Eugene W. Holland, "Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism" (SUNY Press, 2024)
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Hello, I'm Nathan Smith, a host for the New Books Network. I have the pleasure today to speak with Eugene Holland, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University, about his book, Perversions of the Market, Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism, which was published by SUNY Press in 2024.

To capture some good words from the inside flap, Perversions of the Market argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism, not as individual psychological proclivities, but as widespread institutionalized patterns of behavior. The book is divided into two parts, one historical and the other theoretical. In the first, Eugene W. Holland shows the

How? As capital becomes global in scale and drives production and consumption farther and farther apart, it perverts otherwise free markets, transforming sadism and masochism into borderline conditions and various supremacisms. The second part then turns to Deleuze and Guattari's Schizoanalysis.

explaining how it helpfully embeds Freud's analysis of the family and Lacan's analysis of language within an analysis of the capitalist market and its psychodynamics, drawing on literature and film throughout.

To illustrate the discontents of modern culture, Holland maintains that the sadistic relations of production and masochistic relations of consumption must be eliminated to prevent capitalism from destroying life as we know it. And with that, Eugene, welcome. Thank you very much, Nathan. Good to be here. Well, it's a pleasure to have you. You've had a very long and illustrious career.

career, explicating, implementing, and furthering a lot of the works of dualism Qatari. But your most recent book, this one, Perversions of the Market, I often like to see as kind of like a companion piece to the book, I believe it's the book just before that from 2011, Nomad Citizenship. And they have different kind of valences. One's a little bit more utopian, one's a little bit more critical.

So I just kind of wanted to open the floor to tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about how this book came to be and its relationship to some of your earlier work. Well, my first book and my dissertation were looking at Charles Baudelaire, the great French modernist poet, and

I realized that in the short span of his life and as a writer, essayist as well as poet, that he transitioned from masochism into borderline narcissism.

And that was my first look at these categories using psychological categories to characterize socio-historical shifts. And I argue in my first book on Baudelaire that the reason he is the great modernist poet is because he lived the transformation of French society from a

or constitutional monarchy into a full-fledged capitalist society.

And he is someone who lived the experience of the market particularly intensely. So that was the starting point of this. And as I got further into the work of Deleuze and Coitre, it became clear to me that their conceptual apparatus enables us to make a distinction between markets, which have existed for millennia, and capitalist markets, which are a very specific animal, which have been around only for a couple hundred years.

And all my work, including Nomad Citizenship and my most recent book, Perversions of the Market, are about driving a wedge between markets in general and what capital does to markets. So Nomad Citizenship is about what markets could do if they were freed from capital. So that's the utopian side of the coin. And this more recent book, Perversions of the Market, is what capital does to markets.

And so that's something, starting with Baudelaire and his experience of the takeover of society by the market, right up through this last book, all about how capital and markets and the psyche interact. Yeah, no, and it reminds me, I can't remember if it's, it might be Dilsen-Gattari, or

paraphrasing Marx or may actually be in Marx is the idea of all the components were there for capitalism before capitalism emerged. You know, so including the market, as you're saying, where it's only when the accumulation of surplus value and capital as, you know, kind of the realization of that takes the process into itself and makes itself, you know, kind of like the

Endless production of means that we get full-fledged capitalism. Yes, that's right. The market is sort of swallowed by capital and becomes a system in a way it wasn't before. Yes. Unordinarily in markets, one brings to market something one has produced a surplus of or doesn't need anymore. One trades it for something one wants or needs.

But capital organizes all of production and consumption to its own ends, which is, as you say, the endless production of more surplus value. Yeah.

Yeah, great. We're going to get to a little bit more of that just to cue into our listeners. And I guess kind of the second half, because your book is split kind of half historical and looking particularly at sadism and masochism. And then the second half turns a little bit more to the theoretical side. So those will come back up and some of the interests and cross connections with nomad citizenship.

And perhaps the more utopian what's to be done now and what to hope for will come in a little bit more at the end. But I wanted to start us off a little bit on the historical side to begin with.

