Women and computers begin to escape the isolation they share in the home and office with the establishment of their own networks. These, in turn, begin to get in touch with each other in the 1990s.
Sadie Plant, Future Looms1
Introduction
The 1990s are now sufficiently far away from the midpoint of third decade of 21st century establishing the necessary distance to grasp the currents running through texts from that period and to understand their influence on the evolution of contemporary philosophy. In this article, I aim to examine Anglophone inventive interpretations of the works of Gilles Deleuze – both independently written and co-authored with Félix Guattari – which gave their authors a means to confront the pressing problematic ideas of the 1990s: subjectivity, the unconscious, and the intelligence of women and/or computers.
Issues of gender equality and the autonomy of intelligent machines are not exclusive to the end of the 20th century:
Since the industrial revolution, and with every subsequent phase of technological change, it has been the case that the more sophisticated the machines, the more female the workforce becomes. Automation has been accompanied by what is often referred to as the feminization of the workforce ever since the first automatic machines were operated by the first female workers, and the fears of unemployment which have haunted modern discussions of technological innovation have always applied to male workers rather than their female peers.2
However, it was only the revolution in telecommunications technologies that led in the 1990s to a convergence of processes such as industry automation, the informatisation of production, the feminisation of labour, the neoliberalisation of institutions, and the networking of knowledge-power. Rather than requiring physical strength and specialised skills, the growing service sector demanded communicative, interpersonal, and emotional abilities, as well as intelligence and flexibility. Because femininity as a cultural gender construct formatted proficiency in these capacities, the proportion of women in the overall workforce increased significantly, creating a real opportunity to become financially independent from male income on an unprecedented scale. As a result, a tangible force was born that displaced the control over social reproduction from the hands of fathers, factory directors, politicians, and so on. The coupling of women’s and computers’ escape from the dominance of Man as the male generated a new problem of assembling social arrangements that would reinforce the autonomisation of women and computers as positive forms of individuation in relation to sovereignty modelled on the ideal of the Man.
Misogyny and technophobia are equally displays of man’s fear of the matrix, the virtual machinery which subtends his world and lies on the other side of every patriarchal culture’s veils. At the end of the 20th century, women are no longer the only reminder of this other side. Nor are they containable as child-bearers, fit only to be one thing, adding machines. And even if man continues to see cybernetic systems as similarly confined to the reproduction of the same, this is only because the screens still allow him to ignore the extent to which he is hooked to their operations, as dependent on the matrix as he has always been. All his defences merely encourage this dependency: for the last 50 years, as his war machine has begun to gain intelligence, women and computers have flooded into history: a proliferation of screens, lines of communication, media, interfaces and simulations. All of which exceed his intentions and feed back into his paranoia. Cybernetic systems are fatal to his culture; they invade as a return of the repressed, but what returns is no longer the same: cybernetics transforms woman and nature, but they do not return from man’s past, as his origins. Instead they come around to face him, wheeling round from his future, the virtual system to which he has always been heading.3
It was precisely within the intricate conceptual framework of deleuzoguattarian philosophy that a younger generation of philosophers recognised an opportunity to formulate an adequate response to this problemata. From that moment on Deleuze and Guattari entered the philosophical canon, and the postdeleuzian theories that sprang up at that time gained considerable popularity, exerting a major influence on contemporary discourse – academic, artistic, and activist alike – while also transmitting their internal aporias into current political and media landscape. On that ground I am going to demonstrate that: 1) the materialism of Deleuze and Guattari provided an appropriate mode of thinking for the new reality; 2) the internal tensions within this thought enabled a wide range of distinct articulations, each with its own developmental tendencies, which over time solidified into clearly differentiated positions; 3) it is precisely within the two broad fields – women and computers: their entry into culture, its disruption and transformation that the deleuzoguattarian theory achieves its greatest successes.
Perhaps Foucault was right in claiming that “this century will be known as Deleuzian”, even if it may not have lasted a full hundred years. There is never a single, clearly identifiable reason why a given author is elevated to the rank of the most important philosophers of their era. Rather, a web of mutually reinforcing arguments, decisions, and contexts have to interact to make a philosophical project irresistible at a particular time and place. The entire 20th century can be understood as a sustained assault on the foundational concepts of metaphysic – especially their rendition inherited from German Idealism – such as identity, representation, the self-determining subject, presence, truth, and the unity of cognitive faculties. Metaphysics was challenged and destabilised successively by Bergson and logical positivism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and Heidegger, post-Marxist critical theory, structuralism, and poststructuralism. What makes Deleuze stand out is his programmatic rejection of the image of thought as projected from the pillars of philosophical tradition – Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel – combined with a conviction that metaphysical speculation about matter, pre-individual intensities, and the non-conceptual positivity of difference cannot be abandoned. In the 1990s, after decades of critique that had narrowed theory to discourse and language analysis, this speculative capacity was welcomed as a way out of the entrenched paradigms of Saussurean linguistics, Derridean textual deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, comfortably coupled with postmodern culture. Deleuziguattarianism offered a path toward completing the critique of subject and representation by freeing knowledge from the “correlationist” latch.
When speaking of “the problemata of the 1990s”, I am referring to the concept of the problem that Deleuze developed throughout his oeuvre. Social life, and life in general, involves having to act on the basis of provisional reasonings, accidental transformations, informational noise, cognitive errors, confusion of orders, and transcendental illusions of the intellect. Experience is a mixture that draws us into false problems – we ask questions that direct attention into the blind alleys of common sense, popular opinion, and reactionary habits. Before considering which solution is true, one must investigate the conditions of the problem itself, eliminate false problems and devise true ones. A problem formulated at the right place and time – through the invention of new terms in which it can be posed4 – renews thought by unfolding a new virtual field of solutions, directions of expression, and experiments of desire. A new problem implies a reorganisation of existing political, social, and theoretical distinctions. The dialectic of questioning and answering is not subordinated to the psychology of the subject, or even to socio-symbolic representations, but rather, it participates in the objective movement of matter and ideas that underlies thinking itself. Although psychology and social representation may be deeply embedded, intuiting real problems requires us to distinguish between the order of concrete solutions, such as concrete psychologies or societies, and the order of the problem to which they respond; between what is secondary and what is necessary in thought and life – just as “the construction of the organism is both the stating of a problem and a solution”5. “Something in the world forces us to think”6: the virtual problem, “the claws of absolute necessity – in other words, of an original violence inflicted upon thought”7 from beyond the order of solutions. In this perspective, I want to view the socio-technological conditions of the 1990s as both posing a problem and constituting its solution – the conditions that define two unavoidable trajectories of thought: the positive individuation of women and of computers.
I have opted to present the postdeleuzianism of the 1990s through the concept of the problem, as discussing the ideas that animated a given period, I believe, is a better historiophilosophical approach than simply listing the shared features of an objectified intellectual movement. Intuition as a method for separating real problems from false ones hinges on cutting through the mixture along its natural lines of articulation, just as one splits a rock to reveal an intact trilobite. If we take Deleuze and Guattari’s thought itself as such a mixture, we can cut it along two axes that generate its internal tensions: transcendental <> empirical, gothic <> vitalist. This yields a fourfold schema of theoretical positions: Trans<>Goth, Emp<>Goth, Trans<>Vit, Emp<>Vit. If we accept these internal tensions as one series, and the external categories of “women” and “computers” as another, we obtain this article’s problem field. This method allows us to track how interpretive decisions made by postdeleuzian thinkers translate into their concepts of affect, body, the outside, and so on, organised around the central problematic ideas of the 1990s: women and computers. Importantly, The point here is not merely to consider women and computers as studied objects, but also to incorporate the female body, gender difference, computation and artificial intelligence into the perspective of the theorising subject and into the very conceptual matrix of theory itself. So the poles of this problem field (Trans<>Emp and Vit<>Goth) do not represent fixed philosophical doctrines, but rather singularity points or attractors that highlight key interpretive decisions and allow, in a compressed form, for a sharper differentiation between the projects (e.g. Rosi Braidotti and Manuel Delanda are empirical vitalists, albeit with quite different styles, methods and concepts). Ultimately, what matters is not whether one can definitively and indisputably argue on the basis of a particular texts that a philosopher represents a specific position, since ideas and problems belong to the realm of virtuality. The interpretation of how a philosopher addresses the problem is therefore not governed by rules of representation, but of expression. The aim is to use the interpretation of each postdeleuzian philosopher to map out the vectors of thought arising from the encounter between two problematic series: the internal one of Deleuze and Guattari, and the external one of women ∨ computers. In this encounter, a differential is calculated by completing an equation with a specific rule that actualises the deleuzoguattarian abstract machine. I shall now define four basic concepts that enable the cutting of the postdeleuzianist mixture.
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition rose to fame for its striking exposition of transcendental empiricism. Through a distinctive reinterpretation of both terms: empiricism and the transcendental, this doctrine argues that the true element of thought is pure difference, irreducible to the concept, consciousness, or representation. While emphasising the gravity of discovering the transcendental synthesis of experience, Deleuze criticises Kant for stopping at the apperceptive synthesis of consciousness, determined by the commonsensical harmony of cognitive faculties. Kant’s mistake, according to Deleuze, was to project empirical products, such as the self-conscious subject of reflection, onto the transcendental field from where the subject should be generated. This field should instead contain only unconscious and impersonal individuations. In doing so, Kant erased the distinction between the two ontological levels, invalidating the premise of transcendental thought that experience must be distinct from the conditions of experience, which are not themselves experienced, yet they give form to all experience. To preserve the connection between the transcendental and the empirical, one must not derive synthesis from a transcendent subject.
