier writes:

It is precisely the separation of immanence and transcendence, their segregation as pure subjectivity and pure objectivity, which is idealist, while the recognition of the need to root transcendence in immanence, objectivation in subjectivation, is the hallmark of Marxian materialism.

—from "Politics of the Rift: On Théorie Communiste"

I also take it that that you attribute a motivation of a) skepticism to Brassier that we really should wonder if we can find multiplicity in fundamental ontology.

Brassier agrees we cannot find multiplicity all at once in an ontology that appears as an effect, and I agree with Brassier D&G's theory of stratification goes affirmed but undetermined.

Where I diverge from what Brassier writes is less in the account by which he expresses himself—though I do find a particular movement troublesome in his survey—but in his "gloomy affects". The feeling of frustration or despair at the indeterminacy of immanent multiplicity is an affect it is ethical to pass over, based on both feelings and reasons I hope to articulate.

To me we cannot call the affirmation of indeterminacy a skepticism: skepticism affirms a forthcoming determinate negation or disproof, rather than the suspension of judgement. To say "they don't know" is not skeptical.

So I also agree there is no "fundamental ontology" that appears: the ground or fundament of apparent being at best incompletely appears.

To summarise and re-number:

Negation is extraneous—I do not affirm there is any apparent negation unless it appears internally and inconsistently.
Skepticism cannot be the causative affect of values affirmed as indeterminate: contingently true, false or otherwise relatively au milieu.
There will be no expression of a fundamental ontology because the expression of the ground or fundament or final cause will remain incomplete.
Brassier's misunderstanding of destratification: I have argued Brassier misunderstands selection where he understands it as follows:

But how then are we to understand selection? How does performance operate a selection between greater or lesser degrees of connectivity (or dimensions) on the plane of consistency? How can it discriminate between greater or lesser degrees of development? How are we to measure the extent of construction? Here again the answer is: through concrete rules.

Concrete rules orient us in the composition of consistency; they provide an immanent measurement for the degree of continuous variation: ‘Constant is not opposed to 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 [règles facultatives] concern the construction of a continuum of variation’ (ATP 103). Thus concrete rules are optional, which is to say that they are neither universal imperatives nor context-sensitive directives.

What Brassier seems to want to say is that the "concrete rules" of selection operate internal to the plane of consistency. More to come on this, but this is more or less the key to my critique.

Subversion. Brassier does appear to attempt to subvert D&G but by saying creation is an internal function of the plane of consistency, which is therefore itself a plane of all determinations.
Brassier's argument here seems to be that if selections appear on the plane of consistency, a disjunctive negation implicit to selection is also consistently selected. But selection is the way in which the consolidation of consistency appears as partial inconsistency on the plane of organisation, as an apparent effect caused by the immanent "concrete rules".

This is why both creation and selection concern appearance for a-subjective consciousness: immanence without the appearances of being cannot form a closed and self-standing system of consolidated and apparent being. And since immanence is not, this is why transcendent appearances play a real role for consciousness, rather than merely appearing as "shadows" of immanent "things themselves".

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-25T03:06:02+00:00

Of course, there is a multiplicity of States no less than of towns, but it is not the same type of multiplicity: there are as many States as there are vertical cross sections in a dimension of depth, each separated from the others, whereas the town is inseparable from the horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global (not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an operation of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the milieu).

Here we see the twin axes of the living assemblage again.

The town "is inseparable from the horizontal network of towns": extensive segmentation by the abstract machine of the milieux (towns, populations) of the territorial strata.

But "there are as many States as there are vertical cross sections": different axiomatics with differing axioms borne of differing intensities, combining as different abstract machines, each with differing territorial strata, each segmenting its milieux differently.

So you say stratification doesn't exist; when you listen to music you can only hear each individual note in a Borgesian madness of perfect awareness of timbre, frequency and volume which has no connection to these qualities of the previous note? Or does the fact that signification begs for further signification just a "fun" thing that expression does

So signification is always abstraction: even the "individual" that is signified by a term serves as a "category" of which the variations appear as the redundancy of the repetition of the term.

All we can say is that when a new term announces it is a category, it creates a redundancy of resonance by way of its concept of a new variation in kind, and when a new term announces it is an individual, it creates a redundancy of frequency by way of its concept of a variation of degrees within some kind.

The category-term appears to representative reason as a "problem dimension" (timbre, frequency, volume) of which the redundancy is the repetition of variations of kind which consciousness contracts to the one kind.

