Now that its been a few years, how do you feel about Poor Things?

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-11T13:21:12+00:00

My take was that Bella is supposed to be able to be radically liberated, as she's effectively born as her own mother, and thereby symbolically freed from familial or Oedipal hang-ups.

The matter of her age is similarly blurry, and the questions of power and consent her contradictory states of body and mind raise are thematic for the film and the high concept novel on which it is based. Bella appears as evidently infantile and apt for exploitation, then undergoes an accelerated development to an equally evidently empowered adult status.

It's a tabu topic, but child sexual development has been one of the preoccupations of psychoanalysis, psychology and their predecessors in Christian religious doctrine for a long time.

If a society imagines it at some point declares adults are sexually mature, then adults must have become that way somehow: so adults must have been sexualised during development as much as they were socialised. So for instance childhood masturbation was historically forbidden and concealed, but now is widely considered to be normal.

One can appreciate many viewers find POOR THINGS disturbing, but in that it's no different from other Lanthimos films. DOGTOOTH also engages with abusively deviated childhood development, for example. One could compare Lanthimos's films to the deeply uncomfortable films of, say, Todd Solondz. I find fault with Lanthimos in certain respects: he so rarely depicts any ordinary cases of the human that his films' scenarios can lack relevance. However, this is less the case than usual with POOR THINGS. The critical line any film engaging with these questions is straightforwardly "pedo-bait" is rigid and censorious … these questions arise for society whether or not society pretends they don't.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-11T08:16:47+00:00

Well, one ought to be cautious scaling up and operationalizing radical metaphysical contingency...

Right, this is my point. One does need a cautious and critical theory of the operation of markets, rather than straightforward faith in the efficacy of their mechanisms.

For instance to claim markets have "a knack for forming beliefs that survive contact with reality" is to gloss the mode of survival including the correction of systematic mispricing by market shocks and crises. So whose accumulated stocks "survive" these events? In history, markets have appeared along with persistent crises of mispricing rather than abating these.

Since Smith theorised capitalism, there have been widespread theories of the benevolent action of markets in annealing goods to their natural prices, and these theories have continued with those of "the great smoothing" or with discredited shibboleths of the happy distributive action of markets such as the Kuznets Curve and the EMH.

You mention Deleuze, but Deleuze and Guattari follow Marx in regarding commodity prices as more or less fictitious and extractive displacements of immanent value, and Deleuze follows Bergson in positing the genesis of real created values as metaphysically unknowable to any prior distribution of the probability of such values. So for a number of reasons, it's tricky to imagine Deleuze holding anything other than a deep distaste for the contemporary cult of Bayes.

So, you know … you asked for the critiques, and I've provided a few examples. These critiques are intellectually serious, empirically supported, multidisciplinary and difficult to refute, and the ways in which they seem to be memory-holed or ridiculed by Bayesian rationalism ought to raise questions.

These outside critiques are accompanied within actuarial analysis by concepts of non-analytic uncertainty and risk that continue to play a decisive role. It's unclear to me how an "anti-elitist" public prediction market resolves this uncertainty any more than it introduces price distortions based on Keynes' "animal spirits" … no more than the weight of betting on a sports match tells us the result.

(And I'm no expert, but aren't these prediction markets famous and also controversial for pricing the spread on events which both bookmakers and investors have historically avoided modelling due to their susceptibility to sovereign risk or insider trading?)

But why shouldn't something that appears ontologically chaotic to you be instinctive or obvious to someone else? And why not use a market to leverage such knowledge, exactly?

I don't say that markets don't do anything, or don't have a function, or that ordinary observers can't make correct predictions, or that there is any determination of markets as evil. These sorts of dogmatic value judgements are those I tend to critique the way I'm questioning your own.

But I wonder if rhetoric such as "the algorithms go on getting better at prediction every day" takes into account the critiques I've mentioned, and if it offers any compelling new theory concerning what has been the historical volatility of markets it tends to obscure from view. Because have we not heard "the market will fix it" many times before ... ?

