Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Deep Dive 4: Finishing Spinoza, Beginning Deleuze & Guattari

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

This is the fourth installment of the Dialects Deep Dive subseries. Matthew Furlong joins Breht to finish up their discussion of Spinoza's Ethics and to begin their discussion of Deleuze and Guattari.  Check out our first installment of "Dialectics Deep Dive" here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/dialectics Check out our second installment here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/spinoza Check out our third installments here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/deep-dive-3a https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/deep-dive-3b   Outro Music: "My Philosophy" by Boogie Down Productions ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we are doing the fourth installment of our ongoing sub-series Dialectics Deep Dive with Matthew Furlong. And in this episode, we're finishing up our discussion of Spinoza, sort of blasting through books three through five, just touching on some of the main points, and then getting into an extended discussion of DeLuz and Guatari, who wrote capitalism and schizophrenia, anti-edipus, as well as a thousand plateaus in their

collaborative work together, and they each have their individual work as well. Really fascinating, deep conversation, and it ends with a pushing back on the way that Anglo-American academia portrays these thinkers and the whole problem with the label of postmodernism and just really diving into what can Marxists take from DeLuze and Guatari and the importance of Spinoza to the philosophy of DeLuze. And we weave in dialectics and dialectical materialism, mentioned a bunch of thinkers as we always do in this series. And yeah, just a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion

as all of our installations of Dialectics Deep Dive have been. So if you've loved them so far, you're going to absolutely love this. conversation as well. So I'm not going to talk anymore. I think if you've listened to the sub-series, you kind of know what to expect, but up top, of course, we lay out what we want to accomplish before diving into it because it can be so complex. But yes, here's my discussion with Matthew Furlong on Spinoza and then on DeLuz and Guantari. Enjoy. Hey, everyone. It's Matthew again. I'm back here with Brett for Dialectics Deep Dive 4.

In this episode, we're going to clue up our discussion of Spinoza and his work, the ethics. We're going to do sort of a speed run through parts of three, four, and five of the ethics, in contrast to the more sort of close reading that we did last time with Part 2. Then we're going to do a little review, starting with the work of Friedrich Engels, in a letter to Joseph Block from, I believe, 1892, if I remember correctly, about the distinction between the base and the superstructure in Marxist theory and also their connection, and then some of the complications that arise from that distinction, and then how that distinction of base and superstructure figures into the rise in

the late 19th and early 20th century of a new kind of analysis of language that we find, or new kinds of analyses of language that we find in the philosophy of language in linguistics, starting particularly with the work of the Belgian linguist Ferdinand de Sosser, and with the study of semiotics or semiology, which De Sosser also names. in his work. And that transition into these questions concerning language, language use, systems of signs and signification will help prepare us for looking at the work of Jules de Luz and Felizco Atari in a critical manner. Hopefully we can suss out the good and the bad in it, like I said last time in a many-sided way. Through, yeah, again, through this new, new-ish,

or, you know, renewed forms of attention to the question of language. So again, we're going to look very, very quickly at Ferdinand de Sosser and then talk about some philosophers of language, very, very briefly talking about perhaps Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Rudolf Karnat, but leaning more on the work of an Austrian philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein and some of his questions concerning language. And in support of that,

I'm going to maybe look briefly at the work of a Soviet philosopher that I've been reading lately named Vian Voloshenov, in particular his book, Marxism and the philosophy of language. And then we're going to get into finally a discussion about Deleuze and Wittari, which was Brett requested a while ago, which I think should be interesting and try again in a critical, many-sided way to look at what they did right, what they may have not been so right about,

what they're useful for, how they're portrayed in North American culture and whether or not that's correct. And by making some corrections to the representations that they've typically received in Western academia, get a clearer view of their contributions and perhaps some of the things that we can criticize them for and that we could use to criticize ourselves.

So I think that's the basic run of this, and I think what I would like to accomplish today overall is to continue this investigation, which I consider to be complementary to Torco-Lawson's discourse on the principal contradiction of the ways in which the dialectic works in us at the level of our everyday habits and micro-habits. and this is something that I believe Delis and Guateri contributed to very significantly and can actually be of great help to what Deliz and Guatari might call macro politics, which is politics at the level of classes and the struggle between classes and what the outcome of them is going to be. Awesome. Yeah, these deep dives are always fun, wild roller coaster rides of conversational back and forth between you and I, and this one would be no different.

Really happy to finally be getting to DeLuze and Guatari for a number of reasons, which we'll touch on. There's obviously the deep philosophical interest, the connection to Spinoza, and also just the politics of France in the 60s and 70s, which is in and of itself very interesting, how May of 68 was a real impetus for the coming together of DeLuze and Guatari on some level. And there's these implications for Marxism, but also implications for psychoanalysis. This can, their work like the anti-edible complex and capitalism and schizophrenia more broadly, you know, it can be seen as a critique of psychoanalysis, but also it can be seen as a critique of psychoanalysis from within psychoanalysis, like not a complete tossing away of the entire thing, but pointed criticism of where it fails and how it reproduces some of the worst aspects. But again, we'll get into all of that as this conversation goes, you know, through however long it takes.

But we're going to start with the speed run, as you put it, through Spinoza, the last part of his works. And of course, if you want the deeper dive into Spinoza, we've done, I think, two full episodes pretty much covering, you know, core factors of Spinoza's philosophy. And it's going to become increasingly clear why it's important to talk about Spinoza as a prelude to talk. about DeLuce in particular. But let's just go ahead and begin with a quick recap of what we covered last time. This is a sub-series. As you mentioned, Matthew, this is number four in the series. So there's a lot of backlogged material that is leading up to this.

So, you know, what is the content of ethics to and how does it set the stage for the remaining three parts, which fully get into Spinoza's model of ethical practice? Mm-hmm. Well, first, I'd like to just jump back one more. step and talk about the content of ethics one. And I'm just going to be very, very quick with this. He conceives, Spinoza conceives of nature as something in which none of its modifications, none of its forms, nothing that comes forth within it can be really ever said

to be separate from it. There's nothing added to it, nothing taken away from it. And in a sense, he really reflects some questions that, the Byzantine. theologians and philosophers that I've mentioned from around Syria and Libya and these places were asking in the 400s, 500, 600, 700, 800s, 800s, about the question of the fate of the universe, which is that, well, at the end of all this, you know, today we might say everything will settle down through entropy and in the phenomenon of heat death, and there be sort of no matter really moving about in any recognizable way that we can think of,

they back then they sort of, they have this intuition that it's going to be like this. And they consider this, a Greek term that is used for this phenomenon of everything sort of settling back down is apocatas, which a friend of mine worked on. He wrote an interesting dissertation on this, and it means return. And their perplexity is when the universe sprang into being out of whatever the quote unquote source material was, nothing was really added to it because nothing could be added to it from anywhere else. And when it all goes away again, there's nowhere else that it can really go. It's coming and going back into itself. So the question is, what is the actual difference between the beginning and the middle and the end?

And Spinoza is sort of operating in this area as well, where when what we think of as being, as structured being, where there are individual recognizable beings and connections between them is not essentially different than what we might think of as, you know, quote unquote, before the big bang. And if everything settles down into nothingness again, there again will have been nothing added or taken away. And just to sort of characterize this, or to illustrate it a little bit, I wanted to quote from that documentary I recommended about origami in the first episode between the folds, which I think is from 2010. And there's a quote from a really interesting origami artist who also makes his own paper named Michael LaFaS. And he says, origami is a metamorphic art form. Sculpture and painting, when you're adding paint to canvas and you're adding clay and welding things together,

that's an additive process. When you're tripping away at wood and stone and cutting paper, that's subtractive. With origami, you've got that piece of paper and you don't add to it, you don't take away from it, you change it. And that's a good sort of way of crystallizing the logic of what Spinoza means by substance, when he talks about substance as nature or substance as God or God as nature. So that's the real sort of super big picture. The content of book two is how within that universal origami particular folds emerge, first of all, bodies as such, for example, the body of a stone, or you might even consider the entire geological cycle as a body, consider the planet Earth as a body, as Mark says it's the human beings inorganic body, and then even more within that human beings, a human bodies emerge. And the human body is for Spinoza unique in that it's capable of producing images of its own existence or its own journey through, you know, the folding and unfolding of its being.

And this capacity to produce images, which Spinoza says, is in a strictly parallel relationship to what's happening to the body per se. that's what we call the mind, or sorry, that's what Spinoza calls the mind. And for Spinoza, the mind is this complex of images that come and go as our bodily formations come and go in conjunction with other bodily formations. So last time I talked about sitting under the tree and realizing the way that our life cycles were intertwined. So that's the content mainly, basically, of the first two parts. And now in the next three parts, we're going to move beyond that into a deep dive in its own right of the human psychic and emotional experience and how that shapes our lives and how we can live with it.

Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you for doing all that, that's setting up work. So let's go ahead and get into it. What is Spinoza's account in part three of the Apex? Okay. Well, in part three, he defines the affects, and sometimes this is translated as emotions. And I believe you just did an episode on affect theory, didn't you? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So people should definitely go listen to that one because Spinoza is sort of at the root of all, at the ground of all affect theory. And DeLos and Guateria are very important in bringing that forward into the 20th and 21st centuries. He talks about the affects as bodily states, which should also be understood as transitions in their own right, because the human body is nothing but transitions, even its stabilities are transitions. They're bodily states of pleasure or pain that go along with images that we hold concerning the relationship between our body and other bodies. So I'll just try to give an example here. So I'm going to hop in. He gives a whole bunch of, he builds up to this in Proposition 3.

And then he gives a definition of the emotions after Proposition 59. He says that basically there are, there's a sort of tripartite structure of human emotions. Generally speaking, there is desire. Now, what does he mean by desire? He says that, and the Latin term for this is cupiditas, and this is related to the word cupid, right? He says, desire, and he says we explained this in part three and the scullium, let's say the comment on Proposition 9. Desire is appetite, accompanied by consciousness of itself, and that appetite is the very essence of man. And I should say here, the translations are always needlessly gendered.

In Latin, it's homo, which just means human. So the very essence of the human, insofar as the human's essence, is determined to such actions as contribute to the human's preservation. So everywhere we go, we are constantly through nutrition, through metabolic processes, and also through social processes as humans, we are trying to maintain a certain kind of homeostasis, and that's sort of our self-identification as something that's alive. And Spinoza says that we naturally have appetites. Like when you're a little baby, you need to eat, you need to drink, you need to be changed,

you need to be cleaned, all of these sorts of things. But when you grow up, you develop a conscious awareness of these appetites. And your sort of subjective life comes into this. And depending on the culture that you're living, it's not just a matter of, I need nutrition. Depending on where you live, it might be like, I need a slice of pizza or I need a bowl of fall. So sign semiotic sort of already starts to come into this. He says, generally, yeah, the effect of life is determined first and foremost by desire, which is our natural bodily need to reproduce ourselves every single day.

And then within that, there's a sort of general duality between joy or pleasure, and the Latin term here is lightitia and pain or sadness. and the Latin terms he uses is Tristitia. So that's a precursor to the French word trist, which means like sadges je trist. And so this is the basic scheme of his analysis of the emotions. We're constantly desiring and we are constantly striving to preserve ourselves in our own being. And there's this sort of dynamism of joy and pain and what that is for Spinoza's

and where we are affected joyfully or pleasurably, and this is not a hedonistic argument, I should say. We increase in our being and we're able to do more in the world. And when we experience affects that are painful or displeasurable, we shrink into ourselves and our capacities are diminished and we end up more and more alone and less connected to the whole. So that's the basic content of book three. And he gives, from Proposition 59 or after that, starting with the definition of the emotions,

he just gives examples of what he means by that, by each kind of emotion. So he says, joy is pleasure accompanied by the idea of a past thing was contrary to our fair. Disappointment, on the other hand, is pain accompanied by the idea. idea of a past thing whose outcome was contrary to our hope. And again, pity is pain accompanied by the idea of an ill that has happened to another whom we think of as like ourselves. So this is sort of the general framework of analyzing our psychic lives that he comes up with. And another sort of duality that he employs in discussing this is the duality between passivity and activity. So to the extent that we cultivate joyful affects, which allow us, again, greater connectivity,

greater self-relation, greater relation with others, and greater capacity to do things, we become more active. And with the sad passions, we become more passive and less free. So that's the sort of basic outline of that part. Okay. Awesome. And then so how does this theory of the affects inform the subject matter? of part four, which deals with what Spinoza calls human servitude, and what exactly does he mean by

this? Well, out of this sort of basic analytical framework, he starts in part four to build an account of really sort of how to practice our way through these things. He adds to the duality of joyful active passions and sad, passive passings, the sort of duality of good and bad. And he says, well, whatever makes us more active in life is good for us. And this may sound like, again, a hedonistic argument, but I'm going to hope to show, I hope that I can show that that's not the case. And whatever leads us into passivity and sad passions is bad for us. And in fact, not just us, but bad for everybody else around us, because the more passive we are, the more likely we are to be reactive, the more likely we are to be suspicious.

For example, he talks about, you know, if you're really in the grips of passive emotions, passive affects, and say you get dumped, you're more by the person that you like or love, you're more likely to be like, oh, there was such a, this is why they're bad and evil and they did all this stuff to me. you know, they're going to get theirs and all that kind of stuff. But if you are more active, you are more likely to be able to see, well, you know, this wasn't working for these reasons. And, you know, it could, you know, it could not have been dealt with any differently. So it's kind of necessary that it ended in that sense. It's a good thing. And that it increases both of our capacities to be, you know, well-rounded living beings

rather than ending up in this sort of sort of just like a swamp that you call a relationship, that sort of thing. And this has implications up to the societal level where he talks about how it's important to establish political forms whose precepts and whose sort of policies encourage greater activity and discourage greater passivity. He says, of course, that when we have joyful passions, they are created, they are connected necessarily to a greater understanding of nature and a greater understanding of necessity

so that the more active we are, the more integrated into the sort of totality called nature that we belong to and are an expression of. Where is that? There's a really good one. Proposition 71. I really like this one. So he says,

only free people can be truly grateful to one another. And the proof of this, he says, only free people are truly advantageous to one another and united by the closest bond of friendship and are equally motivated by love in endeavoring to benefit one another. And thus, only free people are truly grateful to one another. So, you know, you think of people who are, who engage in relationships because they're always seeking some imagined future outcome for themselves that springs forth from just the

imaginations of their hearts can never really engage in free relationships with people, according to Spinoza, because they're always thinking in terms of how they can make the world conform to what they think of as necessary, which itself comes from an adequate idea of themselves is somehow separate and deserving of, you know, what they want in the world. Instead of analyzing how the things, you know, the ups and downs of a life are all necessary, according to Spinoza. There's always some physical, natural necessity that has wound you up in the position that you're in. And so unless you're aware of that necessity, consciously aware of it and not just constantly

aware, consciously aware of it, but in an affirmational relationship to it, you cannot really engage in a free sort of ungrubbing sort of relationship with other people. He says in the commentary, The gratitude mutually exhibited by people who are governed by blind desire is more in the nature of a bargain or inducement than gratitude. Moreover, gratitude in gratitude is not an emotional state. Nevertheless, ingratitude is base because it generally is a sign that a person is affected with excess of hatred, anger, pride, or avarice, etc.

For if, out of stupidity, a man know, sorry, a person, trying not to reproduce the needless gendered language knows not how to repay benefits, they're not only an ungrateful person. And far less so, are they not won over by the gifts? Oh, this is horrible. Here's one of the shortcomings of Spino's. forgive me for saying this

not won over by the gifts of a loose woman to serve her lost nor by the gifts of a thief to conceal his thefts nor by the gifts of anyone of like character on the contrary the free person shows a steadfast spirit and that they refuse to be corrupted by gifts to their own hurt or to that of society

so I'm sorry that everyone had to hear that he's Spinoza is not perfect just like everyone else and remember he was hanging out in the sort of Dutch merchant republic with all these, you know, Borchwan merchants. And so there are, you know, shitty attitudes that do get reproduced, even though in so many other ways he's totally on point. But this is nonetheless a really important proposition, which is that by becoming more in touch with how you are necessarily determined to be who and how

and what you are, by all these processes that you don't immediately have control over them, you can take greater command of them. And the best way, as he says in part four, is to come together with others and then ideally to create sort of a Republican polity in which you can pass laws and have forms of public deliberation leading to policies and even institutions,

you know, like we have forms of health care or whatever, that increase our capacities instead of decreasing our capacities, which I think most listeners would agree is the diametric opposite of a bourgeois republic, especially at this point in history, in which the entire point is to, unless you're an aspiring bourgeois

is to crush your hope and your will. So that's basically what's going on in part four there. Okay. Just to drill down on one of those aspects, we're talking about pleasure and it's sort of being synonymous with the sort of activity and then pain as being synonymous or tied up with a certain sort of passivity.

I know, you know, just bringing it back down to the level of individual emotional complexes. When I am obviously like in a good mood, like, you know, those days when you wake up and you just have the energy and the clarity of thought and like the internal robustness that you feel genuinely good, it's like, oh, these are one of, this is one of my good days. there is this this uh compulsion to go out and uh act you know i want to like set a challenge for myself or if you can string several good days together or if you're just blessed with having a a certain sort of psychology that tends toward the positive in general um it's more goal orient like i want to you know go out on a long hike or let me see if i can try this new fishing technique or whatever it may be um now on the flip side of that when i am feeling depressed in particular. My entire, as you, you kind of mentioned that, my entire world shrinks. I become

obsessive with my own, you know, the machinations of my own mind. I turn inward as opposed to looking outward. I feel myself to be more passive. Like, you know, when I'm feeling joy, I am active. I'm in control. I feel like an agent, right? When I am depressed, I feel like I am under the oppression of something else that I have no control over. You fall back into addictive patterns, this inward turn. You know, I'll just drink or smoke something or do something to alleviate the acute problem that I'm dealing with. But then I'm wondering where the affirmational relationship can come in here because through

my, you know, engagement with Buddhism, for example, over time, and this is not 100% all the time, of course, but I've been able to see my moods. um as you know more dispassionately and more objectively as like weather patterns in the mind and so like happiness and joy can be present because there are conditions underlying it that i have no control over by the way that give rise to this feeling of joy or you know gratitude or whatever may be and on the flip side when i'm feeling depressed or anxious i know that they are temporary based on the fact that i've been through them millions of times and one thing that they've never done is stuck around forever um and that they they come and go of their own accord, and this allows me to have a different relationship

to the oppressive feeling. I'm just trying to get at what this affirmational relationship might be able to look at in those down moments, because also Spinoza is a determinist as well. So I don't know. I'm just tossing a lot of stuff out there. Does any of that conjure up anything within you or anything you want to focus on there? Well, the first thing it may be think of is Proposition 67 in Part 4. A free person thinks of death, least of all things, and their wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.

