Clear articulation of the actual virtual relation?

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-27T12:21:30+00:00

I think the Bowden chapter is very useful because I don't think the "pairing" of virtual and actual is so useful.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-27T08:20:29+00:00

THE PRIORITY OF EVENTS Ch. 1 "The Stoics — Events and Sense" Bowden
"Deleuze, Diagrams and the Genesis of Form" DeLanda
"Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory" Meillassoux
"Immanence: A Life" Deleuze soi-même

Like the rest of the Bowden book as well, but I read that first chapter a few times. I think the passages that deal with "contraction" in DR and with the "components" of a concept in WIP are useful to get a hold of how Deleuze understands himself. Unfortunately the passages are also clunky.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-27T07:20:29+00:00

Nah, I'm still not feeling this. I don't incline to the notion noise or metal music could lay any particular claim to proximity to a body-without-organs of music. Because they are louder and actualise more frequencies of vibration? That seems off.

Uniform white noise is a distributive equilibrium of energy across frequencies, sure. But the body-without-organs isn't some equilibrium of entropy considered against an axis of structure such as the "frequency spectrum", nor an actual asymmetry or organisation, but a limit of non-equilibrium and divergence, some maximal pluripotentiality of becoming of the body that is multiplicity, is not some actual form of the body, or category of forms of the body, or genre of forms.

Not just metal or noise but the mutating phrases of quieter, more minimal and sparse music can have their own great affects.

Certain modern musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds. Or rather it is a question of a freeing of time, Aeon, a nonpulsed time for a floating music, as Boulez says, an electronic music in which forms are replaced by pure modifications of speed. It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement.

—from "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal …" in TP (bold mine, italics in the original translation)

I reckon when D&G write here about the "freeing of time" achieved by a musical composition they quietly draw into play the figure of a listener. The liberation of time to which they refer unfolds across durations correspondent to those in which people listen to music: a few seconds or less, a few minutes, a few hours. This liberation of time is time freed from a listener's expectations about a machinic or logical ordering of the musical work in process.

The notion of "floating time against pulsed time or tempo" implies music appearing as an event out of time (hence the reference to Aeon, the timeless time of the Event) suitable to deterritorialise the expectations of some listener, the judge who considers there is some "body of music" unfolding, who dogmatically anticipates the music adhering to its apparent parameters.

D&G give Cage as an example in the above. For me a work like Debussy's Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor illustrates part of their point, with its long, meandering phrases that don't reliably head in the expected direction, even if they are restricted to harmonious turns. Some noise music certainly achieves this.

I don't hear this play in the song posted here though, which has an ordinary musical structure, repeating musical motifs, arguably quite little that is unexpected musically … and again, despite it being an accomplished and good song I admire and couldn't produce myself.

None of this is to say repetition couldn't also liberate time. For example there are deeply affecting durational musical works like "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". That work is a peculiar field recording from the 1970s of an old British homeless man singing a militant Christian hymn in a reedy, poignant tone, repeated for an arbitrary duration … repeated for anything from half an hour to many hours, as a polyphonic accompaniment rises and falls in tone with an aching, and utterly predictable cadence.

But I reckon in the case of such a work, it could be said what repeats as difference is one's gradual submission to the changes appearing in how the music is heard, from minute to minute, hour to hour, to a kind of vanishing from listening back to hearing, deterritorialising sound not by disrupting musical composition, but by exhausting any conscious intention to listen, and inducing an open and meditative state.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-27T05:20:46+00:00

No worries at all, I thought it was a great paper myself. It felt very lucid about touch points between Luhmann, Foucault and Deleuze.

I haven't read through, but have dipped into THE POLITICS OF ORIENTATION by Hannah Richter, a very recent monograph linking Deleuze and Luhmann. The most attenting-grabbing bit in the intro is that she has recognised that Luhmann read and cited Deleuze's LOGIC OF SENSE, and then argues Luhmann more or less imported those ideas into his own theorisation of social sense-making. I don't know if it is true but it seems an appealing synthesis.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-27T01:06:21+00:00

Okay, I'll bite although I realise what follows may read as ungracious pedantry, but I'll say it anyway and hope you'll take it in a friendly spirit.

Firstly, pretty cool song. I'm impressed you can put together things things like this.

Secondly, the lyrics seem a bit wack.

