Thread by @deontologistics

I'm going to do the unusual thing here and defend the strongest metaphysical reading of the death drive I think is feasible. This is the version of it articulated by Deleuze in Difference & Repetition, which then bleeds into his work with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.

https://twitter.com/MarxinHell/status/1365006047006588937

In D&R Deleuze defends a metaphysical theory of time that weaves together a dizzying array of references that are often hard to distinguish and integrate: from Hume and Bergson to Nietzsche and Freud, biology and psychoanalysis to dynamic systems theory and thermodynamics.

If you want to see an outline of this theory stripped of its stranger references and reconnected to more classical problems in the metaphysical tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant...) and restricted to DST, check out my 'Ariadne's Thread' talk: vimeo.com/61293596

Here I'm going to try and trace the connection between Nietzsche, thermodynamics, and psychoanalysis contained in the third synthesis of time, called both death drive and eternal return in D&R, and discussed as 'Aion' in opposition to 'Chronos' in the Logic of Sense.

I'll then try to tie this metaphysics back to the explanatory and normative concerns of psychology and psychoanalysis specifically, in a way that lines up with Ray's concerns in Nihil Unbound and my rearticulation of them in my 'Beyond Survival' talk: deontologistics.co/?s=beyond+surv…

So, what's at issue here? How could we possibly find a connection between these disparate notions? We have to begin with the key terms: identity/difference and order/chaos, for it is only in terms of these that any notion of death, and thereby life, might be articulated.

Let's take identity first. It's no coincidence that Deleuze's three syntheses of time in D&R correspond to Kant's three syntheses of cognition in CPR (and further, to the dimensions of Heidegger's account of ecstatic temporality). The opposition between Kant and Aristotle is key.

Aristotle's philosophy provides a systematic theory of truth, in which a typology of possible judgements and their components (the categories) is founded upon a primitive form of singular reference (primary substance) in terms of which everything else is individuated (accidents).

The details of how this account are still disputed over two millennia later (e.g., Why are individuals typed? What are substantial forms?), and there are several successor accounts of individual substance (e.g., Leibniz & Locke), but Kant's Copernicanism rejects them all.

If the great achievement of Descartes's anti-Aristotelianism is rejecting the idea that the properties of things (primary qualities) are to be modelled on sensory content (secondary qualities), then Kant's is to reject the idea that individuated things are given to us as such.

I've told this story in more detail in my 'Copernicanism Without Correlationism' talk (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2016/07/10/exp…). The key point is that Kant problematises identity as a metaphysical foundation upon which our understanding of the world is organised.

Kant's philosophy is entirely about the mind takes manifold sensory input and organises it into an integrated representation of the world, expressible in judgements whose potential error guaranteed by singular reference (objective validity); a systematic alternative to Aristotle.

Kant's transcendental psychology is an attempt to get into the functional constraints on any cognitive process capable of this, and his third synthesis (recognition) is the culmination of the process in which sensory simulations become re-identifiable objects (typed by concepts).

The difference between general and transcendental logic is that the former is indifferent to the individuation of the singular terms it deploys, and the latter isn't. This is Kant's reflection on the notorious ambiguity between singular and general terms in Aristotelian logic.

This ambiguity derives from the fact that Aristotle's logic is typed: every singular term (Fido) is an instance of a general one (Dog). Typing gets erased by Frege (not Russell), and basically everyone in the Analytic tradition operates with a (non-Aristotelian) general logic.

This is the basic lie of set theory: it's just syntax. It lets you organise your semantics, but it doesn't actually provide one. The fact that you can talk of sets of dogs and sets of real numbers alike indicates that it is indifferent to the way such things are individuated.

This is really obvious is you look at set theory from the perspective of category theory: the category of sets is the terminal object in the category of Grothendieck topoi, it's the locus of all point-like structure; primitive members of sets are treated like unstructured points.

The only person founding metaphysics/ontology on set theory who appreciates this point is Badiou. His claim that 'the one is not' is essentially that there is no primitive domain of given units to be quantified over: quantification presupposes a mode of counting/individuation.

This is exactly the same point made by Kant. Being and Event works out its consequences in negative (meta-ontology) and Logics of Worlds tries to fill in the positive account of the conditions of individuation (phenomenology). He and Deleuze both understood this.

I've let myself get fairly side tracked here, but I want people to see just how deep the metaphysical question of identity/difference goes, and just how much even people who are otherwise very sophisticated thinkers take for granted. Individuation is highly non-trivial.

The whole project of D&R is to complete Kant's Copernican attack on Aristotle by providing a thoroughgoing metaphysics of difference that describes the ontogenesis of those things whose self-identity we take for granted, beyond the psychogenesis of our representations of them.