Now, I can say some things. I don't always agree with that. And I'll say why in a minute. But for Spinoza, and I think this is where he kind of resonates with a practice like you take up in Buddhism, you can turn around on those sad affects, like when you're depressed and, you know, you're prone, you're getting into drinking or you're doing this, that, or the other thing, which is diminishing your capacities, for Spinoza, the way out of that is to analyze the, like the relations that made it necessary that you're responding to your depression in this way at this time. And even in that, you have a true connection to nature or the divine

as, you know, he says God, the divine nature substance. And it's still an expression of your capacities, and as weird and bleakly ironic as that might sound, and it's still a testament to your connectedness to nature, even if it's not that pleasant. And so he has an interesting dialectic between active and passive affects in the sense that, for example, he rejects the idea that humility is a good thing on the surface of it. And I think in our first episode at the end, you said how important it is to come. to learning and community teaching and communicating all this theory by, you know, remembering being humble, right?

And he says, humility is the cognizance that a human being has of his or her, their own weaknesses. And on the plain surface of it, that's just bad because it makes you think, oh, you know, I can't do as much. But if you're someone that's prideful, and for Spinoza, pride is an affect according to which you have an overestimation of your capacities, then a touch of humility can sort of bring you back down to Earth because if you're prideful, that itself, even though on the surface of it,

it makes you feel like you're increasing and growing. It destroys your relationships with other people and then disconnects you. So in a weird roundabout way, it can lead in itself into passivity and a sort of getting slapped in the face with the sad passion of humility can sort of re-center you

and bring you back. So there's this sort of complexity there. Does that resonate with what you're raising here at all? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The humility part of it is really interesting. There is a sort of humility in the negative affects. You know, if you're writing high all the time, it can certainly grant you some sense of hubris and arrogance.

And the humility that comes with going through a bout of depressive and a depressive episode or going through a bout of deep anxiety. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really know what to make of it, but it certainly rings true on just the basic psychological and emotional level for me. And likewise, with the proposition about the freer you are, the less you think of death. In the case of our culture,

sort of, you know, imperial core capitalist hypermediatized, you know blockbuster spectacular culture as cornell i remember seeing this cornell west talk for he's like we are the most death ducking death dodging death denying civilization and all of history and it's killing us so in that sense um not thinking of death can also be you know i would argue back against spinoza as as a buddy and just be like if i could sit down and have a drink and chat with them i'd say well what about that? What about when the refusal to think of death becomes, uh, leads you into passivity? Yes. Um, we have this obsessive, this obsession with life. It's very, uh, and not just life, but life as construed in the form of a certain kind of youthfulness. And I think like influencers are

an example of this. And I, um, read a really interesting translated essay by the Chow collective not long ago, where the author said that one of the biggest obstacles that American culture has, again, like two revolution is the way that it hates elders and treats elders like absolute shit, throws it into old age homes and just leaves them to die in COVID and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, even in non-COVID times just sort of leads them, leaves them to mistreatment and decrepitude and indignity and death. So there are ways in which some injection of sadness, not in the sense of being a saddo, a sad sack where you're just sitting like Eeyore, you know, like we're in like and like, and you know, full full disclosure, you know, my younger years I could get sort of down at the mouth. So some of my friends started calling me Eeyore or furlong Eeyore. So, you know, I've experienced. that sadness. I'm sure a lot of us have, especially if you're interested in revolutionary politics in North America at this time. It can be kind of a bummer at sometimes. But nonetheless, a healthy injection of them can break you out of what appears to be an active affect, an affect

according to which you're increasing, but which is actually creating sad passion. So it's an interesting dialectic sort of a spiraling motion around there. And it's really important to note, and I actually just want to recommend another book I've been reading lately by a Soviet philosopher this is from 1979 his name is Avald Ilyenko and it's called Dialectical Logic and he has a really good

the second chapter is about Spinoza and it's very very good and he says we should always keep in mind that the thought that you come away with from Spinoza If you read through the ethics is not morphologically identical to the way that he presents it in the sort of clockwork of the propositions and the demonstrations and the scalia that I've talked about. And so although it may not be apparent as you're reading Spinoza, that there's this sort of spiraling dialectical motion going on through all of these things,

if you can get into it and then come away from it and then start, bringing it out in your everyday life, you'll find something that's very different than actually what you read on the page and is like really energizing and enlivening. Very interesting. Just to touch on the idea, because I agree with you about pushing back on Spinoza

with regards to death, because I think the contemplation of death is generally important and can take on different sort of valence depending on the underlying mood that you're contemplating it in. And so, you know, you can think about contemplating death in an overly morose, morbid way because you're depressed, a sort of like, either like a hyper fear anxiety around it or like I wish this would all just end right now sort of feeling like a like a passive giving in to it and almost like, well, at least when I'm dead, I won't have to deal with this bullshit. But then there's ways that you can do it from a more constructive point of view, particularly in those moments of.

of activity or joyfulness when the contemplation of death, and this goes back to like Momenti Mori and these, even in Buddhism, a long tradition of forcing yourself to contemplate death, is that it can bring beauty and immediacy to the moment and engender within you a great gratitude for the things that you do have that, you know, in lieu of death if we were immortals and could never die, that would be a prison of its own kind and would take away some of the intensity that makes life worth living and gives the roller coaster of life the ups and downs its meaning. So yeah, I think there's two different ways of engaging with death based on that earlier delineation between pleasure, activity, and then pain and passivity that I think could be

brought into this discussion with Spinoza for sure. And actually it's interesting. The French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was on the go in, you know, 19. 1900, 1910, 1920 around there, he had a really interesting argument that living forever would not become intolerable because it'll be boring and just the same damn thing every day. It's that the human being, as it goes through its lifespan, builds up a sort of a gigantic, ever-increasing snowball of memory behind this. and the memory is these memories are sort of images of the physical affects and eventually we would literally become paralyzed by being overloaded with memory and we would end up being physically frozen and unable to do anything at all so i find that's that's a sort of interesting point um another thing is to bring in alan watts again he says you know in our cultures we often have um this idea of death as you know you were locked up in an in a dark room forever, ever, ever. It's like, isn't that horrible? But, and I think that's what Spinoza is saying we shouldn't think of.

Because it's just a thought, not vindicated by any experience whatsoever. It's a thought. And a lot of it, I would argue, comes out of the kind of metaphysical constructions that we've built that, like, we've been talking about in this sub-series so far, starting with Engels, right? this strict opposition to something being there and something not being there, all that kind of thing. We have this idea that death is when the switch goes off and then you're again in this black room forever, failing to note that the notion of forever depends on the notion of time, which depends on moving things. And so it's very incoherent. And just to add on to that and to reveal some of my nerdiness, I've been watching the new show Midnight Mass. I don't

I don't know if you've seen that one. I just finished it. Great. I'm on my third view. Nice. This is I, as I, for the listeners, as I told Brett, I suffered a ligament injury recently, so I've been sort of laid up. And in the fifth, I think the fifth episode, there's a very interesting, and also in the

seventh, some very interesting contemplations on different conceptualizations of death. Yes. And what they mean. And Aaron Green, the main character played by, she's married to Flanagan, the guy that made it, but I can't remember, whatever her name is. She has a concept of death, which I think is at once, like her death.

She talks about, I don't want to spoil anything, she talks about her imagining her own death as something that's very compatible with Buddhism, I think. And also I think it's compatible with Spinoza in the sense that, you, Your death is another modification of substance, and insofar as there are little bodies and particles and molecules and processes that have sustained your life process as what's Bonoza calls the conatos, the striving to persist in your own being, those are released into other generative processes. So the idea of death as a strict negation is something that can be done away with. And I think that if you were to talk about that with someone like Spinoza or to really, because I mean, at this time where he's in the Dutch Republic, they don't know anything about Buddhism or anything like that.

And when Buddhism first comes into Europe, they see it as like this weird nihilism that thinks that extinction, it's very confused. But if you could convey, you know, what you say or what someone like TikTok Hans says about the quote unquote end of the quote unquote this life, it may be that may have offered spinoza a concept of death that's more compatible with what he's talking about as the sort of infinite perpetuity of substance and its modifications yeah in uh in midnight mass you say like in episode i think it is five where they're on the couch having the discussion between yes her classically christian view of death and his atheistic view of death um they're they're both sort of like lacking in their own way it's like only you know part of the picture or something and then like an episode seven when she articulates this this deeper this deeper idea is like a it's like a transcending that earlier debate between like you know a sort of even childlike monotheism and a crude or vulgar materialistic atheism and i have the full quote here actually yeah without without spoiling it this is sort of the big philosophical thrust at the end of the the limited series yeah myself, myself. That's the problem. That's the whole problem with the whole thing. That word, self. That's not the word. That's not right. That isn't. That isn't. How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons, little lightning bolts like fireworks inside. And I thought I'd despair or feel afraid, but I don't feel any of that, none of it, because I'm too busy. I'm too busy. I'm too

busy in this moment, remembering. Of course, I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter. This body is mostly just empty space after all. And solid matter? It's just energy vibrating very slowly. And there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I'm no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy. I am energy. not memory, not self. My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else's pictures picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain, and I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the

energy firing the neurons, and I am returning. Just by remembering, I'm returning home, and it's like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it's always been apart. All things apart. All of us apart. You, me, and my little girl, and my mother and my father, everyone who's ever been, every planet, every animal, every atom, every star, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. And that's what we're talking about when we say God, the one, the cosmos, and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. it's simply a dream that I think is my life every time but I'll forget this I always do I always forget my dreams but now in this split second in the moment I remember the instant I remember I comprehend everything all at once there is no time there is no death life is a dream it's a wish made again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity and I am all of it I am everything I am all I am that I am and so that was the

sort of exclamation point I think at the end of the series philosophically and it is deeply resonant

with both you know theoretical physics at its highest level as well as with basic Buddhist philosophy

yeah I think if you could put it that way to Spinoza maybe he might say yeah maybe what I meant is that there is

no such thing as death mm mm because you you were never separate enough

from the rest of the universe like you can't be lost exactly there's nowhere else to go you cannot you cannot go away in the way that certain forms of Christianity

might tell you that you can go away exactly and that conception of death is being locked up in a in a black room as you gesture toward is is like the the conceptual keeping around of the self right even past the life So there's there's the big blackness that I will somehow, even if vaguely or faintly or in whatever confused way, experience.

And that's that dualism that comes, I think, out of Christianity for sure. Yeah, and I remember being a little kid. I was around five. And my parents, you know, I asked grown-ups like, what is it, what happens after you die? And they sort of describe it. And all I could imagine was like a church with everyone. everyone lying down in the pews asleep. Interesting.

And then I realized that that couldn't possibly be true. And I had my first panic attack. Damn. And then several years later, I was over at a neighbor, you know, these friends that are in the neighborhood and they had a buddy over. He was, they were a bit older. And he was like, I'm going to speak in my accent a little bit. He was like, no, boy, go down the ground.

And then it's just frigging blackness, boy, you're going to be there just thinking, don't this suck. And I thought, that sounds horrible. but then again, like that that contradiction between you dying, but nonetheless, you're there to experience this black thing called death. It doesn't make any sense. So I've spent, you know, the vast majority of my life trying to work through all those representations

and come to an understanding, which I think, yeah, Mike Flanagan articulated through the voice of Katie, Aaron Green, sorry, in Midnight Mass. which is something I think Spinoza points at even if he doesn't fully get there and that Buddhism I mean Buddhism is there basically and that explains why contrary to the early European interpretations of it

it's not nihilistic in any way and if anything it's overflowing with being there's no there's no end to it and I think this is this will help inform where DeLuz is coming from because he like Matt now rejects the notion of strict negation as a fundamental feature of the cosmos and a being. We'll maybe talk about that a little bit later.

But Mao says in a 1964 talk, it's talk on problems of philosophy. He's like, Engels, he gets into the negation thing like after Hegel, but I don't really have much use for it. And DeLas is like, not only do I not have much use for the whole thing about negation, I'm actively trying to destroy it. So, so yeah. Oh, good sidebar there. Yeah, for sure. Let me just add a couple more things. One, I recently heard Jordan Peterson.

Sometimes I listen to him and his podcast. I do enjoy like hearing, listening in on right wing discussions and seeing like where they're coming from and what their conceptions are. And I do it with liberals as well. But he articulated something as like, it's, it's kind, I can't do the Kermit voice, but you can put it in there. Extreme nihilistic Buddhism, you know. And so he has this concept. of at least in this instance of Buddhism as being this extreme nihilism. And I get how that is a deformed understanding of it, a very one-sided understanding of it.

But I also wanted to mention, I think it was Epicurus, and this is a stoic line of thought as well, where he's like, you know, people are worried about death. I'm paraphrasing, obviously. But, you know, when I am, death is not. And when death is, I am not. And so that that is sort of addressing that like leftover residue of the perceiver. He's like it's completely not even there. And so why would I, you know, I was not disturbed by my infinity of nothingness before my life.

And why should I be disturbed by the return of that nothingness after it? And I thought it was an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, it's like I remember I read this sort of new atheist guy years ago. He was like, when you die, it'll be just like, before you're born, absolute oblivion. And it's like, but I can't, like, it's not even something you can speak about.

Exactly. So why I try to scare people with it? Totally. You know, it's just a bunch of hot air, basically. Yeah. And in our society where it's so death denying, you know, multiple neuroses prop up, crop up, if you will, in that, in that rabid denial of death

and this fetishizing of hyper-productivity, which, of course, comes out of the underlying mode of production and so on. yeah absolutely and then you got well i mean stuff like that what's that weird vampire billionaire guy leslie paul feel or whatever what's that guy's name uh peter teal yeah peter teal uh leslie paul teal is the name of some commenter on something

her read years ago so sorry mixing him up with this guy yeah just like trying to um yeah trying to live forever like getting the blood of young people or does that guy ray kurtzvail i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna get into the singularity and live there forever as a computer program. God, dude. Just have some therapy.

Yeah, no, it's crazy. And Michelle Foucault comments on this sort of thing at one point. I can't remember where, I don't think it's been translated, but he says this kind of drive you see to absolutely overcome death, aside from being futile, is just the ultimate expression of Borswa-Will the power. And it's consistent with, I would say, the sort of pedophilic behavior of people like Epstein and all that kind of, all that stuff,

that sick shift, I think it all has to do with the death, in some way or other, with the death denial that marks late stage, like, capitalist, like bourgeois society. Totally, totally. And Ray Kurzweil is interesting, because I watched an interview slash mini documentary on him many years ago, and like this is, like, at least at that time, he was taking like hundreds of supplements every day because in his mind if he just existed like i think 20 30 or whatever arbitrary ass that deadline that he put on it if he could just survive past that threshold then he would open up the possibility because technology would advance to a point where you could download

his consciousness and it's just like hyper naive first of all like you're you're jacked into technology and the whole culture around it and this is this is just not on the immediate horizon this idea that we don't even understand consciousness we don't have the computing power to even do it. It's like it's not going to happen in my lifetime, let alone yours, but it is this fervent, urgent, obviously neurotic fear of death that compels them to create this possibility and then pursue it with all they have. And it just seems like a very icky way to live to me. Yeah. As opposed to the other alternative, which is your death is not something that you owe. It's your birthright. Right. Because it's the ultimate final seal of

your belonging here that you're part of all this right so anyway yeah all right well guys are a bunch of weirdos they're so so so weird they really are I love that Foucault I have to go dig that up afterwards and read more context around that because I love that bourgeois will to power idea yeah I'll have this um like I think it might still be untranslated it's in if so it's in this um formally a four volume collection of all the things that that he did that aren't books or lectures. It's like, but I have it in a two-volume version. It's like 3,000 pages long altogether.

So I'll see if I can find it and translate it if need be. Because it's definitely worth looking at. For sure. But yeah, I think maybe that's a good transition to move into Spinoza's book five on human freedom. Yeah, so this is the last part of Spinoza that we'll be covering concerning the ethic. So what is Spinoza's concept of freedom in part five? and how does ethical practice, as he construes it, free us from the servitude discussed in part four?

Well, it's, I mean, very much contained already, or it's anticipated in the stuff that we talked about in part four where we're in this life of, you know, we're striving to persevere in our own essence. You know, you may come into the world thinking, sorry, I said it again, come into the world. You may appear here. thinking, it's, oh, it's me, and I have to persevere in my own essence on my own.

You can do the John Galt thing, the Iron Rind thing, or you can do the Marx thing and realize that you're striving, your conatus is part of a group conatus that is full of differences and full of perhaps, like, you know, phenomena from other kinds of human beings that may seem alien to you, and that you can overcome this alienness by interacting with other people through the, you know, differentiated groups, all of whom have their own practices and, you know, can learn how to communicate with each other. And so basically the object of book five is about how, how to, not only to make that happen, but also the ultimate, like the greatest degree of openness that you can generate within yourself and with others and for others, that's the, that's the end goal of human life because it's the closest,

thing that you can be to all of nature itself, because nature, it has, there is no rule set prior to it determining it. Nature is a free expression of itself. Angles will say this. Ariagena, who I've mentioned a few times, he will say this. He says that God or nature, he puts the Greek term anarchos on it, which is where we get the term anarchy from. And he, and also anarchism obviously is derived out of this, like ultimately. And he, and he, and also anarchism, obviously, is derived out of this of it like ultimately um and he says it's and he doesn't mean lawless in the sense he means contained by no law prior to its own free coming forth um its own free origaminess if i can put it that way um and he says that and eriogenes says that the divine or nature as such

matter as such and the human being as such are all one in this in this character of being of being anarchus, which is being determined by no other law other than their own generativity. And everything that we do in terms of building ethical practices for our day-to-day life, ethical practices for when we're dealing with each other in organizing situations, say, this is something in North America amongst us goddamn Anglos we really need to deal with because we're so set up to be against each other all the time. We need to overcome that. practice, every time we overcome that, we become more free. And I'll just read from Proposition 10

in book five here in the scullium. He says, as long as we are not assailed by emotions that are contrary to our nature, we have the power to arrange and associate affections of the body according to the order of the intellect. In the scullium, he says, through the ability to arrange and associate rightly the affections of the body, we can bring it about that we are not easily affected by bad emotions. For greater force, and he says, I refer you back to Proposition 7 in this part, Part 5, greater force is required to check emotions arranged and associated according to intellectual order than emotions that are uncertain in random. Therefore, the best course we can adopt, as long as we do not have perfect knowledge of our emotions, is to conceive a right

method of living or fixed rules of life and to commit them to memory and continually apply them to particular situations that are frequently encountered in life so that our casual thinking is thoroughly permeated by them and they are always ready to hand and ready to hand for example among our practical rules we laid down and he he says i refer you to hear to proposition 46 part four and the scalyum to that proposition that hatred should be conquered by love or nobility and not be repaid with reciprocal hatred. Now, in order that we may have this preceptive reason already to hand, we should think about and frequently reflect on the wrongs that are commonly committed among humankind and the best way and method of warding them off by nobility of

character. For thus we shall associate the image of a wrong with the presentation of this rule of conduct and it will always be at hand for us. And he says, I refer you to Proposition 18, Part 2 when we suffer or wrong. So he says, well, I'll give an example. I'm referring to the last, while I was researching all this, the last few months, I was reading a lot about what went on with Trotsky between 1905 and when he was assassinated.

