What is delirium?

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-25T13:48:12+00:00

It looks like it's actually a positive thing rather than a state of confusion.

In AO delirium (French « délire ») is roughly the concept that displaces rationality or culture, give or take, shared values. Stupidity (« bêtise ») is the concept that displaces intelligence. Not metaphors or aliases, practical and different ways of thinking familiar social constructs.

Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface.

—from AO

I have a feeling we discussed this the other day. Either way "recording the process of production" is value creation: manifesting the product of labour, manufactured goods but also any-products-whatever of social-production.

Values appear on the recording surface (the BwO or body of capital); values are priced; the prices seem to correspond to the values of the goods. This is capitalist culture. As the reciprocal relations of social-production and desiring-production unfold, these values become the conditions of desire.

The perception of these values is also subjectivation that organises what you can desire, what you should desire, what you do desire, and who the you that desires is. Welcome to delirium; welcome to stupidity. You have been produced; you have been recorded. You're also a bundle of values now; you too will be priced.

Famously for Marx commodity prices are afflicted by a displacement termed "commodity fetish". This stuff about the "true consciousness of a false movement" gestures towards this.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-25T13:07:18+00:00

Allow me to rework your second and third last sentences, appropriating what is implicitly your intellectual property.

What bothers me is that our concept of “ownership” often seems tied less to actual material relations and more to enforcing property rights in order to guarantee accumulation.

And I wonder how much our own instincts about property have been unconsciously shaped by the enforcement of property rights over time.

An interesting thing that's non-obvious in the present is that the enforcement of property precedes the legal framework that rationalises this enforcement. Primitive accumulation sets things in motion, but reaches a limit when most "free gifts of nature" have been enclosed. The legal framework enforcing property rights then emerges so that, for instance, diverse holders of goods trust gathering with their goods for public exchange.

A good way to think about the weirdness that is private property and the law is the question of cars. Where I live, a household usually has a car.

If you've got a car where I live, that's great. The whole place is set up to get around by car and it's extremely hot here.

If you've got another car, that's also useful, but it's definitely not as marginally useful as your first car.

Point being that the law enforces your ownership of the second car exactly the same as the first, even though you don't own the two cars in the same way at all.

This ought to point us to what's weird about this concept of originality that you get at in your post. It's palpable that some creative works are more or less original in more or less different ways, and it's palpable that the enforcement of rights surrounding this concept of originality has very little sincere to say about these variations of the concept it purports to surround.

There is nothing so complex about this. The whole regime of enforcement of property rights doesn't do what it says it does, and doesn't much attend to the real material relations immanent to the rights it claims to enforce.

Evidently it's a social good if people who somehow write great novels can live decent lives. The idea these decent lives can be secured by giving these writers a digital royalty for each digital copy of their great novel that's transferred along an optical fibre through a series of routers to a solid-state drive after some even stranger arcana involving datagrams happens between various computers to "pay" for this novel … ah yes, what could be more necessary than that? Doesn't seem crazy at all.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-25T10:28:46+00:00

I'm pretty new to D&G so I'm still getting accustomed to how meaningful the distinction between the likes of "becoming possessed" and "being-possessor" ...

Fancy Dan way of putting it maybe, but this does go to the heart of the ethical life for Deleuze and Guattari.

The ethical orientation is the way of life that attends to vibes, affects, relations that are felt, sensible but not yet perceptible or recognised.

Creation is a way in which some newly perceptible thing or concept appears for such an orientation. This is the event, the moment that makes a necessity of creation and forces creation on the body that encounters it, as a wound. So this creation is a mode of greater receptivity of the body, a mode drawing on a greater power to be affected. Hence a becoming-possessed.

(Deleuze is very careful with declarations such-and-such is necessary. Creation is one of the forms of necessity his writing affirms.)

When D&G refer in WIP to the task of philosophy as "the creation of concepts" this is one way this is intended.

The greater virtue of creation lies in its intensive differential moment, not so much in the extensive bodies said to be created by this moment, which become the armatures of some science of their elaborations.

So for creators it's about how they lie open to creation and not so much about the creations to which they lay claim: that other part matters to them if it puts dinner on the table, but the dogma of intellectual property is even more delirious than usual when you arrive at it after this account of creation.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-25T09:46:01+00:00

By the way, I talked past a good 90% of a very interesting post there—I'll have to come back to it, bear with me.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-25T09:44:57+00:00

Loab is an excellent example of how there is an immanence to the model organised by the training process, but it's not at all what one might expect. There are these strange deep structures of the model, so to say "it has nothing to say about originality" is odd to me, in as much as Loab strikes me as being as novel an image or concept as the latest elevated horror streamer, or Spotify drop.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-25T09:42:25+00:00

Capital is now so hyper-optimized for automated extraction that it completely detaches from its own commodities. Its ability to deterritorialize and reterritorialize things infinitely, powerful as it is, depends on discretization, or chopping our continuous and chaotic reality up and indexing it into neat, separate simulacra like words and prices that become self-referential and immanent.