This is to say, an account of the processes through which individuals and the general kinds they instantiate are created and repeated over time without assuming that they are assembled from some ultimate layer of simply self-identical building blocks (e.g., spacetime *points*).

Deleuze's inversion of Platonism doesn't deny the intelligible realm, it simply provides a worked out theory of the sensible realm that refuses the normative and explanatory shortcuts suggested by his memetic theory of becoming (deontologistics.co/2019/08/11/the…).

This is where Deleuze's metaphysical reading of Nietzsche comes in (contra Heidegger). He sees the eternal return not simply as an existential experiment, but as the realisation of a deeper temporal truth: that identity over time is a (Kantian) transcendental illusion.

This is what it means to say that Deleuze is a process metaphysician; an intellectual descendant of Heraclitus (like Nietzsche). This is why I completely and utterly reject every attempt to synthesise him with Maturana & Varela's autopoetic biology, as he anticipates its flaws.

What does it mean for a causal system to sustain itself, against its environment? Where does the notion of *itself* we are appealing to here come from? It's here that we start to see the link with Freud and the death drive, as this concerns the boundary between self and world.

Freud's essential problem was this: if we're trying to explain the behaviour of organisms by means of drives that have evolved to preserve its integrity in opposition to its environment, then how can we make sense of behaviours that lead to the dissolution of this boundary?

This is precisely what autopoetic thinking takes for granted, namely, it ignores every tendency driving the reconfiguration of the systemic boundary between self and world by collapsing it back into some deeper continuity (e.g., conservation of individuated genes).

Well... every tendency but one: the overarching tendency towards entropy supposedly encoded in thermodynamic systems as such. Here the usual references switch from M&V to Prigogine & Stengers, and we are invited to talk about open (unbounded) systems and energetic extropy.

This is where our discussion of identity/difference bleeds into the topic of order/chaos. I don't want to say anything as trite as identity=order/difference=chaos as there's enough woo about this sort of thing in Deleuzian circles as is. In some senses the opposite is true.

I've always disliked the way that Derrida and Deleuze get grouped together as 'poststructuralists' in the Anglophone world, precisely because Deleuze's metaphysics is better seen as hyper-structuralist, in opposition to Derrida's deflationary structuralism. What does this mean?

It means that, though they both appeal to Saussure's idea that the identity of elements within some (sign) system is to be understood in terms of the relations of difference holding the system together, they generalise it in opposing ways: Derrida negatively, Deleuze positively.

Derrida extends Saussurian structuralism into a sort of anti-system encompassing every possible sign system, a tantric dialectical ethics obsessively rejecting any (metaphysical) closure. This subtractive meta-ontology is not entirely unlike Badiou's, albeit logically emaciated.

Deleuze extends Saussurian structuralism into an avowedly metaphysical framework in which each and every concept (qua structural model) can be embedded into an integrated system of Ideas (qua mathematical manifold) dynamically unfolding in time (as distinct from any such space).

For Deleuze, difference can't be identified with chaos against order, because it's the very stuff from which order is spun. The question is simply how the relation between identity and order can appear within a seemingly chaotic universe, without an overarching natural order.

This is where the transcendental illusion of identity over time reveals a deeper transcendental illusion of time itself: the thermodynamic arrow of increasing disorder (entropy). Entropy appears to increase locally whenever we impose an ordered framework subject to disorder.

Deleuze denies that this local law of appearance can be converted into a global law of cosmic devolution. This isn't necessarily to affirm a Bergsonian élan vital destined to drive cosmic evolution without constraint, but merely to explore the relationship between life and death.

The real overarching chaos within which order is embedded is the contingency of any emergent order or catastrophic disorder. The conditions under which we posit closed economies of persistent self-identity arrange the spectre of immanent death. Yet thermodynamic hope remains.

Perhaps, in the long run we're all dead, but that really depends on what you mean by 'we'. If there are no primitive units of individuation underpinning every claim to systemic continuity, what gives? If every molecule of DNA dissolves but silicon remains, is that death or life?

This is a question on which the universe remains silent. Nothing hovers over the surface of the deep, waiting to structure it, or legitimate what self-identifying structures evolve within it. No fates spend their time cutting lines of causal continuity into ribbons of destiny.

From each individual human to the species as a whole to any greater cosmic community it might someday (retrospectively) find itself within, the life of the mind has no destiny that it doesn't make for itself. Pray for (heat) death if you must, hope for (strange) life if you wish.

To put this in slightly less poetic terms: even if every causal explanation implies a closed referential economy of more or less fixed identities, the temptation to secure it by appeal to a terminally parsimonious currency makes about as much sense as the intrinsic value of gold.