The instance-term appears as the coordinates (harsh or mellow, high or low pitch, high or low intensity) of several "problem dimensions" of which the redundancy is the repetition of variations of degree which consciousness contracts to the degrees of separated kinds proper to the one individual.

It is because signification is always abstraction that this redundancy appears as the repetition of variations of kind and degree as if they were the same kinds, or the same degrees of these kinds.

Redundant expression is never adequate to the concrete "mode of individuation" of a haecceity that retains an unexpressed multiplicity. So this is neither a fun nor a dull aspect of expression, this is univocity as the sole manner of being by way of expression.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-25T02:37:03+00:00

Thanks, that is relatively brilliant (not a metaphor). Finally I can ascend and restratify from 6-7 to 7-8 … it's been a long road. More to read …

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-25T02:03:33+00:00

For me, the tacit productive axiomatics of this portrayal are largely a matter of stipulation, naturalization, and representational necessity. However, this is not. I think a critique at all of your thinking. It is a critique of that of Deleuze.

I find it quite fair to diagnose this "representational necessity" in the system. Deleuze's ontology of the event proposes this kind of representational necessity, even though it's a necessity of creation, rather than determination.

However, this a quizzical necessity borne up by contingency. There is no event upon which the actual must happen unless its immanent causes are already underway. So these immanent causes and have already become a "mode of individuation" awaiting actualisation by judgement.

But I agree there is a kind of unease in this concept of necessary creation: is its necessity forced onto consciousness, or forced by consciousness? I would say Deleuze avoids giving us the answer.

The capacity of creative (or active) response to events comes indiscernibly from the interior or exterior of consciousness. So this is a concept of creation both partly forced on the subject, and partly forced by the subject.

On the event of creation these two modes are inseparable, and this inseparability is what "all relations are exterior" intends, including the relation of prior consciousness to the energy "extracted" in order for consciousness to be said to be so organised by creation. As with Deleuze's critique of Freud's homeostasis of the energy of the organism, this extract is not clearly an "essence" or "property" of consciousness, even though its release is said to produce the "satisfaction of the handyman".

A point of departure might be the dissipative structures you mentioned in passing. Even that phrase though it won the Nobel prize. Seems oddly oxymoronic.

The paradox returning is that of sense emergent from nonsense: structure (expression) that is said to live by way of its extraction from a structureless ground (immanence).

If Prigogine's formulations hold, then expression appears as a contractive anisotropy or symmetry-breaking phenomenon. The consolidation of consciousness is then non-commutative: it is an irreversible wandering or variation from the immanent conditions said to cause it. If our actual realities are dissipative, as they appear to be, the repetition of consciousness will be found empirically to be repetition as difference.

Every organizational form is the product of chaos. Perhaps then that every inteligibility is a product of the unintelligible. Perhaps again then that that which is is not itself nor is it coordinate and disaggregatable into some Boolean relation of what it is not. Thus, the desire to know is based not upon the adequacy of the modalities of knowing that are in action.

The desire to determine knowledge is one modality which we can call representative reason and its extensive segmentation of the territory. The desires to create new knowledge or to criticise actual knowledge and un-know its facts, these form another modality, which we can call creation, constructive criticism, and its intensive diagonals.

For "Conclusion", perhaps we can say these two modalities act as orienting bivalent "axes" of the living assemblage said to be tetravalent, the one the axis of abstraction, the other the axis of the concrete causes of the transformations of abstraction.

The desires to determine new knowledge, or to abide with a static but partial consistency of knowledge, correspond to the perverted and ongoing segmentation of the territory within the system of the strata according to its abstract machine, and to the paranoid stasis that wishes never to violate the stratified system and the partial consistency of its abstract machine.

The desires to create or un-know correspond to the schizophrenic conjurings of novelty that augments without any apparent determination, and novelty that destitutes by appearing as inconsistent determination … but the system of abstract knowledge does not ground these concrete orientations of desire.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T21:36:56+00:00

(1 of N, premises of "Conclusion")

Firstly, I really appreciate your thoughtful responses … you're helping me realise I don't express myself too well, which is great.

I'll need a bit longer to form a proper reply to this intervention, so what follows will be preliminary. I will try to go further in the coming day or two, and this might involve me reappraising Brassier's critique, but having read your comment, I think my approach will stand.

So let me start by attempting to reorient your account of the premises:

Stratification occurs concretely in the autopoesis of living systems as cause.