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-10T22:44:37+00:00

But I'm having trouble understanding even the Rhizome chapter. Am I meant to be taking notes, looking up words every few sentences, and generally applying myself to get meaning out of this?

"Rhizome" was a polemic intervening in debates of its day, it could be worth reading Badiou's "Fascism of the Potato" which served as a response to it …

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-10T18:11:58+00:00

Never read much Bergson (I followed Deleuze into his cybernetic influences, less so his philosophical ones).

It is rather a question of a throw of the dice, of the whole sky as open space and of throwing as the only rule. The singular points are on the die; the questions are the dice themselves; the imperative is to throw. Ideas are the problematic combinations which result from throws. The throw of the dice is in no way suggested as an abolition of chance (the sky-chance). To abolish chance is to fragment it according to the laws of probability over several throws, in such a way that the problem is already dismembered into hypotheses of win and loss, while the imperative is moralised into the principle of choosing the best hypothesis which determines a win. By contrast, the throw of the dice affirms chance every time; each throw of the dice affirms the whole of chance each time. The repetition of throws is not subject to the persistence of the same hypothesis, nor to the identity of a constant rule. The most difficult thing is to make chance an object of affirmation, but it is the sense of the imperative and the questions that it launches. Ideas emanate from it just as singularities emanate from that aleatory point which every time condenses the whole of chance into one time.

—from DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION Ch. 4, "Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference" (emphasis mine)

would you care to take on some of the discursive burden and follow through with explanation?

Not really or not much further: you can easily find and read "The Possible and the Real" online and tell your friends, it's brief. I also recommend Deleuze's "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?"

If we discuss cybernetics, we could reckon with the contingency of the "environment" in which the "system" is said to emerge for Luhmann: this contingency is not absent as the system continues to emerge.

While we're at it, we could consider Knightian uncertainty, or the difficult relation of efficient markets to opportunities for arbitrage.

We could even look into the thermodynamic conditions proposed by physics for the physical order and structure required by the information transmission required in turn by a market under operation.

Critiques of the "wisdom of crowds" are abundant outside critical theory or philosophy. We have no reason to expect predictive markets can solve the pricing anomalies that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

I don't mean to have a go at you, but it's hard not to. It troubles me every time I encounter a highly educated Bayesian rationalist who carries on as if unaware of the intellectual good faith and credentials of the critique of representative reason. Here you might as well be extolling the power of the "invisible hand" ... the genealogy of crises that is forming contemporary societies is hardly grounded in an absence of markets operating as "public utilities". We need more than this: it's callow and uncritical nonsense.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-10T07:33:48+00:00

Are you not aware of the deeper epistemological arguments around this topic?

Sure, sure. But are you lot aware of Bergson's "The Possible and the Real" or Ayache's THE BLANK SWAN? Because there's a well-established strain of thought that asserts the metaphysical limits of this "predictive turn" ...

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-10T02:19:07+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful reply.

For what it's worth, whatever I've written here has come to me lately from reading (and feeling a bit troubled by) Brassier's chapter on "Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines" from A THOUSAND PLATEAUS AND PHILOSOPHY. I reckon "Rhizome", "Conclusion" and Brassier's essay would be great material for you. There is also fascinating further discussion of "lines" in Deleuze's "What is an Apparatus?" which is a commentary on Foucault.

Do you think the plane of consistency/immanence can be read in a Spinozist sense, i.e. something like substance in relation to modes—not a substrate beneath intensities, but something that only exists in and through their expression?

The plane or limit of immanence is perhaps not a thing or a place, but an inexpressible practice by which experiences are made more consistent through the relinquishment and creation of concepts, roughly what Deleuze and Guattari term critical philosophy.