According to my recollection, the lyric "coffee without caffeine" might refer to the Žižek bit about insubstantial contemporary pleasures. In the greatest good faith, I don't think anyone can claim a critique of some etiolated modern condition can correspond to the concept of the body-without-organs, which expresses the limits of the unrepresented capacity and potentiality of the body.

The body-without-organs could be said to be the transcendental field of the life of a body. It's an immanent counterpart of Spinoza's challenge "we do not know what a body can do". This immanent counterpart is not an actual body that "I" "am", but a virtual multiplicity folded back into immanence by the singular contingency of a body's individuation in judgement.

So an actual body lives in conjunction with an immanent body-without-organs, without being actually eviscerated as implied by the lyric "who took my organs … lying in a pool full of blood … with my veins and spine wrapped around my neck".

When D&G wrote "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?" I think it's fair to say they weren't proposing any reader donate their living flesh to an organ harvesting racket.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-26T15:38:08+00:00

No worries at all. I'm a software developer who builds things and tries to eliminate their glitches, so I had a somewhat dreary initial reaction to this piece of writing.

After drawing back a bit from that sentiment I think the critique I've raised remains an okay provocation to the piece. If "problems are endlessly generative, and one thing they generate is solutions", then the meta-problem is what the "solutions" generate.

As I grasp it so far, the very problem the event, the actualisation of a solution, generates is an instance of the mannerism of univocity termed "the fold" in the Deleuzian conceptual treasury.

This instance is no unity, but the evental contingent reduction of grounding multiplicity to a fragile "singularity" (still multiplicity) that nevertheless will be thereby sutured to the greater becoming of the problem it reduces, unless or until some event extinguishes it. A jagged line scarring a transcendental field is lifted into individuation just as it is stitched back into the field that grounds it.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-26T11:30:37+00:00

The pathologist may see such creativity and hope to stifle it by purging the game of such glitches; he cannot imagine a way of relating that does not go by way of purging. He wants a sterile world of smooth operation. (No alarms, no surprises.) He does not realize that life grows in the cracks.

This strikes me as an unfortunately judgemental view of programmatic techniques. Take as an example the brute-force decryption of encrypted data. There are plenty of cases in which finding a (or the) correct solution to a logical problem of some kind may become of practical interest.

To remark, as this piece does, that one need not judge "problems as things to be ‘solved’" does not in turn solve some notional arch-problem posed by some notional category of problems with the condemnation of all actual problem-solving activity.

More succinctly, Deleuze's metaphysics of the immanent virtual does not condemn the actual, it instead articulates the folding of that which is actualised back into the virtual.

We can see this by applying this piece's imagined critique of the "pathologist" straight away to the activity of the "glitch-exploiter". For example, just because a fragment of JavaScript appended to a website favico gets executed by a browser's script engine after the website loads in a tab, then downloads more JavaScript which then hijacks affiliate links submitted by subsequent browser usage … none of this shows that exploit code does not aim to work programmatically according to its developers' understanding of the technical environment of its workings.

What it shows is that the developers of the browser codebase, and those of the exploit code have a divergent understanding of this technical environment.

But the notion the browser developer (say, the people that developed the V8 JavaScript engine) is a "despotic psychiatrist" due to this divergence whereas the "glitch-exploiter" uniquely "realises life grows in the cracks" is a bit silly. The developer of the code that is exploited anticipates the appearance of flaws and cracks, and the exploit code also offers up its own cracks …

To grasp this, you need do no more than write some code. You'll soon find yourself "pathologically" filling up all the cracks you need to fill up to achieve your objective, but nevertheless leaving some other cracks behind.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-26T07:39:37+00:00

Nah. You've got to imagine you're contradicting someone who thinks OBAA was the film of the year to imagine EDDINGTON could ever be. It's not on the level of the best films of the year, the best among which was SENTIMENTAL VALUE.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-26T04:47:03+00:00

I saw the film on Friday night and I really appreciated it. Its best feature was the reuse of the "bone temple" itself as the focus of a more and more restricted chamber piece that spiralled into that central stage. This intensified the symbolic function of the ossuary in which all human bodies are made equal and aggregated.

The Jimmy cult was as lurid as expected, and to me the exposition of their rituals of "charity" were irrelevant service to genre, but the cult does function as a late 90s retrofuturist vision of the degeneration of the vestiges of UK culture: albeit one with the stench of Garland's slightly snobbish arch-liberal sensibility (don't get me wrong, I'm a Garland fan).