I think most listeners are probably familiar with sadism and masochism and their psychological and sexual connotations. In short, the quote unquote perverse experience of pleasure in inflicting or receiving pain, respectively. Less well known, I imagine, is the fact that those terms arose from works of literature that have more complex ambitions than being mere smut.

We'll dive into the particulars of these texts in a moment, but could you unpack briefly how these categories function differently in, I guess, kind of the socio-historical, structural sense you're working with, as opposed to the more narrow psychological sense? Well, that's a crucial reversal for me, actually.

Marcuse may have been one of the first, along with Reich, to retool Freudian categories for socio-historical analysis, particularly analyses of capitalism. But for me, it was Billis' book on Mazok.

called Coldness and Cruelty, where he shows that sadism and masochism aren't inverses one of the other. Once the sexologists and the psychoanalysts and the psychologists take them over, they're simply mirror images of one another. But if you look at the literary works, which is what Deleuze does in his study of Masoch, it's very clear that these are very, very different syndromes.

And so that was a starting point for me to turn these categories inside out and use them to diagnose socio-historical transformations rather than psychological proclivities. And there's a brief comment that Liz makes, one or two brief, very brief comments about the fact that Saad wrote about a century, century and a half before Mazok.

But that's about as far as he goes with it. And so for me, it was the suggestion to look more closely at why sadism would appear before masochism. How is masochism understood to come 150 years later? And so what became clear once I looked at the literary forms of these texts is that although Saad is responding most directly to Kant,

and the early modern culture in France and in Europe, the diagnosis that's available in his work is a diagnosis of capitalist production relations. And these are emerging at the time at different places, different times. But he is very acutely aware of this.

And then Mazok, 150 years later, is writing in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, which is important, but also at the moment in Europe when consumerism becomes essential for the capitalist takeoff.

And Mazelka was a very, very popular writer in France, a contemporary of Baudelaire's. And they are both addressing what happens to society when it becomes grounded in the market.

And so consumerism is diagnosed as a masochistic formation, whereas, and sadism applies to capitalist consumption, excuse me, to capitalist production. Production, yeah. Yeah. And

These are behavior patterns. It's a stretch, although I do explore this briefly in my book. It's a stretch to call all capitalists sadists, but there's...

there's no question that the behaviors that capitalists engage in are sadistic in the terms that Saad offers in his writings, just as consumerism is masochistic as a behavior in the terms that Mazok offers in his texts. So there's a de-individualization or a de-personification of these categories, and they're now

looking at, they're now used to diagnose institutionalized patterns of behavior, not to characterize people's identities or label them as a sadist or a masochist. Yes. Yeah. And just, I guess, kind of like put a pin on that. That's an often, you know, people read Dill's and Guattari's work, the two big texts, Antietapist and A Thousand Plateaus, and they're

They have a subheading of capitalism and schizophrenia. And I think a very similar thing, as they say time and time again within the text, is

is how they're treating schizophrenia as well. It's like, this isn't a, we're not talking about schizophrenics. I think Deliz, you know, famously says, I've never seen a schizophrenic, you know, but it's more of the, as you say, like the pattern of behaviors and the structural, I guess, kind of protocols under which these things take place. Yes. That is more important than the, let's position that and pin that to a specific group

individual that has a specific issue. You know, if we're in anti-Oedipus, it's, you know, triangulating it between mommy and daddy, you know, in the Oedipus complex and trying to, I guess, kind of contain, in a certain sense, larger patterns within and individualize them in a certain way. Yeah, switch for Deleuze and Guattari as anathema. Actually, they say we have never seen a schizophrenic in anti-Oedipus, which is blatantly not true because

I got to retweet it. It's at Laborde Clinic all the time. But the point is exactly the one you made, which is not talking about classifying individuals. And they're certainly not talking about the horrors of schizophrenia as a mental illness. They're talking about much broader patterns of behavior. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No. Fantastic. Yeah.

I guess to kind of like dive into the, you know, pull out some of the things you just brought up with the specific historical moments. I guess first off, I want to ask, can you tell us a little bit about the texts from which sadism and masochism come from? What was going on in the world at the time of the publication? What genres are they in dialogue with? And what does an attention to the form of expression of these works reveal? Yeah.