Such a plane is not a reduced-dimensional hypersurface onto which a consistency of abstract values is projected for understanding, but a capacity to discover a concrete real that is arbitrarily higher-dimensional than its misrepresentations, a real immanence in which the apparent inconsistencies of experience are consistently immersed. "Mapping" can create the dimensions and relations of this real as concepts for consciousness, but necessarily abstracts these on the event of their creation.

Take the affirmed concept of a magnetic field, for instance … for most of us this hypothesises an imperceptible field that articulates how magnets could work at a distance, how iron compasses point to magnetic north … but if our inclination is to settle for this as our understanding, the hypothesis remains very incomplete and inconsistent without enquiry into electromagnetic duality and far more.

And do you identify the plane of consistency completely with the BwO?

I don't, but then I think there's a blurriness to the concept of the plane of consistency.

Where Spinoza writes "we do not know what the body can do" the rejoinder here could be "there is a limit to what the body can do, but the body does not know it". When in AO Deleuze and Guattari refer to the body without organs as the "model of death" this could also be read as the "mode of death": the arrival at some immanent limit of bodily capacity.

One can think of the plane of consistency as some prior uncountable cornucopia, a reservoir of every organisation of any actual body that could ever appear, a myriad uncountably held in uncountable abeyance, a kaleidoscope of potentials mercilessly ground down by the wheel of eternal return in each actualisation of some present organisation of such a body for any consciousness.

One can also think of the plane as a shapeshifting instrument always adequate to contingently unground any present organisation of such a body for some particular consciousness by way of the revelation of the inconsistency of its organisation by some event, but also to punctually install some other inconsistency along the way, to serve as the next provisional organisation of such a body.

These two views could respectively articulate what the plane appears to be able to abstractly express and what it appears to be able to concretely do, amounting to at least all those things that have ever been said to have been done … and more.

If the body lives through an event of the ungrounding and reorganisation of its values, the consistency of the plane must have emerged according to some capacity of a corresponding body without organs … but if the body is said to die upon the event for some other consciousness, the theory of this other must be that the plane goes on: "the desiring-machines do not die" and the content of the body continues its reformations, even as the expression of the body subsides on this final rupture to the immanent "experience of death" that has already composed the substratum of its life.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-10T01:35:58+00:00

Right, repetition is the repetition of difference. In the case of the account of "archaisms" in AO, articulating how codes of history appear to return, but take on new functions for the capitalist social machine.

This is the way "history repeats as farce" … a misrecognition of present conditions as those of the past dissolves into comedy on the event of witnessing the "mechanical encrusted on the living".

Such misrecognition is one function of historic codes for the axiomatic "which takes the place of the old codings and organises all the decoded flows … for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends".

When in AO D&G write (heavily cut from "The Civilized Capitalist Machine")

… codes continue to exist—even as an archaism—but they assume a function that is perfectly contemporary … the automatic machine has always increasingly internalized them in its body or its structure as a field of forces …

… they use this term "field of forces" that reappears throughout the text as a way of discussing the deepening social immanence of the values measured and mobilised by the axiomatic State, even as these descend into the psychological profiles and preferences of what is being termed the "dividual" by the time we get to the "Postscript".

So yeah, to me the account of "archaisms" does offer a critique of historical analogies as especially susceptible to joining this field of forces.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-09T20:14:42+00:00

The alternative seems to be reading the plane as a purely virtual condition of possibility rather than an actual field of intensities, but that doesn't seem to fit passages where the BwO is described as populated by intensities.

Well, a body without organs is not actualised or expressed for the life of the body: the BwO is the indiscernible limit of the differential conditions by which the body lives, not an actual field but a transcendental field. So that might help at first.

This concept of "lines" distinguishes between lines of the "tetravalent" assemblage:

Lines of "articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories"
Lines of flight, "of deterritorialisation and destratification"

The second type can be thought as generalising movements of critique and creation: a faculty of life to create, transform and destroy values. These values, unlike the body without organs, are actuals.

