version

Well-known member
There's a good bit in one of the interviews at the start of Chaosophy where Deleuze talks about a system being rational if you accept certain articles of faith within it. They all work and make sense from within, even if they're completely deranged from the outside.

"All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational - not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad . . . the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time . . . "
 

craner

Beast of Burden
There's a good bit in one of the interviews at the start of Chaosophy where Deleuze talks about a system being rational if you accept certain articles of faith within it. They all work and make sense from within, even if they're completely deranged from the outside.

"All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational - not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad . . . the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time . . . "

Not that you've read all of it
 

version

Well-known member
The tension between their reputation and stated aims is interesting. They're often dismissed as impractical mumbo jumbo, but if you listen to Deleuze he'll inevitably emphasise the materialism at the core of his thought, e.g. trashing psychoanalysis and favouring psychiatry's use of drugs because the latter's a material intervention in the brain chemistry.
 

other_life

bioconfused
(yappin) deleuze read adorno in his later years and seemed to like him (cited in 'what is philosophy') even though he swore up and down for much of it that he was anti-dialectics and that hegel was his nemesis #1. seems like a desideratum to work out how deleuze was dialectical in spite of himself + how he personally received the frankfurt school/how their thought dovetails. that chaosophy quote had me thinkin about this
 

version

Well-known member
(yappin) deleuze read adorno in his later years and seemed to like him (cited in 'what is philosophy') even though he swore up and down for much of it that he was anti-dialectics and that hegel was his nemesis #1. seems like a desideratum to work out how deleuze was dialectical in spite of himself + how he personally received the frankfurt school/how their thought dovetails. that chaosophy quote had me thinkin about this

Difficult to get away from binaries, even in CaS you'd have them setting up their oppositions of Molar/Molecular and Smooth/Striated. Not to mention the interplay between the two of them to write the stuff in the first place.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I mean, I can start to see how the schizoanalytic method is opposed to the conventionally conceived dialectical method, insofar as the latter involves an ongoing process of synthesizing conflict toward a greater and greater synthesis, I.e that often has implications of there being some absolute One toward which the efforts are oriented.

But you can also conceive of the dialectical method in a manner more compatible with schizoanalysis, in that you can use the thesis/antithesis framing in more of a pluralistic and situational fashion, moving toward local maxima of situationally useful syntheses, rather than as one massive unifying process toward a global maximum, as it were.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
A schizoanalytic dialectical process can be used to proliferate a bunch of synthetic directions, and if you do this with an attitude of some syntheses being more useful than others depending on circumstances, then arguably the two methods aren’t at odds.
 

other_life

bioconfused
i mean thats the thing, adornos contention in negative dialectics is very anti-transcendental, trying to guard against transcendence being smuggled back into (and thus arresting the movement of thought) - that we don't actually posit anything by negating the negation; ergo utopia-communism definitionally can't have a 'program'; that the concept needs to think towards, but can never think -all the way through-, the nonconceptual, &c &c /yap All of this feeling very compatible with deleuze's tack on the infinity-immanence of thought
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
A schizoanalytic dialectical process can be used to proliferate a bunch of synthetic directions, and if you do this with an attitude of some syntheses being more useful than others depending on circumstances, then arguably the two methods aren’t at odds.

they are at odds in your head because you are unable to appreciate the greatest insight of the dialectical method, what Marx takes from Hegel, that being the unity of opposites. You lack the discipline to understand the dialectical method, hence the absurdity to assume that there is a schizoanalytic and a non-schizoanalytic dialectical method.

The bourgeois philistine such as yourself is always appalled when he sees mother nature being defiled by his own hand of exchange, and yet, precisely for this reason, for you the material world, or corporeality as such, is only a philosophy, and not sensuous.

For you, the commodity is sacred, and you have to constantly repeat this trauma of violating mother nature.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i mean thats the thing, adornos contention in negative dialectics is very anti-transcendental, trying to guard against transcendence being smuggled back into (and thus arresting the movement of thought) - that we don't actually posit anything by negating the negation; ergo utopia-communism definitionally can't have a 'program'; that the concept needs to think towards, but can never think -all the way through-, the nonconceptual, &c &c /yap All of this feeling very compatible with deleuze's tack on the infinity-immanence of thought

but the difference is that Adorno is not an empiricist. He is well aware that contradictions will continue to exist under communism, and that there are likely to be constraints to go beyond in any communist mode of production, even if the struggles in thought as it were do not assume a directly class character.

Even if we were to transition to communism in the next 100 years, we would still have to deal with the problematic of being on a planet headed towards inhospitability. Our relation to travel, to consumption, to ownership, all of these are aspects in thought and practice that have to be worked through. It is no good just saying the immanence of thought, it is an easy cop out, and just goes back to 18th century mechanical materialism.
 

other_life

bioconfused
and yeah i didnt specify - the whole tack seems to be that there is no finalising resolve to contradiction/that infinity cant be totalised/that negation is always the case

still operating on the theological-scholemian level so apologies for imprecision of terms, its been 8 years since ive tried to grok marx and marxists where theyre at.

that bordiga piece is classic and id even say its a throughline to his thought, ie a primitivist reading is already plausible, explains camatte's heel turn
 
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