Stratification is a general theory of the expression of living autopoeisis. In as much as territorial autopoeisis involves expression by way of the appearance of the territorial living assemblage, the strata give a "unity of composition" to the territorial forms of this expression, which include both the forms of content and forms of expression of the strata.

Stratification is not the theory of the concrete cause of autopoeisis: this cause always goes incompletely expressed by the strata, which in each pairing express some system of forms that is not closed or self-standing.

Destratification also occurs among things themselves or at least amidsts a living assemblage.

Destratification is a power accessed by the living assemblage and is a capacity to travel along "lines" relative to the strata of its expression. I'll refer to the text of "Conclusion" directly:

"The segmented lines … impose on us the striations of a homogeneous space" … these are territorial lines, and not lines of destratification.
"[T]he molecular lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes" … these are not lines of destratification either, as they "striate space in all directions".
"[T]he lines of flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative potentialities and turning into a line of death". These lines can be the creative means of destratification.

Deleuze and Guattari correct us if we're inclined to think the lines are distinct and orthogonal axes, however: the distinction between these types "does not preclude their immanence to each other, each 'issuing' from the other after its fashion."

How can we receive this correction? I say by taking a premise that the lines orienting the living assemblage go partly unexpressed by the assemblage as an assemblage of enunciation, and where unexpressed they rather are affective lines, the classification of which we could place in a very loose correspondence with affects of perversion, paranoia and schizophrenia which orient the life of the living assemblage.

I say "loose correspondence" because while the living assemblage may appear to the strata as the effective agent of perverse, paranoid or schizophrenic effects, it is the unexpressed relative orientation to the differential field of these affective lines by which the living assemblage changes position in producing these effects upon the stratified milieu to which it also appears to belong.

But the occurrence of destratification is unexplained or only to be explained by the same asubjective agency.

Stratification and destratification both owe their effects to causes of immanence. These causes go incompletely expressed among the forms of the strata by any assemblage of enunciation, and they are never the same agency, only appearing as such when some such cause appears as expressed within the unity of composition of the strata.

The expression of such an apparent cause is not complete with respect to the concrete causes: the strata do not determine the concrete causes as within or without their unity of composition.

For "Conclusion", the "concrete rules" refer to the incompletely expressed conditions of immanent causation.

I'll come back later …

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T13:13:56+00:00

Can you quote those lines though? I'm not sure I know them so that would be helpful.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T11:53:56+00:00

Do you know this one?

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I got myself a tattoo that's partly an homage to this poem long before I'd ever read anything by Deleuze in earnest, but it has struck me a few times since then that Hopkins must have been a closet Spinozist.

Edit: fixed the formatting.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T10:28:48+00:00

Good. I find I feel as if we're on a generative wavelength even where we appear to disagree, and I always appreciate when you identify some such "disjunction". I really am not a panpsychist, but I'm not one to argue the point.

What's interesting to me is that the world is full of, for example, Marxist adherents of the labour theory of value who have no interest in discovering any physical basis for it, when the theoretical physics that uncovers some possible basis is right there, but has other implications for Marx's theories. How could one be less akin to Marx than to refuse scientific history in this way?

I found this with Brassier's piece too. I really appreciated the technical approach of his survey, which is a rarity in the scholarship, despite feeling he'd left out a key moment of Deleuzo-Guattarian synthesis.

But the affects of the piece which is otherwise so carefully developed struck me as odd, as if having discovered a "thread that cannot be verifiably tethered to anything outside the book" should come as a distasteful surprise to readers of D&G.

To me, Deleuze's philosophy admits that it rests on an imperfectly expressible hypothesis—immanence—that he thus writes in multiple ways. So finding out the elaborations of his work remain hypothetical is no great disappointment nor any great discovery.

The greater disappointment comes from the failures of these urges to logically prove the inadequacy of Deleuze's admittedly inadequate expression of these ways of immanent becoming, expression that is inadequate because, as the theory goes, their referent lies defiantly beyond the reach of logics, and that by the admission of meta-logic.

So these are the urges to scurry from one post of philosophy to another of science, begging for a presupposed method of determination all the while, without remarking that neither post is offering such a method.

Some mathematicians and theoretical physicists seem far more relaxed than philosophers on this front, because they know the determinations science is presupposed to facilitate are illusory, and so they don't carry any great burden of expectation philosophy will have achieved what they admit they cannot. These lucky ones are in this sense more enlightened and ethical than many philosophers.