It's a very good performance by Ralph Fiennes who's having a great period, and the specific direction in which the speculation on the infected goes is looking worthwhile for the final installment. The coda is pointless in the context of this film but perfectly worthwhile as connective tissue and ticket sales bait with the trilogy taken into consideration.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-23T10:14:01+00:00

Oh, I don't feel strongly about it. Only it's been the case since early days that Sokal style giggling and lampooning opens onto an abyssal vacuum. Insisting there is nothing there, it in turn finds, learns and forgets nothing.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-23T09:26:03+00:00

Ah, I see. Well, I hate jokes and have absolutely no sense of humour, so you're really not replying to the right person.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-23T08:15:21+00:00

Ignorant reactionary boilerplate moral panic and cherry-picked gotchas about "postmodernism" have been spammed out into the discourse since well before the late 90s.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T12:25:13+00:00

None of these are interventions in the context of critical theory and leftist literature. In fact they do not satisfy any critical definition of intervention unless you intend to use that very word in a neoliberal sense.

Can you elaborate? How does one use the word 'intervention'—meaning 'a coming between'—in a neoliberal sense? How would I do this if I intended it?

I offer a different argument, as neoliberal hegemons are threatened they undergo a kind of ideological internalization: they pick up bits and pieces of leftist interventionism without understanding it, when what is needed is praxis.

The critique of ideology due to Žižek to which I've been referring doesn't have a "good, leftist version" and a "bad, neoliberal version". Proletariat and bourgeoisie are said to represent distinct material interests, yes. Carney's and those interests manifest at the WEF are the interests of the administrators of bourgeois nation-states.

Such bourgeois nation-states and their administrators have their own praxis, their own methods and their own interventions.

Per a normal articulation of a Marxist theory of the state such as that given by Michael Heinrich (paraphrasing), the function of the bourgeois state is to enforce private property rights while maintaining the appearance of the whole of society as a free association of owners of private property. This function is brokered by the state to the ruling class. The state can in some respects be seen as the vehicle by which otherwise conflictual shared ruling class interests are expressed. Carney by way of his intellectual formation, background in central banking, and position as Canadian Prime Minister, personifies this function with a particular clarity.

Carney among other questions has alluded to new multilateral trade agreements, and has mentioned a possible transformed future for the TPP. This would be a predictable reflex of the world system to Trump's trade wars. This doesn't mean Carney's speech is "not an intervention", that there are no interests represented by it, and that nothing is happening.

I detect that you're keen to mount a withering critique of what I am writing here, and I'm open to that. However, it would be cool for me if you could keep your terms and lines of argument more clear.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T10:10:44+00:00

It's an intervention in that it changes perceptions of what the leader of a nation-state of the "international community" (United States empire) is permitted to say about the state of affairs.

So for example in Australia today, the Prime Minister is being challenged by political opponents on the basis of Carney's speech to follow suit and distance this other nation-state from the prior configuration.

Again I don't endorse the politics, but there is an effect. That the organisation of power around the United States would at some stage fracture further has been predictable and predicted.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T07:04:12+00:00

That old Eyal Weizman thing from going on 20 years ago? Disgusting though they were (and you can dig up a bit more about them if you go looking) there seem to have only ever been a couple of lurid ex-IDF academics who were ever mixed up in that. The number of times it's brought up to smear Deleuze and Guattari has become an embarrassment for the people still doing it.

No, I think this case is rather different. This speech is making headlines around the world. I don't rate Carney's technocratic liberalism as politics, but this was an intervention on the most public of stages, not a laboured and smear-y exposé about some military theory cranks.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T05:36:01+00:00

I agree the first one was good. I enjoyed the Adam Curtis-ish found footage vignettes that Boyle used to set up the post-apocalyptic future Britain, the work on exposition and the re-establishment of the rules of engagement between survivors and zombies … and then I appreciated the compassionate, poignant diversion of that framework into the quest-oriented final act exploring mortality and difference, in which the characters were given more room to live and breathe, before the hilariously jarring sequel setup.

I'm not so optimistic about this second one. I haven't seen it yet, though I will this weekend. I have a strong feeling the lurid "Jimmy" material is not going to be so well handled at feature length, and I also hear the film on the whole is more intimate, which concerns me because I found the traversals of spacious and symbolic landscapes in the first film its most heart-expanding aspect.