In Deleuze’s radicalisation of Kantian critique, the synthesis of experience remains transcendental only if it is immanently situated within the field it synthesises. “It is a question of passing from a construction of the given for a subject (Kant) to a constitution of the subject in the given (Hume)”8. This empiricist displacement of transcendental philosophy rendered by Deleuze, as expressed in this “passing”, means that philosophy must investigate the conditions of real experience rather than merely possible experience. “These conditions can and must be grasped in an intuition precisely because they are the conditions of real experience, because they are not broader than what is conditioned, because the concept they form is identical to its object”9 All ideas originate in experience, and all mental operations are operations on sensory data, yet – here Deleuze distorts empiricism – these ideas and operations cannot be derived from empirical psychology or everyday opinions. Instead, “philosophy’s mission consists in opening ourselves to “inhuman or superhuman” modes of experiences that surpass our anthropocentric vision”10. The success of this mission is secured by the transcendental side of this empiricism, which proceeds from difference within experience, a difference with respect to the interiority of transcendent consciousness, “potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity”11: “a world of exteriority, a world where thought itself is in a fundamental relation to the Outside.”12 By virtue of this exteriority in experience, which at the same time constitutes its generative condition, Deleuze’s empiricism opens itself onto “the universe of science fiction: [in which] as in science fiction, the world appears fictional, strange, alien, experienced by other creatures, yet we have the feeling that this world is ours and that we ourselves are those creatures.”13 Transcendental empiricism thus points toward the paradoxical necessity implied by immanence: every synthesis of experience is breached by unknown forces that can only be conceived of and deciphered speculatively. Hence, in order to overcome the metaphysics and phenomenology of the subject of reflection, Deleuze’s empiricism must be both a critique of the model of representation and an undertaking in genetic thought. “Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard.”14
The second axis of the problematic field is outlined by the pair gothic <> vitalist. As in the case of transcendental <> empirical, it is impossible to establish a clear line of division between these poles. This follows from the style of thinking and the theoretical decisions of Deleuze and Guattari, such as their adoption of radical immanence, which entails that, once perspective shifts, differences in kind turn out to be differences in degree (for example, ecosystems depend on the degree of water salinity, or the quantitative bot-to-human ratio determines the qualitative character of social media). The transcendental and empirical sides differ in the topology of the determination of thought, that is, in the schema through which thought is determined: the transcendental separation of condition/conditioned versus the empirical embedding of concepts in experience. The transcendental pole emphasises the role of an a priori field of synthesis, such as the body or machinic unconscious, which produces the set of constraints and conditions necessary for conceiving “inhuman modes of experience,” whereas the empirical pole views these constraints and conditions as a posteriori formations whose emergence can be traced in social practices or natural processes. Meanwhile, the gothic and the vitalist are united by a materialism that posits a positive force irreducible to any representation or form. What separates them, however, is the manner in which this materialist force is determined. Put most simply, gothic materialism concentrates on the in_organic, the in_animate, or the un_dead, on a close-to-mechanical repetition as a productive non-dialectical or “non-conceptual negativity,”15 such as the death drive, technological progress, or a naturalistic description of matter. The gothic procedure could also be said to operate through subtraction – forms of social or natural individuation are explained by subtracting any overarching cause from organisation. Nothing beyond a minimal set of principles and mechanisms is required to explain the emergence and operation of complex systems. By contrast, according to vitalist materialism, the condition of life’s spontaneous self-organisation is the élan vital, thus the vitalist procedure presupposes the addition of a cause, such as affect or the body, which grounds forms of social or cognitive individuation. In the first case, the Outside deprives subjects of agency and compels passive disintegration; in the second, the agency of all entities is affirmed as the active expression of vital forces striving toward libidinal liberation. While vitalism holds that it is Life or matter that dissolves all dualisms and distinctions by harnessing the unlimited potentiality of Life or matter, gothicism effectively argues that the only non-reactionary line toward the potentials of inorganic life passes through the technologies of modernity or capitalism – that is, through intelligent matter in its most recent form of abstraction.
Empirical/vitalist (EmpVit)
Rosi Braidotti – nomadic subjects, posthuman subjects
“If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs, everything that passes between organisms.”16 The field through which Rosi Braidotti explores everything that passes between organisms in her philosophical project becomes her own biography – of a woman, an immigrant, and an intellectual in the age of globalisation and postmodernity. Unlike many feminists of the period, Braidotti did not regard postmodernity as a presumed end of history that “undermines political agency,” including that of emancipatory movements, but rather in the fluidity and fragmentation of culture she saw the potential to overcome patriarchy altogether. The grand narratives of modernity, such as the self-conscious subject of reflection, the opposition between nature and culture, or the historical progress of Enlightenment reason, provided epistemological and political instruments for governing female desire, which is why in postmodern culture, at least declaratively oriented against these structures of phallogocentrism, Braidotti recognised the possibility of defeating the oppressive model of gendered subjectivity.
Building on poststructuralist critiques of patriarchal rationality, and drawing in particular on Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, Braidotti develops the concept of the nomadic subject – a “postmetaphysical figuration of the subject.”17 This concept is “postmetaphysical” because, just as in metaphysical discourse, Braidotti employs speculation to outline the contours of this subjectivity, yet, unlike metaphysics, she rejects its systemic, deductive, or dialectical modes of thought. Such speculation must follow a cartographic movement, filling in the gaps in the maps of intensity developed a posteriori by nomadic consciousness. Empirical-speculative maps become planes for “transversal connections and a multiplicity of scales, layers, and locations,”18 through which nomadic consciousness can subvert or move beyond “hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity.”19 From these maps over the postmodern territory, Braidotti discerns a series of feminine ethical figurations, such as the nomad, the rhizome, or the cyborg, which, forced to live in motion, in fragments, without a geographical or symbolic homeland, abandon all nostalgia for tradition, naturalness, or permanence. Instead, they “expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity.”20 The figurations of nomadic thinking are not meant to evade the real political and economic conditions of life under capitalism, but rather to point toward tactics of resistance and adaptation to a new, postmodern reality, directed against a subject constituted on the model of the centralised phallic signifier.
Alongside “the nomadic subject”, Braidotti also uses the term “nomadic consciousness.” This follows her assertion that the knowledge legitimising colonial, racist, and patriarchal projects arises from the tradition of transcendental, rationalist, and Enlightenment philosophy of self-consciousness. Therefore, rather than writing “from nowhere” – in the belief that a philosopher can abstract themselves from their social position and embodiment to attain universal knowledge – Braidotti practices a particular kind of autotheory or autofiction. By grounding her “writing of the self” in Deleuzian empiricism, Braidotti avoids a narcissistic dissection of her own biography, instead using it as a set of specific starting points for a mode of thinking whose horizon is no longer the current circumstances of life, but rather the heterogeneous and posthuman utopias sprouting from the cracks in the system. “The feminist ‘philosophy of as if’ is not a form of disavowal but,, rather, the affirmation of a subject who is both nonessentialized, that is to say no longer grounded in the idea of human or feminine ‘nature’, but she is nonetheless capable of ethic and moral agency.”21
By blurring the boundaries between the biographical and the speculative, Braidotti’s expansive empiricism had no difficulty in incorporating posthuman and postanthropic themes into an all-inclusive feminist project, in which women’s emancipation leads to the question, “what new forms of subjectivity are supported by the posthuman.”22 Rather than merely positing the woman as a deficient replica of the man, the category of the human also smuggles in an instrumental and exploitative relationship with nature, occupying the position of something that must undergo brutal reshaping in order to be incorporated into culture. The Posthuman presents a picture of far-reaching social transformations brought about by the advancements in science and information technology, in the face of which not only does the humanist category of “the man” become untenable, but even the anthropocentric stability of the Homo sapiens species is exposed to multifaceted questioning. Intelligent and self-organising matter, derived from contemporary biology and neuroscience, deepens the critique of transcendence inherent to modern and patriarchal rationalism. The initial concept of the nomadic subject brings Braidotti to a materialist vitalism, on the grounds of which one can “contests the arrogance of anthropocentrism and the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Human as a transcendental category.”23 What emerges here is “[a] posthuman theory of the subject… as an empirical project that aims at experimenting with what contemporary, bio-technologically mediated bodies are capable of doing.”24 Nomadic consciousness thus becomes a way of Life in general, one that constantly forces the modern notion of the subject to grapple with identity crises, while simultaneously giving rise to new alliances on the posthuman front of political resistance against hegemony and exclusion.
Brian Massumi – affect and control
While Braidotti employs deleuzoguattarian thought to construct a more spacious concept of the feminist subject, one capable of turning up at all contemporary fronts in the struggle against the system’s multidimensional oppression, Massumi’s EmpVit moves in the opposite direction – stripping that thought down to its bare bones by removing its subject. The rationalist concept of a conscious subject is an absolute illusion that represses bodily experience into the depths of the irrational unconscious. Before the body is mediated through concepts of consciousness, “It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving.”25 The field through which Massumi attempts to escape rationalism is affect, understood as experienced pre-conceptual and pre-personal life.