And this is, and young comrades, learn from my mistakes. Don't do this thing where you're up late and you're reading the Marxist, Internet Archive, and you're like, God damn, that's amazing. I should write that down. Don't say you're going to do it, do it, because I'm now flying on memory, and I've, especially my laptop just died yesterday, so all my links on everything I've forgotten. But it's a really interesting observation by Lennon about Trotsky's sort of wrecking behavior,

where he says that at one point, you know, it's not really his fault that he's like this. and I also read another comment I can't remember who it was from and he said you know when things are going well Trotsky followed the line like a laser beam I'm paraphrasing

he's he's so obedient to the majority decision taken by the party but as soon as something goes wrong he goes right off the rails he goes block and And, you know, I mean, again, I, you know, I'd refer people to the pearls of the roundtable

episodes you did about Stalin and also their own episode about the fall of the Soviets to think more about this. But I'm interested that Lenin seems to have had some kind of empathy for Trotsky about his bad behavior. Like it just is who Trotsky is. It's like deeply ingrained in his personality. He can't help but be that. Yeah, in a way, right?

And I'd say Spinoza would say that, well, you know, it's not like he couldn't have done nothing about it. He could have come to a more adequate understanding of why he is that way. So in Spinoza, it's the understanding that allows for any possibility of limited freedom. Is it through the understanding that there can be higher degrees of freedom in a fundamentally determined human life? Is that fair to say? Yeah, right. And so when you start to do the bad thing that's typical of the way that you're constituted. If you have this understanding that Spinoza is giving you the method to develop, you can catch it faster and be like, oh, God, I'm doing it again, right?

And I understand in a way what Troski is going through, because, you know, I've tended to have a temper and to react, to be reactive in my life about things and just be like, oh, my God, it's, you know, and I think a lot of us are like that in the advanced capitalist countries. And it's really interesting, right? Like if you read some Trotsky, even in his prose style, the way he articulates dialectics and also the things he's interested in. And you juxtapose it to Lenin and Stalin, maybe even more so Stalin, who comes from very, very poor, like, immiseration as a child. You know, like Lenin is so he so steadfast.

His favorite musician is Beethoven, whom I also love. and, you know, he loves the apassianata. And Trotsky comes off more like a cosmopolitan European swing kid. In a way that kind of reminds me of the music of the Swedish hardcore band refused. In a way, there's this kind of like, blah to it, right? And there's good things about that in a way. There's a really interesting article I read by Trotsky. Radio science, technique, and society.

from 1926. So I'll just try to, I think, near the end, there's some really, like, hype passages here. Okay, she's talking about radioactivity. Radioactivity, as we have already mentioned, in no way constitutes a threat to materialism, and it is at the same time a magnificent triumph of dialectics. Until recently, scientists supposed that there were in the world about 90 elements, which were beyond analysis and could not be transformed one into another, so to speak, a carpet for the universe woven from 90 threads of different qualities and colors. Such a notion contradicted materialist dialectics, which speaks of the unity of matter

in what is even more important of the transformability of the elements of matter. Our great chemist, Mendeliev, to the end of his life, was unwilling to reconcile himself to the idea that one element could be transformed into another. He firmly believed in the stability of these quote-unquote individualities, although the phenomenon of radioactivity or phenomena of radioactivity, or phenomena of radio activity, rather, were already known to him. But nowadays, no scientist believes in the unchangeability of the elements. Using the phenomena of radioactivity, chemists have succeeded in carrying out a direct execution, quote unquote, of eight or nine elements, and along with

this, the execution of the last remnants of metaphysics and materialism, for now the transformability of one chemical element into another has been proven experimentally. The phenomena of radioactivity have thus led to a supreme triumph of dialectical thought. The phenomena of radio technique are based on wireless transmission of electromagnetic waves. Wireless does not at all mean non-material transmission. Light does not come only from lamps, but also from the sun, also being transmitted without the aid of wires. We are fully accustomed to the wireless transmission of light over quite respectable distances.

We are greatly surprised, though, when we begin to transmit sound over a very much shorter distance with the aid of those very same electromagnetic waves which underlie the phenomena of light. All these are phenomena of matter, material processes, waves and whirlwinds in space and time. The new discoveries and their technical applications show only that matter is a great deal more heterogeneous and richer in potentialities than we had thought hit there too. But as before, nothing is made out of nothing. The most outstanding of our scientists say that science and physics in particular has in recent times arrived at a turning point. Not so very long ago, they say we approached matter as

it were, quote unquote, phenomenally, i.e. from the angle of observing its manifestations, but now we are beginning to penetrate ever deeper into the very interior of matter to learn its structure, and which will soon be able to regulate a quote unquote from within. A good physicist would, of course, be able to talk about this better than I can. The phenomena of radioactivity are leading us to the problem of releasing intra-atomic energy. The atom contains within itself a mighty hidden energy, and the greatest task of physicists consist in pumping out this energy, pulling out the cork so that this hidden energy may burst forth in a fountain. Then the possibility will be opened up of replacing coal and oil by atomic energy, which will also

become the basic mode of power. This is not at all a hopeless task. And what prospects it opens before us, this alone gives us the right to declare that scientific and technical thought is approaching a great turning point that the revolutionary epoch and the development of human society will be accompanied by a revolutionary epoch and the sphere of the cognition of matter and the mastering of it.

Unbounded technical possibilities will open out before liberated mankind. So he's like very into, super enthusiastic, right, and embracing all this new stuff that's coming along, which is not to say that Lenin and Stalin don't. Obviously they do, but his whole demeanor is just really like, wow, like you know what I mean?

Yeah. But maybe the price to pay for that is also that he gets really down. So I, sorry, I feel like I might have gone off track there a little bit. That's really interesting. I like that a lot. Yeah. But, but, so like, yeah, like there's these moments where he's super up. And according to people that observed his behavior in organizing situations,

there were moments he was super down. And that gave rise to some destructive behavior that could potentially hurt a whole lot of people. and so Spinoza is like you know it's like you should come talk to me because I can help you with that and I think a lot of us are probably more constituted to be like Trotsky than we want to admit we are given we live in this society of spectacle we are given all these false hopes and then like think about how much I've thought about this before I really got into me music. When I was a little kid, you just put on like Casey Ksum's top 40 or whatever. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

And everything, you know, perhaps better known as the voice of Shaggy on Scooby-Doo, but... I didn't know that. Yeah, he was. I was so... Yeah, but... And Bumblebee in the Transformers cartoon. That's one of those ones. I can't remember which. But 80s were a long time ago. You know, all the songs, and it's still the way today in a lot of mainstream...

It's about fighting. it's about oh you know we're in a romantic relationship like a you know a borsal romantic relationship we're both making all of our happiness depend on the other and we can't get it together and we can't stop fighting and it's all about this erratic like blowing apart and then coming back together and knowing it's going to happen all over again um and so in some ways like we are all constituted or as out-deserved and say interpolated as subject to to embody this dynamic of being super up and then being super down. And Spinoza sort of advances the whole stoic approach

by saying that we need to come to a kind of balance here. And it's not a balance of indifference to anything. It's a balance of increasing joy as we recognize that we are determined. And because we recognize that we are determined, so what I just talked about with pop music and how it imposes ideas of what it means to be in a relationship or to relate to other people, you can be like, oh shit, I'm being determined in that way, right?

And now because I know I'm being determined by that, I can question that determination. And by questioning, like the questioning itself is another determination and that can sort of release the energies that have been bound up by the first determination and make them available for other determinations that are better. So that's sort of like the essence of what he means by freedom. And again, as he points out in part four,

the best medium in which to do this as of, you know, 16, the 1670s is in a sort of a secular republic. And at that time, it's a bourgeois republic because the bourgeois is the revolutionary class emerging. And that appears, they, you know, it appears to provide the avenue to freedom. And that's why Spinoza favors that kind of political formation, as opposed to something like the Holy Roman Empire. So, so yeah, like just that's really the sort of essence of part five.

And if you get into part five, that's what you'll find is just sort of this account of how to come to this greater balance and the unity of that balance with a greater openness. Yeah, so this opens up an avenue of thought. And again, I like making the connections. And so I'm going to make them with Buddhism because that's obviously a huge influence on me in one of the fields that I'm most comfortable talking about because of my ostensible knowledge about it. But, you know, in Buddhism, there's the same because we're kind of wrestling at the, at the, at the. the point between being fully determined but not being fatalistic, right? Like, like, there is an ounce of freedom, but it comes through an awareness sort of of your unfriend and a dispassionate ability to sit back and observe it. So in Buddhism, it is, it is quite literally the trained

methodical awareness of your mind and its machinations. And with that, your patterns, your habitual patterns, of thought and behavior, being hyper-aware of them over time can distangle them or strip them of some of their power. Or the way that Ram Dass put it is like, when you're in an addiction, there's the part of you that wants to just use your will to overcome it. You know, I'm going to like block it up in a box and I'm not going to touch that substance and then like all of a sudden your mind starts convincing itself. Well, you know, you've been sober for two days.

That's pretty good. You know, nobody needs to be perfect. maybe day three, you can have a little, a little treat, you know, like blah, blah, blah. So Ramda says, instead of trying to overpower it with your will, it's really this hyper-awareness of the patterns as they repeat, you know, now I have this uncomfortable feeling. And so do I go to my special drawer and I pull out the special thing and I, you know, let's say just use marijuana. I grind it up and there's a sort of ritualistic anchoring that goes on with my preparation of the thing. and then I inhale it and immediately that bad feeling that I had 20 seconds ago sort of dissipates into a happy, you know, whatever. But you're watching it as it come and go.

You watch it over and over and over again and it eventually stops having the pull that it once did. And so there's really no will to exercise here. There's no separate self that can take this thing and control it, which is what we want to do. But it's actually this hyper awareness that allows for the patterns to follow. away of their own accord simply by being spotlighted enough. You understand it enough to just let it go and it stops having the pull over you. And I think here is where, because you know, people can call Spinoza a fatalist and any determinist of any stripe can be called a fatalist. But it's sort of determinism without fatalism, if you will. And I think it has echoes in Buddhism. And I don't know

if you have any thoughts on that at all. Yeah. It's, hmm. Yeah, the, it's, yeah, it's, yeah, Yeah, it's easy to, very tempting and easy in a society defined by vulgar materialism to think about being totally determined as being something like a robot or something like that. Yeah. Or a computer program or like a Rube Goldberg machine where there's no, there are no gaps for that separate self to run and be like, this is my decision or something like that. But Spinoza, although, as I've said, he is largely framed by the language of the mechanical philosophy. He points beyond it. And Ily Ankoff talks about this, and I mentioned him earlier in his book, Dialectical Logic in the chapter on Spinoza. Especially once we've got chemistry and stuff like that on the go, what we even think of as determination becomes very, so much more complex that it's just a waste of time to think about it in that robotic computer program.

and Rube Goldberg, mechanical machine kind of way. And so, yeah, it's one of the most difficult aspects of Spinoza's thinking to understand the unity of freedom and complete determinateness. But I think in this thing that I just read from Trotsky, he talks about how important chemistry is for dialectical materialism, especially if you start thinking like metabolically, chemically, and thinking about determinateness in those. fields and what they mean, it will release the shackles of the false impression that Spinoza

wants to make you into a mere automaton or thinks that that's what you or he or any of us really, really are. So does that make sense at all? Yeah, absolutely. And just going back to the Trotsky example, where this freedom comes into play, like Spinoza's diagnosis of Trotsky, which you're sort of implying, is that if Trotsky could become increasingly aware of how his personality pulls him in this certain direction that tends to have destructive effects on a thing that he ostensibly cares about through that increasing awareness of how he operates, he could have prevented it from overtaking him to the levels that it actually turns into, you know, wrecker behavior or whatever.

Am I right in that? And is that why you brought up the Trotsky thing in the first place? Yeah, yeah. And again, I mean, I don't, you know, I'm just cobbled together some very rudimentary indications from Trotsky himself and what other people that worked with him said about. I don't want to be unfair to him. Sure. But insofar as the picture presented is accurate, I think that's, yeah, that's the correct

answer, yeah. Yeah, nice. Okay, so I think that that ends our discussion of Spinoza in particular, and we're ready to move on. Is there anything else that you wanted to say before you move on? Are you pretty much good? No, other than just if what we've been talking about has, you know, interests anyone out there, I would really

recommend, again, Beth Lord's book, a guide of Spinoza Ethics, Spinoza's Ethics, which is a really excellent introductory book. And again, read it in a group with your friends, your comrades. And also De Loza's little book on Spinoza,

practical philosophy. And there's a paper that he wrote called Spinoza and the three ethics. It's relatively short. It's in an English translation in a collection called critical and clinical essays in French's Critique Clinique. And he says that in his estimation,

within one package, there are sort of three distinctive works in the ethics, even though they are in a unity, nonetheless. So the proofs and the propositions and demonstrations are, quote, unquote, one book. The scolia throughout all that stuff, that's the second book.

And then part five, he says it's a, It's a third book, all of its own in a way, even though they'll have this interconnected unity. And I find that an interesting essay to think about how to approach this text and its different components. So, yeah, just some sort of basic reading recommendations for anyone that has become interested in Spinoza. And also, lastly, the chapter on Spinoza and Evald Ilyenko's book Dialectical Logic is extremely helpful. And you can find it on the Marxist Internet Archie. his last name is I-L-Y-E-N-K-O-V-I-N-K-K-O-V, and I'd recommend not just this work, but a lot of his stuff I've been looking at.

Yeah, and just to add to that, especially for more introductory stuff to Spinoza, if you want to start off a little slower, you can go into any podcast app and literally just type Spinoza's name, and you'll have discussions crop up, like philosophy podcasts that cover it, and, you know, getting a nice little introduction from a few of these can be very helpful before you try to jump into even the secondary literature, let alone the primary literature on Spinoza because, I mean, as with everything in philosophy,

it can be challenging for sure. Very much. And I haven't listened to an episode about Spinoza on this podcast, but I would generally recommend the podcast of the history of philosophy without any gaps. That's a really good project. So what I've heard is very good. So I would imagine that anything that they talk about

on Spinoza would be very good as well. There's also what's left of philosophy, philosophize this, the partially examined life, and many more. So those are just some start-offs. All right, but now we're going to shift into Duluz and Guatari in particular, and this is going to be really fun. So in the past episodes, we've talked about the rise of the so-called mechanical philosophy

and its decisive importance for 17th century philosophy and science, particularly Spinoza. And in conversation offline, you've said that the rise of linguistics, the philosophy of language, and semiotics or semiology are just as decisive for 20th century thinking, specifically so in the case of DeLuze and Guateri. So can you talk about these related forms of inquiry concerning language, focusing on their implications for revolutionary theory and in relation to classic Marxist distinctions between base and superstructure? All right. So how to talk about the question of language and how it becomes significant in the 19th and 20th centuries? For one thing, it has to be noted that, you know,

going all the way back to Plato and in the quote-unquote Western tradition, it's a concern that's there the whole time. Like, what do words mean? What's the relationship between words and concepts? You see a dialogue like the Cradalus where he talks all about, like where do names come from, like that kind of thing. And then in Aristotle's work, you get the foundations of logic. So you get a sort of systematic exposition of how logical civil.

religiousism work for, you know, like there's that really archetypal one. So all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. And you get this kind of systematic approach to how propositions in language give rise to, I guess, other propositions that make sense. And what's the relationship between things? And how does language correctly or accurately convey the relationships between things? What starts to happen in the 19th and 20th centuries, I think it could really be articulated nicely. I might just read a little passage from the course in general linguistics by the Belgian linguist Ferdinandes-Sosier. This work is derived from lectures given between 1907 and 1911 at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

He describes, the Soster describes, three stages in the history of human concern for language in, you might say, he just restricted maybe to the quote-unquote Western tradition. So I, you know, that good rule, no investigation, no rate to talk. So I don't know what was going on in China for thousands of years or what was really going on in India for thousands of years, for example, concerning language. So I can't really speak to that. This is what DeSosur says. So introduction, chapter one, a brief survey of the history of linguistics. The science, which has grown up around linguistic facts, passed through three successive phases before coming to terms with its one and only true object of study. First of all came what was called, quote unquote, grammar.

This discipline first instituted by the Greeks and continued mainly by the French, so you think, of, there's this whole approach called the Port Royal Grammar, which is part of the foundation of Noam Chomsky's work, which is interesting, is based on logic. It offers no scientific or objective approach to a language as such. Grammar aims solely at providing rules which distinguish between correct and incorrect forms. It is a prescriptive discipline, far removed from any concern with impartial observation, and its outlook is inevitably a narrow one. Next came philology. At Alexandria, there had been in Egypt, there had been a quote-unquote philological school,

but the term is chiefly applied to the scientific movement inaugurated by Friedrich August Volf in 1777, which still thrives today. Linguistic structure, however, is not the central concern of philology. Philology seeks primarily to establish, interpret, and comment on texts. This main preoccupation leads to a concern with literary history, customs, institutions, etc. In all these areas, philology applies its own method, which is that of criticism. Insofar as it touches upon linguistic questions, these arise principally in the comparison of texts of different periods, in establishing the language characteristic of each writer, and in deciphering and interpreting inscriptions couched in some archaic or problematic language. Such research undoubtedly paved the way for historical linguistics. Ritchell's work on Plautus may be this described as quote-unquote linguistic, but in this field, philological criticism has one failing. It is too slavishly subservient to the written language, and so neglects the living language.