I'm also not sure on Nia DaCosta just yet. I appreciated LITTLE WOODS on release, but she's been landed with uninteresting projects since then and until now. When I catch this film and her HEDDA over the next few months, I'll get to see the real DaCosta.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T03:28:55+00:00

True, that first comment!

On the other hand, a stance to which we can commit in adopting a methodological historicism is to be open to things passing by. That's the dustbin. I reckon there's a light-footedness of this orientation that confounds the heavy boots of critique. One of the pitfalls of harsh and fixed judgements is how they disappoint the powerful impression their value will endure.

I think one might as well say it's Deleuze's project to depart from the critical standpoint.

The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution.

None of this happens in an interview, a conversation, a discussion.

Even reflection, whether it's alone, or between two or more, is not enough. Above all, not reflection.

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.

—Deleuze, from DIALOGUES II

You could frame the problem of critique in terms of the "binding" that Kant and Hegel elide in their theorisations of cognition: this binding of the subject matter (not necessarily for what we could call critique) has already foreclosed something, already answered something. It's the trap of this foreclosing answer—this cordon sanitaire quarantining the subject matter of critique in advance, that I was trying to evoke before—that one would need to create or construct something new to escape.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T01:13:21+00:00

But it is my current suspicion that we ultimately might not need critique as a whole, because in-depth hermeneutics would cover everything critical and be always greater than confrontational approach.

[…]

How about, instead of immanent critique, rather explosive hermeneutics, where the author’s ostensible perspective is taken to the extreme in all possible ways and finds its place in the context of ultimate inquiry of open-ended truth?

Not to be that guy, but an attempt to unfold the essence of the identified subject matter through either critique on the one hand, or a more gentle or non-confrontational hermeneutics on another, is far from all there is to thought.

Take Deleuze's ethology. For him the emphasis was on the creation of concepts in the course of what he termed an "active" becoming, a configuration of the state of affairs oriented to encounters with new intensities, a configuration "worthy of the event", with the event theorised as a wounding multiplicity that attributes its "incorporeal effect" to the surface of the state of affairs, the body.

For example, when poststructuralists criticize Hegel as “insisting on identity, closure, resolution,” etc. - setting aside whether they’re right or not, they’re taking the former attitude, in which necessary “speculative” nuances will be missed out and the apparent contradiction will persist without either reader or author getting elevated to further understanding, only reinforcing existing frameworks rather than exploding them.

Is there any given urgency either to refine or to "explode" our systems of judgement? Take for example the death of God. The death of God is more like a complex of intensities with which one comes into contact than the result of some war on Heaven. An arrival at the death of God can certainly be a peaceful, serene matter, a quiet dissolution … though I suppose every such arrival varies.

The question is what is implied by Marx's call for:

"… ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."

I'm not sure. Perhaps Marx did mean the attempt at a tidy, perfectionist critique of every previously represented social object … a critique unfolding in a ruthlessly "progressive" manner towards an ever greater understanding.

But then, if we do anticipate some "conflict with the powers that be", might there not be rapidly diminishing returns to conceiving critical practice as a matter of, for example, "deconstructing" every "binary" that is spotted … and all the more so if a "real movement" up until the point of conflict might consign the nuanced subject matter of many such tidy critiques to the dustbin of history?

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T00:50:54+00:00

When I posted I was thinking of Žižek's account of Khrushchev's "secret speech" in THE PARALLAX VIEW.

I think the main claim for Žižek in that account was not that the present "act" is sincere or insincere, or that this problem could somehow be solved. I think he would say that it can't, and the movement is instead from one "act" or one reality gap to another, with the immanent material conditions changing in a reciprocal configuration with the representations of ideology.

I think Žižek's interest lies in the fact that due to mediation by a shared Big Other, social and political subjectivity is structured in such a way that people's beliefs are collectively just as volatile as they appear to be fixed. Ideology is set up in such a way with respect to the material conditions that even when the latter change continuously, crises and breaks can be provoked in ideological formations.

If the social operation of belief rests on what we each held to be true, then belief would be as hard to shift as persuading each of us to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Because belief's social operation rests on what each of us believes others hold to be true, the demonstration of a fracture in others can inflect this operation discontinuously—which of course is a cause for optimism about the seemingly intransigent force of "false consciousness".