“The stakes”, of Massumi’s critique of rationality, as he himself claims in his seminal 1996 text, The Autonomy of Affect, “are the new.”26 To conceptualise the new, Massumi invokes two related distinctions made by Deleuze (based on his readings of Spinoza and Bergson), which serve to extricate us from the structuralist paradigm: “for structure is the place where nothing ever happens that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules.”27 The new to be new must happen outside the structure, leading to a change in its rules: “nothing is prefigured in the event”28. The first distinction concerns the intensive and extensive differences, which translates into the distinction between affect and emotion, ultimately reflected in the concept of the body. As bodies, we are excited and excite other bodies on the affective level, these excitations trigger effects on the level of consciousness perceived in the form of emotions. While affect measures the transformation of the body’s power (increase = joy, decrease = sadness), emotion constitutes a representation of this transformation, often confused, i.e., subordinate to ideology and phantasms. “Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.”29 Affect, on the other hand, is an intensity that has not yet been qualified. This makes affect paradoxical, because it lacks content, which only emerges with extensive quality and would situate it within an emotional content, accessible to the order of conscious representation. Therefore, granting autonomy to the affect – that is, attributing it to a distinct order where the rules of existing representations and semantic structures do not apply – allows us to describe phenomena that would seem paradoxical in the analysis of emotions and beliefs. Massumi refers to research on the reactions of children to a certain film screened in three different versions: one wordless, and two with voiceover: one factual, one emotional. It turned out that although the factual version elicited in children the strongest emotional response, it was the least well-remembered, and their skin resistance decreased while watching it; whereas the version without words was remembered best, eliciting the strongest skin-galvanic response – one that is autonomous relative to conscious emotional reaction. Massumi argues that the only resolution to this inconsistency is to acknowledge the primacy and autonomy of affect in the reception of images, where there is a dissonance between the intersubjective and conventional meanings of images and their intensity, which, moreover, leaves the strongest effect on the body and in memory30.
The autonomy of affect theory enabled Massumi to develop his own approach to social control. Automated sensory devices, databases collecting information from online activity, advanced data processing and the prediction of behavioural patterns, as well as the rapid and coordinated distribution of information, all together create a system of social government. Instead of focusing on the preventive deterrence of illegal behaviour, this system takes preemptive measures aimed at stopping threats at the level of their potential, before they become reality. While typical preventive measures concern the level of consciousness – for example, punishment works only when it is consciously understood – preemptive measures operate at the affective register31. They generate images that interfere with bodies before these images become representations. Massumi’s textbook example is the “war on terror” and the U.S. invasion of Iraq following the attack on the World Trade Center: George W. Bush had no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, but he had legitimate concerns that if Iraq could, it would use such weapons, so according to the logic of preemption, it became necessary to eliminate the very possibility of a threat. Since authority operates under a double conditional – “if he could, he would” – preemptive measures are always justified. The possibility that a specific event occurs exists independently of circumstances and cannot be fully negated. The aim of such measures is therefore not to establish facts in the literal sense, but – as Massumi puts it – to engender affective facts that program somatic reactions to concrete images and signals, and which cannot be counteracted by a mere “statement of facts.” The indication of a potential threat alone evokes fear, which serves not only as a justification for pre-emptive measures, but also as their political effect (among other things, the pre-emptive war on terrorism intensified Islamophobia, which in turn contributed to Bush’s re-election as president).
Although, according to Deleuze’s concept, affect has always functioned independently of representation, that is, as an ontological condition, it was only with the development and widespread adoption of computer technology that the sovereign power was able to operationalise this difference and permanently incorporate the logic of pre-emption into its repertoire. Massumi emphasises that just as pre-emptive measures generate a concrete sense of threat, so too does a policy based on pre-emption generally aims to produce an environment in which it will recursively and constantly justify itself, thereby controlling social life on an affective and corporeal level. The war on terror launched after the attack on the WTC meant directing surveillance and counter-terrorist techniques against the citizens of the United States themselves, turning the entire country into a zone of information warfare. By virtue of the autonomy of affect, pre-emptive politics is autopoietic, impersonal and pre-representational, thus conscious representation of this politics and its reflective critique are insufficient for effective resistance against dominant power. A change in thinking about corporeality and a transformation of bodies themselves is necessary.
The logic of the double conditional operates through indexical signs32 – a special type of sign which “state nothing” but take effect immediately, like commands, triggering concrete affects in the surroundings. In the order of positive facts, Iraq had no means of firing missiles at the US territory, thus the invasion was carried out on the basis of false premise. In the order of affective facts, however, something took place that evoked sensations transforming the body and created a new environment of experience: “this is an actual Experience, including, all the more more-than-perception reveals.”33 How is it possible to experience something that is beyond the perception of the conscious subject? Because “the body is radically open, absorbing impulses quicker than they can be perceived, and because the entire vibratory event is unconscious, out of mind.”34 Here we see the convergence of both vectors – empiricism and vitalism – in the theory of the new as an unstructured and inexplicable event perceived by the body, unmediated by the concept35. What is inexplicable does not constitute a transcendental condition that synthesises experience, but establishes a separate order within it, whose “autonomy is its openness… the fact that something has always and again escaped.”36 The vitalist-empirical interpretation of Deleuzian philosophy becomes particularly clear when we examine how Massumi deploys the concept of the “virtual”, for instance in such sentences as: “This requires a reworking of how we think about the body. Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual.”37 “Virtual” here means being physiologically or neurologically faster than the act of representation or reflection; Massumi transposes it from the order of the problematic and the ideal into the order of the corporeal. While the empiricist approach to intensity, virtuality or affect is set up to explain how we register new events, vitalism unearths the ontological basis of the production of novelty. In addition to biology and neuroscience, which Braidotti draws upon to grasp the irreducible power of self-organising matter, Massumi also relies on complex systems theory and the technical sciences. Like Braidotti, he adopts the image of matter emerging from contemporary sciences to challenge modern rationalism. Significant for both instances of EmpVit is that what enables a critique of modernity, a move beyond it, and the production of a new kind of knowledge is the spontaneous self-organisation of matter manifesting itself at corporeal and unconscious levels of cognition.
Empirical/gothic (EmpGoth)
Manuel Delanda – war and science
The first contribution along the EmpGoth vector belongs to Manuel Delanda. We can identify three key tenets: 1) the adoption of a naturalistic and flat ontology to explicate Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, such as assemblages, virtuality and intensity, without appealing to the mind or a transcendental principle that organises cognition; 2) the positing of emergent creative properties in assemblages, which can be described in naturalistic terms; 3) the assertion that computer technology has made it possible to reveal and simulate the virtual structures of matter – validating points 1) and 2). While the first two tenets chart the vector of postdeleuzian empiricism, the third inserts its specific gothic dimension.
The trajectory of gothic empiricism is already present in Delanda’s first book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, where he introduces the conceptual figure of the robot-historian. From a future perspective, the robot-historian tracks the evolution of intelligent machines, which coincides with the process of intelligence migrating from human bodies to artificial forms of perception, such as computers38. In this view, “humans would have served only as machines’ surrogate reproductive organs until robots acquired their own self-replication capabilities.”39 This experiment challenges the anthropocentric thesis about the uniqueness of human intelligence and the necessity of a conscious subject as assumed by humanist Enlightenment, without denying the possibility of knowing matter or including the theorist’s position as a participant in the process by which matter thinks itself. The gothic postulate holds that it is not Life itself that spontaneously cognises itself, but rather the non-conceptual negation – in the form of technological progress under war conditions – that is, the movement against existing forms of Life’s organisation that generates ever-higher levels of intelligence and abstraction. For this experiment to succeed, Delanda incorporates the advancement of intelligence into the “overall set of self-organizing processes in the universe.”40 To this end: a) materialistically – he reduces matter, with its various forms, mechanisms and species, and all social phenomena, linguistic systems and cognitive faculties to machinic assemblages; b) pragmatically – he describes these systems through their functions and capabilities, rather than their essences; c) naturalistically – he explains the operations of machinic assemblages using mathematical models, mainly in the context of chaos theory, projective geometry, complexity, dynamic and dissipative systems, etc. The concept binding these three moves together is the machinic phylum, a term coined by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, to encompass all processes of self-organisation. According to Delanda, the machinic phylum appears wherever the operation and development of certain systems dissolves categorical distinctions between organic and inorganic life, consciousness and the unconscious, reason and intelligence – distinctions maintained by outdated systems and organisations. This process enables spontaneous – and possible to mathematically model – “cooperation” between neighbouring elements: “as if the principles that guide the self-assembly of these “machines” (e.g., chemical clocks, multicellular organisms or nest-building insect colonies) are at some deep level essentially similar.”41
The two major fields where intelligent systems have been incrementally redesigned are warfare and science. The growth in complexity, abstraction and adaptability occurs through the discovery of new functions of the machinic phylum. This process is accompanied by the evacuation of these functions from human operator or interpreter. The machine displaces the human in two ways: either by supplanting and replacing, or by machining, i.e. formatting the human for the efficient performance within a new functional composition of the machinic phylum. As an example of the former we can take machine vision, where we deal with multiple layers of data collection and analysis and the generation of models simulating human mental processes, such as associative memory or inductive reasoning, but on scales no longer attainable by the human brain’s capacity for processing and conceptual representation. Machine vision technologies are applied both in science, for pattern recognition in genetic material, and in warfare, which Delanda in 1992 was predicting as a feature of the “near future”, yet which today is ubiquitous in military operations. Meanwhile, the ongoing machanisation of the human can be observed in the historical tendency of war machines to pull people into their cogs and discipline them, forming together a new system that realises the unknown so far potentials of the machinic phylum. This can be illustrated by the training of Spartan soldiers, affording lower levels of command with decisional independence during battle, rather than making them wait for a decision from the headquarters, which would have led to increased information friction and a deterioration in control over military operations. Thanks to “many permanent links established between military and civilian institutions”42 the automation of the decision-making process and the reshaping of humans to adapt to new machinic arrangements in science and the military is spreading throughout society – new war machines are spawning wherever we find intelligence, organisation and information. Undoubtedly, the decentralisation of control over information flows carries negative consequences, but Delanda emphasises the opportunity for greater democratisation and the shared individuation of humans and machines. In the 1990s, this promise was embodied by computer networks as new forms of collective intelligence born out of the encounter between “the world of abstract machines of the machinic phylum and that of concrete assemblages and human practices. Not only do computers offer windows into the machinic phylum (chaos research) and allow the phylum to cross between many human beings (open networks used for collective decision making), they also allow the creation of abstract machines which are midway between physical assemblages and processes of self-organization.”43 These self-organising processes, driven by computer technology, are opening up entirely new ways for people to interact, facilitating a faster exchange of knowledge, and so on.