Okay, that's a lot to unpack, but here's the start of it. What Deleuze is able to show in his comparative study of the literature of Saad al-Mas'aq is that they are worlds apart. Saad's works always take place in institutions. There are a lot of characters involved, whereas in Mas'aq's works there are basically two characters, the masochist and the woman that he contracts to punish him.

And in the institutions that Saad is writing about, there are two distinct classes of characters. Primary and secondary characters is what I call them, but they are those who are wedded to sentiment and...

And his target there is Rousseau, Rousseau's natural man. And those are the secondary characters who are tortured by the primary characters who are strictly rational and are trying to apply Kant's categorical imperative to interpersonal relations. So Sade is in dialogue with Kant most of all, although, as I say, one of his targets is Rousseau. And what he's going to do is to sort of flip Sade

The utopian ambitions of Kant's moral philosophy is categorical imperative. And instead of producing something which is obviously good, he's going to produce something that is patently terrible. So this distinction between the primary and secondary characters is at the center of these institutional narratives that...

that Saad tells us, that Saad recounts for us. And

What becomes clear is that the primary characters are treating the secondary characters strictly as means to their own ends. They are objectifying them and using them just to produce endless scenes of pleasure for them and torture for the victims. And in the context of early modern Europe, this is a very important

This maps onto the way that natural and human resources are being objectified and treated strictly as means to the end of surplus value accumulation in the hands of capitalists. So you have an older feudal arrangement when there was a personal tie of fealty between serfs and landowners, serfs and nobility. And although there was a lot of variety in terms of how well these

These reciprocal responsibilities were played out. That was a personal relationship, and this is what capitalist production is going to eliminate. By purchasing labor power, not owning the laborer,

Capital will treat people as means of production, variable capital, strictly as factors of production. And the same thing will apply to all natural resources, not just human resources. Natural resources will also be treated strictly as factors of production. And in fact, this is the moment when European capital is beginning to blanket the globe

categorizing, cataloging, and preparing natural resources for their use in generating surplus value. So that's a very clear cut, the difference between primary and secondary characters, the fact this is an endless process of objectification and extraction of pleasure in the psychodynamic sphere, surplus value in the political economic sphere.

Very clear-cut mapping of this onto the beginnings of capitalist production relations. And then if you look at the novels of Mazok, totally different. As I said, just two characters, the masochist and the woman-manager.

hired or convinced to punish him. And rather than being in an institutional setting with lots of characters, it's a domestic sphere, very intimate. And instead of an endless process, this is a contract between the masochist and the torturer, which has very specific parameters.

And the fact that it's in the domestic sphere is very important because at the time that Mazok is writing and becoming tremendously popular throughout Europe, this is the moment when the domestic interior becomes a sign of status.

And the decoration of the interior is going to determine one's social standing more than family name, more than land ownership, and so forth and so on. Yeah, like step into the parlor and see a nice couch and here's the piano and my wife can play. Yes, exactly. Yep. And this...

This is not just true of Mazok, but the description of interiors becomes a very important part of the novel at this time in the 19th century. But also, this is a moment at which the Victorian novel begins to revolve around suspense.

There's no suspense in Saad's novels. It's just one scene of torture after another, interspersed with long diatribes rationalizing what they're doing. But in Mazak's novels, everything is suspense. Almost nothing happens. There are elaborate descriptions of interior decor. And suspense was becoming a key feature of the Victorian novel in general because there

of the interest in determining whether investments will pay off. The thing about a capital investment is you don't know what it's worth. You are projecting what it's worth into the future. And as often as not, your expectations are betrayed. And so Mazok is writing in this context where suspense is already a key element of investment.

of the novel. And what he does is to, instead of focusing on investment and the question of whether an investment will pay off, and as often as not, those investments are investments in marriage as well as something more strictly economic. But for Mazog, he's interested in the domestic interior and the role of consumption and

in constituting one's identity. Now, for us, especially under the impact of advertising, which also emerges just about this time, but doesn't really take off until a few decades later,

But the construction of identity based on consumerism is exactly what Mazok is targeting here. And the fact that we still base a lot of our sense of identity on what we consume or what we are able to consume,

is what Mazok is directing our attention to because you may well be able to constitute a sense of identity through the commodities you purchase,

But every purchase actually just realizes profit on capital investment and increases the power of capital over your life, over society as a whole. So consumerism is linked with masochism just the way that production is linked with sadism via the literary forms of these two works.