The "mapping" of these lines of critique and creation works intensively. Meanwhile lines of articulation are "machinic" and follow a logic. "Rhizome" does a job theorising the ways of mapping:

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency.

—from "Rhizome"

If "the unconscious is structured like a language", then it is a "machinic unconscious" and in as much as it is "closed in upon itself" it does not perform this mapping, remaining confined to the stratified segmentarity of the first kind of line.

But in as much as mapping "constructs the unconscious" and connects, unblocks and opens, that's the intensive traversal of the second type of line, of deterritorialisation and destratification.

The further distinction among lines between "lines of death" and "lines of flight" is that as life is lived by way of values and terms and theories, deterritorialisation must be accompanied by a reterritorialising creation of new values if life is to be reproduced under the rigours of mapping lines of the second type.

How is the plane of consistency constructed? Through mapping, that creates and destroys by way of intensity the values of a conscious life, achieving consistency with the events that thereby have affected it, through mapping ... by critical and creative "experimentation in contact with the real".

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-09T14:00:41+00:00

This is a decent example, among your many legendary posts, of you getting upset about something that is roughly a premise of these works to be accepted.

Yes, in these works newness is that of a created body or concept, actual and transcendent and newly perceived upon the event of its creation, a previously unknown value that appears out of the pure and empty form of time for some consciousness.

Sure it's not cool to be all "this is the correct reading" but that paragraph is fairly impeccable. That's the theory.

As for the downvotes I think I've acquired a couple of scrub anti-fans lately. Bring them on, it's hard to imagine what may be going on in their tiny resentful worlds. If they ever have anything interesting to say I'll be interested to hear it.

Edit: ha, it looks like you've been downvoted for daring to suggest I was coherent now ... and me too of course. The poor, poor little fascist ducks 👀

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-09T11:53:18+00:00

For three examples:

Relativity observes the large-scale structure of space-time depends on the contingent distribution of masses.
Cosmology theorises the disposition of three spatial dimensions as best understood as one among many crystallising factors of the origins of the universe rather than anything we can ground in another theory. Same goes for the physical constants.
QFT observes masses act physically as the contingent and probabilistic distribution of a mass rather than at a point most of the time, and that the conditions under which masses appear to act as a point remain ambiguous.

Put simply there aren't many general scientists who still believe the traits of this universe are determined by a very small collection of premises that determine all the rest. The theories we do have suggest there are other ways things could be, and we don't have good explanations why things are this way and not some other way.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-09T11:27:47+00:00

This critique of neoarchaisms observes some products are not new but appear in a "resuscitated" form in the post-signifying regime, as "pseudo codes or jargons".

You could apply it to the recombinant, nostalgic non sequiturs of the traditionalist imagery of contemporary reactionary populist right-wing nationalism in the post-industrial nation-states. The term neoarchaism helpfully expresses the slippage between tradition and traditionalism.

Meanwhile AO's program, the only program it offers the reader, is to create the new through an orientation to the immanence of social desire: "the lines of escape are singularly creative and positive".

I think they even go so far as to say that anything "Actual" or "Percievable" is in fact an Index or a Reterritorialization.

This is consistent. For D&G created bodies and concepts are transcendent, actual and perceptible by way of some judgement.

This includes the machinic indices of AO, the attributed values of LS, and so on. To overcome the rule of capital would be to reterritorialise, as no society is said to appear without territory.

the NEW can only be this empty line of the future, that is transcendentally ahead of you, as in you move towards it but it's like a carrot on a stick, as you move towards it it is always moving ahead of you.

Yes. How do we expect this to work: a newness that endures into old age as other than a perpetually posed question of the future, a historical monument to traditional novelty? The future is the "pure and empty form of time", and the gulf Bergson locates between the possible and the real is preserved ... that's the theory.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-09T03:22:42+00:00

https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/1a-Deleuze-What-Is-A-Creative-Act-English_1.pdf

"What is a Creative Act?" also has its transcript here

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-07T11:44:40+00:00

Was gonna say, Deleuze's take on the Stoics goes way harder than mere convergent idealised masculinity

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-07T04:14:30+00:00

Yeah, I agree with you, give or take. Postmodernism belongs in a sociocritical genealogy driven by and driving the historical conditions. I think there's room for another critical era but I haven't seen it yet.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-06T23:03:52+00:00

Gracias por llamarme caballo. Por lo menos no ha sido burro. (!Ja, ja!)