Furthermore, its concern is almost exclusively with Greek and Roman antiquity. The third period, and so this is going to be, the third period is what opens up into modern linguistics, philosophy of language, and semiology or semiotics. The third period began when it was discovered that languages could be compared with one another. That discovery was ushered in comparative philology or quote-unquote comparative grammar. In 1816, in a work entitled the Sanskrit conjugation system, Franz Bopp studied the connections between Sanskrit, Germanic, Greek, Latin, etc. Bop was not the first to observe these affinities or to consider that all these languages belong to the same family. In that respect, Bop had been forestalled, notably by the English Orientalist W. Jones, 1794, but isolated statements here and there do not.

prove that in 1816 there was already a general understanding of the significance and importance of the facts in question. Although Bob cannot be credited with having discovered the relationship between Sanskrit and various languages of Europe and Asia, he did see that connections between related languages could furnish the data for an autonomous science. What was new was the elucidation of one language by reference to a related language, explaining the forms of one by appeal to the forms of the other. It is doubtful whether Bob would have been able to inaugurate his science or at least inaugurated so quickly without the discovery of Sanskrit. Sanskrit, as a third source of evidence beside Greek and Latin, provided a broader and sounder basis for study. In addition, as luck

would have it, Sanskrit happens to be exceptionally well situated to provide illuminating linguistic comparisons. For example, suppose we take paradigms of Latin Gainus and Greek Gainos, and now what he's going to do here is list the formations of what are called the noun the noun cases of this word in Greek and Latin. So for those of us who are just monolingual anglophones, a lot of us have probably never really heard of a noun case. Have you heard of a noun case? I have not, no. Okay. Now in languages like Greek and Latin, so I said in the first episode that Latin, the nouns change their shapes of their endings to correspond to what's going on with the verbs, what's going on with the adjectives, it's called agreement. And you sort of have some of it in

French, but it's not as pronounced as in Latin. So he says, genus, generis, genera, I'll just explain what those means. So genus in Latin is when the word is used as a subject of a sentence. It's the subject of the action of a sentence. Generes is what's called a genitive. And that means when you say that something is of something or belongs to something. So you hear the term sui generis. It means

one of a kind, right? Genera is what's called a dative case. It's when the word is taken to be the object, the indirect object of a verb. And then the next one is genera, which is called an accusative, and that's the shape that the noun

takes on when it's the direct object of the action of the verb. And then, or does Generum might be, that might be an ablative or something. I'm a bit rusty on this stuff. And then he says, alongside that, we have Greek Gainos, Genni, Genea, Geneon. And these forms, they play the same role in the sentence

that I just described as for the Latin. He says, he continues, these series of forms tell us little, either on their own or when compared with one another. But they tell us a great deal. As soon as we set them beside the corresponding stance, form. And remember, Sandskitt precedes all this, Gannas, Ganasis, Ganasi, Ganasu, Ganasam, etc. And so he says, once the comparability of languages becomes clear, we can start to systematically study

them in new ways. And so the noun case thing that I just mentioned, these are ways of categorizing how these terms work in different related languages. And then we can sort of get a structural idea of how languages work and how sentences give rise to sense. And so once that starts happening or around the same time that that starts happening, you get the emergence of what we call philosophy of language. And the real sort of the person who's taken to be the instigator of that is a thinker, He remember he was German or Austrian.

But anyway, his name was Gottlob Frege. And he started, instead of trying to study the correctness or incorrectness of logical syllogisms and how sentences relate to each other, he started to try to break down single propositions to be able to tell what ones make sense and what ones don't make sense. And this is why it's often called analytic philosophy. right and analysis is derived from a Greek compound of the the prefix anna which means up to go up so you might say there's this is the Greek verb bino I walk so if you say I walked up I walk up something anabino you could say that and the the the leisis part of it comes from

the Greek verb luo which means sort of to to release or loosen up so analysis is loosening up of things. And so the archetypal example that Frege and then Russell picks up on this, I think in his paper on denotation, is a sentence the present king of France is bald, stated when there is

no king of France. And the question is, is this a true or a false statement? And taken on its own terms, you actually can't really answer that. And the only way to really deal with the proposition is to break it down to a bunch of components, one of which is the implicit assertion that there is

a present king of France, which there isn't. And so the conclusion of the analysis is that this is kind of a nonsense sentence because its main object doesn't actually exist. So it's not a real sentence. And this is the sort of reflection that you start to see going, starting with Frege. And it has, and through Russell and people like Moritz Schlich, Rudolph Cardap, all the logical positivists, and this is a whole galaxy of thinkers we could talk about. We could do a whole episode about that.

Multiple episodes, yeah. Multiple, yeah, many, many. I'm sure, well, again, listen to the history of philosophy without gaps, and I'm sure you'll find a lot of talk about this stuff. And this has a lot of importance for the relationship between base and superstructure that is positive in Marxist analysis. And just for anyone who might be new to all this, who doesn't really know that, the base is just the economic activity, the reproduction of everyday life.

The superstructure is taken to be, or it's argued to be the sort of forms, symbolic forms, institutional forms, like religion, social mores, fashion, art, all this kind of stuff that are built up on top of the base activity and then sort of reflected at, a group level, right? So as, you know, Engel says an anti-During, thoughts are sort of a reflex of what's going on materially. Superstructure is a much more complex, much more often like deliberate reflection of what's going on in material activity. Now, this has led some people in the history of all this to think that only the base has any causal efficacy at all, and the superstructure is just what's called an epiphenomenon.

So it's sort of like a sideshow. And it doesn't really do anything. And for example, just to give you an example of this way of thinking, this is someone I went to school with in university and was not a Marxist, but I think in some way was operating on the idea that only what is strictly materially true in the least descriptive sense possible could actually be real and everything other than that is just sort of a side effect. And so this was a young guy and he was absolutely enthralled

by evolutionary theory. Love Darwin and all that and was really infatuated with the notion of fitness. And I'm a very nice guy, but on another level, I used to wonder like, this guy tried to a fascist. This is like really weird. And he would only wear like charcoal gray clothes, worked out constantly, you know, walked fully or carried a briefcase.

He had a haircut that kind of looked like that Marcus Aurelius thing that Zuckerberg taught. And he had committed his entire being to this concept of evolutionary fitness. This is why I used to wonder, be like, is this guy going to turn out bad? You know what I mean?

Yeah. And he took himself to have escaped from all of the false symbolisms of human culture. And to have escaped from what in a Marxist analysis, you will call the superstructure. And he was simply operating at the base without realizing that he was emitting this like constant sort of symbolic project all the time through his interpretation of what it means to be fit. So it's like somehow it's more fit to wear drab colors than to wear bright colors. it's more fit to have a briefcase than to wear a backpack. You know what I mean? And he was so, you could almost not really talk to him about anything else.

Or he rather couldn't really talk in any other mode. And sometimes I think over the years I've seen, you know, interpretations of base and superstructure on the left that are sort of like this too. Like if you really, really, really want to get down to the base and strip away all the superstructural phenomena, what you're really going to get is an ape, and excreting. And that's it.

And Engels actually sort of notes, he notes this, this trend amongst a lot of young Marxist at his time. And, yeah, and he says that this is not really a correct way to do things, that you shouldn't think that the superstructure is just illusory, and that systems of signs don't have any causal role to play in the development of human life.

So he says, this is a, yeah, not 1892, 1890. So to Joseph Block, London, September 21, 22, 1890. According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. And I should say he italicizes ultimately, the ultimately determining element. More than this, neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element, element is the only determining one. He transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements

of the superstructure, political forms of the class structure and its results to wit constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas also exercised their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many case preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which amid all the endless host of accidents, that is of things and events whose interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent as negligible. So amid all this,

the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary, which is to say, if we stop eating, we all die and nothing else goes on. Otherwise, the application of the theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. We make our history ourselves, but in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these, the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, et cetera,

and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic causes, but it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic linguistic, and after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well, above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia and hence with international political relations, which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power. Without making oneself ridiculous,

it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the high German consonantships, which widened the geographical wall of partition, formed by the mountains, from the Sudetic range to the towness to the extent of a regular fissure across all Germany. So what Engels is saying is that the symbolic formations that are generated by just basic economic activity also play a role in the development of human life and human societies and then therefore also necessarily play a role in revolutionary class struggle. I mean, imagine sort of the Russian Revolution and the Soviets without, you know, socialist realism, without the internationality, without all these artistic forms.

They play a role in shaping people's attention and their energies and bringing them together and giving them a common goal. So there are all these things that are called super structural that it's easy from the standpoint of vulgar materialism to just say, well, that's just an illusion, when in fact, dialectical materialism, holds that that is not true at all. And just a couple of comments on that. Can I break in there real quick? Oh, yeah, yeah. Just an example of this idea that, you know, in rejection of this vulgar materialist notion that the superstructure is epiphenomenal, which is to say that it is merely sort

of froth on the wave, right? Or like there's, it is, it is a mere effect. It has no causal impact in and of itself. And this argument also happens in, like, philosophy of mind between the brain and consciousness. Some people arguing that consciousness is epiphenomenal, that it is sort of the froth that the workings of the brain throw up, but that consciousness itself has no causal impact on the brain itself or on the material world, et cetera. But in the base and superstructure analysis, another great example to help clarify how there's

this turning back on itself and reifying or maintaining the base or this more complicated relationship than vulgar materialism would allow is like American anti-black racism. There's a materialist base account of how it came to be, right, with chattel slavery, the underlying economic interest, and then the superstructural or ideological justification for these people who proclaim that all human beings are created equal, right, to own and dominate other human beings. You strip them of their humanity. You dehumanize them.

and so your your calculus still works out but then after chattel slavery is is functionally ended right with the civil war the end of the of the slave trade itself the superstructure continues to live on in the form of anti-black racism and has material impacts clearly on the lives of white and black people in the United States for generations and still to this day after the you know base of the reason why that was invented in the first place chattel slavery has has all but been ushered off the historical stage and so i think that also helps to clarify the point being made here as well yeah absolutely and i'm going to present a little a passage from a late dialogue by stalin from 1950 called Marxism and problems of linguistics but first i just wanted to because i don't think this person has been really talked about on the show yet and I was just reading some of his stuff over the summer the spring in the summer which is Amber Hosha from Albania and I was really really enjoyed this is an address he gave on at the Albania's VI Lenin party school which is they don't go to learn how to party but

it's delivered at the 25th anniversary of its founding and the text is called study Marxist Leninist theory linking it closely with evolution, or sorry, revolutionary, revolutionary practice. And he just, he says, there are people who, though posing as materialists, give priority to their ideas and consciousness, and there are others who also call themselves materialists, but according to whom only economic development is important. Economic development alone allegedly brings about the automatic transformation of society as a whole. Therefore, the subjective factor is entirely powerless and does not play the slightest active role in historical development. Naturally, both of these categories of people are mistaken and do not have as clear

an understanding as they should of the fundamental principles of our philosophy of the materialist dialectics. In essence, social life is a material process because it is based upon work. Man should be closely linked with work. He should like it and understand theoretically what work is. So this might horrify some of the fully automated fans out there. According to Karl Marx, work is a process carried out between man and the environment. Man himself acts upon matter as a natural force. Therefore, man cannot be thought of as detached from nature. It cannot be conceived that the elements of nature react upon him and he stays inactive before them,

does not act as a creature who has and should play the part of a natural force. In order to live, man needs to be fed, to set in mind. motion all his physical and mental forces, his hands and feet and muscles, his body and brain, in short, he must work to discover process and construct the various things of nature so that they may serve him in his life. What occurs in this natural process? By acting upon the outside environment, man transforms it, but in this process, he also transforms himself at the same time, develops his own tastes and capacities. Therefore, the starting point for man, according to Marx, is his work in that form which pertains exclusively to man, for there

are animals that work too, but their work differs from that of man. The results achieved by man exist beforehand as ideas in the imagination of the worker. So the results achieved by man exist beforehand as ideas in the imagination of the worker, a thing that does not occur with the bee when it constructs its high, Marx says. That is to say, man not only changes the form of natural things, but at the same time, he realizes his own purpose of which he is conscious, a purpose which defines as a law the way he is to act and to which he should subject his own will. And so he goes on to sort of clarifying that a little bit more. And then he says, Engels explains that in the last analysis, this is in the letter to block, the most important

factor, the decisive factor in history is the quote, production and reproduction of material existence. This should be understood, he teaches us, because the economy is the basis, but not only the determining factor, for there are other elements in the superstructure, such as the political forms of the class struggle and their results, the constitutions established by the victorious classes, the juridical forms, the religious concepts, the various political theories and so on, all of them exert their influence through their actions and naturally leave their traces. There are, therefore, Engel says, quote, action and reaction from all these factors, and quote, but from among them, the economic factor comes into relief, stands out, and exerts its influence. This is the most

important factor among all these other factors, which finally opens the way. If the objective process of the development of our society is studied, it will be clearly seen on what basis the transformation of people's consciousness was brought about and how the new ideas which were created by the new social conditions flowed out in order to have this process properly understood and not to permit vulgar conclusions according to our dialectical method all the transformations brought about by the development of our society should be studied as they arise as they develop and advance as they disappear and finally as they are transformed and replaced by new ones but the classics of Marxism-Leninism teach us that the role of ideas in social

development cannot be denied. Engels attacks quote-unquote economic materialism that which pretends that the only development of the economic forces is important. Quote, this is vulgar materialism, Engel says, end quote. And so the idea is that in dialectical materialism in Marxist analysis and, you know, Marxist Leninism, and also in Mao Zedong thought, we cannot get anywhere simply by doing a way with systems of science or with the sense of propositions or with forms of linguistic expression, artistic expression, all of these things, even cinema, anything like that, visual art, all of these play a role in the dialectic and in the outcome that is going to emerge in it. Okay, and just to follow up on that, this is from Stalin, this is

1950, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. So it makes a very important, clarification here, because you might be tempted then to think, and I'm sure that a non-zero number of people have thought that superstructure and language are identical to each other, so that language itself is necessarily superstructural, and that superstructure is inherently just linguistic. And this is Stalin. So he's about, I think 71, this is three years before he dies, he's in his 70s at this point. A group of younger comrades have asked me to give my opinion in the press on problems relating to linguistics, particularly in reference to Marxism in linguistics. I am not a linguistic expert and, of course, cannot fully satisfy the request of the comrades.

As to Marxism in linguistics as in other social sciences, this is something directly in my field. I have therefore consented to answer a number of questions put by the comrades. Question. Is it true that language is a superstructure on the base? Answer, no, it is not true. The base is the economic structure of society at the given stage of its development. The structure is the political, legal, religious, artistic, philosophical views of society and the political, legal, and other institutions corresponding to them. Every base has its own corresponding superstructure. The base of the feudal system has its superstructure, its political, legal, and other views,

and the corresponding institutions. The capitalist base has its own superstructure, so has the socialist base. If the base changes or eliminated, then, following this, its superstructure changes or is eliminated. If a new base arises, then following this, a superstructure arises corresponding to it. In this respect, language radically differs from the superstructure. Take, for example, Russian society and the Russian language. In the course of the past 30 years, the old capitalist base has been eliminated in Russia and a new socialist base has been built.

correspondingly, the superstructure on the capitalist base has been eliminated, and a new superstructure created corresponding to the socialist base. The old political, legal, and other institutions, consequently, have been supplanted by new socialist institutions. But in spite of this, the Russian language has remained basically what it was before the October Revolution. What has changed in the Russian language in this period? To a certain extent, the vocabulary of the Russian language has changed, in the sense that it is. been replenished with a considerable number of new words and expressions, which have arisen in connection with the rise of the new socialist production, the appearance of a new state, a new

socialist culture, new social relations and morals, and lastly, in connection with the development of technology and science. A number of words and expressions have changed their meaning, have acquired a new signification, a number of obsolete words have dropped out of the vocabulary. As to the basic stock of words in the grammatical system of the Russian language, which constitute the foundation of the language, they, after the elimination of the capitalist base, far from having been eliminated and supplanted by a new basic wordstock and a new grammatical system of the language, have been preserved in their entirety and have not undergone any serious changes. They have been preserved precisely as the foundation of the modern Russian language.

Further, the superstructure is a product of the base, but this by no means implies that it merely reflects the base that it is passive, neutral, indifferent to the fate of its base, to the fate of the classes, to the character of the system. On the contrary, having come into being, it becomes an exceedingly active force, actively assisting its base to take shape and consolidate itself and doing its utmost to help the new system to finish off and eliminate the old base and the old classes. It cannot be otherwise. The superstructure is created by the base precisely in order to service, to actively help it take shape and consolidate itself, to actively fight for the elimination of the old moribund base together with its old superstructure. The superstructure

has only to renounce this role of auxiliary. It has only to pass from a position of active defense of its base to one of indifference towards it to adopt an equal attitude to all classes, and it loses its virtues and ceases to be a superstructure. In this respect, language differs radically from the superstructure. Language is not a product of one or another base, old or new, within the given society, but of the whole course of the history of the society and the history of the bases for many centuries. It was not created by some one class, but by the entire society, by all the classes of the society, by the efforts of hundreds of generations. It was created for the satisfaction of the needs, not of one particular class, but of the entire society

of all the classes of the society. Precisely for this reason, it was, created as a single language for the society common to all members of that society as the common language of the whole people. Hence, the functional role of language as a means of intercourse between people consists not in serving one class to the detriment of underclasses, but in equally serving the entire society, all the classes of society. This, in fact, explains why a language may equally serve both the old Moribund system and the new rising system, both the old base and the new base, both the exploiters and the exploited. I think this is a really important sort of contribution to the discussion here

because, again, it's very easy, and I've certainly heard this over the years and definitely seen them online, see people, young comrades, young people getting into this express the idea that language is nothing other than an expression of the base when, in fact, it cuts across many, many bases, and therefore it deserves sort of study in its own right. as an object of nature. I wonder if, I mean, is this because language is prior to, I mean, even human culture, like language is developed evolutionarily before the rise of civilization proper, like when

we were still hunter-gatherers? And so it's like, it cannot be the effect of any one base because language itself predates the construction of modes of production overall. Yeah. Unless you want to count hunting gathering as a mode of production of sorts. As a motor production. Yeah. And well, I think to go back to do the so-sure, he says, he argues that even before that,

humanity is engaging in the productions of systems of signification, even before language, as we understand it, comes about. And just to sort of give an example. of this, I'd really highly recommend the 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Verna Hertzhog. Yeah, I've seen it.