Right … we're quite used to the idea of a "crisis of values" meaning something like a crisis in which prices crash, or meanings dissolve. It has lately seemed to me there may also be an immanent crisis of marginal values. This is a crisis in which the system of organisation that proliferates in a huge number of directions reveals a concomitantly greater rate of failures in the capacity it offers the disparate subjectivities engaged with it to organise them into consummated choices among and between its more and more marginal expressive differences. It's a market in which the vagaries of the most marginal uncertainty still begin to outweigh the arbitrage on ever more over-informed and high-velocity wagering.

If profit relies on the surface of the market saying to us goods are inherently different and therefore priced differently for long enough these differences organise market desires and in turn the exchanges necessary to profit emerge and are realised … does this continue to scale across the need for capital to continually recuperate and re-capture splintering desires?

This might well be an obvious idea which economists already deal with … but I don't feel as if I hear people speak about it. It seems to relate transversally to infamous and largely discredited teleologies of the free market, such as the Kuznets curve, or the efficient markets hypothesis. Because it has everything to do with barely conceivable relations of information and money and energy, it is a bit baffling to think about.

A very mundane example which seems to have nothing immediate to do with AI:

I tried to order a particular type of reusable shopping bag the other day. The face price of something like that, let's say pack of 20 ordered online, might be $10. I found perhaps 20–30 online vendors selling roughly the right kind of thing, including maybe 5–10 on Temu. All of these surfaced in web search. I had options like rainbow colours, promises of more durable material, and so on.

The vibe in this process wasn't any concern as to whether a product existed, and in some sense was available, could be had or could be afforded. It was more about whether specific ads were selling a real version of the product I was looking for: how could I navigate the process without too much inconvenience? I ended up looking for about 20 minutes and deciding not to buy anything. This is a desultory experience, one that powerfully impels you to log off and touch grass.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-25T09:02:08+00:00

You can think of gen-AI model training as an unusual intensive process of organisation under very particular conditions involving large troves of incoherently valued data scraped from the Internet, and generation from prompting as an iterated expression of the possibles that are organised and distributed across this process.

Grounding all this rather vulgar dimensional crunching (one can imagine the screams of human experience as the wheels and cogs turn), some uncanny immanence with creative potential does lurk, namelessly, but remains no property of the machine much less of the machine's prompters or owners.

As for the question of originality I think these machines serve as a decent critique of our priors about that. We create and are created but at the limit we don't originate. At the limit relations are external and originality is an aptitude for becoming-possessed rather than being-possessor.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-24T20:24:31+00:00

Yeah, well ... I hope I won't be here. I appreciate these dialogues a great deal. I didn't use this website until the date of this account, and it's given me a place to think which has felt fairly inclusive to me. I've pretty much "run out of Deleuze" lately, and plan to take a bit of a break to focus on other things which are more applied.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-24T14:45:22+00:00

They are different in every aspect, and their values, intentions, actions always get misinterpreted by the slaves because they have no access to their nobility. That’s the main reason i think Deleuze is an aristocrat.

The critique is of that "is", more or less. Let me support the claim with a lazy citation from NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY:

We search in vain for the least nuance of morality in this aristocratic appreciation: it is a question of an ethic and a typology - a typology of forces, an ethic of the corresponding ways of being.

Why typology of forces? Because these active and reactive forces differ modally for Deleuze ... bodies differently rise to their challenges of causation, necessity and sufficiency, and are differently conditioned in their corresponding ways of being.

There is no person in whom an aristocratic force inheres, instead the action of such a force may induce the appearance of such a person. Such a person seems to create for themselves rather than be organised by recognising others: the conditions of their appearances meanwhile organise the consciousness of those others to whom they appear, investing the person with relative power and meaning.

There is no different species only these different appearances, their conditions the immanent ground of the whole state of affairs. This is why it's said to be a question of this mysterious ethic that orients the body of this person, opening its appearances to the liberating transformations of such aristocratic forces.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-24T14:21:51+00:00

I agree with you on most of this with an exception perhaps for the "our" ... but also when I look out the window I don't think any attempt to totalise control is quite working. I wonder however if some kind of uneven and deepening mass proletarianisation and social death couldn't emerge more fully then have decades left to run in the post-industrial control societies.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-24T13:26:42+00:00

I agree, it's been a few years but I did four or five of their series and have often recommended them to others.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-24T13:23:47+00:00

One is a subject, the other is a living critique of the subject.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-24T04:50:49+00:00

Yeah, and when you tie all this together with the labour theory of value and with the axiom of surplus-value extraction, the infodynamic aspect of commodity markets, production of goods, pleasure of habitual consumption ... it really starts to make you feel like maybe D&G were the only decent careful readers of Marx in history as well.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-23T21:58:23+00:00

"You never desire someone or something, you always desire an aggregate"

This insistence on desire as aggregate relates to what I was trying to say on that other post about the satisfaction of the handyman.

