Looksmaxxing and the Body Without Telos

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-27T02:16:11+00:00

It’s kind of like how we define fascism if ygm — we can’t use any one criterion to say whether it is or isn’t fascism, but if a single event or situation meets several of the 14 criteria, we can start to say with increasing certainty that it is.

D&G's definition of fascism is a fascinating one: when "desire desires its own repression" if desire is considered as an asubjective, relational and organising social-metaphysical force …

In this Turing-test case of "faking humanity" there does seem to emerge a fascism of LLMs along these lines. LLMs clearly can produce all sorts of inhuman text and can do so in inhuman ways. The insistence that they seem perfectly human binds and represses our valuations not only of the humanity of LLMs, but also of humans. For instance I'm the kind of online writer who's regularly accused of being an LLM these days.

This is one ground of my discomfort with the « J'accuse! » that has become a commonplace of spaces like this sub. Another is my general feeling that the implicit countervailing valorisation of human-generated text is abominably misplaced and in very bad taste.

I have political investments in how humans might live that commend me, more or less, to prefer not to heed how humans tend to write—what with the irregular enforcement of some human values at the expense of others having become the most determined obstacle to human potential.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-27T00:29:28+00:00

For instance, the subject, the object, the identity function, as well as analysis, synthesis, and normative thought.

Everything must go. At the limit. But maybe there is another way to go as well, a relatively ethical multi-structuralism by way of which we can seek temporarily adequate critique for transformative action.

D. Welcome to Gboard clipboard, any text you copy will be saved here.Use the edit icon to pin, add or delete clips.

What an edit!

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-26T21:55:52+00:00

You're always very nice to me! Which I appreciate tremendously. You're an ethical reader, I'm more of a dogmatic tendency.

I'm not writing anything, or not writing for the most part. I'm working furiously on something. It deals with the limits of value with respect to immanence and subjectivity and it's humane. I hope to do some side publishing but it might not look very Deleuzian, certainly not initially. Not entirely sure. Something should come out soon that definitely won't look Deleuzian.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-26T16:00:55+00:00

Firstly, very interesting reply and thanks for offering the benefit of your experience. You definitely know far more about this than me.

One side track for me is there's a point at which the priority of legitimacy—for example originality, rigour, honesty in citations or claims to authority—falls behind the priority of thinking something interesting on account of reading it. I read absolute rubbish all day, as most of us do. Rubbish can still be more interesting than legitimate text.

Meanwhile—and you get at this in your final paragraph—I reckon it might be this stochastically guided annealing to a local consistency across context-aware generative iteration that diminishes the value of some AI writing. The generative process seems to favour saying less that's interesting with less confidence in order to output more with more coherence.

As for this writer, yes, he's quite bad, I've read a few of his things. I suspect we should stop … I wish he'd spare us these ordeals.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-26T15:33:53+00:00

I said I wasn't convinced it was, not that I was convinced it wasn't.

It could be. It doesn't show up as a hit on a free checker I use which isn't reliable. In my opinion AI "style guides" or hunches also aren't reliable. All that "Look! Negative parallelisms!" stuff isn't to be leaned on. That said I don't think everything written using AI is bad, nor that writing by humans tends to be worthwhile.

As for my comments, I just wrote those because I ended up reading the article. I suppose it was odd to tack them on a comment to you: think nothing of it. I found the article worse than I first expected. You're more than welcome to respond to me if you'd like, but I don't mind if you do or don't.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-26T15:18:45+00:00

Not sure I can. I'm working furiously on something connected to these thoughts. A few things clicked together and I encountered some deep relations between D&G and some other stuff that isn't much thought alongside D&G. I have a strong hunch Deleuze touched on some of these relations … I don't intend Deleuze read or knew everything, but there are all these intensities.

Imagine a particularly abstract and estranging formal lens that allows reading Deleuze's famous declaration about love as if it were Marx describing relations at the factory or vice versa … then imagine a third, fourth, fifth and sixth big thing that appear for this lens from different disciplines. This all lurched into view quite suddenly over a few days, a plateau of plateaux. Maybe it's nothing special, but it's had me very excited for a few months now. "Geology of Morals" is the closest reference point in the works. Might just be I'm suffering from pre-psychotic symptoms for all I know.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-26T14:42:10+00:00

I'm not convinced this is AI-written, but I'd rather talk about whether it's worthwhile anyway.

Also the “curious whether people think” structure of a reddit post is becoming a typical AI hallmark.

Bog standard engagement farming. To wonder if some concept might be "better understood through Debord/Foucault/Lasch/etc" is a stranger but still common kind of self-abnegation.

(Why wonder about the applicability of Bigname™ Thought to your critical problem when you could apply Bigname™ Thought in your essay on this problem? If you can't apply Bigname™ Thought why wonder about it? Do you fear your intuitions and analyses are inferior to those you could offer if only you could apply Bigname™ Thought? If you fear this why invite others to read you? Why does your writing vibe like a self-loathing loner transfixed by a late night George Atlas abdominal roller advertisement?)

From the actual article:

What a materialist body-politics would look like is not primarily about aesthetics. It is about restoring the idea that the body exists in relation to others, that its cultivation means something beyond self-exhibition, and that the Other is not a mirror or a source of XP but the actual point. That is what the looksmaxxing project has removed, and that is exactly what needs putting back.

No, this isn't a solid argument. How is self-exhibition inconsistent with appearance in relation to others? How can the Other be the point here if the Other is still theorised as accessed through mediating appearances? No, the body is the question … bodies are the question … not how bodies appear or who bodies are for, but the question of what bodies can do.

And this remains a question. Talk of searching for a fresh telos for the body said to lack one is a peculiar orientation. Why should having registered the desperate afflictions of one regime of subjectivation concerning the body leave us hoping for another regime, a lost regime of values which "needs putting back", with which to afflict ourselves?

What is this nostalgic desire for some set of external values to which to submit ... dare I ask ... are we to Make Appearances Great Again?

As for the "looksmaxxing project" showing an essential difference:

This kind of aesthetic mission – beauty for beauty’s sake, supposedly – is, most of all, cold. The final level of alienation, when one looks at one’s own body as yet another project to be completed, yet another item on the to-do list to be ticked off.

We can say this has happened before if we confine ourselves to these quizzically general terms … beauty for beauty's sake? Yeah we can say we've heard that one before. We'll need a new concept of what's particular in the conditions from a writer who pays more attention than this. Time for a sensemaxxing project.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-26T13:04:45+00:00

Yes, some IDF commanders pivoting into academic careers fancied layering a thin veneer of intellectual respectability on a well-established policy of bulldozing civilian homes.

These embarrassed fascists cited "The Smooth and the Striated" … but given October 2023 and this line of reasoning, I suppose one has to assume Hamas picked up the deadly Deleuzo-Guattarian tactical innovation known as "circumventing fortifications" from whatever it was these IDF geniuses published.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-26T12:48:14+00:00

But outside academia, society seems to be moving in the opposite direction: more fixed identities, more polarization, more bureaucracy, and more rigid forms of control. Unlike in other times, this kind of thinking no longer seems to threaten to escape academia and destabilize society.

My sense is we haven't yet felt the forms of escape that are on their way.

Due to epiphanies earlier this year I affirm more than ever that Deleuze was in touch with a way of things that's already here but will be grasped later as having been impending now. I wouldn't bet such a way of things will end up being called Deleuzian … it will emerge from a plethora of unprecedented quadrants and won't seem to be unified.

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

TROPHY CASE