And the focus on literary form, to get to I think the last of your questions, enables one to de-individualize, de-personify these behaviors and also to detach them for the most part from any references to sex at all.

and to look at them to substitute for the psychosexual dynamics, the socio-historical dynamics, which is the only way you can explain the difference between the novels of Sade and the novels of Mazog. Because if you look at the psychological definitions, getting pleasure from inflicting pain or getting pleasure from getting pain,

That can't explain any difference in the time these books were written, the formal features of them, which are so distinctive.

And so that's what the turn to the formal enabled me to do in terms of the diagnosis.

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Yeah, no. And just to like, I guess, pull out, I guess, a couple of threads from that. And I'm sorry. Yeah, that's that is there's a lot packed into that first question. And you went through all all three components. That was beautiful.

I mean, some things to like, I guess, kind of unpack or like on the side of sadism. I mean, you brought up the categorical imperative of Kant. A lot of that seems to or it's an attempt to base moral judgment within reason. Right. Yes. Which is just like bring out what you said. There's like these there. You know, it's a very punctuated text where there are moments of.

you know, a spectacle of torture that is then followed up by a rationalization. Like I'm just, I'm not even, it's not me. I'm following reason or I'm just battling in a certain sense. Yeah. And then the shift in Mazzoc where there's this kind of like

What makes these things, I think it's really interesting dynamic where we have simultaneously consumption, but we're being punished in the process of it. And one thing that it always reminds me of, and it's kind of based on the crude

critical race theorists, Fred Moten and Harney have this great bit about like being a bad debtor and the idea of like by entering into the system, you are already kind of doing violence to yourself. So even if you are

you know, in consumption, receiving a surplus, receiving benefits in a certain sense. It's in the process of like entering into said system that is already built to kind of cause you pain is where kind of this like weird, I'm getting pleasure, but I'm simultaneously buying into something that is going to forever like

Continue it. Continue in this suspense of like, I guess, kind of like a long or a slow death, if you will. Yeah. Not necessarily leading to literal death. Well, ultimately. But and it you know, I just I one moment that really jumped out to me in most recent like political process.

in the U.S., the elections, there was a great moment, I believe, it was in one of the debates where Kamala Harris brought up the idea of we're having a new, I can't remember the exact things, but basically it was like a new tax category for single parents or single mothers, right? Which, and I thought that it's a really, like it's a good, I think it kind of brings up this issue of is it good that single mothers who

do absolutely need further, you know, like support, especially from the nation, um, are being recognized and provided with, um, benefits. Yes. But is it also, but is it also being within a larger system that is creating the conditions where they are, you know, are being neglected? Yes. And it's this, I, this like dialectic or this tension between, um,

recognized, but in the act of being recognized, you're already, I guess, wedding yourself to a larger structure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Predicated on it. Yes. And in fact, I think I may mention in passing once in Louisville because I didn't develop it, but the modern state can also be considered in terms of this masochistic dynamic because as you say, you can seek to have your rights recognized by the state, but

But every time someone gets their rights recognized by the state, it increases the power of the state over more and more and more domains of social life. So there's also a masochistic dynamic to being a citizen of a modern state.

which is akin to the economic dynamic that I focus on. Oh, no, absolutely. And that's, I guess, just to bring that also back to the Moten and Harney, that's from their book, The Undercommons, which that's kind of the importance of the undercommons. You know, it's like we there's a collectivity that is

below the threshold of the state or kind of operating in the interstices of the state. Yeah, and the reason they privilege that is not to be like,

You know, you know, like we shouldn't be recognized. They're not trying to be imperceptible and like a like a literal I don't want to be recognized. But it's the idea of, as you just said, the recognition within a state or within a capitalist market, what have you, is already predicated on forfeiting and making more powerful the very thing that's causing you pain. Yes, yes. And the undercommons is more is.