The Delanda’s gothic line takes a distinct path, as I shall show later, compared to the ones CCRU and Parisi follow, as it is oriented around the mathematisable mapping of processes typical of inorganic matter onto organic and social life, rather than around the death drive and deterritorialisation. The mechanisms and processes described by geology, crystallography or fluid dynamics determine the proper movement of complexity, which also allows us to explain the functioning of ecosystems, markets or military operations. It is these mechanisms and processes that are responsible for “non-conceptual negation” and the reduction of rules – the ways in which Life represents itself – by discovering ever more abstract attractors and initiating the transition of systems to different phase spaces. A naturalistic understanding of the gothic line also introduces a vector of empiricism into Delanda’s thought. In a sense, Delanda offers a Humean critique of substantialist metaphysics, replacing in his theory of knowledge the habits of the conscious subject with physical processes described by the natural sciences. This informs his interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, such as assemblage, multiplicity, intensity, ideas, the abstract machine and virtuality. All these concepts are stripped of their transcendental component and translated into the vocabulary of complexity theory, non-linear dynamics, etc.44
Delanda’s gothic empiricism paved the way for the full flourishing of new materialism and other akin posthumanist approaches, which adopted the view that one can freely speculate about matter and life by drawing on selected scientific theories and concepts. Unlike his successors, Delanda, in his later books such as Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy or Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, relies on a meticulous and coherent system of scientific arguments. In contrast, the later new materialism is usually accompanied by the vitalist idea of the profound creativity of Life itself, which the naturalistically inclined Delanda strongly rejects.
Luciana Parisi – alien logic of reproduction
Parisi brings together the problematic series of women and computers onto the plane of reproduction. The stake of feminist critique has always been to trace and expose the compulsory exploitation of women’s bodies in material reproduction and symbolic exchange under capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Feminism, especially in its classic critical variants, viewed technology as a reflection of instrumental reason, which programs and perpetuates the binary oppositions of modernity: mind/body, subject/object, male/female. However, in the second half of the twentieth century – through the work of thinkers and artists such as Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, VNS Matrix, and many others, undoubtedly in response to the spread of computer technologies – a different approach to technology took shape within the feminist movement. Cyberfeminism, as this current came to be known, on the one hand emphasised the necessity of technological progress for the political emancipation of women and, on the other, the structural similarity between women and machines within systems of social reproduction. Rather than arguing for the wholesale rejection of technology, cyberfeminists drew a subversive conclusion from the historical operation of instrumental reason: if both women and machines are destined to perform silent labour in the shadow of enlightened political debates conducted by self-conscious male subjects; if they are expected to secure the bodily, communicative, and computational reproduction of the entire social system; if both women and machines function as instruments of the Promethean impulse of masculinism, then the histories of women and machines are intimately intertwined in narratives of oppression and struggles for freedom. The emancipation of women has been continually accompanied by the autonomisation of intelligent machines and the automation of labour – each making the other possible.
From her earliest texts with CCRU, through Abstract Sex and Contagious Architecture, to her investigations of the relationship between thought and computation in articles from the last decade, Luciana Parisi situates herself within the cyberfeminist project of redefining reproduction. I will focus here on Abstract Sex, which, although published only in 2004, is a work that explicitly emerges from the Anglophone reception of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari during the 1990s. There, Parisi advances the thesis that the contemporary digital technologies have led to the rise of bioengineering, “the new blurring of the boundary between artificial and natural sex,”45 opening a terrain for the experimentation with and control of biocultural flows. Laboratory research into the cloning, copying, mutation, and design of genetic material, which announced a proliferation of species and gender mutations, expands, to quote Spinoza, “what a body can do,” disrupting existing discourses and systems reproductive coding. “Artificial sex permits the unprecedented transformation of our gender identity, the construction and reconstruction of sexual forms and functions of reproduction.”46 In contrast to the dominant feminist view that digital technologies merely realise the fantasy of the disembodied subject, continuing and reinforcing the metaphysics of modern rationality, Parisi sees in these technologies a profound transformation of the very model of embodiment. Without understanding the ways in which systems of sexual reproduction and the disciplining of bodies are determined and governed through digital and computational technologies, identifying the lines of resistance and escape that emerge within their own field of possibilities will remain inconceivable.
The key concept in this framework is deterritorialisation, which governs the transitions between successive layers of complexity in the evolution of inorganic, organic, and social systems. Parisi draws on the theory of endosymbiogenesis developed by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, transplanting their revision of the Darwinian model into a critique of the theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. According to Darwinian theory, evolution is driven by competition for survival, in which those organisms best adapted to securing resources within their environment prevail, determining which genetic mutations are passed on to subsequent generations. Contemporary Darwinism therefore understands sexual reproduction primarily through meiotic chromosomal division and genital reproduction, within the domain of organic life and along lines of genealogical descent. Margulis and Sagan, however, argue that genetic diversity is also produced through horizontal, intercellular, and microorganismic communication.
This mode of communication origins in the so-called Great Oxidation Event, when bacteria capable of surviving in oxygen-rich environments began to engulf anaerobic bacteria. Unable to digest these bacteria, gave rise to eukaryotic cells. Cellular division (mitosis) and symbiosis are thus mechanisms of evolution no less significant than sexual reproduction (meiosis) and competition for resources. “Mitosis is related to the deterritorialization of genetic material that constitutes the nucleic genome as the interior milieu of a eukaryotic organism.”47 From this perspective, planetary oxygenation contributed to a deterritorialisation of ecosystems, which in turn entailed a deterritorialisation of sexual reproduction understood as a set of available informational patterns. This event involved “splitting the unity of the organic stratum (…) and constituting new assemblages of reterritorialization: the eukaryotic cell.”48 The incorporation of anaerobic bacteria by aerobic bacteria ruptured the integrity of the prokaryotic layer of life, exposing it to a multiplicity of heterogeneous and molecular sexual relations. “Cellular life enfolds a dissipative autopoietic process that moves through orders of complexity by means of deterritorialization and decodification.”49 At this point, a new technology – the mitotic technique of reproduction – established a plane of consistency on which virtual and incorporeal communication could rise among multiple reproductive models available at different levels of complexity, “bursting out the previous arrangements of cellular contents and expressions.”50 Parisi calls this plane hypersex, interpreting it as a machinic phylum, though unlike Delanda she relates it to “heterogeneous modes of sex and reproduction from where new content and expression of molecular sexes eventuate.”51 Hypersex constitutes the condition of the individuation of life on Earth, participating in every subsequent deterritorialisation of strata and informational models that compose the biocultural layer together with its own procedures of decoding and overcoding. Through the development of contemporary digital and computational technologies, this same hypersex will enable the reintegration of non-meiotic modes of reproduction and thereby a cyberfeminist deterritorialisation of the modern discipline of gender.
From here Parisi moves on to a critique of Marx’s concept of social reproduction and Freud’s concept of psychic reproduction. For Freud, Parisi recalls, the inorganic is incapable of producing difference. In the mechanism of inorganic repetition – that is, in the death drive – the movement is one of regression toward undifferentiation. This tendency is counteracted by the pleasure principle, a mechanism of repetition aimed at preserving the organism’s integrity, which Freud associates with Darwinian sexual reproduction. The death drive would thus be that which tends toward entropy. As entropy increases, the system ultimately reaches inorganic undifferentiation: death. Consequently, the pleasure principle inhibits entropy and seeks to maintain the system in a state of homeostasis (preserving or increasing its informational organisation). Parisi contrasts Freud’s position with Deleuze’s analysis in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, which departs from this entropic dynamic of life, death, and pleasure. This alternative reading translates to a different function of femininity, the feminine role in sexuality, etc. For Freud, feminine desire, often associated with fantasies of pain, has a masochistic character, and so is passive, amounting to a regression toward inorganic undifferentiation. It must consequently be balanced by the proper principle of individuation and differentiation, namely the active and negentropic force of masculine libido. Meanwhile, in Deleuze’s account, pleasure and pain, masochism and sadism, are not complementary terms; they are not bound together by the same principle. Instead, masochism involves an “autonomy of repetition” with respect to the reproductive cycle of life and death. This autonomy has less to do with sexual difference than with the arrangements of desire and power of capitalist machines. Masochism – as a set of bodily and desiring techniques – injects into disciplinary societies and bourgeois patriarchy a parthenogenetic logic of reproduction, in which the replicative inorganicity of archaic bacterial sex is repeated within the biocultural and social order.