It's really good. One of the greatest films ever made in my view. And the scene when they're in the cave, so for those who don't know, it's Herzog's documentary about a cave system somewhere in France. I can't remember which part of France it is that was discovered by accident

in 1994 when some hunters, sorry, Sorry, hikers, I'm thinking of the hunter-gatherers. Hikers triggered a landslide and opened up the mouth of this cave when they went in there. And there was cave ars going back something like 34,000 years. How intense of a situation is that? Yeah, and just to illustrate for the listener, how crazy this is, they brought carbonating in. And there's one wall that has two superimposed images of like a rhino or a water buffalo or something like that.

and they found out that I mean the style is identical and they're you know one one of them's going one way and the other one's going the other way they're sort of partially superimposed and they found out that one of them was drawn 5,000 years after the other wow you know you talk about you know when you meditate and that that sort of weird abyss opens up before you like you're swimming in the ocean and you get to the part where the beach the sand drops off and you really start to get into the depths of the ocean In terms of time, that should just blow our minds, right? But back to the main point, there's a really great part where they show a wall with red painted handprints all over. Do you remember that part? Oh, yeah. And the sort of argument there is that here's a mind, a human mind coming to an awareness that, like, I'm here. Like, I exist. And you cannot call that a rudimentary.

like an unconscious or like whatever we think of when we think of the vulgar sense of primitiveness that cannot be attributed to this mind. And even though it's not linguistic, there's still the systems of science going on. So language itself, I think even to so suri would say, is itself a specification of the human tendency towards signification in the first place and needs to be, that's why he proposes this science called semiology. and the term semiotics later gets introduced. I can't remember at what point.

So it's, yeah, not just that language itself predates what we think of as like class society, which it does, but that even language itself is generated out of a more broad tendency towards what we call signification. And there's just, there's so much, we could do a whole set of episodes about that, that language emerges out of something that's more gestural and this actually just de luz will say that

the borderline between what we think of language and something like bird song or whale song is not necessarily as great as we think or the dancing of bees or the way that evolutionarily certain species of orchids have conformed to the appearance of

of a certain species of wasp. And through this evolutionary relationship, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I think the wasp mistakes the orchid is something it can mate with, but then it takes the, the orchids pollen and propagates it. And so, even in that sense, these plant and animal species can form signs, these kinds of significations for each other. So I think, yeah, like, that's the, that's the real answer to the question, is not just that what we think of as language predates class society,

but that language itself emerges as a kind of like narrowing or like a, you know, a refinement or whatever you want to development out of something that's even more ancient. It's beyond ancient. It's archaic. And that speaks to the fact that we as human beings are a complete expression of the material conditions that we exist within. And that's why, for example, just to jump, ahead of it. Donald Davidson, the analytic philosopher of language, will say that you can't

even think about language in the first place without this sort of triangular structure of at minimum two beings that need to coordinate their actions and a world within which and against which they do coordinate those actions by identifying certain things as objects of concern for material life. So, yeah. And yeah Does that help at all Yeah No it definitely does

And two things I want to bring up One is I was recently I think I was reading You've all know Harari Sapiens And in it He was talking about A little bit about language And about how other animals do it

And I forget the exact type of monkey You know But in it he talks about a specific sort of monkey that Has different vocalizations To warn the other monkeys Of whether or not there is like a lion or an eagle coming, right?

So if there's the vocalization for Watch Out Eagle, all of a sudden all the monkeys will turn and look up at the sky and see if they can spot it. And then if there's a vocalization for Watch Out Lion, all the monkeys will automatically scurry up a tree. And they can even like take these vocalizations, record them. So it's not even coming out of the voice box of a monkey, but it's a recording of it, and they'll behave the same way.

And they've caught monkeys like lying. So like a monkey and another monkey are coming up on a banana. The other monkey gets there first. So the monkey further away will make the vocalization for lying. That monkey will scurry up a tree. And then the first monkey will run over and grab that banana. You can see the invention of lying in the world that it plays evolutionary, even before the construction of human language.

And the other thing I wanted to say, too, about the hands in the cave, it's really, I mean, profound on so many different levels, but at the very least, it implies an ability to conceptualize identity and time. So like a dog, like my dog, a very smart creature in relative terms, it doesn't understand itself temporally to the point where it would leave a dog print purposefully for dogs in the future to look back on, right? So the very fact that you would go into a cave, spray your hand, and then put it up there, it is like, this is me, I was here. So there's an element of identity. And there is a conceptualization of time. Like, this is going to outlast me.

And, you know, I don't want to get too presumptive because you can't fully know. But, you know, the idea that people in the future would be able to look back and know that I was here. So that in and of itself speaks volumes about the conceptual mind, which is already creating symbols to understand itself and its own self in relation to a broader time span, you know. And well, there's, it's interesting you put it that way because there's a French, philosopher who just died last year, I think. I was very sad, or maybe two years ago, I was sad to find this out, named Bernard Stiegler. And he's a very interesting case. He became a philosopher in prison while doing a five-year bid for armed robbery. And he ended up, he wrote this three-part work called Technics in Time, which really sort of touches on what you just said.

And he says that the thing that distinguishes humanity in this regard is not that there's just sort of like phylogenesis in sort of the reproduction of the sort of order of life that we are. But we have this other thing called like, he calls it epiphonesis, which is sort of our technical memory. And we like pass on, we were able to pass on significations. And I guess you might say this is partly of what's responsible for the possibility of a superstructure in a way that like a duck can't do. So that's a, you know, interesting, anyone who's interested in this kind of question. It's a three-part series techniques in time, which touches on this stuff. So just to, yeah, push a little bit forward here now, I'm just going to read from one of my

favorite books of all time, partly because it's hilarious and partly because there's an incredible exposition of time and memory in it, which is St. Augustine's Confessions. Now, for those who don't know, Augustine, I can never remember his years. I think he died in 4.53 when Rome was sacked. He was born in what is now, I believe, Tunisia and spent a lot of his life there. He went up to, I think he spent some time up in around Italy and stuff like that. And he has a very interesting account, starting from his infancy or his childhood of how he learned language or how he understands that he learned language. And this sort of touches on how what I just said about how language itself may be actually nestled within,

if the social people like that are right, is nestled within a broader tendency towards signification that is sort of bigger than language, if I can put it that way, but within which language sort of exists or subsists. He says, on the path to the present, I emerged from infancy to boyhood, or rather, boyhood came upon me and succeeded infancy. infancy did not quote unquote depart for it has nowhere to go yet I was no longer a baby incapable of speech but already a boy with power to talk this I remember but how I learned to talk I discovered only later it was not that grown-up people instructed me by presenting me with words in a certain way by formal teaching a certain order rather by formal teaching as later I was to learn the letters of the alphabet I myself acquired this power of speech which with the intelligence which you gave me, my God, by groans and various sounds and various movements of parts of my body, I would endeavor to express the intentions of my heart to persuade people to bow to my will. So like when you're a baby, you scream for your strain carrots or whatever. But I had not the power to express all that I wanted, nor could I make my wishes understood by everybody. My grasp made

use of memory. When people gave a name to an object and when following the sound, they moved their body towards that object, I would see and retain the fact that the object received from them this sound which they pronounced when they intended to draw attention to it. Moreover, their intention was evident from the gestures, which are, as it were, the natural vocabulary of all races and which are made with the face and the inclination of the eyes and the movements of other parts of the body, and by the tone of voice, which indicates whether the mind's inward sentiments are to seek and possess or to reject and avoid. Accordingly, I gradually gathered the meaning of words occurring in their places in different sentences and frequently heard, and already I learned to

articulate my wishes by training my mouth to use these signs. In this way, I communicated the signs of my wishes to those around me and entered more deeply into the stormy society of human life. I was dependent on the authority of my parents and the direction of adult people. And in sort of modern philosophy of language. This is called the ostensive or the ostension theory of language learning, which is that people point, you know, your elders, they point at something and say the word, and then you learn to associate that thing with the word. And so in 1950 or 52, it's published posthum, you'll see in 1953, in Ludwig Wittgenstein's book, Philosophical Investigations, he starts with a meditation on this account. And the very first thing that he brings to light is that

well the gesture of pointing in itself is an object and how did you know what that meant how could you without without an instruction as to what that meant how did you know what that meant because and then the the outcome of this question if you were going to insist that you have to be introduced even into the the certification of pointing at something you have an infinite the regress of people pointing at the gesture of pointing to which there is no beginning or end. And so there is the idea that at one point you're outside of language and then another, through this process, you're brought into it, doesn't make any sense.

You end up in this sort of paradox. And so sort of in keeping what I've been saying, Wittgenstein's argument is that, well, what we call language has to be the expression of a common form of life, a sort of prior kind of coordination, who's, I guess, you might say, whose evolutionary story must be told in order to understand how we could arrive at a group of beings who can attach words to things by pointing their finger at something. And that's sort of the, kind of in a way, moves away and beyond just the analysis of propositions and whether or not they make sense or the objects within them are real or not that you see,

especially with like Frege and Russell, and then he moves into this analysis of what is this form of life that gives rise to the possibility of what we call language. And that's sort of the object of the philosophical investigations. And I think this really helps us move into DeLuze and Guattari more, even though the things that DeLyz has to say about Wittgenstein are pretty funny. Because it's interesting, right, because Wittgenstein, even though he recognizes this to be the case that there has to be some kind of prior not formal in the sense of

like a formal, formal dance or formal rules, but in terms of the form of the group being that humanity is, some kind of synergy or something like that that makes us understand the significations that we tend to make how out of that, something like what we now call a language could even arise.

He kind of feels Wittgenstein has a lot of anxiety over this because nothing is as certain as it could be anymore. And he ends up just all of his books are just these weird attempts to come to grips with this and to give sort of give up the desire to have an idea of language as something over here that we use to label the world, which is something over there. and he he on the one hand recognizes that the separateness is false but on the other hand has a lot of and very real like everyday life like mental health issues because of this and there's this series of interviews based on questions asked alphabetically by a journalist and Claire Parnett with de Luz and she comes to Wittgenstein so she's like W Wittgenstein and he's just I'll just say it in French to try to impersonate the way he says this, and I'll say it in English.

He's like, oh, Zay, it's very triste. Oh, I'm not telling this. I say, oh, Wittgenstein, it's la poverty and starry on grandeur. And what he's saying is that, look, I really don't want to talk about this because he makes he so sad. Vickenstein so sad, and he's, he's like,

it's poverty sort of dressed up or ensconced in this grandeur. and that what I think the thing he's saying is that bro just like let go of the desire for that kind of metaphysical concept of language and get more into the get more into what you yourself call the world of organism the whirl of organism or you know alfred north wayhead like get into the process and stop worrying about the fact that we like can't nail everything down anymore or that there's no way through language to access this sort of separated alienated world that's on the other side, because it's not on the other side. It's what's propelling you to give rise to these expressions in the first place. So stop letting it kill you because it's making you sick. And like he,

Wittgenstein, if you read about his behavior and just his problem and stuff, he really, really struggled every single day because of this kind of thing. Yeah, I read, I read chunks of Roy Monk's biography. I don't think I ever got through it, but I got

through it enough to kind of see the volatile character of Wittgenstein. himself and it's really interesting. Yeah, and I think to me, the most, this really says a lot about him. He was giving lectures and one of his students bought a friend. And the friend, Wittgenstein noticed throughout the lecture that the friend kept leaning into, the gas kept leaning into the students' ear and whispering. And finally, Wittgenstein turned around and was like, what hell's the matter with it?

You deaf? And it turned out the guy actually was deaf? Jesus, yeah. And so he had a real like Larry David kind of moment. Absolutely. And it was just apparently the most awkward thing ever. And then on the Monday after that, this guy, you know, he was called to the front door of his apartment or whatever. And Vicenstein was there with two like really expensive earhorns to help him here.

And he was like, I'm such an asshole. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. But he had this tendency to get really shitty with people and then just plund like plunge. like plunge into this depths of despair over his own shatingness. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of it had to do with his inability to stop being tormented by these philosophical problems. Yeah.

So anyway, it seems like we may have just about come to DeLis and Guittari at this point. Yeah, you ready to dive in? Yeah. All right. So yeah, we got the language, linguistic aspect down, sort of chronologically move through some of the major touchstones on that front. and now we're getting into Deleuze and Guatari proper. So let's talk first about maybe their biographies and their historical context, because I think that's important.

The events of May 1968 are obviously very important for their thinking. So let's zero in on them and help clarify where DeLuze and Guatari are coming from theoretically. And they're coming, like they have two separate sort of pre-collab intellectual lives. And then they're brought together and their strengths are sort of intermingled. But yeah, take it wherever you want. Okay. Well, like I said on the phone earlier, I'm not going to get too deep into the biographical stuff. For one thing, as DeLu says, academics' lives are seldom interesting. And he basically spent his whole life in the same neighborhood and never really traveled.

But for those who want to dive a little deeper, there's an interesting 2007 biography of them together by Francois DOS. So it's DOSS-E, if the last name, Delozing, but entire intersecting lives from 2007. So you may find a lot of helpful information in there, but just very, very briefly. Deleuze was born on 18th of January, 1925, and he died on the 4th of November in 1995, and I'll talk about that at the end of this little mini bio here.

He spent his whole life basically in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. So an arrondissement in Paris is an administrative district, and the 17th is in the northwest sort of portion of the, old city like the real core of the city so he never traveled at all not really no it's kind of like um um manual kant right he was a home body oh my god he yeah he freak out of your i know but just in that one respect yeah in the sense yeah i mean he he didn't have that you know how cond had that neurotic thing where he he would every he would do everything at the same time yeah it wasn't like that but he really um i think there was something really important for him

to stay where he was and to sort of like deeply experience the world through where he grew up. I think there's there is a philosophical purpose to it for him as well. I like that. Go ahead. But slightly different. No, no, it's funny. Like Kant is people could like set their clocks by Kant's daily walks and stuff. Exactly.

Yeah, don't really know too much about his parents or anything like that. He was sort of sort of like a Borswa family. I would not really, in Borseswa, in the sense of property owners or something like that, but more maybe, I suspect that his parents probably had some sort of like state position in the state apparatus or something like that. Although if I'm wrong about that, I'm happy to be corrected on it. But interestingly, and I think this is probably very important for him, he had an older brother named George, who was a French resistance fighter who was captured. I mean, so these guys lived the Nazi occupation of France, which is important to note. And so his Georges de Luz, he was in the resistance, he got captured, and he died in custody on a train to a concentration camp. I think that's pretty heavy, and it probably informs a lot about the Luz's take on the world.

He attended the Sorbonne, so he did very, very well. He wrote his first paper, I think he produced it for a reading group, and it's called philosophy, math,asis, and science. and it's a commentary on this thinker from the 19th century, me, Malfatti, who is actually Ludwig van Beethoven's personal physician. And it has something to do. And again, no investigation, no right to speak. So I've tried to track down the text that the Malthaddy text that DeLuz comments on, and I have not been able to find a PDF of it or anything anywhere.

So I can't really speak to it. But I do know that it's grounded in Malfatty's commentary. on some aspects of Indian philosophy going back to antiquity. So that's very, sort of very interesting tributary into the Liz's thought. I just wish I knew more about it to say more. He taught at various sort of lyce, they're called Lycees, sort of lyceums, which are kind of like junior colleges all around Paris. And then in 1968, so this is the same year that the events of 68 happened,

he produced both of his doctoral thesis. So in France, I don't know if he, still do, but at that time you got to put up two. So one is to prove you can be a scholar and the other is to prove you can be a teacher. And you have, so you've got to do that second one to get the license to actually teach in the university system in Paris, at least at this time. And so after he produced those two things, so the first of which is his big book on Spinoza, which is called Expressionism and Philosophy. And then the other one, which is maybe his most well-known work, which is difference in repetition. Then he was appointed to an experiment.

teaching institution at Vincent's called the University of Paris. So it's kind of like section, section eight. And so this unit was formed in response to student demands after the May 68 stuff to move away from, I think, more traditional styles of philosophy teaching, which were largely influenced by sort of French Catholic philosophers and theologians, sort of, for example, partisans of what is called Thomism, which is a source. certain way of interpreting the dialectics of St. Thomas Aquinas and making it undialectical so that you have this sort of being as a fixed genus. It's kind of like in the first episode

when I talked about Carl Linnaeus's table of living forms. You have like the animal kingdom and then all the subdivisions down to individual species. Yeah. Homism and forms of thinking like it, which are popular in France around the time Deleuze is coming up and then coming into into his scholarly and pedagogic life kind of predominate a lot of French teaching at this time and instead of being the sort of fixed sort of categorical system of living forms just like ontological form so it's like being

and then all the subdivisions within it and it's sort of like it's what Mao was talking about when he means metaphysics, right? This system of representations that are fixed that imply that real things in the universe are really fixed And so for many reasons, De Loz was taken to be a good person to teach in this new way that the students were demanding. And just sort of a funniest side about what a rigorous thinker he was. I read an anecdote a long time ago by one of his classmates when they were young people in undergrad.

And he said, we'd always get together and hang out and talk shit about philosophy, kind of dorm room. and it was as though we were tossing around a beach ball and the object of the discussion was the beach ball and then eventually at some point Delos would come into the room or he'd be in there the whole time and eventually the beach ball would get thrown to him and when it came back

it came back no longer as a beach ball but as a medicine ball and you would get blown through the wall and have to come back in the building because he he's a very no nonsense thinker very insistent on being closely responsible to the text and being able to justify your interpretation of it. And as his friend said, never let anybody get away with anything ever. And if you read his

sort of like public interventions in his interviews about what's going on, he really, yeah, in the same way that like Lenin or Marx or someone like that just doesn't let any bullshit fly at all. He's just absolutely ruthless when it comes to stuff like that. And is a, is a, really good genius level scholar, which I think is something that's not always appreciated in Western academic representations, which I will talk about in a moment. Now, to turn to Guattari,

oh, shoot, I should say too, that I think it was not long after, or around the time that he finished his two theses, that he had a respiratory attack, and he was taken to hospital, and he ended up, it turned out he had a chronic respiratory illness that it was progressive, And he had it for the rest of his life.