More in line with what I talk about in No Man's Citizenship about ways of avoiding axiomatization.

and trying to work out ways of making a living or surviving without becoming dependent on the capitalist market. So the undercommons is very, maybe less political economic, but it's definitely along the same lines. Yeah, and I think that also brings up, you know, kind of to foreshadow briefly as you brought it up, the difference between a capitalist market and capitalism.

like a post-capitalist market. The market is not inherently bad in, in to like, I guess, paint out some of the, the synonyms here is it's not so much recognition would, is like the condition of being in the market. You know, it's great that people can be recognized, but when you're being recognized by a market that is predicated on accumulating surplus value, that's the same thing where it's like,

when kamala harris was like we're going to have this tax or if i can't remember if it was tax exemption or what um but it's like that's great i like they do deserve support absolutely but it's built in the system the the implication there is that by being recognized you're already giving it more power so just to like line out it's yeah it's um it's the same thing in uh

People getting jobs, you want to say, oh, yeah, well, that's great. You got a job. There are jobs available. But then on the other hand, what are the conditions of work in that job? And inevitably, except for minor exceptions, you're going to be increasing the power of capital over yourself and over others. So, yeah, it's that ambiguity or ambivalence aspect.

Not to say schizophrenia, which is what it is. I mean, it's that split between the horrors of work and the supposed compensations of consumption that I think is one way of understanding the schizophrenic nature of capitalism, although it's not the one that Dittl and Guattari themselves talk most about. Yeah, right.

I guess we've kind of already talked a little bit about how these two sociocultural historical formations, sadism and masochism, relate to capitalism. So I think I'll instead, I guess, to link those together a little bit. I don't know. There's some stuff in that you have that I think is very important, especially as we move forward in our discussion of the.

how consumerism or the masochist side is an important response to overproduction on the sadistic side. Yes. Yeah. Well, there are two ways, at least two ways to think about the compensatory relationship between masochistic consumerism and capitalism in general. One is that consumerism

Remember, the masochistic scenario takes place in the domestic sphere at home, which is where you're consuming. At least at the time, that's where the primary locus of consumption was. But what that is, the haven in the heartless world is the term that was used to characterize how the domestic sphere was supposed to compensate for the brutal competition and exploitation in the labor market.

So that's one way. That's the sort of the motive for masochistic consumerism, compensating. Living well is the best revenge is the tagline for that aspect of it. But the other is that capitalism needs consumerism once it gets started.

It cannot sell the goods that it overproduces unless it convinces people to define their identity in terms of consuming more and more stuff. And so it's definitely, again, it's no accident, it's no historical accident that Mazok writes 150 years after Saad when capitalist production relations are

not completely established, but well on their way to getting established. And there needs to be a boost to consumerism in order to prevent crises of overproduction from tanking the whole system. Yeah. Yeah. And that comes up, you know, in the

Kind of the as we're going to as we're, you know, nearing especially this like as we're going to discuss the ever expanding like connection of capital with global colonialism and then eventually globalization. These are all, I think, part and parcel of it's not just, you know, the transition to we have colonialism.

And that's resource extraction. That's like one way of framing it. But it's also these are new markets. Yes, we are. We've taken all these resources. We've made them. Now we have too many.

Like we've already made all this is that we're recording this the day after the Super Bowl. So the Chiefs lost, but we already have all these T-shirts that say the Chiefs won. And I think that it's well known, or at least it was when I was growing up, that what happens to those T-shirts is they get sent to the third world.

And then it can be written off as a humanitarian gesture. You know, it's like that is we now have a surplus. We have these T-shirts. No one's going to buy them. We need someone to consume them in some way. And it would be great if they would buy it on Amazon. But since that isn't going to happen, let's find another way to generate at least some profit, whether it's cultural, humanitarian, you know, whatever. Right. Right. So...