The thesis that digital technologies, such as cloning, play a critical role in the deterritorialisation of gender identity and models of sexuality operating within dominant systems of social reproduction led Parisi toward her later investigations of programming, algorithms, and automated computation. In Abstract Sex, she argues that it is impossible to subordinate all modes of sexual individuation – from the cellular and libidinal to the digital level – to a single paradigm of reproduction. Parisi opposed her vision of stratification to the theories that portray sexuality as wholly instrumentalised by technocapitalism. Biotechnologies and digital technologies, she maintained, have made it possible to conceive gender identity and modes of sexual reproduction as distinct models of information production and exchange. The ramifications of this approach were further explored in Contagious Architecture. If reproduction cannot be reduced to a single paradigm, not least because technologies continually explode the field of reproductive potentialities, then the problem arises as to how technology itself can be conceptualised in a way that does not subordinate it instrumentally to a particular, idealised model of human reproduction. When discussing digital, automated, or computational technologies, the question of reproduction thus becomes a question concerning the possibility of algorithmic thought. Responding to this question, Parisi – both in Contagious Architecture and in her later research articles – seeks to demonstrate that algorithmic reasoning cannot be reduced either to the processing of data from an external source, such as information gathered from the movements and sensory reactions of biological bodies, or to the execution of formally encoded operational rules. Contemporary algorithmic models would therefore introduce into prevailing culture, according to Parisi, an alien logic in much the same way that mitosis, parthenogenesis, and masochism do. To conceive this alien mode of algorithmic thinking, Parisi draws upon ideas from both the broad field of Artificial Intelligence studies, cybernetics and logic, as well as from decolonial thought, particularly figures such as Sylvia Wynter. From these two vectors she aims to derive a theory of the ways in which alien logic conditions and deterritorialises systems of social reproduction, reopening potential lines of individuation beyond the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist horizon.
For Parisi, the stakes of reinterpreting the materialism of Deleuze and Guattari lie in the possibility of developing a non-patriarchal sexuality and non-human cognitive models within the reproduction of social systems. Although the algorithmic destabilisation of cultures that have organised society fuels post-truth politics, the psychopathologies of Web 2.0, and a brutal efficiency-driven approach to institutional decision-making, the development of forms of automated computation also provides tools both for the critique of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy,52 as well as for the construction of new modes of information processing carrying the potential for a better models of social reproduction. All of these aspects belong to the same process of deterritorialisation. For this reason, effective resistance to the destructive effects of systems of oppression, or their abolition altogether, is impossible without computational technologies, since it is within and through them that a new stratum of informational organisation has been constituted. In Parisi’s view, it is not vital matter itself that is responsible for the deterritorialisation of modernity, and consequently that enables its critique. Rather, modern information technologies generate modes of material functioning that undermine the oppressive social practices and epistemic categories within which those very technologies were produced. While Delanda’s concepts are found on the gothic line because computer technologies make it possible to strip Life down to an inorganic structure of complexity, the gothic line in Parisi’s work is tied to the positioning of the death drive – understood as deterritorialisation rather than the elimination of difference – at the centre of the ontogenesis of inorganic life. At the same time, unlike Braidotti or Grosz (as we shall soon see), Parisi’s feminist thought is grounded neither in the subject’s biography nor in embodied sexual difference, but rather in treating reproduction and sexuality as models of information processing.
The trajectory of Parisi’s thought along the empirical–transcendental axis is equally noteworthy. Already in Abstract Sex, which sought to identify the naturalistic and empirical roots of the prevailing social system of reproduction (hence the importance of endosymbiogenesis for the theory), we can find the concept of hypersex, which on the one hand Parisi links to an event in natural history, but on the other she asserts that it reveals the operation of a machinic phylum – an incorporeal and virtual plane upon which new contents and expressions are synthesised. In Contagious Architecture from 2013, the point of departure is once again a pragmatic understanding of algorithms as epistemic practices. Yet Parisi is gradually drawn into questions concerning the possibility of nonhuman syntheses of space and time, or of an alien subject of automated computation, the consideration of which requires a modification of common ideas of the human subject. Finally, reflection on the possibility of nonhuman cognition within algorithmic technologies has brought Parisi, at least in some of her more recent writings,53 to the question of the transcendental conditions of thought as such, conditions capable of accounting for the alien subject that is assembling itself alongside the development of these technologies.
Transcendental/vitalist (Trans/Vit)
Elizabeth Grosz – body and the incorporeal
As with other postdeleuzian feminist thinkers of the 1990s, Grosz departs from the crisis of rationality brought about by the long-standing critique of the foundations of modern reason (from Kant to Hegel) and of the subject (beginning with Descartes). The Deleuzian metaphysics of positive difference enabled Grosz to perceive in this situation an opportunity to develop methodologies and techniques of knowledge production capable of accounting for the agency of the body, which had long been suppressed, distorted, or openly opposed within the Western philosophical tradition. Any perspective capable of moving beyond this crisis must avoid treating corporeality either as something pre-social or as a mere cultural effect. Otherwise, corporeality would once again be inscribed within the familiar and damaging binary oppositions of ideal/real, original/copy, concept/matter, masculine/feminine, and soul/body. From this standpoint, Grosz intends not only to criticise the metaphysics of essence together with its inversion in the form of social constructivism, but also to reclaim the body whose materiality has been lost in favour of the ideal dimension of subjectivity that has dominated the history of philosophy. Rather than explaining reality as a whole through a single substance – such an apparent monism would merely restore reality to a fundamentally dualistic paradigm54 – in Volatile Bodies Grosz mobilises the metaphor of the Möbius strip, whose logic will guide her intellectual trajectory. “The Möbius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another.”55
Despite her reservations concerning some of their concepts, such as becoming-woman56, Grosz recognises the value of a strategic alliance with Deleuze and Guattari. In their work she finds a conceptual apparatus that, when employed in the spirit of radical French feminism of the 1980s, creates the conditions for a theory of knowledge as embodied and gendered. Although feminist critique shifts attention from reason to the body, its aim is not the wholesale rejection of rationality but instead an exposition of the a-rational core of systems in which the male body remains the transparent and neutral ground of representation57. Grosz goes even further: the body constitutes a condition of rationality for every social and philosophical system, a condition that can never be fully conceptualised58. She does not deny the role of thought, language, or everything incorporeal – a theory of which she would develop more fully in her later work – but instead emphasises the irreducibility of thought’s corporeality. The postulate of the sexed body, responsible for the production of meaning along the axis of fundamental sexual difference, determines the transcendental dimension of Grosz’s philosophical project. Here the body assumes a role analogous to transcendental apperception: it is the persistent condition that shapes the subject’s experience. This is why, bodies also delineate and define the forms of intuition: “for bodies are always understood within a spatial and temporal context, and space and time remain conceivable only insofar as corporeality provides the basis for our perception and representation of them.”59 By tying the knowing subject and its spatiotemporal limitations to the sexed body, Grosz continues the project of Nietzschean perspectivism, which identifies the blind spot of modern epistemology constituted around the assumption of a subject of knowledge devoid of any concrete location from which it interprets the world. Grosz replaces this ideal epistemology of the subject-without-perspective with an epistemology of corporeality and sexuality. Knowledge can never be captured in a finite series of propositions because the subject of knowledge can never fully grasp or exhaust its embodiment and sexuality from whose perspective it knows. Thought is therefore embedded in the body – the body defines the transcendental field of cognition – which always remains open to new determinations and new becomings of both body and thought60. The positioning of the female body as a necessary condition for the critique of patriarchy is a feature of the feminism of sexual difference.
Precisely because the body is a living body, “the exploration of life—traditionally the purview of the biological sciences—is a fundamental feminist political concern,” because we “need to have a more nuanced, intricate account of the body’s immersion and participation in the world if they are to develop political strategies to transform the existing social regulation of bodies, that is, to change existing forms of biopower, of domination and exploitation.”61 To this end, philosophy must abandon its traditional assumptions about the human, for the human is neither the centre nor the goal of life. “Life is a form of self-overcoming, a form of affirmation, an excess or superabundance of opposing forces, whose internal will, what Nietzsche describes as the will to power, interprets and thereby transforms itself and its world.”62 The body thus marks the displaced site at which life interprets itself. Here, Grosz combines a transcendental account of embodied cognition with a vitalist ontology: “life succumbs to its rhythms, direction, and forces, to the ever pressing forces of development, growth, and decay… All forms of life must organize their receptivity to and their actions in an environment according to a temporal economy, whether they do so consciously or not.”63 In this way, the political and ethical horizon is extended beyond human relations to encompass the entirety of organic and inorganic matter.