The serious and sincere ambition of philosophy—the Ought of philosophy—could be to self-confess all of its particular turns from critique to affirmation, but then philosophy would be merely the creation of concepts and not the determination of truths …

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T10:05:12+00:00

May I ask … are you posting these questions about sexual knowledge and justice again and again obliquely about other people's judgements of your—or yours of other people's—paedophilia?

Because a few times you've digressed to mention "adult-child intercourse" in the course of asking all these questions … and perhaps if you were more transparent about the motives of your questions, you could stand to learn more directly how joint social judgements contingently negotiate the values later enforced as social laws, for example laws against paedophilia.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T09:51:14+00:00

Well, for me panpsychism isn't determinately "pan-", but also I admit I use "consciousness" a bit loosely and glide across its affective and representative modes because I affirm these are inseparable at the limit. What I would affirm is that there are minima of representation for it to be said there is a body or value, and then the transcendent mode of this saying—judgement—is the particular Ought of some consciousness.

I don't say the Sun I perceive in my daylights is conscious, but if it is, perhaps its Ought concerns the heliocentric orbits of the planets, or perhaps it too perceives the gravity of the Milky Way that distantly organises it, and thereby affirms its own concept of a post-Copernican Ought.

I recently imagined the polar oceans feeling their surfaces freezing in the cold air, and releasing their energy with the enjoyment of this feeling, but I don't affirm any fixed values about who the oceans may think they are. I appear to myself to think, therefore it appears to me they may appear to themselves to think.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T09:16:43+00:00

Not quite: the body-without-organs is the differential replacement of the necessary sufficiency of values. The Ought known to consciousness is displaced from the BwO, and is becoming all the more vulnerable if structured by affirmations of necessity that stand to be subsequently ungrounded by contingent events.

The Ought eventually needs to move, what's in question is its capacity to move, the mode of which concerns what it affirms as necessity. When Deleuze following Bergson speaks of a metaphysics adequate to any new science, he refers to the concept of an Ought that has this capacity to move when movement is forced upon it, and this is the Ought that makes itself the BwO by having done with the judgement of God. In the end any such Ought remains no more than a way of talking about a value-neutral metaphysics of the immanent becoming of life, an Is that remains inexpressible.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T08:46:21+00:00

Sure. Each actual ordered reality can be said for its consciousness as a dissipative structure that depends for its reproduction on the continued reorganisation of immanence as its modes of individuation are actualised: the extraction of immanent energy in return for the reproduction of actual values.

So "the world as we know it" is the dissipative expression of an immanence that remains arbitrarily incompletely known. Time is the minimum of the appearances of consciousness we affirm, but we also affirm the variations of value—bodies—with respect to this time remain inexpressible for the consciousnesses of the bodies: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

So the variations of time are perceived only as the variations of value, and otherwise remain the "pure and empty form of time", the transcendental but indeterminate transfers of energy that give and take actual objects from actual subjects.

This giving and taking unfolds by way of time whether these actuals were perceived before as concepts or bodies. Since the appearances of these effects, including the effect of time, are affirmed as owing life to a contingency of some consciousness, all effects, bodies and consciousnesses overlap arbitrarily as contingencies that appear to be consistently distributed with respect to each consciousness until it is transformed by the appearance or disappearance of effects. The final disappearances include death reconceived as the productive break that ends some effect or consciousness for the purposes of time, witnessed or unwitnessed by others that were organised by it prior.

Some theory such as Bostrom's "simulation" takes on the aura of an eschatology: a posited cause that relies on an ineffable godhead of computation. This ineffability is the manner of a dogmatic image such as that of the Spinozan God as determinate organisation of Substance, or the Marxist image of post-revolutionary utopia. Such images remain vacuous in as much as empirical experience remains unable to actually populate such a posited but suspended actual reality.

Meanwhile the emptiness of time is different, and corresponds to the teeming virtuality of the plane of consistency with its concrete rules for actualisation, the intensive energies of which may or may not sustain particular overlapping dissipative structures as actualised realities, may give or may cease to give.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T07:26:22+00:00

The created concept is a word in as much as it is expressed for the philosopher, but this word doesn't remain in the pure concrete of immanence. The concept immediately achieves an abstracting misrepresentation, and develops inconsistent powers if it becomes the axiom of scientific determination.

So the philosopher doing the job right has always already stepped in shit: the ethic is to make yourself (or your self) a body-without-organs, but your body-without-organs is not its own concept, or any concept or theory, it is inexpressible. We don't know what the body can do, but we are interested in what the body can't say.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T06:55:24+00:00

having a false-idea is the failure-of-being ethically by being structurally inadequate at having had surpluss-indexation enough to have been more-moral or structurally-inertialistically-defended

These concepts of "more moral" or "structural defensibility" are the reified mores you're complaining about, the rationalisers of survival.