And when he died, he committed suicide by jumping out of the window of, I don't know if he was at home or in hospice. I can't remember. But he was hooked up to a breathing machine like all the time. Yeah, he was ventilated because, and they had to take out one of his lungs. He's a lifetime smoker. Yeah, yeah. And also someone who struggled with drinking.

I think it's worth noting. And yeah, he said by the end, you know, I feel like I'm a dog chained up to a wall. and yeah he you know he took he took his own life because of that so yeah literally jumping out of a multi-story i believe it was inside the hospital or hospice or whatever and just deciding to to have the agency to at least end his own life because the state of his being at that point was prohibitive of any sort of joyful agency or expression and it was just brutal drudgery of suffering and he decided to choose not to live that way and there's there's a an aspect of nobility, right, to being able to write your own final sentence, if you will,

and choose to opt out of grotesque suffering. Yeah, and, I mean, it's interesting, right, because Spinoza is so important for him, and Spinoza says that suicide is sort of the ultimate expression of passivity, so I'm kind of like to see what DeLus would say. Interesting. And, I mean, Spinoza himself also died of a respiratory illness. Exactly, yeah, inhaling the tiny shards of glass. Yeah, progressive respiratory illness.

So it's like, okay, bud, all right. You know, I don't want to be a bad spinoza, but I feel like if I were in DeLuze's position, I know what I do at the end. I mean, he went through it for like 30 years. Brutal. Yeah. Okay, as for Guatari, he was just about five years younger than DeLuz.

He was born on the 30th of March, 1930. He died on the 29th of August, 1992. So this is like within our lifetimes, right? This is not super, super long ago. He was born in a suburb called Villeneuve Les Sablons in an administrative division in the northwest of France, known as I hope him present, Owasse. I hope any French comrades out there, I apologize for that one.

Born to a working class family, his father worked as a chocolate maker, and then eventually, so like in someone's company, and I guess eventually he opened up his own little chocolate shop at some point. Guattari had, he had some philosophical training, which pretty much everyone does in France with their coming up through the system. But then he decided to go down the route of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

So first he trained under Jacques Lacan. I think you've had an episode about Lacan, do you not? Certainly multiple episodes on psychoanalysis were in which Lecon was mentioned, but not an episode wholly on Lecon. Okay, cool. Well, I mean, I would recommend the list. check those out. I mean, psychoanalysis is something I haven't really looked at in quite a while. Like, I haven't read Lacan or anything like that in a while. So I can't say too, too much about it,

but I would hardly encourage everyone to seek out that material. And then he worked under a student of Lacan's named Jean Uri. And so Jean Ory was involved in a clinic called Laborde. It's a psychotherapy, psychiatric clinic. And Waitari worked there pretty much every day when he wasn't traveling for the rest of his life and then he died of a heart attack on the floor there um at the age of 62 in 1992 he was he was really politically active his whole life in a way that deluz may may not have been he was just much more of like a protest kid and you know being involved in all he was more involved in the party communist francis he got kicked out of the PCF uh for guess what being a trotskyite yeah exactly and uh that that may i think that that may in terms of like the sort of

final assessment for a conversation that we're going to give. I think that may become significant. So that's sort of the basic rundown of who they were. I believe Guatardee was also, you know, just adding to what you're saying about his political involvement being pretty intense was on the barricades in 68 and was very much a part of the political on the ground movement of the time. Yeah. And he was also involved in the anti-colonial struggle against the French occupation of Algeria. which is a key, I mean, that's key for understanding a lot of left politics in France, I think. And just as an aside, someone maybe we could talk about sometime, I mean, absolutely, you can't really understand Jacques Derrida, who probably hasn't been talked about in a while broadly, which I think is good.

I think by the time he died, he was getting dragged through the mud so much. It's good. It's like 15 years ago. I'm sort of good that he's not talked about so much. But he was a, you know, also like Spinoza, a Sephardic Jewish man. He was born in Algeria, was a subject of France, not a citizen of France. That's part of being a colonized person. And then when the Nazis came in and took over, then they took over the governance of colonial Algeria. And Derrida was basically, as a child, excluded from like any kind of public activities that really suffered a lot under both French colonial and the Nazis.

And so just in general, that's an example of like how important Algeria is for like the, the history of 20th century, like French thinking and French left political activities. But yeah, Gwetari was like all up in that stuff. And a lot of the work of them together, I think, has to do with assessing why May 16th, didn't go the way that people probably would have wanted it to go. And I think your episode that you did in 2018 on May 16th is really, really helpful

for thinking about that because your guest lays out a lot of the sort of disconnects that were going on, particularly between the workers and the students. And, you know, not to shit on the students, but there seems like there was a non-zero degree of like romanticization going on, some refusals to listen, and just, you know, not to use the internet,

but a little bit of larping, maybe, which is not to undermine the importance of it. And I think so they were, Deleuze and Guittari were often mocked in later years into the 80s for continuing to work on the question of, I guess in a way, of this failure. And so they were sort of mocked by, it's about like French liberal thinkers, like Bernard on the, Henri Levy, and this whole clown show of guys, oh, you know, these losers, you know, the revolution is dead, liberal democracy rising. That's what I mean? Like the Soviets are coming down.

We're going forward with it. And these guys are just a bunch of backwards assholes who just wish that their revolution had happened. And they were sort of often sidelined in that way. And in fact, like, these guys were not always, like, as big, treated as, like, big superstars as the way that they're represented so much in Western pop culture at academia. They often got sort of like sidelined and shit on and mocked and all that kind of stuff back then, even in their own country. And so I think, but I think the question is that they raise is, like, why didn't it work? Aside from the external reasons, why didn't it work about, you know, the disconnection? between the different protesting segments and all that kind of stuff.

And their answer has to do with how we are psychologically interpolated as subjects of capital through regimes of science and the circuit systems of science. And I think that's really what they sort of bring to their Spinozaism, because they're both really in a way answerable to both Spinoza and Marx. So, yeah, I guess that's sort of general lay of the land about what they're doing. So, yeah, is that okay? Yeah, absolutely. I just want to jump in and add a couple of things that I thought were interesting.

They're not crucial, but they're interesting. And one of those is, so you're dealing with this May 68, you're dealing with Marxism, you have Guattari's past Trotskyist sympathies, you have the Soviet Union still in existence, you have them having lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris. So you have all these political things on the line. And, you know, there is a connection to Marxism as well as a critique of it. And then on the cycle analytics side, you have that same basic dynamic, you know, Guattari's coming from being, you know, under the tutelage of somebody like Lacan. And obviously, Lacan at this time has, you know, a big profile in France in particular.

And so they're coming from, I don't know, I would argue within the psychoanalytic tradition while attacking some core tenets of it. And just to give a little anecdote about the role that psychoanalysis played in this whole thing is like representatives from the international psychoanalytic association war disguises, I think, and they went into the May 68, you know, fervor and they went and they afterwards they wrote basically a hardcore critique of. of the May 68 protesters under a pseudonym from a psychoanalytic perspective calling them Stalinists, etc. And so after the intervention

of DeLuze and Guatari, there's like the star of psychoanalysis started to wane and particularly some of these subgroups within the psychoanalytic realm took a big hit from DeLuze and Guatari's work and maybe we can get into that if not in this episode, in a future one.

But I just wanted to situate them within not only the realm of Marxism and left politics, but also within the interdisputes between different sections of the psychoanalytic front as well. Yeah, no, I think if we don't get to that this time, then another time will be fun. But I just like to, like Deleuze especially is so disdainful of psychoanalysis. There's a really fun commentary he does on the little Hans case of, Freud. Do you remember that one? Vagely, vaguely. And so just for those who don't know, little Hans is an actual case that Freud dealt with. He treated a five-year-old little boy named Hans from a bourgeois family in Vienna, who I remember correctly. And this was the

case. This is what his father brought to Freud. It's like, this is what's been going on. He's not doing well. And Freud is like, well, what are the sort of, you know, what's he manifesting and wonder, sort of some antecedent events that may, you think may have been significant. And so basically, you know, if I remember, he's like, he can't sleep, he's terrified of being alone, all this kind of stuff. And what happened recently? Well, two things happened recently. The first thing is that he was caught by his parents and maybe the neighbor playing

doctor with his little friend to the little girlfriend from next door. And they were forbidden to speak to each other. they weren't allowed to hang out anymore. There was no sort of like, it's good that your friends, but maybe this is not the kind of thing you guys want to be doing. There's nothing like,

boom, it's over. You have no relationship to this person at all anymore. And that was really, apparently very difficult for little haunts. And then sometime after that, his father took him out for a walk,

and they were walking down the street and a horse that was drawing a carriage something like dropped dead right in front of it and just fell down, almost fell on Little Hauntz. So if I remember the case document correctly. And what does Freud do with this? Well, Freud does what Freud does.

He says, he's like, well, obviously, little Hans is terrified by the gigantic phallus of the horse that he saw as it fell to its death, which he naturally subliminally associates with the phallus of the father, which is then your prohibition of him hanging out with his little friend. Susie or whatever, is a stand-in for your patriarchal, whatever, right, or your function of preventing him from sleeping with his mother. And DeLuze is like, wow, it couldn't possibly be just because you broke apart the most important connection in his life, and then he just saw this gigantic thing, almost kill him, dying in front of him. No, it has to be the horsecock and its symbolic implications for his sub-examination. for his sub, his, his, his, his, um, his psyche formation within the, the Edipal triangle of the

Borswa family. Yeah, Sigmund, that's great. Yeah. Really great work. And so like, Delos, he, he does this all the time, right? He's just like, and this is why, like, anti-edipus, it replaces that kind of, it doesn't do away with the notion of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, he just remap it onto Spinoza and they're just like it's it's not about the theater of these symbolic representations and how they shape your psyche it's about actual material relations uh and and and how they shape your psyche you he loved his friend he did something maybe you know little kids shouldn't

maybe they you know like they shouldn't be at that kind of stuff there's got to be a healthier way of dealing with that yeah than just saying you can never see this person again come on segment totally um you're just wasting your time and so he he sees um psychoanalysis in many ways is very like infantile and just sort of silly but nonetheless like they the phenomenon of the unconscious is something that they have to deal with so just a little sort of side comment there yeah no it's great it's really interesting and of course they're using psychoanalytic language and concepts as well throughout and i think it's interesting because foucault would later comment on antedipus and said that the three enemies of of deluz and guatari in that

in that book are the bureaucrats of the revolution the poor technicians of desire, i.e. the psychoanalysts and the main enemy of fascism and not just the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but

the fascist inside all of us in our heads. And Foucault said as an alternative title, you could title the book an introduction to the non-fascist life. So that is all to say interesting little historical note on Foucault reflecting on it. It helps break down some of the targets of the work

itself and this idea of the role that fascism plays and like, you know, to kill the fascist that lives inside all of us is a, is an interesting maneuver as well, as opposed to simply externalizing it and saying it's something evil out there in the world. You know, where does fascism come from and why is it so appealing to so many people? That's part of it as well. So all of that stuff is fascinating to me. Yeah. Yeah, and if I could use that as a jumping off point to sort of get a little deeper into the question of how these people are curated in Western pop culture and Western academia. When we first started doing the episodes, I perhaps made the mistake of starting a Twitter account. And the first thing I saw when I logged in was a woman tweeting, I swear to God, every day I spend on this website.

website makes me stupider than the day before and really positive response to that tweet actually everyone was like holy shit me too and it's like yeah you think there might be something going on here and one of the things i saw right after that was someone just a young young person young comrade whatever being like these fucking guys i sorry mom i sorry i swear i promised my mother i wouldn't swear i always do it these fucking guys are the worst thing that ever happened to you know thought and blah blah blah and just, you know, they're just, you know, cancel, cancel, that kind of thing. And I want to say, in fairness to that person, if what you're talking about is the Deleuze Guateri or the Foucault or the Derrida or any of these guys that has been given to you

through the institutions of Anglo-American bourgeois academia, you're 100% correct. That stuff is not worth spit. And one of my biggest frustrations going through grad school and all that was like, battling against that, like people taking certain representations for granted in a way that shows that they don't read the goddamn texts. And a lot of being a professional academic in Anglo-American academia consists in strategically not reading texts so that you can play the capture of the flag game. Like another thing I've done while I was laid up with my bed, my bum knee was I reread

Salem's lot by Stephen King and one of the funny parts. Oh man, I love that book. But the main character, Ben Mears, he talks about how he went to a liberal arts college and he just sort of laughed kind of early. It just felt like a game of intellectual capture the flag. And a lot of that is what's going on. But even more deeply than that, I've found over the decades, that's how I'm even older than Neiman Shirazi from Citations needed.

That's how old I. Over the decades, I can talk about it. decades now. Oh, yeah, I love those guys. They've been, this whole cadre of thinkers, if I can put it that way, has been erroneously received by two strands of liberals for the same reason in totally opposite ways. And it revolves around the idea that, A, these guys are postmodernists. And I think that at the end of the day, if these, a lot of people are being honest, when they say post-structuralism, they basically just mean postmodernism. And I'm going to read an attack by Guitari shortly on postmodernism. And a lot of it has to do, I think, with the characterization of May 68 is nothing but a failure,

right? And have you seen the documentary series Century of the South by Adam Curtis? I have a long time ago, though, but yes. But there's the sim of everyone should watch that. He's often taken to be sort of like another version of the zeitgeist film stuff, but he's not. like he is a good documentary and he has the receipts for what he's saying and he often has the people who drove this stuff saying it that they're like yeah i did that right um and there's this sort of inward turn after the failure of of revolutionary struggle in may 68 because it was not well organized it was just sort of a spontaneous explosion and it didn't come with like after a decade or two of planning right and so and in in america um it seems like revolutionary mass politics sort of ate shit at the end of the 60s as well for a number of reasons. Like the Dead Kennedys say, the 60s weren't all failure. It's the 70s that stunk. Interesting.

There's this inward turn to just personal enjoyment. You know, we can't fix things politically, so we need to focus on just our own pains, our own pleasures. Everything becomes very, very individualized through like Reiki and psychoanalysis. And then eventually in the 80s, who captures. all of these disappointed radicals, Ronald Reagan, by saying, what does Ronald, how does he sell American neoliberalism on the people, one of the catchphrases of the hippies? If it feels good, do it. He sort of inverts their psyches into this sort of very inward-looking thing. And often,

people like Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, those are the big four that get treated this way. They're said to have been part of this thing where it's like you know what just fuck it do do whatever truth isn't real the subject is alone in his free play

to interpret the world how he wants all this kind of stuff there's a really well-known Canadian philosopher named Charles Taylor who's a straight liberal in many ways but for some reason was taken to be a left thinker and he does this

and there's no textual support given for it what's, it's just this assertion. Even on the back of Jacques Derry does for the translation of his first book of Grammatology, there's a promotional publisher's blurb asserting this about the content of Derrida's thinking, which is that you can use it to make, you can use deconstruction to make a text say whatever you want. And that is completely at odds. It's the opposite of what you actually find inside this work. And so there's a whole bunch of, um, these distortions that happen and they both are for there are these liberal sort of liberal interpretations so there's a sort of right leaning liberal interpretation where it's like these guys are nihilists and they're going to destroy society with their you know decadent bullshit and they just want everyone to do asset and have orgies or whatever something like we don't know what it is but we don't like it and we think that it rests on the idea that there's no such thing as truth and that the subject is just free to project its own interpretations on the world blah blah blah blah. And then you get this other side, the sort of left-leaning liberals, some of whom I guess taught me

or maybe we're a little bit ahead of me in school and stuff like that, who are like, no, this is wicked, man. We can just be creative. We don't need to be beholden to anything. That's post-structuralism, bro, like all this kind of stuff, all of which is impossible to maintain if you start adding any real robust textual support to it. If you really read the text beyond soundbites and you go into the logic of these people's arguments, you're not going to find anything like that. So my big problem for the 20 or so years that I've been doing philosophy is how to get people to stop talking this way, right?

I don't know how to, I mean, again, I'm not in academia. Thank God. It's a very sad place, especially right now. And it's full of all these lies and distortions. And I think one of the reasons for it, like if you look at sort of Ilyenko's commentaries on Western forms of education, like we're talking about kindergarten on up here, like not just academic university. And also the work of Nadezda Khrushkaia, who to whom Lennon was married and she was the first minister of public education on the Soviet Union's. Her assessment of Western forms of education, of bourgeois forms of education is that at best, And this is what I have found, this kind of stuff is going to get interpreted in a way that produces a kind of dogmatic skepticism. And what I mean by that is that, again, it's like, well, there's no such thing as truth. Nothing can be known for certain.

Linguistic expressions are nothing other than the expression of a certain either individual interest or class interest. Now, Stalin, the thing I just read, he already repudiated that. And so the best we can do is to go with the flow in whatever is happening in terms of public institutional life and just sort of enjoy ourselves with our creativity on our unboundedness to anything real or anything that obligates us to anything in our private lives. And there's even an American philosopher named Richard Rorty, who you may have heard of. And he wrote a book called Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Oh, God.