It was the logic of the Möbius strip that led Grosz, after many years of writing about the corporeal dimension of enlived thinking, to undertake in The Incorporeal an analysis of language, meaning, and thought, at what she calls the “limits of materialism”: the incorporeal. There, Grosz discusses several philosophical traditions and figures – including Stoicism, the philosophies of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer – that do not reduce ideality to material chains of cause and effect, but instead investigate “the subsistence of the ideal in the material,”64 the incorporeality immanently contained within corporeality. One could, of course, describe thought in terms of neurocognitive or metabolic processes, but such descriptions do not capture conceptuality itself, the meaning of a concept as a concept, at the level of how “ideality frames, directs, and makes meaning from materiality; materiality carries ideality and is never free of the incorporeal forms that constitute and orient it as material.”65 Ideality must be addressed on its own terms, without forcing it to a binary opposite of materiality, and instead by considering thought through the material assemblages in which it occurs. As Grosz emphasises, central to her understanding of incorporeality is the concept of the plane of immanence developed by Deleuze and Guattari, which “can be conceived as the entirety of materiality, with the entirety of ideality that make this materiality conceivable, that is, capable of forming concepts.”66 This is not the Platonic ideality of pure forms, but an abstract plane on which concepts, ideas, ideals, and meanings encounter one another and enter into relations, acquiring direction and significance alongside the history, evolutionary processes, and social formations in which they were thought. “The plane of immanence is the virtual adhesion of ideas, the belonging together of concepts, even as they are produced and developed in different times and places, the possibility of thinking engendered by other thinking.”67 The term transcendental vitalism aptly captures Grosz’s interpretation of the plane of immanence. On this plane, life extracts a new consistency from chaos, enabling it to confront problems that would otherwise remain inaccessible and impossible to articulate without thought and concepts. Through the plane of immanence – and through its concepts – life is able to confer new meaning upon itself, stretching beyond its original context of operation, and beyond the limits of the bodies that compose material assemblages. Ideal concepts thus “function as affirmations of life, not only the life of the philosopher, but all life, all materiality, this and only this world.”68
Transcendental/Gothic (Trans/Goth)
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit – technology and the Outside
The birthplace of transcendental gothic was the University of Warwick, where the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit operated. Over the course of its decade of activity, CCRU brought together numerous theorists, artists, and students, who appeared under a wide variety of aliases and pseudonyms in both print publications and the various websites associated with the collective69. Already in this heterogeneous pseudonymity, fictionalisation, and rhizomatic mode of operation one can discern the theoretical decisions that underpin TransGoth. On the one hand, this involves a rejection of phenomenology – even a phenomenology that would not be correlated with consciousness or an individuated body but with intensive Life. On the other hand, transcendental gothic constitutes a refusal of all vitalist tones within the deleuzoguattarian conceptual matrix: the élan vital is ravaged by the Outside conceived as the process of the auto-production of machinic desire, which invades organic and social life in order to reprogram it, clawing production out of its constraints and elevating it toward ever higher inorganic and technological abstractions70. These anti-phenomenological and anti-vitalist premises give rise to a distinctive interpretation of the plane of immanence as what Mark Fisher called a Gothic flatline: “a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive.”71 On this gothic line – that is, on the plane of immanence as the process of the auto-production of the Outside – the modern advance of technology unfolds, which CCRU identifies as a force driving an escape from systems of power and representation. Or, at the very least, it locates within technology an always-temporary intensification of counter-hegemonic modes of functioning, since every technological revolution, whether the rise of cyberspace or automated computation, performs a critique of existing social codes and rules founded upon distinctions between the living and the not-quite-living, the social and the machinic, the masculine and the feminine, the human and the non-human, the automaton and the organism, and so forth.
The gothic dimension of postdeleuzianism becomes intelligible once we trace the series of shifts and reinterpretations of the notion of the transcendental through which its meaning comes to be identified with the auto-production or auto-construction of the Outside in technological development. As is well known, Kant was guided to the problem of the transcendental through the question of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, that is, the possibility of attaining certain and necessary knowledge of the world that exceeds both the mere analysis of concepts and assertions derived from empirical observation. Kant’s solution consisted in distinguishing the transcendental conditions that delimit the bounds of knowledge: time and space as forms of sensibility, the categories of the understanding, and the ideas of reason. Prior to this intervention, Kant claimed, metaphysics had illegitimately formulated judgments about what lay beyond the legitimate scope of its application, mistaking the conditions of possible knowledge for objects of knowledge, and thereby surrendered itself to indeterminate speculation. Kantian transcendental philosophy rests upon the distinction between transcendental structure and empirical phenomena, between the subject’s act of synthesis and the object that is synthesised. Transposing this distinction into the field of psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus undertook a critique of Kant’s very theoretical architecture, arguing that he had not yet drawn the ultimate consequences of transcendental thought. They connect the apperceptive subject of consciousness to the subject of desire in Freudian psychoanalysis, explained by the Oedipus complex, which determines sexual relations within the bourgeois family. In order to follow how the unconscious formation of the bourgeois Oedipal subject emerges – an institution indispensable for the reproduction of capitalism – one cannot copy the synthesis of consciousness (the conditioned term) onto the syntheses of the unconscious (the conditioning term)72. Since Oedipal desire is responsible for the naturalisation of a particular social model, its idealised projection backward onto the unconscious field of desiring production commits a logical error: it constitutes a metaphysical transgression beyond the legitimate limits of its operation. If the Oedipal subject is a transcendent determination of desire, then Deleuze and Guattari relocate its transcendental synthesis within a machinic and impersonal unconscious, where the real production of desire takes place before it is subordinated to any particular social representation. Anti-Oedipus sought to carry the transcendental thought into a materialistically conceived process of unconscious production, from the perspective of which social forms of organisation – such as the humanist and privatised subject of consciousness, the Oedipal family, or commodity logic – appear as already synthesised products rather than as the genuine conditions of productivity.
Capitalist modernity is distinguished from previous social formations by its inherent dependence on the Outside, which unleashes production towards an ever more radical critique of anything that is fixed, identical, unified, and organised, and towards the deterritorialisation of all codes and territories. Althoigh for Deleuze and Guattari absolute deterritorialisation occurs within a stratum or territory but drives the organism toward its outside,73 for Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit its dependence upon the interior of a stratum disappears, spreading instead like a “plague from the Outside.”74 As the production of production, the absolute deterritorialisation of the transcendental unconscious is “a descent into the Outside.”75 On the one hand, the Outside cannot be experienced as absolute deterritorialisation – since CCRU rejects phenomenology – on the other hand, as the machinic unconscious it is repressed by forms of reterritorialisation, such as personal identity, the family, and the state. What further distinguishes CCRU’s transcendental gothic from Deleuze and Guattari is the insistence that the vehicle of this deterritorialisation, by virtue of its intimate connection with modern capitalism, must be the market-driven progress of technology that becomes increasingly automated and autonomous, abstracting intelligence from its biological, human, and conscious substrates. New technologies perform critique, and so selection, of that which assembles itself in the future, transforming existing cultures into the raw materials of the auto-construction of an arriving artificial intelligence.
The transcendental gothic of CCRU presupposes one further conceptual displacement: a cybernetic reading of Marx’s theory of capitalism. Land argued that Kant’s critical philosophy is a symptom of modern colonial capitalism because the concept of synthetic a priori knowledge conceals a relation to the Outside characteristic for this socio-economic formation76. As the dynamic of cognition – the synthesis – constantly requires new variable contents originating from outside the subject, that is, from the labour of the sensible, uncivilised, animal, mad Other, the pure form of cognition – the a priori –presupposes its universal validity, present both in the knowing subject and in the object known, that is, in the Other. “This universal form is that which is necessary for anything to be “on offer” for experience, it is the “exchange value” that first allows a thing to be marketed to the enlightenment mind.”77 Because capitalist modernity continually requires contents drawn from unknown frontiers, rather than suppressing it appropriates alterity by introducing it into circuits of exploitation, accumulation, trade, and investment. By inscribing Kant’s transcendental architecture within Marx’s schema of the capitalist mode of production (M–C–M) and within a postcolonial understanding of the global economy, Land was able to translate this model of modernity into the language of cybernetics. The M–C–M circuit, which expresses the tendency of the capitalist system towards interminable expansion, functions as positive feedback between investments in fixed capital – that is, technology in the broad sense – and the commodity trade on the consumer market. Since new technologies confer an advantage over competitors, capitalism establishes a continuous and accelerating process of technological development. That development, in turn, intensifies the forces of alterity and alienness that destabilise traditional institutions and cultures.
The transcendental process realised by capitalism consists of: (1) an unconscious and impersonal drive towards the Outside, and (2) the progressive reduction – or, which is an equivalent term: critique – of all forms of transcendent representation, such as law, Man, or the subject of consciousness. The “transcendental unconscious” – functioning as a cybernetic positive feedback loop – constitutes “the auto-construction of the real, the production of production,” one that proceeds by “methodically dismantling everything in Kant’s thinking that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject.”78 Auto-production and auto-construction of the real mean here that “there is no dialectic between social and technical relations, but only a machinism that dissolves society into the machines.”79 In materialist terms, an illegitimate representation is a formation of desire that arrests the production of the real within redundant, homeostatic, and ossified social forms. It is precisely these representations – as procedures and systems that generate material effects – that become the target of critique, no longer understood by Land and CCRU as an idealist method for evaluating the validity of cognition but rather as the central mechanism of auto-construction of the real. In contrast to Freud who associated the life drives with the desire for organisation and the preservation of the organism’s unity, the gothic reinterpretation of the transcendental unconscious locates genuine desiring production in the operation of the death drive – in Freudian psychoanalysis still identified with the principle of disorganisation. Paradoxically, by dismantling extensive representations, “critique is escalation” and an intensification of the process of the auto-production of the Outside, a “self-perpetuating movement of deregulation,”80 an “an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.”81 In cybernetic terms, one might say that destabilisation is what counteracts entropy: complexity and power of a system increase because its behaviour becomes less predictable, and so it generates more information, reducing entropy and, in turn, expanding the system’s potentiality.