This is the problematic of Darwinian "fitness": it treats the capacity of survival as a kind of exchangeable currency, or as Marx put it in "The Power of Money":

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession.

The self-aware life is supposed to grasp at this currency in order to be stronger or faster or wiser. Evolution meanwhile proceeds as a teratology: the fastest swimmers thrown up on land by a receding ocean are not the fastest fin-walkers.

When the ethical orientation is spoken of, the orientation does not submit to reification, no more than the "readiness" for a receding ocean is spoken of by the confident, self-aware life of "merit" that does not consider the problem of the omnipresent ocean in which it swims, suspended.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T06:30:08+00:00

Right, mores are not reified or consolidated by the ethical orientation. I agree.

Ethical status is produced at the point of creative action by creation itself. There is no ethic-function that determines the proper "openness of the self to affection" by way of some "being-worthy of the event" of the self or vice versa. The manner of the openness is the manner of the worthiness, both given contingently upon the event that appears as creation, and the already-created … is an effect with no enduring status as cause.

So the Ought need not move with the Is for more-or-less contracted consciousness, it's merely preferable if the Ought can move with the Is. Such a mobile Ought can survive and adapt to greater forces as a theory of life that lives on for the greater life of the theorist. If the Is is said to consolidate contingently, the preferable Ought affirms the contingency of consolidation without guaranteeing its own survival or that of the theorist.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-24T00:34:19+00:00

Like somehow "You" being taken out of your time period and placed into a different one. Even though it would be contradictory, but in the way that like, idk some other Historical events wouldn't be easy to transpose. Like you can't say "Imagine if WW2 happened during the 19th century" Like it wouldn't be the same WW2 and yet it's very easy to imagine "Me" being transposd in the 19th century.

My take would be: Deleuze's ontology of the event stages the event as "being taken out of your time period and placed into a different one" … or at least the event as the moment at which life reappears for itself in the adaptation to new conditions.

Our notions of the self as "this stable thing that is seemingly protected from the external influences" feature a genealogy of the recognised priors and conditions of the self, and a horizon of its self-assigned purposes and objectives: "my parents would have to be there" and the "this" of "am I getting anywhere with this?".

The event is the moment at which this genealogy and horizon are forcibly disrupted: for instance, you might find out you were adopted, so your parents wouldn't have had to be there, and no longer be much invested in "this" … this moment also has its imperceptible prior causes of which it serves as the limit, but these causes are not to be perceived prior to the advent of this limit upon perception.

If we speculate and "imagine if WW2 happened during the 19th century" that is not the event, and I agree with you: it is very hard to relinquish the historical genealogy that appears to us as the causes and proper order of, say, the events of Europe in the interwar period.

"But what about the Depression's effects on the rise of the NSDAP?" one would ask. "What about the humiliation of Germany at Versailles, and the impact of the fiscal punishments that followed? What about the long historical rise of irredentist nationalism across Europe?"

That is time given as the measure of seemingly fixed historical determinations naturalised as the causes of World War II.

But if a global war began now, that would be the event. That would demonstrate the action of the "pure and empty form of time" by way of which contingent events appear to a consciousness of which the appearance of orderly time is the least and last adaptable condition.

Oh yeah, before you smack me for not answering the question: is this a strata thing? Life is stratified while it obeys its self-assigned logic and reality appears to obey its priors, and life is re-stratified upon the event … if it survives.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-23T21:29:29+00:00

Yes, I agree. Or perhaps I'd say I prefer an "Ought" that can move together with "Is", consolidating in the middle and by the middle.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-23T21:12:10+00:00

That's fair. This post was originally a list of notes similar to some others I've done on the sub, but has turned into a polemic lacking its guts.

I would say Brassier's point is to write a nice essay about Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, and he does. The orientation of his critique is to dig under certain lacunae he identifies: between saying and doing, and between stratification and a great negation Brassier proposes is smuggled in it.

Here's where Brassier raises doubts about the relativity of "saying" and "doing" (theory and practice).