And he kind of takes this in the positive way of sort of what some of these guys are saying and said, okay, well, I go to work and I do my job as a university professor, and I tow the line and all this. But at home, when I'm hanging out on the veranda, drinking mint juleps with my buddies, I can talk shit about all of it and just, I don't believe in any of it and all this kind of stuff. And that's what these guys are taking to license. And in fact, that's not at all what they're trying to do.

do. They're trying to, in a way that maybe doesn't use the same vocabulary of dialectical materialism that you see running from angles through Mao, although they read that stuff, maybe in a slightly different vocabulary, they're trying to get into the problem of like, why are we the way they, why are we the way we are, and why is the way we are an obstacle to overcoming bourgeois society and what the hell can we do about it? And I think the more you read, these French thinkers on their own terms in their own context against the backdrop of really important thinkers who many people listening may have never heard of like Georges Cangayin, Jean Hippolyte, Jean Cavaliers, all these people that influence these guys and that when you know the connection between these guys and that prior generation, you can start to see these continuity and you understand what it is they're really trying to dig into all of these pop cultural academic, Western Anglo-American representation. presentations don't make sense anymore, and you realize that, I mean, it's trash. It's just trash. And it's a disrespect to these people and the work that they did. And the contributions that they

make to the political lines that we're now trying to build after 40 years of neoliberalism. So, yeah. Yeah, that's really, really well said. And I completely agree with that. And it makes, you know, it's the saddest to, to see, like, Marxists, uh, instead of, them just completely dismiss them as if they're utterly irrelevant to what they're doing to what we're trying to do or somehow indicative of pure rad-lib you know anarchism or whatever and therefore it doesn't even need to be engaged with i think that's a that's a real loss for us do you have anything to say about i know you've said it in a million different ways but any way to summarize that like why marxists in particular especially those like in our tradition of taking

lenin and mao very seriously like you know why these these people should not, like Deleuze and Guaure, you should not be dismissed and, you know, more broadly, Derrida, Foucault, etc., specifically from a Marxist perspective. And then we can get into how they welded Spinoza and Marx together. But do you have anything to say on somebody who is a Marxist, is suspicious of these thinkers, just something to nudge them in the direction of, no, actually you should read them. Yeah, I think, well, one of the first barriers that people run up against is that a lot of the writing itself appears to be very, very idiosyncratic. and seems to be coming out of nowhere. And part of the problem there is, if I can just put it bluntly, for reasons of, you could say,

the way capital operates in French Borslaw society versus ours, and the way that in France, like social power is exercise through culture and stuff like that, for better or for worse, the French, I don't know what's going on

the French school systems these days, but at this time, they're just better educated than we are. They don't have a really chopped up, super divided, super hyper-specialist sort of streaming system in the way that we do where the whole point is like, look, we're going to, we just got to get you, either you're going to be an engineer or a lawyer or some Joe that works at a gas station. We've got to get you there as fast as possible.

Like we're very, you know, the approach to education in Anglo-Borgeois societies is completely impoverish compared to what these people were treated to. And oftentimes when people say, well, this sentence doesn't make any sense or this term doesn't make any sense. What is really going on is we just don't know what they, they know things that we don't know. They are schooled in the sciences and in philosophy and history, our literature, all this stuff and all the interconnections between them in ways that we just are not. And that's to our disadvantage. It sucks, right? That's something we got to overcome. But it's also, I think, what causes people to throw up psychological barriers against this stuff because it's so hard. But also, like, if you read, you know, as Engel says,

like the great French materialists of the 18th century, like Danny Diderot, you're going to find prose styles that actually aren't that far off of what you see in a DeLosun Guatari book. Or if you read, I have a really good anthology of artists writing about their art. It's called Theories of Modern Art, collected by this editor and Herschel Chip. If you read sort of like Paul Clay, the painter's example, or sorry, his, some of his writing about how he understands art and its implications for human existence and its role in perception and material life, again, not that far off from what you're going to find in a DeLosin Guittari book. And so a lot of the problem is that, again, like capitalist education, especially in the Anglo countries, keeps us weak and keeps us ignorant and unable to branch out and to learn things of our own accord.

And so something you're going to read, like if you read like a thousand plateaus or antedipus, where it's just jam-packed with references to all this other work, sort of natural hostility can arise to that. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. Yeah. And that acts as a barrier. And so then you're forced to read secondary literature and you're an English speaker. So you're reading some secondary literature by an Anglo-American thinker. And then there's the distortions inherent in that, et cetera.

Yeah. And that's sort of one of the great difficulties of translations, which is that translations are really only of use to people who know the original language. That's a very difficult problem. And it really speaks to the importance of language learning. And I was the Soviet stuff I've been reading like Ilyankov and Voloc. Ashinaf and Klupskaya is like language learning is sort of key to getting dialectical materialism as well. So we all need to learn more languages, I should say. So let me see. So where were we? We're talking about where does the hostility come from? A lot of it too,

I think it has to do, like I say, this designation of postmodern. And I'm just going to pull out This is an essay that Guatari wrote called postmodern deadlock and post-media transition. And this is from probably, I would say, the early 80s. Qutari writes, a certain conception of progress in modernity has gone bankrupt. So certainly in the case of what where the United States is, at right now in 2021. The fallout from all that is becoming ever more apparent. Its fallout, its fall from grace has shaken collective confidence in the very idea of an emancipatory social practice. In a parallel fashion, a kind of glaciation has taken over social relations.

Hierarchies and segregations have hardened, and destitution and unemployment today tend to be accepted as necessary evils. Unions are now clinging to the last institutional branches available to them and retreat into corporatist practices that lead them to adopt conservative attitudes that resemble those found in reactionary circles. The communist left is sinking irreparably into ossification and dogmatism, whereas the socialist parties, here I think, of the NDP here in Canada, eager to come across as reliable technocratic partners have announced all progressive questioning of existing structures. Hey, Bernie, that's you, right?

No big surprise then that the ideologies that once claimed to serve as guides for reconstituting societies on more just and egalitarian grounds have lost their credibility. Does it then follow that we are condemned to stand with tied arms before the rise of this new order of cruelty and cynicism that is on its way to overwhelm the planet with the firm intention of sticking around? This is, in fact, the regrettable conclusion at which numerous intellectuals and artists have arrived, especially those who claim some connection with the post-modernism vogue. He sort of separates out what he calls post-modernism in architecture.

He's like actually as a kind of artistic form in this sense, it sort of has some kind of meeting, but he wants to like set that aside and say, well, that's not really what I'm worried about. Be they painters, architects, if they are like this, or philosophers, the heroes of post-modernism have this in common. They all think that today's Christensen, in artistic and social practices can no longer result in anything, but a total refusal of all

collective project making of any importance. Let's cultivate our garden and preferably in conformity with the practices and customs of our contemporaries. Don't make waves, just make fashion, gauged by the art and opinion markets, screened through publicity campaigns and polls. As for ordinary sociality, a new principle of sufficient communication, quote-unquote, should ensure that its forces are kept in balance and provide for a its ephemeral consistency. If we think about it, how far have we come since the era when the banners of French sociology read, social facts are not things? And now, for the postmoderns, they are no more than erratic clouds of discourse floating within a signifying ether. But where, by the way,

did they get the idea that the socius, so that is the social substance, can in this way be reduced to facts of languages and these, in turn, to binaurizable or digitizable signifying chains On this point, the postmoderns have hardly come up with something new. They place themselves squarely in the tradition itself downright modernness of structuralism, whose influence on the human sciences seems doomed to be relayed in the worst possible conditions by Anglo-Saxon systemism. The secret link between all these doctrines comes, I believe, from their having been subterranean, marked by reductionist conceptions, spread immediately after the war by information theory

and the first research into cybernetics. The references that these different doctrines ceaselessly borrowed from the new communicative and information technologies were so hurried and so badly managed that they threw us far behind the phenomenological research that had preceded them.

It will be necessary to bring this back to a simple truth, but one heavy with consequence, i.e., to know that concrete social assemblages, and here, this is, you may have heard this term from an assemblage. This is a translation out of a French term, agonement. So assemblers doesn't quite do justice to the term agoncement. Agencement, in a social, a social agonement is the way that a social formation comes together and through its

coalescence confers upon its members an agency that they had not had before. So think about that in terms of Spinoza and coming together and realizing and increasing your capacity. capacities. Like, that's an a jauncement. When you're acting as a composite social body and that allows you to do more than you could on your own or in a bad group, that's what they call an agencement. And for some reason, in English, it's translated as assemblage most of the time. And I don't really understand why, but it's not very helpful. Concrete social assemblages, agencement, which must not be confused with the quote unquote primary groups of American sociology, which still belong to the field of the economy of opinion, put many things into question. other than linguistic performance, ethnological and ecological dimensions, economic semiotic components, aesthetic, bodily, phantasmatic, irreducible to the semiology of language,

a multitude of incorporeal universes of reference which don't willingly fit into the coordinates of the dominant empiricist approach. Postmodernist philosophers can flit around pragmatic research all they want. They remain faithful to a structuralist conception of speech and language that will never allow them to relate to the subjective facts, to the formations of the unconscious, to the aesthetic

and micro-political problems. To put it plainly, I think that this philosophy is no philosophy. It's nothing more than an ambient frame of mind, a quote, unquote, condition of opinion that only takes its truths from the current intellectual climate. And that's a pretty savage attack on and he goes on like for many more pages on something that these guys are taken to be synonymous with when they're curated in our in our institutions in our pop culture over here and I just think that you know for every representation that's taken out of the texts by you know you know slice cutting it out

and throwing it up and then in ensconcing it in our bourgeois Anglo let it go man if it feels good do like that kind of stuff, it can only be destroyed when you engage in a responsible thorough reading of these texts. And I just want to say, like, so a lot of, a lot of what makes Marxists in our contexts, hate these guys, has to do with a series of optical illusions that ultimately serve the bourgeoisie. Because, as, you know, Parenti, for example, in democracy for the shoe shows, and as my experience in universities, like the universities over here exist. for the Anglo-American industrial and post-industrial bourgeoisie.

And so these misrepresentations either make us get infatuated this stuff for all the wrong reasons and turn it into just shitty epistemological and personal hedonism or makes us hate it and reject it without reading it and seeing what there may be to offer there. All right. Yeah, really, really well said. And so that covers the misrepresentation, some of the barrier to. entry why reading them directly is important and how getting their ideas handed down to you

by the Anglo-American bourgeois left or right is always going to come with its fair share of distortion. So let's move forward and talk about we obviously we put a lot of groundwork into Spinoza but also talking about Marks. So how do Duluz and Guattari take what they owe to Spinoza and weld it to what they owe to Marks? Well the first thing I should say is, is that basically what the list says, he's committed to the claim that Marx's analysis must be followed strictly if any of this other stuff, the bringing the Spinozism stuff to it is going to make any sense.

So in other words, you can't use a Spinozist analysis of the psyche, your individual or any group psyche and group body if you're going to purport to replace it with Marx's analysis of the history of class struggle and the nature of capitalism and how it has capital and how it works. And the ultimate insight that Lenin picks up on that, it's not just class struggle. Adam Smith knew about class struggle. The bourgeois knew about class struggle, but class struggle culminating in the dictatorship of the proletariat. That's something that DeLosun Guateri never, ever, ever, ever renounced. They never talk about that. They never say

it all failed, so we need to just turn inward instead and do this other kind of stuff. And in fact, the very last, and I'll talk a bit about their relationship to dialectical materialism and the relationship between the quantitative and the qualitative. They have a series of dualisms or dualities in their thinking, like molecular and molar, micropolitics, macro politics, and another one of them is smooth and strided spaces. And a smooth space is one in which people, whether individually or as a group, can morph, you know, if I can put it this way, away from the sort of dominant representations of class society and come to relate to themselves in a way that's sort of relatively free of all that. A striated space is one where all the strata of class domination are in action. So, for example, a prison is a striated space.

An ayahuasca ritual, that's more of a smooth space, if I can put it that way. Schools, like when you go to school, high school, that's a striated space. Going to a punk show is like more of a smooth space, if I can put it that way. I see. And a lot of, again, these sort of left liberal understandings is like, hooray for the smooth. Fuck the striated. But the very, very, very last line of a thousand plateaus is, I'll finish with it,

the last paragraph here. What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing, so like when you're, say when like Lennon and all them are organizing, they're trying to break away from the Tsarist system and the bourgeois system and the self-understander. understandings that go along with that, and those self-understandings impede revolution. So that's a kind of smoothing, and they want to introduce a new striation, which is to say socialist society. What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or

combinations, how the forces at work within space continually striated and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and amidst new smooth spaces. Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces. To live in the city as a nomad or as a cave dweller or as my friend Matt and I as a skateboarder, for example. Skateboarding, one of the most important modern cultural phenomena around the world in my view is a way of smoothing one's relationship to industrial cities, which really want you to accept their striations. Graffiti is another one, like another thing like that. Movement's speed and slowness are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory, but the struggle is

changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, and switches adversaries, never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us. So in other words, the last word of a thousand plateaus is it's going to come back to mass class struggle in the end. And it cannot help but do that because we're a group being, we're a species being composed of individuals who are psychically constituted and determined by a material infinity of conditions and circumstances and causes. And so, again, all of their, I think all of their work together comes back to trying to understand what's the relationship between our individual psyche, the psyche of us

and our small connections with our family, our friends, our co-workers, comrades, or organizing with whatever, and how does that feed into, how is that folded into the big struggles, the big social dichotomies, right, that we have to contend with, and how can we use that micro level, right? Or they call it the molecular level, and they call it molecular, not because it's small, but because at the level of the individual psych, you're even with you and your friends, what's going on and your apprehension of what the world is, what you are, what they

are, what your connection is, can often even throughout a day be subject to like rapid fire changes and be like, oh, maybe I'm wrong about, no, I think I'm right about that. I'm like, you know what it's like to live inside yourself. But that is the subject matter of the big, like, you

can't understand the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat without also understanding that stuff because you are one of those nodes. And you, as Spinoza says, you're determined by this, you know, multiplicity of causes that you'll never adequately fully understand. You're determined through metabolism. You're determined through the mechanical principle or the mechanical features of the human body. You're determined as I'm like your goddamn ligaments in your knee, which I'm suffering from right

now. You're determined by like, you know, again, I need corrective lenses to see. Like, so there's weird things in my eye that need, I need an apparatus to change it. But then you're also determined, I mean, you're determined by the way that family life is structured in bourgeois society versus other societies. And then at last, not at last, but in addition to just being subjected to class relations and class dominations, there's also all the systems of symbolism and signs that arise with that and how that affects your psyche in the way that you relate to other people and to world history and to the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, all of these things feed into it.

And if anything, I think what their argument is underlying, if anything contributed really to all the disjunctions in May 68 that led it to fail, it's a lack of attention to all those things. Like, why couldn't the students be open to the workers, right? What's going on in them psychically that leads to these sort of attitudes? like where did that come from and how can we change them because yeah they in this kind of bourgeois society a student is something that's categorically different than a worker in the minds of people and what can we do within ourselves to like make the necessary switches the necessary conversions

so that we stop seeing things according to those divisions and start seeing things according to the sort of material flow of our mutual sort of belonging to this class society which we're trying to get rid of. Yeah, that's really, really fascinating. So, I mean, in so many ways, their goal in all of this is still very much a Marxist goal. Is that correct? Yeah, and 100%. And we can get into the, I mean, I think, yeah, like Qatari's Trotskyite tendencies lead to some statements from him that I'll talk about in a minute that need to be taken, I think, nowadays in the light of, especially light of greater historical evidence taken with a little grain of salt um but i think what we should not do in the same way that lennon does not hate trotsky we shouldn't hate him for that yeah um we should

use it to understand how we're the problem we should use it to understand where we might go wrong because uh he's dead we can't correct him any further um he made a lot of contributions but he also transmitted some messages that you know play into um or can play into, you know, the way that a lot of Western, so-called, the Western left, like, seem to have this horrible habit of shitting on every actually existing socialist project in the world, which are pretty much outside of the global imperialist, capitalist, Borseswater North. Right.

And so while he may come by it honestly, and for good reasons or reasons in the same way that, again, Lenin says Trotsky is not his fault the way he is, you know, like we can't be sloppy about it and we should understand how even if he honestly sincerely you know goes into these errors and it's not really his fault we should also understand how in just the same way that they've been distorted to um propagate certain sort of bors law precepts um this stuff can also be used to say well yeah like gutari says this and you know then like ching chang and the wagers and you know all the rest of that stuff um the soviets were monsters and salem was a monster and all this kind of stuff.

And he doesn't really go far as saying anything like that. But anyway, so I just wanted to jump in before we get there into a very late work by Gwetari called the Three Ecologies, which is very short. I think it's, I don't even know

if it's 100 pages long. Oh, geez, it's only about 45 pages long. And so this, it's a really accessible text. It's very, very straightforward, not full of a lot of the sort of really idiosyncratic terminological constructions that you often see

in his work like machinic unconscious schizoanalytic cartographies phylum universe of reference all that ones is all I like that one they're all solid but we get them thrown at us just read this theory, absorb this theory

but every time he comes up with a term that appears to be just idiosyncratic it comes out of his group work with people at Labore clinic and how they're trying to come up concepts with each other to figure out how to arrange the everyday lives of people living there. So the doctors, the patients, and the support staff. And it's all part of this sort of practice of treatment and stuff like that,

whereas we get to throw it at us in Anglo-American pop culture and academia is just sort of undifferentiated, just quote-unquote, theory, just absorb these concepts. So I'll just read a little bit from the beginning here. he quotes as an epigram from Gregory Basin there is an ecology of bad ideas just as there is an ecology of weeds the earth is going and this is from like 91 or 92

just before he died the earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformations if no remedy is found the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet's surface. Alongside these upheavals, human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating. Kinship networks tend to be reduced to a bare minimum.

Domestic life is being poisoned by the gangrene of mass media consumption. Family and married life are frequently ossified by a sort of standardization of behavior, and neighborhood relations are generally reduced to their meanest expression. So here I think of the homeowners associations. It is the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority, be it social, animal, vegetable, or cosmic that is compromised in this way in a sort of general movement of implosion and regressive infantilization. Otherness, and in brackets the French lauteurite, tends to lose all its asperity. Tourism, for example, usually amounts to no more than a journey on the spot with the same redundancies of images and behavior. political groupings and executive authorities appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues. Despite having recently initiated a partial realization of the most obvious dangers that threaten the natural environment of our societies,

they are generally content to simply tackle industrial pollution and then from a purely technocratic perspective, whereas only an ethical political articulation, which I called ecosophy, between the three ecological registers, the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity would be likely to clarify these questions. Henceforth, it is the ways of living on this planet that are in question and in the context of the acceleration of techno-scientific mutations and of considerable demographic growth. Through the continuous development of machinic labor multiplied by the information revolution, productive forces can make available an increasing amount of time for potential human activity,

but to what end? Unemployment, oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, and neurosis, or culture, creation, development, the reinvention of the environment, and the enrichment of modes of life and sensibility. In both the third world and the developed world, whole sections of the collective subjectivity are floundering or simply huddle around archaisms, like, make America great again, as is the case, for example, with the dreadful rise of religious fundamentalism, the only true response to the, the ecological crisis is on a global scale provided that it brings about an authentic social and cultural revolution, reshaping the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets. Therefore, this revolution must not be exclusively concerned with visible

relations of force on a grand scale, so the macro political, but will also take into account molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence, and desire. So here we go back to Spinoza. A finalization of social labor, regulated in a univocal way by a profit economy and by power relations, would only lead at present to dramatic dead ends. This is obvious from the absurd and burdensome economic supervisions of the third world, which lead some of its regions into an absolute and irreversible pauperization. It is equally evident in countries like France, where the proliferation of nuclear power stations threatens over a large part of Europe, the possible consequences of Chernobyl-style accidents.