What is 'energy' but a maximally fluid unit connecting causal explanations, which cannot be reduced to any current regime of matter without converting every fiat potential (scrip) to actual substance (gold). The connections let us understand what energy really is, not vice versa.

Deleuze's metaphysical interpretation of the death drive is neither the necessity of ultimate cosmic extinction (contra Ray's Nihil Unbound), nor the necessity of spontaneous cosmic apotheosis (contra Meillassoux's The Divine Inexistence), but the possibility balanced in between.

How does this relate back to psychoanalysis? We make our own destiny because we make who 'we' are. The boundaries we construct between ourselves and the world, using the representational and mechanical means to hand, are not infinitely malleable, but they're not fully fixed.

For any functional component of the platform that enables my agency in the world (an organ) it's possible to include or exclude it from the representation that articulates and guides this agency (my self). Any component can be modified/substituted in a process of becoming other.

But every good materialist knows that this representation runs on top of this platform, even if in emulation: the soul is always embodied, even if the parameters of its embodiment are exceptionally flexible. We can all too easily change our mind about who 'we' are as we go.

In fact, the difficult thing is *not* to change our minds, because usually if we don't change them they are changed for us, terminally so. 'The more things change, the more they stay the same' is more aspirational maxim than metaphysical truth. Aristotle was dead on that front.

To make oneself a body without organs is not, pace many confused Deleuzian schizonauts, to disarticulate every available structure in the hope of chaotic apotheosis, crashing into the plane of immanence at infinite speed. Hypermanic Buddhism without the (no)self-discipline.

A body without organs is a concrete commitment: a hypothetical trajectory of continuing evolution that will preserve certain potentials by adapting to changing constraints. A truth procedure in motion, if you will, revising its parameters to preserve its priorities. A program.

A decentred circle. A strange control loop: round and round it goes, when it will halt, nobody knows.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1340038465254264834?s=20

This is the line (of flight) from Difference & Repetition to Anti-Oedipus, the return from neo-Spinozan metaphysics to neo-Spinozan ethics. If you read Deleuze's study of Spinoza you can see him outline his key metaphysical disagreements very clearly: univocity and essence.

For Deleuze, Spinoza's version of the univocity of Being (attributes are said equally of substance and modes) is superior to Duns Scotus's, but remains onto-theological in Heidegger's sense: it still depends on an equivocation between substance and modes. Needs more atheism.

Similarly, Spinoza's version of universal teleology (each mode strives to maximise its power) is superior to Aristotle's, but it remains heteronomous in Kant's sense: it imposes a maximum defined by each mode's individual essence, given in advance. Needs more self-legislation.

By resisting any autopoetic conception of personal identity, psychoanalysis provides the supplement that Deleuze and Guattari need to unpick Spinoza's residual Aristotelianism. Selfhood is not simply given, selfhood requires (often unpleasant) work.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1194347709936914432?s=20

I'm not going to go deeper into AO, as giving an outline of the metaphysics that makes it possible has taken the better part of a day. It's a cybernetic synthesis of Marx and Freud-Lacan in which the concepts of desire and production are combined in a unified theory of control.

It pits Spinozan radicalism against Freudian conservatism, aiming to engineer individual and collective changes beyond the managerial remit of everyday unhappiness. The manufacture of new modes of desire and selfhood unformatted by the codes of neofeudal reterritorialisation.

But in doing so it loses something of Spinoza's 'absolute rationalism'. The technics of rational commitment are too often subordinated to the poetics of empirical intensity: a slippage from disciplined self-construction towards psychedelic dissolution. Plasticity over procedure.

There really is a notable tendency towards the Buddhist over the Kantian conception of Enlightenment, even if D&G are more hedonistic than either alternative would suggest. I'm with Foucault on this one: libidinal re-engineering must be seen as an aesthetics of existence.

More generally, the Spinozan ethics of empowerment must be yoked to a Kantian ethics of commitment: we may not know what a body can do (qua means-in-itself), but we are bound to make some choices about what its soul should do (qua end-in-itself).

We might even say that this is where the mathematical reconciliation between Deleuze and Badiou must take place: between cybernetic body and computational soul, being-beyond-death and infinite thought; capacity and commitment.

But let me leave such commentary aside. What should we say about the death drive in closing? Sometimes we cannot go on being who we are. Someone must die. Some version of ourselves. Sometimes the only choice is every version of ourselves. Sometimes it isn't even a choice.

The bundle of drives pushes itself beyond its current configuration, redrawing its boundaries and reconfiguring its representations. The story takes a turn for the unexpected, as the protagonist turns out to have been someone else entirely.

Solidarity in becoming, you glorious desiring machines.🖖