And also with that, to kind of like get to the second chapter of the historical bit.

you bring up the idea of borderline conditions. Yes. So could you tell us a little bit about those and we can, yeah, definitely. What, what's, what the novels of Sod and Mazok do is give us a viewpoint on a structure of the psyche, which is, which is strengthened by the particular protocols that each, each of them engage in. But, but,

Already, the second generation of psychoanalysts following Freud realized that the kinds of patients they were seeing were very different from the neurotics that Freud focused on.

And neurosis and perversion are parallel syndromes. They both involve strengthening the ego, one by doing exactly the opposite of what the superego says, the other by trying to disavow the superego and to champion the ego. That's consumerism, the construction of identity, right?

based on consumption. But as the market drives production and consumption farther and farther apart, and this is particularly aggravated when you get to fully global capitalism the way we have now, the psyche is no longer strengthened in a neurotic or perverse formation. It's characterized by splitting. And split personality is the old term for the most dramatic version of this. But the...

But splitting becomes the more general feature of patients that the second generation psychoanalysts saw starting in the early 20th century and has continued up today. So what happens is that the psyche splits apart. Parts of the psyche are more or less non-communicating with one another.

And this is one of the reasons that Melanie Klein, one of the second generation psychoanalysts, became such an important reference point for the psychoanalysis of Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari as well, because she talks a lot about the psyche in its original form before it gets consolidated.

And how the patients that she and others at that time saw reverted to splitting so as not to have to deal with circumstances and traumas they couldn't handle.

So, borderline conditions are the characteristic of this, let's say, from the early 1900s on, increasingly, is the defense mechanism that the psyche reverts to in order to try to salvage some sense of self and some sense of experience. And

That diagnosis was then taken up by Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut to talk about narcissism. Kernberg is most explicit about calling it borderline narcissism. But then this category became, in the hands of Christopher Lash and others, a tool for looking at the way capitalist culture was evolving throughout the 20th century, basically.

So instead of having strength, ego strengthening formations like perversion and neurosis, you have instead ego weakening, splitting, defensive splitting,

which then can call up a variety of different kinds of reactions. And I talk about three of them in the book that seem very prevalent. One of them is the version of narcissism that Christopher Lash and others have already used to talk about capitalist culture. I also talk about fascism

racism and other supremacisms as forms of borderline supremacism. And then the third category, the third response is a different form of narcissism, which has been written about, but is not as well known, perhaps, as the Christopher Lasch

critique of narcissism, but Marcuse and Norman O'Brown and others, Henry Malcolm, have looked at the positive side of narcissism. And so there's a polymorphous narcissistic response to borderline conditions, which is in some ways diametrically opposed to borderline supremacism and

And secondary narcissism or borderline narcissism as it's been used to diagnose culture. And that's the more hopeful side of the development. So you have very discrete formations with sadism and masochism. And then you have, as you move into the 20th century and 21st century,

uh, welter of phenomena of which I've picked out three because they, they seem to, um, to capture some important elements of the way, uh, the way culture is unfolding. Yeah. And kind of with that, uh, if I can, let me see if I can bring it up. Uh,

me trying to translate into uh and into just i guess kind of like plain english with that is like with the idea of the super super ego that's like uh like a perfect ideal that one should live up to so you talk about one kind of is it turning away and then the other one is kind of i like i guess a

I don't know if it's quite a full identification or a projection onto it, but with is would it be fair to say that like borderline narcissism is kind of, I guess, a modern instance of that would be like extreme individualism.

Yes.

Individualism. The other one is I am just like you because I'm part of the Supreme Group. I'm the white South African or the nativists, you know, etc.,

Yeah, that's good. The way splitting operates differently there, because in the case of borderline narcissism, individualism, you have what is at base a very weak ego structure that's splintered into these different fragments. And so you create a kind of an overcompensatory narcissistic personality, self-aggrandizing, self-centered.

as a way of compensating and making up for it. Whereas the borderline supremacism is actually in some ways a more severe form of splitting. What happens is that the self identifies with the superego and projects elements of itself onto others, and then it subscribes to the punishment of those others by the superego.