Transcendental gothic also manifests itself distinctly in the way the cypher zero functions in Sadie Plant’s cyberfeminism. Her Zeros + Ones brings together the Industrial Revolution, the rise of weaving machines, the prototype of an automatic computing machine devised by Ada Lovelace based on the design of industrial looms, the psychoanalytic negation of female desire, and the significance of the arrival of the zero from the East in the emergence of both capitalism and computer technology. Plant intervenes in the history of computer technology and computational practices to expose the singular and distinct convergences between intelligent machines and women in modernity. These convergences stemmed from the functional role shared by intelligent machines and women as means of communication between men in patriarchal societies: they mediate, translate, convey, carry, supply, serve, weave, gather, transcribe. By virtue of occupying the position of 0 or minus in the binary model of modern sexuality, feminine desire and subjectivity fell outside the system of representation (as 1 or +). “In relation to homo sapiens, she is the foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without and the enemy within.”82 Here, the CCRU’s transcendental architecture is repeated – women, like machines, deliver otherness for the a priori synthesis of the patriarchal identity. However, as the central thesis of gothic cyberfeminism holds, patriarchy, by determining desire and subjectivity of machines and women through a logic of lack, deprives itself of the ability to register communication from outside its own representation. Even if the patriarchs are confident that they control the flow of all messages, they cannot recognise information transmitted in an alien logic. Strings of code have only meaning within a pre-determined range. Conceiving of this alien logic requires redefining the zero, a cypher whose arrival in Europe played a key role in accelerating technological progress. Plant points out that “the ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binaries or counterparts to each other: zero is not the other, but the very possibility of all the ones. Zero is the matrix of calculation, the possibility of multiplication, and has been reprocessing the modern world since it began to arrive from the East. It neither counts nor represents, but with digitization it proliferates, replicates and undermines the privilege of one. Zero is not its absence, but a zone of multiplicity, which cannot be perceived by the one who sees.”83 With the development of computer technology, the reproduction of the system of the patriarchal representation is being infected by replicating viruses, reprogramming the system’s mechanisms to produce alien intelligence. “Plant ejects all negativity from woman’s role as zero and affirms it as a site of insurrection,”84 where new forms of desire and intelligence crawl out of the shadows of organisations subordinated to organic unity or subjective identity.
Unlike Grosz, CCRU does not seek a definitive foundation for the account of transcendental synthesis in the body or in the incorporeal plane of immanence. Instead, the transcendental synthesis is here embedded in technology, or rather in the intrusion of new technologies into the existing social field, recorded in the form of singular events such as the appearance of the zero in Europe, the Jacquard machine, Y2K85 or cyberspace. Without getting into the details of the CCRU’s complex theory of time, new technologies create a sort of transcendental bottleneck, which performs a critical selection of what already belongs to the future, whilst dissolving what is left in the past into the materials from which the future is assembled. For Grosz, the transcendental remains an ever-open source of the new, and the plane of immanence is understood as the absolute potentiality of the ideal and the incorporeal. Meanwhile, through a dynamic conception of the transcendental/empirical distinction, CCRU grants the plane of immanence a directional dimension, determined by successive technological transformations. It is precisely this emphasis on the teleological function of technology that distinguishes transcendental gothic from transcendental vitalism. Only increasingly faster, smarter and more abstract forms of decoding the mind and the body can carry out a materialist critique of existing systems of representation. Since critique is a process, the criterion of critique lies in the future; it constitutes both the plane of immanence and the finality of the process, by which the auto-construction of the Outside escapes repression in the present.
The trajectory of TransGoth, emerging from CCRU, itself clearly demonstrates how the internal tensions of a given framework, under the pressure of its own evolution, conceptual critique, and transformations in the technosocial problematic, can generate lines of flight branching into new philosophical positions. I will not attempt to survey them in detail here, but one can identify a range of distinct proposition, some explored in greater depth, others propagating at the level of manifestos or memes: left accelerationism (Laboria Cuboniks, Peter Wolfendale, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams), right accelerationism (the various milieus active on X), unconditional accelerationism (Vast Abrupt), cold rationalism and acid communism (Mark Fisher), the Dark Enlightenment (Nick Land), neorationalism (Ray Brassier, Peter Wolfendale, Reza Negarestani), and cute accelerationism (Maya B. Kronic and Amy Ireland). Despite their differences, each continuation of CCRU repeatedly returns to the deleuzoguattarian problem of deterritorialisation of women and computers, approached as the Outside projecting itself from the future in the form of technointelligence. The divergences between these programs therefore reduce to different solutions to this problem, which in turn shape their respective conceptions of the place the human hold in a looming non-human future, the relation between capital and postcapitalist revolution, strategies for intensifying deterritorialisation, and so on. What we encounter here is a form of path dependence – in the sense used by complexity theory – along which are distributed the accumulated sediments of earlier problems and solutions, forming a system of constraints for subsequent theories. One may, of course, fail to notice these earlier problems; yet once they come into view, they can no longer be ignored, whether positively or negatively. Every theoretical decision is made within a determinate architecture of ideas.
Postscript
| Plane of immanence | |
| Braidotti | Nomadic subject / life |
| Massumi | Autonomy of affect |
| Delanda | Machinic phylum as abstract structure of self-organising processes |
| Parisi | Hypersex as plane of permanent info-symbiogenesis |
| Grosz | Body / the incorporeal as undetermined potential of materiality / ideality |
| CCRU | Outside as auto-constructing technointeligence from the future |
Rather than offering a summary or drawing definitive conclusions, I would like to raise two further issues that fold back into the theory of problem. The point of departure for this article was the plane of composition on which two problematic series converge: the internal tensions of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and the socially pressing question of the agency of women and computers. The point of arrival is a projection onto a set of planes of consistency composed as solutions to the virtual problem generated by this encounter. The planes of consistency found in these postdeleuzian theories – the concepts, materials and methods from which they are composed – unfold along their own trajectories. They have trajectories because they are recursive machines: their mode of construction determines the results of their operation, while at the same time each iteration reflexively incorporates both its own functions and the history of the effects it has produced. So, for instance, Grosz begins with the body, yet under the influence of accrued interpretations and critiques – of both Deleuze and Guattari and of her own work – as well as the dynamics characteristic of philosophical fashions, such as the saturation of discourse with variants of materialism, she ultimately arrives at the study of the incorporeal within the context of Deleuzian vitalism. My intention was to employ the category of the problem as a method: first, to generate an image of thought that was not so much the dominant at a given moment, as it was potentially available within a particular constellation of social and technological transformations; and second, so that this image would be a vector image, i.e. the initial compositional decisions – the foundational schema of a given concept or theory – possess a vector that is being repeatedly redefined in subsequent works, yet never yields the same theory, owing to differences in the contexts in which the image is applied.
The second issue concerns the transformation of the problem to which contemporary philosophy has to respond. Once again, one can speak of the composition of two problematic series: on the one hand, the dead ends and certain automatisms that grew around the postdeleuzianism inherited from the 1990s; on the other, a new socio-technological dynamic. As in the case of technology, it is difficult to abandon established solutions to past problems and cease carrying them forward as models for thinking through the new ones. Yet the constant repetition of such solutions risks rendering a philosophical style anachronistic with respect to actual problems. My working hypothesis is that today we are confronting the exhaustion of a metaphysics of difference, novelty, and openness, whose privileged vehicles were affect and desire, and whose principal target of criticism was binary thinking. One reason for the growing fatigue with the metaphysics and politics of difference – and a fundamental one, insofar as it is connected to the present virtual problem – lies in the capacity of the algorithmic architectures that organise infrastructure and media to regulate attention, affects and desires. The politics of post-truth together with global climate change and the integration of artificial intelligence into every aspect of social life raise questions of navigation, selection and format in environments saturated in noise. These conditions call for a renewed investigation of rationality and a critique of reason: both of its harmful deployments and of those dimensions indispensable to the constitution of autonomy, whether individual or collective.