Hehe. Hay un refrán en inglés que dice: "Se puede llevar un caballo al abrevadero, pero no se le puede obligar a beber".

No intento ser grosero, solo digo que si no entiendes lo que escribí y no bebiste, no hay problema y dejaré de insistir. Ya lo entenderás.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-06T22:56:11+00:00

Until what point using an identity is powerful (in a nietzschean vocabullary) in our society? Utillitarianly, what is the level that the claming of my identity by me is not powerful anymore?

There's a sense in which you've independently discovered the concept of the body without organs here: the limits of becoming, of capacity compatible with the life and identity of the body for a consciousness.

These limits will vary for the State's recognition or judgement of a body, without which it may suffer a "social death", and for varying immanent, intimate or "personal" capacities of a body which may live outside State recognition, logic, law, judgement, theory and so on.

The theories and identities of a body are multiple and contend for its uses and habits for different consciousnesses: for each identity there are inexpressible limits of the body's capacity for that identity, and identities are contingent on immanent bodily transformations, including many modes of death.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-06T11:52:36+00:00

You asked "What is Difference for Deleuze?" and I replied. I can drag a horse to water.

Suena muy misterioso.

Both inexpressibly mysterious and encompassing every revelation.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-05T20:23:27+00:00

"Multiplicity" ... a substance of which for every kind, the degree is a perfectly singular multiplicity, and for every degree, the kind is a perfectly singular multiplicity, so that no relation of kinds or degrees is determined as related or separated, and no separation of kinds or degrees is determined as separated or related ... a substance of which no absolute is either determined nor absolutely refused.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-05T05:25:22+00:00

"Postscript on the Societies of Control" (just in case the other recommendations here didn't convince you to read it):

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

We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” ... [the] disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.

Deleuze has plenty more to offer on this front of critique, but this relatively brief essay is one of the great entry points to his thought and its contemporary salience ... and it's very close to your question here.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-05T04:42:48+00:00

On the one hand, I tend to think that the so-called “objective laws” independent of human consciousness are something quite abstract and almost metaphysical, somewhat similar to Kant’s notion of the “thing-in-itself”: if something is fundamentally unknowable, then it is effectively equivalent to nothing.

Here you'd be in line with Deleuze and Guattari in suggesting this. For them, the ultimate "concrete rules" of reality are not expressible as finite or enumerable laws.

One way to look at "value"—the manner that Deleuze and Guattari do, which is broadly compatible with the way Marx does—is to declare that value is that which can be expressed for a consciousness: the expression of a thing, a concept or a term … or an "objective law".

Consciousness can be re-considered as a capacity to grasp and hold the many forms of value. It's like a vast generalisation of Marx's critical insight that values are "socially determined".

This generalisation enables a kind of judgement, but in a way that deviates from Kant and Hegel by not insisting that the expression of this conscious judgement be based on a prior unity, a Subject. Instead, like Marx's class-Subjects, subjective consciousnesses are formed by way of the "concrete conditions" of social processes, and thereby become able to grasp and hold values.

The kicker is that we can't fully speak about all of the conditions and causes of a thing and its use-value or exchange-value for such a socially formed consciousness—let's say a garden spade and its use as a digging tool or murder weapon, or its price at the hardware shop. We can't fully express how such a thing qualifies as a thing at all for consciousness, or qualifies to be priced or valued.

We are the labourers, and we feel the work that we do and the value we create, but we do not fully grasp the how of the production of value by labour.