So you have the South African landlord or whatever. You have the fascist who's punishing communists and Jews and so forth. And in the book, I talk about, I mean, I do look at the psychodynamics of Nazi fascism.

But I also look at the psychodynamics of the Ku Klux Klan here in this country, which is a very, very, very close parallel. And then I also look at Christian fundamentalism, which also shares the same structure of projection. You pick a feature of yourself. Mm-hmm.

your homosexual proclivities, let's say, and you project them onto someone else and you punish them there. And so the Christian fundamentalist has what other bugaboo of the day? Is it trans people or it's gay people or whatever it is. Or Asian migrants. Yes, that's right. You project that onto someone else and have it punished. And you identify with the punishing authority figure that is going to

So those are the two different ways that splitting is mobilized by these defenses.

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Yeah, and I mean, with just to like, I guess, further highlight some of the things you brought up with the connection between Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, etc. I study music primarily, and that's one of the big things that often comes up in relation to things like blackface minstrelsy in the 19th century. The people doing that were not, it wasn't so much like, you know, like white southerners. It was predominantly black.

working class and immigrants in white immigrants in the north and a lot of it has to do with this kind of like weird projection and identification with those doing the punishment it's like I'm I in you know plenty people have talked about the intersections of class and race and how race can be used to break up class solidarity and vice versa yeah and a lot of that would come from something like

Um, I'm a white poor, you know, I'm, I'm Irish, you know, relatively white and, you know, 1950 or 1850s or whatever. Um,

But if all of a sudden there are all of these free black workers, I'm now in competition with them. I do blackface minstrelsy. I'm able to sure up my own ego in a certain sense by identifying with my boss. You know, I'm going to punish the bad worker or the poor in a certain sense. But yeah, no, that's yeah. It's a very interesting dynamic that unfortunately has.

Plenty of resident. Resident. Yes. Yes.

All right. Moving a little bit into that, into the theoretical half. So the first half, we've sketched out some of and we've already gotten into a lot of the theoretical stuff as well. These are very intermeshed arguments you have here. Yes. So in Antioedipus, Thelus and Quattari very clearly claim that there are only two things in the world. And this is kind of in short, there is desire and the social.

So just speaking in plain English here, these are two large conceptual categories that often pop up in various guises throughout their work. And as we turn to the theoretic half of the text, I just wanted to mark a similar structure in forming those two chapters. So you have the psychodynamics of markets and then the sociodynamics of markets.

Yes. So this is a fair to keep it kind of casual for the podcast. Could you give us a glimpse into this relation between desire and the social and what that means in relationship to the capitalist market? And that's broad. Yes. Well, no, that's it's a good start because.

In the Antietapist, they are taking on Freud or psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan. Hence, Antietapist. Yes, that's right. The first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. And when they say there, what they want to say is there's only desire and the social. What they're trying to sidestep or really eliminate from consideration is the notion that the psyche is formed in the family.

that the determinations of the psyche are basically familial and that then things happen when those dynamics get projected outward onto the social. So in the view that they are trying to dispense with, there are three terms, psyche, family, society. And when they say there's only desire in the social, that's what they're saying. The family is just a relay. There's society and there's desire, the individual, the psyche, family.

And desire immediately invests the entire social formation, not just the family, and then get projected outward. So that's one of the main thrusts of that argument, that there's only desire and the social. The other side of the coin, though, is that at the same time that they are trying to correct Freud, they're also trying to correct Marx, right?

Yeah.

with what you do at work, what you do at the mall, that desire is part of the economic system and can't be relegated to either family life or a pathology. And one of their critiques of Wilhelm Reich's work is that although they think he was asking the right questions, that he went astray by thinking that desire was irrational.

That it was what produced problems. And if you could just get rid of the irrationality of desire, things would be better. On the contrary, what Liz and Kwasi want to insist is that desire is everywhere. They say at one point that every time a banker fondles his dossiers, he's getting off, right? That it's a tiring thing.

So that's the target, or those are the targets, Freud and Marx, that that phrase is supposed to realign so that we understand that desire invests the entire social field. It's not restricted to family or to the psyche whatsoever.