A deleuzoguattarian rationalism has not been tried yet, and it should, I would argue, since it may prove capable of confronting the relation between automation and thought – a problem that has become central in the age of post-truth politics and artificial intelligence. What would be required is a methodological vector that preserves the positive achievements of the postdeleuzianism of the 1990s, such as its mapping of lines of escape from dominant forms of representation across various domains of knowledge, while at the same time moving beyond those responses, which were formulated against a problem that is no longer ours. For example, all of the positions discussed here placed considerable hope in undermining reason, organisation, and epistemology. From the perspective of the last several decades, however, we can see both the theoretical aporias of such an approach, and its inability to propose convincing political solutions, not to mention the inadequacy of the language of those postdeleuzianisms for grasping the impact of current automated computational technologies upon subjectivity and institutions. Éric Alliez has observed that Deleuze himself moved from the radical empiricism of David Hume towards a Leibnizian conception of the interiority of the concept86. One consequence of this turn towards the concept as such can be recorded in the evolution of Deleuze’s notion of the image of thought, from its formulation in Difference and Repetition to its redefinition in What Is Philosophy?, which may be read as a critical reflection aimed at bringing out a more rationalist dimension of his own philosophical project. While in 1968 Deleuze maintained that the image of thought had to be overthrown as it subordinated pure difference to the negativity of the concept and to representation in consciousness, and still in 1972, in Anti-Oedipus, he would have regarded virtually any creative destabilisation of the dominant image of thought (such as the Oedipal formation) as worth pursuing, from 1980 onward he increasingly confronted the internal difficulties of his own metaphysics. First, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze introduced the function of caution as a qualification of deterritorialisation; later, in 1991, in What Is Philosophy?, he followed this line of reflection even further:
It’s no longer a question of the bogeyman of representative Reason but of the conditions of emergence of philosophical thought, implicating the psychosocial and historical conditions that a thinker encounters hic et nunc, as well as the noetic presuppositions that a thought determines in its functioning alone. The image of thought thus concerns the postulates of every thought, not its representative illusion. These conditions define the prephilosophical plane from which thought proceeds, and so the image of thought, which is no longer opposed in a binary-value way to the “good” use of concept production, consequently corresponds to what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence, i.e. to the concept’s plane of composition.87
The investigation of the problematic of the 1990s, or, more broadly, the study of virtual problems, should be viewed within this approach to the image of thought. The method of intuition traces lines of division across a given plane of composition constituted by problematic ideas, along which theoretical positions are distributed. From the resulting constellation of responses to a given problem – including the distinct ways in which those responses themselves formulate and express the problem – there emerges a concrete image of thought: “a system of coordinates, dynamisms, and orientations: what it means to think, and to ‘orient oneself in thought’.”88
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Footnotes
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S. Plant, The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics, Body & Society, 1995 Vol. 1(3-4), p. 45. ↩
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S. Plant, Zeros and Ones, London 1997, p. 39. ↩
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S. Plant, The Future Looms, p. 62-63. ↩
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G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, tr. H. Tomilson, B. Habberjam, New York 1991, p. 15. ↩
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Ibid., p. 16 ↩
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G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. P. Patton, London-New York 1994, p. 139. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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A. Sauvagnargues, Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendantal, Paris 2009, p. 31; Deleuze and Transcendental Empiricism, tr. T. Adkins, unpublished. ↩
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G. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts. 1953-1974, tr. M. Taormina, Los Angeles-New York 2004, p. 36. ↩
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A. Sauvagnargues, Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendantal, p. 31-32; Deleuze and Transcendental Empiricism, p. 25. ↩
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G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 57. ↩
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G. Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 163. ↩
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Ibid., p. 162 ↩
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G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. xx. ↩
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R. Brassier, Mad Black Deleusianism. On Nick Land. ↩
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G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand plateaus, tr. B. Massumi, Minneapolis-London 2005, p. 499. ↩
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R. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, New York 1994, p. 99. ↩
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R. Braidotti, Transversal Posthumanities, Philosophy Today, Volume 63, Issue 4 (Fall 2019), p. 1182. ↩
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R. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 23. ↩
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Ibid., p. ↩
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R. Braidotti, Cyberfeminism with a Difference, New Formations, no. 29, 1996, p. 353. ↩
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R. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 2013, p. 3. ↩
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Ibid., p. 66. ↩
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Ibid., p. 61. ↩
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B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, Durham – London 2002, p. 1. ↩
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B. Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect, in Parables for the Virtual, p. 27. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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Ibid., p. 28 ↩
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Ibid., p. 23-24. ↩
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B. Massumi, The Future Birth of the Affective Fact, in Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, Durham-London 2015, p. 190-191. ↩
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Ibid., p. 202. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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B. Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect, p. 29. ↩
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Ibid., p. 27. ↩
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Ibid., p. 35. ↩
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Ibid., p. 30. Right next another example of a de-transcendentalizing treatment appears: “The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt—albeit reduced and contained”. ↩
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M. Delanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, New York 1991, s. 10. ↩
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Ibid., p. 7. ↩
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Ibid., p. 6. ↩
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Ibid., p. 7. ↩
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Ibid., p. 228. ↩
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Ibid., p. 229. ↩
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For example, ideas become singularities – reconceived as attractors – representing the tendency of physical systems to follow certain paths of individuation within a given space of possibilities; whereas intensities become a gradient or rate of change, and thus the distribution of intensities can be represented as a vector field. For a more detailed critique of this move by Delanda, see: D. Roden, Reality Chunking, https://enemyindustry.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/6729/. ↩
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L. Parisi, Abstract Sex, London – New York 2004, p. 7. ↩
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Ibid., p. 7. ↩
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Ibid., p. 66. ↩
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Ibid., p. 65. ↩
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Ibid., p. 66. ↩
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Ibid., p. 65. ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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L. Parisi, E. Dixon-Roman, Recursive Colonialism and Cosmo-Computation, SocialText 2021. ↩
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Np. L. Parisi, Repregramming Decisionism, e-flux 80 (2017); L. Parisi, The Alien Subject of AI, Subjectivity 12 (2019), s. 27–48; L. Parisi, Xeno-patterning. Predictive intuition and automated imagination, Angelaki, 24/1 (2019), s. 82–97. ↩
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E. Grosz, The Incorporeal, New York 2017, p. 12. ↩
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E. Grosz Volatile Bodies, Bloomington 1994, p. xii. An example of Möbius strip for Grosz is skin surface, because it creates an interface for a „double sensation”, a smooth passage between the subject pole and the object pole. Ibid., p. 35-36. ↩
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E. Grosz, A thousand tiny sexes, Topoi 12 (1993), p. 167-179. ↩
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“[A]n irrational or nonrational kernel within rationality that subverts its claims to provide methods and systems of judgment for knowledges”, E. Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, New York-London 1995, p. 29. ↩
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Ibid., p. 26-31. ↩
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Ibid., p. 84. ↩
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This theme, in particular the openness of biological processes to cultural interventions and definitions, recurs throughout all of Grosz’s work. ↩
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E. Grosz, Nick of time, Sydney 2004, p. 2. ↩
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Ibid., p. 10. ↩
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Ibid., p. 5. ↩
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E. Grosz, The Incorporeal, p. 5. ↩
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Ibid., p. 12. ↩
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Ibid., p. 9. ↩
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Ibid., p. 136. ↩
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Ibid., p. 148. ↩
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From about 1995 to 2005 the core of CCRU included Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Steve Goodman aka Kode9, Maya B. Kronic (Robin Mackay), Anna Greenspan, Stephen Metcalf, Iain Hamilton Grant, Luciana Parisi, Ray Brassier, but within the collective’s orbit, one could notice Orphan Drift, Kodwo Eshun, Kathy Acker, Reza Negarestani. ↩
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E.g. in Nick Land’s Circuitries: “The body is processed by its organs, which it reprocesses. Its “true freedom” is the exo-personal reprocessing of anorganic abstraction: a schizoid corporealization outside organic closure.” N. Land, Fanged Noumena, ed. R. Brassier, R. Mackay, New York 2011, p. 311. ↩
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M. Fisher, Flatline Constructs, New York 2018, p. 2. “For Gothic Materialism, though, the flatline is where everything happens, the Other Side, behind or beyond the screens (of subjectivity), the site of primary process where identity is produced (and dismantled): the “line Outside”. It delineates not a line of death, but a continuum enfolding, but ultimately going beyond, both death and life”. Ibid., p. 27. ↩
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It is worth noting that Deleuze made this modification to the transcendental in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and only later, together with Guattari, did they apply it to the question of the machinic nature of desire. ↩
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This model of the relationship between the inside and the outside, in the context of absolute deterritorialisation, informs Anti-Oedipus in a certain respect and is scattered throughout the book, but is only fully developed in the chapter The Geology of Morals in A Thousand Plateaus. ↩
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Flatlines, in CCRU, Writings 1997-2003. ↩
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Tick Delirium, in CCRU, Writings 1997-2003. ↩
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Land presents this argument in Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest in Fanged Noumena. ↩
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N. Land, Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest in Fanged Noumena, p. 67. ↩
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N. Land, Machinic Desire, in Fanged Noumena, p. 321-22. ↩
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N. Land, Circuitries, in Fanged Noumena, p. 294. ↩
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N. Land, Making it with Death, in Fanged Noumena, p. 262. ↩
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N. Land, Machinic Desire, in Fanged Noumena, p. 338. ↩
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S. Plant, On the Matrix, in Cultures of the Internet, ed. Bob Shields, New York 1996, p. 326. ↩
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Ibid., p. 333. ↩
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A. Ireland, Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come, e-flux 80 (2017). ↩
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M. Fisher, Y2K-Positive, Mute Magazine, vol. 1 no. 15 (2004). ↩
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E. Alliez, The Signature of the World, tr. E. R. Albert, A. Toscano, London-New York 2004, p. 99. ↩
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A. Sauvagnargues, Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendantal, p. 42; Deleuze and Transcendental Empiricism, tr. T. Adkins, unpublished, p. 35. ↩
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G. Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, tr. M. Joughin, New York 1995, p. 148. ↩