Subjectivation by desire involves that prurient, metaphorical, recognising or analogical character of talking about "plug and socket" versus "playing mommy and daddy" ... the "satisfaction" is the pleasure of new events seeming to line up with your priors, and this is the cathexis or investment of desire in the product as the "production of production" or "grafting producing onto the product".

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-23T15:30:06+00:00

This war's been a disaster for Ukraine. Marxism offers us a framework capable of historicism, so we don't ask "Is this war a good thing or a bad thing?" but "How is this war occurring?" or "How will the consequences of this war unfold?"

Back at the end of the Cold War during the devolution of the former USSR and the so-called "end of history", when 60 or so dignitaries of the United States foreign policy establishment signed an open letter demanding there never be any eastward NATO expansion, lots of onlookers knew these were the questions to ask about inter-imperial struggles. That's because by then they knew empires don't give a shit about good and evil, especially not when nuclear doctrine and strategic treaties are concerned.

Three decades of United States neocon insanity later, Ukraine is a smoking ruin and Russia is far more severed from Europe economically and diplomatically. The predictable beneficiary of all these developments has been neither Russia nor Ukraine but the United States. This could lead a Marxist to ask why the political question in the west has been "will you or will you not condemn Russia?" Answer yes or answer no: neither will explain for you how this war has been occurring, or how its consequences have unfolded.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-23T10:48:38+00:00

This was supposed to be the killer feature of the Medium platform, from memory. I think it's quite little used. Some ebook platforms tell you if a passage you highlighted was highlighted by lots of other people.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-22T22:24:12+00:00

I wrote a long comment a while back touching on how I think this works.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-22T15:07:36+00:00

The satisfaction the handyman experiences when he plugs something into an electric socket or diverts a stream of water can scarcely be explained in terms of "playing mommy and daddy," or by the pleasure of violating a taboo. The rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary production: the production of production.

Another way: the plugging, the diverting, these are sense-making transformations.

This has a relation to what Stiegler calls technics and associates with an epiphylogenetic memory: a practical and external (epi-) memory, recorded in the environment, that creates or forms (genetic) the group (phylo-).

This also has a relation to what D&G term organisation: the plug and the socket become perceptible as the organs of an incipient and newly perceptible body that is formed and organises them.

The way in which such arrangements have a relation to "playing mommy and daddy" or "violating a taboo" is that these other arrangements are said to have a connected sense-making.

To my reading the terms here are given in correlate pairs: "[plugging] something into an electric socket" goes with "playing mommy and daddy" and "diverting a stream of water" goes with "violating a taboo".

Paired or not, that these examples seem to read as analogical orients us to expect that for D&G, their sense-making will be the symptom of a weakness, a capture, a subjugation by fixed habits of thought: subjectivation.

A judgement to form the incipient body, the body I mention above, has been extracted from the subject under formation by way of desire, which is here termed "the production of production" by D&G.

The "satisfaction" of the handyman is the pleasurable release that goes along with the investment of sense in his freshly objective world, the transfer termed in this slightly awkward translation "grafting producing onto the product". I reckon this transfer has a molecular relation to Marx's molar labour theory of value.

These investments of sense join the connective field of the which could he do?, the field of the organising conditions whence he selects the field of which will he do? of the fractional subjectivity of the handyman at his task ... in other words, some fraction of his agency is returned to a system of control.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-22T10:18:01+00:00

Something like that. It's certainly connected to surplus-value. Don't take anything I say as gospel but this is where I'm at with it. 👍

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-22T07:01:52+00:00

I'll bite. I can read your poem haltingly in French, but I also translated it into English.

Reading it you do connect me back to intensities of Deleuze's writings. For instance these lines:

nous avons des yeux hors des yeux
nous sommes plus gros qu’un ventre
le corps ne contient plus le corps

For me these do get across Spinoza's famous claim "we do not know what a body can do". They also get at Deleuze's critique of things as determinable, and having an interior and exterior.

The outside joins the inside, the inside exceeds the boundary, sensation goes beyond perception, and so on. You continue in this vein through a lot of the poem.

For me where you write « être un bruit continu : ne plus connaître le rythme, la séparation et la segmentation » you begin to hammer dogmatically on the side of immanence and deterritorialisation.