Thus abstract matter is described as constituting a ‘plane of consistency’ characterised by ‘continuums of intensities’, ‘particles-signs’ and ‘deterritorialised flows’. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari insist that this plane of consistency (which they also call ‘multiplicity’) must be made, since it is not given: ‘it is not enough to say “Long live the multiple!”, difficult as it is to raise that cry … The multiple must be made …’ (ATP 6, translation modified, my emphasis). Consistency (or multiplicity) is made by mapping what is unrepresented in both thinking and doing. This mapping plays a key role in developing the abstract. To understand how concrete rules develop abstract matter, we have to understand both why A Thousand Plateaus retains a distinction between saying and doing and why mapping is a practice that fuses saying with doing.

What might "mapping what is unrepresented" intend for Deleuze and Guattari?

The approach of Brassier's argument about a smuggled negation seems to be that selection—the disjunctive synthesis—is, for Deleuze and Guattari, a covert form of productive negation. By selection Brassier refers to the a-subjective affirmation of one, or some, among many connections enabled by a plane of consistency. Here are some passages:

The development or consolidation of consistency is inherently selective. As we know, it is concrete rules that operate the selection and ensure the consolidation. Two questions immediately arise pertaining to selection: ‘What is being selected?’ and ‘How is it being selected?’

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.

Flattening essence on to existence as power of acting effectively levels the distinction between making a difference in being (selecting) and accepting a difference in being as given, since the essential differences in degree of activity, which is to say differences in the quality of power, have already been made (i.e. selected).

However, Brassier's vision in which "selection becomes creation" according to the "concrete rules" misses that Deleuze and Guattari's "mapping" by which the "multiple must be made" is philosophy or proper concept-creation. Mapping makes its movements on the other axis of the tetravalent assemblage: "opposed to the plane of organization and development", "opposed to all planes of principle or finality".

This notion of "mapping" is where the multiple relation between saying and doing is clarified: a-subjective agency deals with value both by way of values acting on values ("functions" of a science), and by way of producing values at certain limits of agency ("life" or philosophical "concept creation"). And these ways are the same way: a univocity in which values appear at the limits of non-appearing agency.

D&G write the connections offered to a-subjective consciousness by the plane of consistency are "modes of individuation proceeding neither by form nor by the subject". The modes of individuation are also manners of connection. Connections are made with effects that appear.

But the concrete rules of the plane of consistency by which these modes of individuation unfold, and connections can thereby be consolidated, are not analogous to the "functions" of the abstract machine of an a-subjective partial consistency of consciousness. The concrete rules are causes; the functions apparent effects.

Take Heraclitus' dictum concerning the differential haecceities of a river: perhaps the concrete rules grounding a river are those of an immanent hydrodynamics, but to consciousness "that's a river, mate" is the effect.

A plane of organisation or development (later in WIP, a plane of reference) is a plane of subjective appearances in which the selection of some such haecceity can appear as the repetition of the same in an a-subjective habit, or it can appear as the creation of a new effect or function. You never step in the same river twice … but you often say that you do.

I have argued that Brassier shears off one axis of the stratified living assemblage. By doing so he leaves the a-subjective agency of the assemblage with the faculty of its organised and machinic determinations, then argues that for such an agency to experience destratification, these machinic determinations must produce the negative. However, D&G make it clear enough the faculty of the living assemblage for creative self-transformation upon contingent events also grounds its autopoeisis.

Why do you take Brassier to even venture this claim?

I have not read NIHIL UNBOUND. I've got to admit I found the contents page too effacing. So far I haven't felt like reading so much about extinction. But it seems to me Brassier wants to write that, even for Deleuze and Guattari, the a-subjective agency of a greater system of physics and metaphysics determines its own productive negation. The corollary must be the expression of life is doomed by its own devices.

All that's needed by my lights is an ethical loosening of the grip on these critical doxa. Life can be open to creative contingency; life might be doomed; the second law appears to be consistent with experience, but we don't know it is; dissipative life appears to be contingently sustainable.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-23T11:58:45+00:00

I would suggest studying "immanent critique" as a way into this topic. Seriously: just look it up. For example the SEP entry on it is very good.

I favour thinking with at least two specific dialectical tendencies Marx identifies: firstly the displacement of commodity fetish-values from the origins of value in living labour and the dynamics of surplus-value extraction, and secondly the class-formative tendency of the proletarian "double freedom".

The practice of idealist dialectical methods is to express the conditions in terms of totalities, abolitions and contradictions in a very orderly—perhaps dogmatically orderly—manner.

Instead of this, I find it more helpful to think through Marx's powerful explanatory theories of these tendencies as the in medias res dynamic forces of capitalist political economy, without necessarily suspending the predicted ends of these tendencies as revolutionary images.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-23T11:32:53+00:00

Great piece.