One need hardly mention the almost delirious stockpiling of thousands of nuclear warheads, which at the slightest technical or human error could automatically lead to collective extermination. In all of these examples, it is the same dominant modes of valorizing human activities that are implicated. That is to say, one, those of the Imperium,

and in quotes, he says Latin, the Imperium is sort of a term for authority, of a global market that destroys specific value systems and puts on the same plane of equivalence, material assets, cultural assets, wildlife areas, etc., to those that place all social and international relations under the control of police and military machines. Trapped in this double pincer movement, the nation states see their traditional role of mediation being reduced more and more, and they are frequently put in the combined service of the authorities of the global marketplace and of military industrial complexes. So that's pretty heavy.

Incredibly prescient. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm just going to double check. I'm going to look at the publishing information here. I thought it was 92. That's such a good diagnosis of precisely where we are. Oh, 89. Wow.

The year I was born. Yeah. And the year Fear of a Black Planet came out as well. If you want to really have your mind blown about the prescient's, listen to this part. Everyone's going to sit down for this one. now more than ever nature cannot be separated from culture this is 1989 in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems the mechanosphere and the social and individual universes of reference we must learn to think transversally just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of venice so our television screens are populated by quote unquote degenerate images and statements remember last time we were talking about CNN and then playing the video footage of people jumping out of the towers on 9-11, while the guests were trying to have a conversation about peace.

By degenerate, quote-unquote, images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City. He, quote, unquote, redevelopes by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, Most of whom are condemned to homelessness becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology. God damn. God damn. Mother Parker called it.

Yeah. Insane. Yeah, that's really intense. Men like Donald Trump. Yeah. Like he hadn't even really, he wasn't even, that was so long before, that was like 15 years before the apprentice came out. Mm-hmm. And it was like, what is it?

over 20 years before the stupid birth, he did the birtherism shift. Yeah. Of all the people just to pick out to showcase, you know, to like, this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. He picks him out and God, have we lived in the wake of those consequences.

Yeah. And so, yeah, while there are works by Guitari that really hard to get through because you've got to grapple with all this terminology, there's also stuff that's really much more accessible. And as I've said before, the best way to start reading these

French thinkers from the 20th century is to start with their public discourses, letters to the editor, interviews in the newspaper, radio appearances, even just recordings of them hanging out wherever, where they're just having a chat with people. There is lots of accessible stuff there. It is useless. It's not what you've been told it is by goddamn left liberal professors. It is useful. You said useless. Sorry, it's not useful. Sorry. Sorry. actually that reminds me of there's a passage here from the beginning of their last book together what is philosophy we'll see if I can it's pretty I find this very funny

this is from introduction the question then so the question being what is philosophy the exclusive rate of concept creation secures a function for philosophy so de Liz's definition of philosophy is the creation of concepts relative to concrete problems that are given to us by our material conditions. We always come back to the question of the use of this activity of creating concepts and its difference from scientific or artistic activity. Why? Through what necessity and for what use must concepts and always new concepts be created and in order to do what?

To say that the greatness of philosophy lies precisely and it's not having any use is a frivolous answer that not even young people find amusing anymore. In any case, the death of metaphysics or the overcoming of philosophy has never been a problem for us is just tiresome idle chatter. Today it is said that systems are bankrupt, but it is only the concept of system that has changed. They're talking about philosophical systems. So long as there is a time and a place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy or will be indistinguishable from philosophy, even if it's called something else. So they, yeah, and that's

another thing too is that in i find an anglo-american academia that's sort of hammered into our heads again and again and again is that philosophy has no real real use um but if you um you know you read your marxist leninism you read lenin um it becomes clear that um philosophy is immediately taken up in use and once you get wise to that you look back through history and see stuff like plato and aristotle and you realize that it was always being put to political uses at all times always And it's only the sort of politics of the bourgeoisie that tries to hive it off and be like, okay, you guys can still have this, but it's just a hobby because we figured out what the like the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union came down, all that. And we got all the answers. Francis Fukuyama wrote that book about the end of history and the last man. And it's demonstrated that liberal capitalist democracy is the final form of humanity. So at best, philosophy, it's over. It's been overthrown by the truth of liberal. capitalist democracy. And so if you want to do philosophy at school, I hope you enjoy it as a hobby, but

you should be an engineer or a lawyer. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to point out, too, going back to that quote about invasive algae, before he mentions Donald Trump, he talks about the television and the mass media and its impacts on us. And there is no Trump without that particular type of grotesquery, the mass media, not just

reality to you. which shot him into the living rooms of every American and gave him that name recognition even more than he already had, but also the way that he used spectacular media as a way to get into power also cannot be set aside and how liberal media just played right into it and gave him all the free air time because it was good for their profits. I mean, all those connections are just right there for the making. and I would absolutely love to hear both DeLuze Anguari's take an analysis on the rise of Trump and Trumpism and its impact on American politics and global politics. Really interesting.

Yeah, I wish they were alive to see that. DeLos would just be like I told you so. Like, it's like, I warned you, bro. That kind of stuff. But just to speaking to the prescience of singling out Trump, I've been meaning to say this in terms of getting into the vibe of like Spinoza's substance to recommend some science fiction literature, which is to say

the parable, the parable novels by Octavia Butler. Have you read those? I've not, no. They're absolutely, everyone should read them. And there's a consistent reflection or meditation by the main character. She develops this sort of, her name is Lauren Olamina.

She develops this concept of what she calls God and her definition is God is change. And throughout the book, it's said in 2025, the first book, The Parable of the Sower, came out in 1993, and it starts in 2025 in, in, I might be a suburb of Los Angeles. I came around like, climate change is fully taken hold. It's displacing people. They've got like, you know, a walking dead style sort of community they managed to cobble together by pulling up walls and having people on the walls with guns all the time. And she recognizes that this thing is going to collapse at some point.

And she's trying to come up with a discourse about the meaning of all life and human life that can give people hope to keep moving and holding out for a chance of rebuilding. And it's called Earthseed. And the first principle is God has changed. And if you read that stuff, it helps you get a good way into what Spinoza is talking about. But just, yeah, in terms of the prescience, The sequel Parable of the Talents came out in 1988. And at the beginning, there's somehow the United States,

the national political system or the federal political system is somehow still sort of intact. And there's a presidential election going on. And this is 1998. And the sort of the right-leaning, the right-wing candidate is this fascist demagogue who is able to whip, whip his followers into fascist street violence rage through these very ambivalent statements that he makes that anyone can read

anything into and his actual campaign slogan is Make America Great Again. Wow, that's so funny. Octavia Butler, if people haven't read her, everyone should read her. And in terms of related to that, in terms of how to develop practices

like for organizing for where everyone is trying to go, what we're trying to get to, and how to overcome all of the shittiness that Western culture puts into us. There's an activist and organizer out of Detroit and Adrian Marie Brown. I hope I'm getting the pronouns right. I think she goes by she, and if not,

I apologize. And she has a book called Immersion Strategy. And it's in its own way, really like it's dialectical and materialist and very spinozaist. And her sort of primary influence is Octavia. a butler and this sort of this mantra like god has changed and like all of the implications of that you could say nature has changed substance is change and um just on that note one thing that we haven't got to talk about in this i thought we might but oh my god it's 20 to 10 to 7 my time

almost holy smokes um is is really about what where deluz fits into the history of of dialectical materialism and the concept of difference that underpins it and his contribution to it. And I had a whole sort of also a little line of discussion here looking at Hegel's science of logic and what sort of what the lois, like how he comments it on it on the basis of the commentary of his teacher Jean Hippolyte, who was born in 1907 and died in 1968. So Hippolyte wrote two works on Hegel's dialectics. and the Hegelian system. The first is called the structure and genesis of the phenomenology of spirit, which is absolutely massive.

And then there's a small book called Logic in Existence, which really starts more from the science of logic, and really tries to dive even deeper into the Hegelian notion of difference is at the ground of all being, I guess, if I can put it that way. and what sort of a critical commentary to Liz makes on that. And maybe we can do that another time. But there's a lot to be thought of there because he and Wittari, they countenance Mao is on contradiction and say, as I've sort of said, I guess early on in the sub-series, the idea of the term one into two is a sort of strategic deployment.

If you use that as a teaching formula, But then you start to, through practice, not just in like the practice of learning philosophical text, but all kinds of practice, whether, you know, it's industrial production or artistic production or learning science or whatever, gets you hip to the fact that it's not just as simple as one into two because one thing. And the Soviet thinkers I've been looking at recently, I remember maybe this guy Vladisov, like Torski, you might have been the one talking about it, even one thing taken on its own in a slice of time. You think of it just taken and it's like a can of Coke or something like that. Or the soup cans and the Andy Warhol thing is already itself, to be one thing, it's already differentiated in multiple. And you realize then the sort of that Mao's teaching formula sort of has to give rise to this insight that at the level of how he says it verbally or the grammatical formulation of it isn't

quite true. There's a little sleight of hand there, but it's for a good purpose. And a lot of philosophy is like, there's a little slight a hand for a good purpose. But de Luz, I think, is interested in seeing if we can say that in another way, because the one into two thing, if you're not careful, it can fall back into that kind of like, I said early, like Thomism, Thomist metaphysics, or the idea that's implicit in the Linnaeian table of living beings of this, sort of like one unified substance out of which all these things come that are sort of different than it and then they divide up without paying attention to the immediate intrinsic multiplicity of any one thing at any given time yeah so maybe we can do that another

time absolutely yeah absolutely well let's end it there for this time and this is an ongoing sub-series we'll definitely do more and I just absolutely love this conversation and there's so many more things to talk about where do you see this this sub-series going next. Do you have anything in particular in mind? Yeah, well, as I've been doing this stuff, I've also been doing sort of a, and I've alluded to it several times now, doing sort of a parallel line of reading into the Soviet philosophers after, in the, starting, I think, with Voloshenov in the late 1920s. And what I would like to, I'd love to hear from, if the listeners can give Brett some

feedback on whether or not they think that is the interesting. I sort of have a three-parter in mind on first Soviet philosophy of language and semiology, particularly in Voloshenov and oh, nuts, there was someone else I had in mind. I think Elie Ankoff gets into this stuff too. A second part about the philosophy of Soviet philosophy of perception as contemplated in Soviet cinema. So in there where we look at the texts of Ziga Verthoff, who is a great, Soviet cinematographer and director. And then the last part of this proposed three-part series or, you know, continuation of this sub-series, Soviet philosophy of education and actual Soviet policymaking as embodied

in the work of Nadez de Krupskaya, who unfortunately all too often gets referred to as Lenin's wife, and this they were married, but it does her a great disservice to reduce her to Lenin's wife. Yeah. Because as the first minister of public education in the Soviets, she's kind of a big deal. And she's an important woman in the history of socialism. So, yeah, I mean, I imagine that probably sounds like a fun set of discussions to you. I think it'll be fun.

I'd love to hear from the listeners if they think that would be worthwhile. Yeah, totally. And then also there's the option of having a look at this sort of relationship between Hegel and DeLuz and how that fits into what Marx does with Hegel and all that stuff. stuff. Okay. So, the sky's the limit. Yeah, let's, we'll definitely talk about that, because I'm not sure I want to leave Deleuze and Guaari completely yet. So, but we'll talk about that. The, the basic fact is that more of these are to come. And eventually, I totally agree with getting into the, the history of Soviet cinema and education and philosophy and perception. That's all

definitely on its way as well. But for now, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, I've also, yeah, like that stuff that I've been, it's incredibly rich and instead, it offers a rich alternative to trying to battle through the prejudices of bourgeois, Anglo-American philosophy, to understand

these French guys, it gives you another doorway and to understanding them in a way that's just not, it doesn't have to be as much of a fight. And then it gives you the ability to assess these things in a sober manner. Yeah. Awesome. And I just have one last thing to say.

I just want to say, signal boost, a content creator that I've been following recently that I think a lot of people are trying to get into this could really make use of, and that's the YouTube channel, Socialism for All. They do readings and commentaries on foundational texts in the history of Marxism, and particularly Marxism, Leninism. The commentary is, I find it's mature and thoughtful and well-rounded and many-sided, and this individual is producing these things is a real voice of sanity and just good sense in an online environment that is awash in stubbornness and just shitty cat-calling and dogmatism, which is often fueled by the kind of like, you know, the rage

that's intrinsic to like American pop culture. so yeah socialism for all they got about um just under four and a half thousand subscribers on youtube right now um their material is really worthwhile and very educational so i'd encourage you everyone to let go check them out and subscribe and listen sweet i will absolutely do that i've not heard of them yet but i'll subscribe after after we end this and and i would also just throw out recommendation i've recommended it before i've had on todd mcgowan many times but his podcast or a couple times, I think. His podcast, Why Theory, is really interesting.

It's coming more from a psychoanalytic perspective, but they have a full episode, a couple episodes on, on Deleu's before and during his collaboration with Guatari, and they take the criticisms of psychoanalysis from within psychoanalysis and from without very seriously and try to navigate those complexities as well. So if you're interested in that side of this discussion, definitely check out Y theory. Anything else you want to say before we wrap up? Any plugs, any recommendations beyond what you've already done?

Or any last words? No, I think I'm out of words for you. This was a long one. Yeah, what? This might even be longer than the last one. No, I just want to close on the usual note. Just telling everyone out there I love you. And, you know, a lot of, we're trying to come together on this continent somehow,

some way to find each other and make things better. And it doesn't happen, as Shea said, without love. So I just want to wish everyone peace and love and solidarity. Amen to that. And Mark's on his deathbed was asked, supposedly. Do you have any last words? And quite like you, Mark said, last words are for fools who haven't said enough in their life. Amen.

Amen to that. All right. We'll be back with you soon. Bye, everybody. Peace. So you're a philosopher? Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Yes. I think very deeply. I think very deeply. I think very deeply. I think very deeply. I think very deeply. In about four seconds, a teacher will begin to speak. I think very deeply.

Let us begin. What, where, why, or when? Will l'all be explained like the structures to a game? See, I'm not insane. In fact, I'm kind of rational When I'm asking you Who's more dramatic This one or that one

The white one or the black one The punk and I'll jump up to attack one Terrorist one is just the got to lead a crew Right up to your face and diss you Everyone saw me on the last album cover Holding a pistol Something far from a lover Beside my brother

S-C-O-T-T I just laughed Because no one can defeat me This is lecture number two My philosophy Number one was poetry You know it's me You know it's my philosophy. Many artists got to learn.

I'm not flammable. I don't burn. So please stop burning and learn to earn respect. Because that's just what chaos collects. See, what do you expect when you rhyme like a soft punk? You walk down and you can get junk. You got to have style. Style. Original.

And everybody's going to want to diss you. Like me, we stood up for the South Bronx. And every sucker MC had a response. You think we care? I know that they are on a tip. My posse from the Bronx. In real, real life, we wrote correctly. A lot of suckers will like to forget me, but they can.

Because like a champ, I have got a record of knocking out the frauds in a second. On the mic, I believe that you should get loose. I haven't come to tell you, I've got juice, I just produce. Create innovate on a higher level. I'll be back, but for now just a second. I play the nine and you played the target You all know my name so I guess I'll just start it Or should I say start this

I'm the artist And new concepts that they're hardest Yo, because I'm a teacher And Scott is a scholar It ain't about money Because we all make dollars Last wide I walk with my head up

When I hear whack rhymes I get fed up Rappers like a set up A lot of games A lot of suckers with colorful names I'm so and so I'm this I'm back But they all just Whik, Whick, Whack

I'm not white or red or black I'm brown From the boogie down Productions, of course I music be frumping Others say they're bad But they're bugging Let me say you're something now

About hip hop About de nice melody and scottor I get a pen, a pencil, a marker Mainly what I write it for the average New Yorker Some emcees be talking and talking Trying to show how black people are walking But I don't walk this way up for a tray or reinforced stereotypes of the day.

Like all my brothers eat chicken and watermelon. Talk broken English and drug selling. We don't tell it and teach them pure facts. The way some act in rap is kind of whack and it lasts. Creativity and intelligence, but they don't care because their company's selling it. It's my philosophy on the industry. Don't bother dissing me or even wishing we soften. Dilute or commercialize all the lyrics because it's about time.

We are hearing. And hear first man from an intelligent brown man A vegetarian, no go or ham Or chicken or a turkey or hamburger Because to me that's suicide self-murna Let us give back to what we call hip-hop And what it meant to DJ Scott Loran You're a philosopher

Yes, I think there is easy In about four seconds A teacher will begin to speak How many MCs must get this Before somebody says don't But Chris, this is just one style out of many, like a piggy bank, this is one penny. My brother's name is Kenny, that's Kenny Parker. My other brother, ICU is much darker.

Funky-down productions is made up of teachers. The lecture is conducted from the mic to the speaker. Who gets weaker, but King or the teacher? It's not about a salary, it's all about reality. Teachers, teach and do the world good. King just rule and most are never understood. If you were to rule or cover a certain industry, all inside the society. room right now would be in misery

No one would get along Norse sing a song Because everyone be singing for the king Am I wrong? Am I wrong? So yo, what's up? It's me again. Scholar rock, KRS, BDP again. Many people had to nerve to think that we would end the trend. With criminal-minded

And only 10, funky, funky, funky, funky, hit records. No more than four minutes and some seconds. The competition checks and checks and keeps checking. They take the album, take it home and start sweating. Why? Well, it's simple. To them is kind of vital. Rital to take KRS one's title To them I'm like an idol Some type of entity

And everybody's rhyme They want to mention me I'd rather mention us Me and Scottler Rock But they could get bust Get robbed get dropped I don't play around Nor do I F around

And you can tell by the bodies That are left around When some clown jumps up To get beat down Broken down to his very last Comptown See how it sound A little unrational

A lot of MCs like to use the word Dramatical Fresh for 88 You suckers. Suckers.