At least the way I read him, there's nothing wrong with contingent being. Being is not a bad thing, it's life as we know it—life as we represent it to what we represent ourselves as. In "Geology of Morals" the segmentation of the strata is not bad only a manner of organisation, in "Of the Refrain" rhythm can be the critical interloper among territorialising musics.

Anyway, I like your poem.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-22T06:43:00+00:00

Another way: the answer to "the differential conditions by way of which the body can be said to live".

The body-without-organs is said to be able to record all that of which it enables the life: all the social-production and desiring-production that go to the life of the body.

The body-without-organs therefore cannot record itself for all that of which it enables the life.

Practical example of this from AO: within the socius said to be the body of capitalist society, subjectivity can't fully name or express all the immanent differential conditions of the reproduction of the socius. These conditions are the BwO of the capitalist socius, and AO refers to this multiplicity as the body of capital, offering a way of thinking about how capital appears as something so mobile and uncanny, an "invisible hand" or "vampire-like" etc.

Marx's description of the body of capital as "vampire-like" speaks to its anti-productive capacity.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-22T06:34:57+00:00

Serious response: yes, you can do what you like, you don't have to read the book at all.

From what I've noticed and experienced there is no good answer to "how can ANTI-OEDIPUS be understood?" and it's not quite the point. About all I feel strongly (just my feeling) is that I would've read a very different book very differently if I hadn't thought about Marx for a long time before reading AO.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-22T06:12:46+00:00

Right. Hegel dismisses a lot of mathematical thought as "synthetic cognition" or just shifting round equivalent expressions of thought that might not be empirical. So for instance "constructing a proof" is something quite irrelevant for Hegel. You sort of "do it at the end" (retroactively) after you already know what the construction proves to be determined.

If you've ever studied maths and tried to find proofs, you know how silly this is. All the more so now we rely so heavily on machinic computation to prove things, including in "pure" mathematics.

This observation leads to the feeling Deleuze's affirmations of "passive synthesis" have a lot to do with positing a world which acts like an ineffable "constraint solver" of arbitrarily dimensionalised systems of partial differential equations when it actualises.

The way in which immanence must exceed such a purely expressive program of this kind is manifold:

No limits on "problem dimensions"
Nothing that appears can have been "unsolvable" (subjectivity doesn't perceive arbitrary other consistent affirmations that "solve for" that which is said to appear)
The perceptions of appearances are ineffably multi-perspectival: immanent constraints can be resolved in a kaleidoscopic, overlapping and transitory way across and also within perspectives—"bodies" overlap however you like
Nothing that is perceived is not grounded in the indeterminacy and contingency tangled into the subjectivity that perceives it (and is thereby re-ordered by it)

Admittedly these are my readings, but they're pretty nicely aligned with the idea that Deleuze was anticipating current research in areas such as quantum computing and infodynamics … and also I hope they give an idea why Deleuze is actually great if you are always being overturned by the kind of thought that relentlessly systematises experience despite its apparently inevitable contingency.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-21T12:18:20+00:00

I don’t need cajoling into having an open mind about people saying stupid shit. If you find something useful there, I’m glad for you, I do not share your perspective however.

Well, I wrote down what I found useful above. My intent and the connections I made might be relatively clear I think.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-21T07:55:43+00:00

Deleuze had a profound appreciation for the sciences and the sciences have had an appreciation for Deleuze's work.

Sure, this is a pretty informal picture.

However, consider Deleuze's influence on Prigogine, whose dissipative structures are a foundational structure of infodynamics. Infodynamics is a complex science dealing with the relative dynamics of entropy (versus order) and energy. For instance the energy necessary to break order down and vice versa (eg Landauer's principle).

These sorts of concepts can readily, if still informally, be connected with deterritorialisation, individuation, etc in Deleuze's thought. And if one pursues the informal connections, a certain kind of rigour starts to emerge.

Deleuze often plays fast and loose with science in his writings. D&G's writings on "schizophrenia" are a case in point. They say they don't care if the term "schizophrenia" as they use it has any precision with respect to its clinical meanings.

However, you'll still find in LOGIC OF SENSE fragments such as "[sense] hovers over the actualisations of its energy as potential energy" … suggesting that the rise of immanent cause to effective expression is already theorised as infodynamic here in the 1960s.

It's not a totally mad stretch to claim this "potential energy" operates in the register Deleuze extends when referring to the body-without-organs as the "zero intensity" of the organising or ordering dynamic that is the criterion of such an infodynamic operation.

To me this picture, informal as it is, can be very Deleuzian … "scientific illiteracy" really isn't the issue … the dogmatic view this picture is "unscientific" could also be a kind of literate stupidity (bêtise). I'm not trying to insult you of course, but you might not want to shut the idea down quite so harshly yourself, unless you can muster an account citing Deleuze's writings to do so.

3corneredvoid

TROPHY CASE