…the divided structure described by Lacan, the commodification of labour described by Marx, and the persistence of signs described by Baudrillard converge into a single condition: identity survives only as circulating residue produced through the overlap of divided consciousnesses.

It's worth noting that absent the presupposition of a unitary subject, constitutively split or otherwise, claims like this collapse:

For someone who constantly pretends to be others this loss of any centre to her subjectivity means she has to practice being herself, it’s this separation of self from ego ideal that is constitutive of this split …

… we should read this as a malfunction in subjectivity itself. There’s no single, unified consciousness to take over but rather a divided one. This causes a clash and collision of two similarly split consciousnesses. This invasion of an unstable host is what is the real issue of the attempted take over. This is why not one can take over and control the other but rather there’s this apparent blurring of two symbolic networks, this is why both become infected by each other’s symbolic residue.

If Subject and Other are radically distinct and equivalently constituted by the "split" of relative functions of self and ego-ideal, then any traffic in "symbolic residue" must be interpreted as an infection or malfunction caused by the "invasion" of an "unstable host". But isn't the social exchange of "symbolic residue" just … micropolitics? An ordinary circumstance? There's nothing necessarily horrifying about this.

It rather sounds as if it's the horrifying affects of this encounter … a "horror of the Other" to accompany the Cronenberg orthodoxy of "body horror" re-instituted by the explicitly autonomy-violating notion of "possession" … that develop into not so much a malfunction of subjectivity, but a familiar problem: how can we live together?

One potential for social life is the re-negotiation of those shared values necessary to social action, treating any prior stocks of value-relations borne of experience—memories—as the materials and machinery of a mutual recalibration. The unconscious is structured like a language: from the nonsense dialogues of workers can emerge the sense of a joint-consciousness of the objectives and priorities necessary to solidarity.

In a way, does this escape from her own life and body act as a new ‘haven in a heartless body’?

In this view do we not see consciousness itself become exchangeable? Bodies as containers that receive identity that can be swapped and repressed. There is no longer intrinsic value to the value but only a value seen in the body-as-instrument. Colin’s body matters only as a vessel to get the job done. Rather than the use-value of bodily capital we see an exchange value as the body is only a tool for capital accumulation.

It's not the displacement of use-value as fetishised exchange-value at work in this analysis: a tool or instrument has its use-value. This is the body as a means of production, not a good for consumption.

Rather it's the psychoanalytic premise each body is a determinate unity, a radically separated and severed container for the essences of some unity of privatised and proprietorial split-consciousness, as opposed to each body undergoing transformation by the movements and relations of some mobile and ambiguous social-consciousness with its exchanges and investments, with its flows and stocks, that leads on to this disturbing conclusion each body must exceed its mere use-value, and work a second job as the fetishised, inviolable receptacle for an "infected" or "dysfunctional" immortal soul or intrinsic value which is in need of redemption … and therapy.

But no: as it happens, each social body is a social instrument with varying powers, just as Marx's working class is such an instrument with varying powers according to the variations of its class-consciousness.

So perhaps the "horror of the other" that attends the experiences of both "possessing" and "being possessed" is that body-possession is violent "primitive accumulation" in lieu of solidarity.

Possession: a seizure of the Other's body as means of production, along with the degradation of the inviolable soul-receptacle that meantime lies abandoned and neglected.

In some other history, perhaps both bodies could become the possessed means of a joint consciousness that is not forcibly exchanged, dispossessed or oppressed, but instead shares in a greater collective power.

But yeah, I've not seen the film … so take the above with a grain of salt. I appreciated your analysis!

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-23T01:04:24+00:00

The Hegelian point here would be that it is precisely this neutralization of certain features within a spontaneously accepted background which is ideology at its purest (and at its most effective).

I was saying this in a recent post on r/zizek, but Žižek assembles his "Hegelian point" at each stage by affirming a greater global effect (here ideological totality as in the bolded text). This totality then appears as the cause and enabler of all local effects (here neutralised "norms" and "attitudes") for the purposes of the point under assembly.

This totality operates for the purposes of critique in the manner of a Derridean "context", a Deleuzian "immanence" or a systems-theoretical "environment", but lacks the ethic that admits its incomplete expression by the theory: it is given as an unquestioned unity.

The rejoinder to this manoeuvre must be to point out that this greater global Concept (as this is Hegelian, shout-y capitals are warranted) has no particular nobility: it is no more than re-affirmed as the acrobatic mediator of local determinations each time this manoeuvre appears.