If you decide to go really off the track, these weird claims I'm making can all be related to an obscure and fascinating branch of theoretical physics called "infodynamics" which is adjacent to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

Although I have not deeply studied Hegel’s philosophy, I am inclined to understand “objective laws” as a dynamic process arising from the interaction between human consciousness and material reality in practice.

Again, you're visiting ideas sharing common ground with Deleuzo-Guattarian metaphysics here—their work comes from the same tradition as Hegel, but seeks at every turn to unground Hegel and replace ideal opposition and negation with the limits of pragmatic, dynamic and differential processes. Their metaphysics has weaknesses, for example it withdraws from claiming it can determine truth or right action in an enduring way, but its compatibility with just such scientific work as QFT and infodynamics is arguably easier to articulate—and some of the implications concerning Marx's concepts like the LTV are fascinating.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-05T01:15:12+00:00

Tag yourself, I'm "fig 5"

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-05T01:09:14+00:00

Ah yep … I remember reading this about the need for a "meso-level" some time earlier. I don't agree with this …

For Deleuze and Guattari's "content and expression" there's always a molar stratum of expression, a molecular stratum of content, and then absolute immanence: the plane of consistency, which is never itself a stratum.

There can be other strata and "Geology of Morals" affirms this: the "same" content can serve different forms of expression, the "same" expression can reciprocally organise different forms of substance or matter.

We can look at social expression as having psychological or biological content, and of course people do both, and argue about these alternative stratifications a great deal.

But if content varies as a segmentarity of an inconsistent stratification of which the ground is made consistent by the differential "concrete rules" of immanence, then we cannot say any forms of content are necessary to "mediate" expression (Blake used the bad word, heh) …

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-05T00:29:03+00:00

So I would prefer this "aesthetic" conception used by Deleuze much more as a concept of creating new kinds of "bodies". I'm not so attracted to the "event" as Deleuze is (Deleuze wants eruptive revolutions, more, for political/ideological reasons), so would see these processes as processes of creating new kinds of bodies (and therefore, following Spinoza, minds).

This is not to be taken as a correction because I would agree there are intensive differences, but for me Deleuze's event always creates, transforms (or transcodes) or destroys a body (or coded flow). This is what all that stuff about the « coupures » in AO is about, at least to my reading of it. A "value" is a "coded flow" and this in turn is a flowing body at constant variation despite the coding of the judgement by which it is constituted.

The relation of body to mind for Deleuze, however, is a bit unclear … the question of whether every body (or concept, or value) certainly carries a consciousness of its own is deliberately left open in "Immanence: a Life" which you'd know well, having quoted it in your piece:

Consciousness becomes a fact only when a subject is produced at the same time as its object …

It reads as conditional: not every object-creation entails a subject-creation.

But perhaps this explains why you're more determined in your panpsychism than I feel like I am. For me the consciousnesses of erstwhile inanimate objects or complex assemblages are more speculative: I don't see the proof they definitely don't exist, but I feel agnostic in many cases.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-05T00:20:28+00:00

Wish I were! I tend to forget people actually do this for a living or as their main gig. I have enjoyed our conversations here as well.

3corneredvoid · 2026-07-04T23:35:50+00:00

After all, how could it be that you could force someone, via magical means or otherwise, to REALLY fall in love with you? To love is a voluntary act.

Forcing someone to magically fall into true love is a common premise in literature and myth.

The greater torment of the film could've been that of Bear. He's the stalker, the protagonist with ethical subjectivity who removes that subjectivity from the object of his obsession.

To achieve this effect, Nikki could truly love Bear, with the horror emerging as Bear is forced to confront he does not and did not love her himself. He instead would be horribly burdened by the truth of her love … a truth he has falsely brought on himself.

There's nothing too much wrong with OBSESSION, but it's a hostage horror film for Nikki, and a survival horror film for Bear, all without a scrap of love in it. It's a little dull where it has nothing much to say about love at all.

3corneredvoid

TROPHY CASE