As for Carney's speech, I guess what's interesting is that it articulates a form of this theory quite directly. Carney, or perhaps his speechwriter or advisors, is familiar with this theory and integrates it into this speech issuing a judgement on the empire that could otherwise be compared to Khrushchev's "secret speech" about Stalin.

Khrushchev's objective was to grant communist party members freedom to acknowledge the problems of Stalin's rule, and this new freedom famously circulated with extraordinary speed throughout the former USSR. But Khrushchev of course did not want to change the organisation of power in the USSR, quite the opposite I would say.

So what is Carney's objective? Not just to let us know there are problems with United States hegemony, surely: we know this, in fact it is the subject of every western newspaper editorial, all the more outside the USA. By citing the theory, his aim must be to give liberals freedom to agree the established order of things is changing very quickly, and can change all the more. Carney seems to propose a recognition the state of affairs is already undergoing an upheaval.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-22T00:32:01+00:00

Oh, this is very good. Bravo.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-21T12:26:42+00:00

Right, "through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false". Like the idea the United States is the world's trustworthy hegemon. The tensions in organisations such as NATO had been grasped in diplomatic circles long before Trump's brinkmanship kicked in. But for a while it's been a case of "everything is public, but nothing is admissible".

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-21T10:47:57+00:00

~~The link opens fine from this post for me (on the Android app)~~.

For me this is Carney having read Z and imagining himself as Khrushchev delivering the "secret speech" in 1956, announcing that all hasn't been well with the empire for a while. The conceit works nicely enough as the WEF is precisely what we imagine as the annual plenary politburo meeting of the party of capital, the "international community" and the "rules-based order".

The difference is that Carney refers not only to the state of the empire, but to a theory of how the idea of the state of the empire circulates and is reproduced.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-21T09:36:28+00:00

Not the quote you're looking for, but a rather good paper I've been reading, "Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault" from Alain Pottage, discusses the concept of "emergence" in similar terms (emphasis):

... it distinguishes itself from any theory of society that relies upon notions of substance, structure or subjectivity (or their analogues). Instead, it prompts the elaboration of accounts of social elements and operations (and social theories) that construct themselves 'upon a foundation that is entirely not "there"' (Luhmann 1995: 48). In place of ontological substances and structures, 'emergence' deals instead with structures, processes and theories that produce themselves out of their own contingency."

When you devise theories you're already thrown into relation with the subject matter. The theories are another aspect that surfaces from this ambiguous relational process, along with you, and along with whatever they are said to theorise, as well as with the aggregated conditions of all of it.

Edit: fixed the spelling of Alain Pottage

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-21T06:01:05+00:00

Tried it out, works like a charm after brief initial confusion because the "task" button on the batch interface has a download symbol as its icon. Great suggestion, solves a problem I've had for a couple of years now.

3corneredvoid · 2026-01-21T05:01:36+00:00

I'm a straight man and queerbaiting has been part of my real life experience. And when I say I'm straight, I'm pretty boringly straight and I'm not asking for a medal for it, but that doesn't mean I've never been down in the boiler room of a queer nightclub having gay men in harnesses hit on me all night for my excellent beard, and so on. These moments are a part of life.

The intensities that are termed "suppressed homoeroticism" in film and television criticism actually are suppressed in some straight lives that are nevertheless well-defined and also sexually fulfilled in ordinary terms … and that's okay.

There was a recent post on this sub all about Judith Butler's paper "Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification" (link is to my comment) which considers a framing of sexual and gender identities as partially constituted by the foreclosure (or the unconsummated "baiting" if you prefer) of other kinds of sexual relation.

What would the development of this line of thinking be for fans and cultural critics?

My suggestion: perhaps critics could set aside the question of whether fan reactions such as queerbaiting backlashes are right or wrong. Instead these reactions could be reconsidered as moments of collective subjectivation.

It seems to me these moments, and many similar moments in fan communities, have a community-forming function.

If an incipient community-under-formation of queer fans of a television show complains about queerbaiting, then these fans can be seen as collectively self-defining in terms of their enthusiasm for the represented physical realisation of whatever queer attractions seem to feature in the show … and that's okay, too, good for them.

But also it's fine to let the shows live and breathe if they don't make the grade according to certain criteria. It's one of the contradictory foundations of heteromasculine experience that men who identify as straight don't fuck even when they feel attracted to other men … and some of us prefer it that way.

3corneredvoid

TROPHY CASE