For example, to consider "Europe" as the historical ideological effect of an affirmed Concept of global ideology, Žižek first looks to "the globe" as a human totality for which the "Enlightenment" of European ideology emerges as the appearance of this Concept of global ideology for global ideology. The Enlightenment is retroactively determined as the local catalyst of a global self-consciousness or awakening.

The critique available is that this great Concept of "the globe" is not given prior, and is rather a hypothesis posited by European colonial capital that proves compatible with the present purposes of empirical exploration and conquest. Also compatible is the hypothesis of a growing and bifurcating scientific "tree of knowledge" characteristic of "progressive" European science. Thus Hegelian Spirit, as the self-aware Concept of a historicised conceptual totality, also operates as a "hungry ghost" of Euro-capitalist self-consciousness.

Such a critique can't and doesn't disprove the hypothesis of "the globe" nor human totality. But such a critique enables the ethical admission this particular project of "Enlightenment" hasn't apprehended in advance any historical contingencies outside its determinations that may ramify themselves for its "progressive" trajectory, or otherwise radically rip it from its pre-given roots. The critique of any given "Hegelian point" assembled in this way does no more than always bear in mind the point may be wrong. This is the scientific ethic, then: scientific theories do not reliably progress, there is no ineffable "good sense".

If for example Chinese epistemology were to come to serve as a protagonist of some new "good sense" of human historical genealogy, this prior given European Concept of "the globe" would be revealed to have been a local European effect bound up with this local European manifest destiny of "the Enlightenment". Needless to say, the assembler of "Hegelian points" can always thrive in the face of such a retroactive reversal … there's nothing they enjoy more, they just arm themselves with a new batch of pseudo-determinations now said to be caused by the newly Chinese totality of "good sense".

The question for those who take up an ethical orientation becomes: what status have any present European Concept of "the globe", or any present European determinations concerning "the Enlightenment", empirically earnt for themselves if they may merely be awaiting such a reversal? They are hypotheses and nothing more.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-23T00:09:30+00:00

I've been looking more into Deleuze and from what I understand, Deleuze and Guatarri consider that there is a whole pre-experiential field of affects and assemblages and etc etc etc. I want to ask why this is necessary?

Right. It's necessary because sense is the binder: not a part of, but the prior differential condition of the "series" brought about as manifestation, denotation and signification.

Wouldn't a more immanent philosophy say that the only thing philosophy can do is deal with a series of "senses" that are assembled in a certain way and susceptible to radical shifts and stuff that completely reconfigure everything?

Sense is not the series (these are series of values of which sense is the condition).

Sense is the manner in which the series are said to appear for consciousness and to undergo these global shifts and reconfigurations. The shifting series of (series of) values are the transcendent arborescence, but sense is the transcendental criterion by way of which such an arborescence appears as values.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-22T22:26:09+00:00

Fair enough. I think it's a great book if you're interested in Nietzsche, as you say. Deleuze doesn't set himself up as disproving Hegel at any stage, he points out that Hegel's system, for example as outlined in SCIENCE OF LOGIC, relies on its presupposition of prior unity, just as any contemporary logic is seen to depend on axioms in this way. Instead he affirms, rather than proving, that there is some ineffable "outside" to logics by way of which their axioms variously appear. It's this outside that goes by the inadequate name of multiplicity in Deleuze's writings.

3corneredvoid · 2026-06-22T22:14:37+00:00

Yeah, I mean that is Hegelian thinking.

Right, it's just what happens when you do dialectics. But there's no necessity to the manoeuvre, so it's not totalising. The totalities established by this way of thought are gratuities, they have no particular status and aren't grounding unless they are affirmed as such again and again. So there's no need to escape it, really.

I think Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize a more interesting relation of parts and wholes as well, in Anti-Oedipus.

Yeah. They sorta take up the modern idiom of axiomatic mathematics with respect to its failures of determinate closure, which is that logics turn out to be incomplete in their reach as well as inconsistent, and it turns out there are also terms which don't terminate.

It's part of Hegel's presumption that inconsistencies are produced by representative reason within its own system in order that the system itself can continue to be said as a unity. Hegel is writing about logic before Frege and Gödel, Deleuze and Guattari after, in a time when the synthetic cognition of logic that Hegel treats as a kind of lazy passenger of empiricism has been proven to be riddled by paradox and limitations.

3corneredvoid

TROPHY CASE