And that the family is not needed to intervene between social dynamics and psychodynamics. Well, and furthermore, that the family is also part of the social, you know, like like the family is not an innate thing.

normal, like natural. Right. You know, like I, and Engels has written about that on the formation of the family. Yes, and in fact, there is a great redraw on Morgan and Engels'

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's very much one of the resources they draw on to try to dispel the notion that the family is somehow a separate unit. Yes, yeah, where you can contain much like an institution of some kind, you know, that's where all those things happen. And that can't lead to revolution, say, because if desire were able to, you know, as they're kind of talking about, and they're like, no, it's

in the entire structure like you know desire yes and a social are like two sides of the same coin in a certain sense yes if desire were allowed to like openly i don't know display itself within the structure that could lead to something like revolution yes yeah in the same way that desire is also integral to fascism as they say it's like the fascist

Like they desired Nazism like in Germany, right? Like, yes, it is there. And it's not just in the family and it gets played on in different ways. Yeah, that's a very good point because they insist that the masses weren't fooled, weren't tricked into desiring fascism. They desired fascism. And in the circumstances when Nazis,

Germany's recovered from a tremendous defeat in World War I, and the Nazi party revs up the economy in extraordinary fast pace,

you can understand why people would desire that. And the same thing would apply then to voters in the last election. They weren't fooled into voting for Donald Trump. They knew perfectly well what he stood for. He wasn't, you know, disguising anything. They wanted whatever it is they got. Yeah. Oh, and I thought that that, I remember, you know, it's kind of a,

Like I grew up in the middle of rural Indiana and my my partners from Manhattan, you know, a very different world. Right. And we were talking. And so I grew up in a Trump territory. Let's put it that way, you know. And I mean, he's an athlete. You know, I hate the guy that that's not me.

But, you know, like the reaction and this is something that often happens with like especially the liberal establishment is like and Deleuze actually and Guattari talk about it quite a bit of like, oh, they're voting against their interests. Like, no, they're not. That's not what they're voting on. You know, they're like, right. And that came out.

when the whole like they're eating the cats they're eating the dogs thing in ohio which is bullshit and then like they had um uh jd vance on a talk show he goes well yeah i know it's not happening but we're creating a problem or like we're giving voice to a problem and what they're giving voice to is desire you know like it's not about the reality of it it's like

The you know, insofar as they say that, you know, the masses aren't fooled. They actually desire fascism in a similar way. It's like, well, if you know, that's a great example. They openly said basically, well, we know it's not actually happening, but look how excited everyone is about this. Right. You know, and like that kind of came out recently. Yeah.

And yeah, I just wanted to, I guess, kind of note in passing, I love the way you framed it as like they're kind of both correcting Freud and Marx because Freud gets a, I think it's safe to say, a much harder time in Antiochus. Sure, absolutely right. But you're, I read Antiochus and Spectres of Marx, the Derrida text, and it's interesting that you bring that up because it's like, no, they are actually also correcting Marx and trying to

I guess put a finger on us on the similar point where, uh, the, if we're, if we have like kind of this, um, we have desire and we can keep that in the family and what happens on the market, that's just above board, normal, you know, that's the social it's everything's okay. And, and Derrida really tracks that through marks of like his fear of this spirit, this, this,

non this immaterial thing that is both the both what allows, you know, appropriation and exploitation of workers that he's like, well, if everyone could just see that they're being that money is being taken from them, they will they'll rise up.

And it's this it's a similar type of thing where they they want to keep both of those aspects, such as I and the social in play. And it's not about collapsing all this. It's not about all desire and it's not about all social. It's about keeping those two things in tension. Yes, exactly. Showing how they interrelate. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And.

I mean, that kind of leads us to the last chapter of your book that opens up some of these socio-dynamics. And I think many, many readers of Volus and Katari's work engage with it and they have the kind of

glib takeaway that, oh, they're advocating for like hedonistic anarchism where everything goes, which is, you know, just like the, you know, kind of the baseline. Yeah.

comes out a little bit more an anti-Oedipus. It's a little bit more of a critical work, but I think that your work in particular, and this is shifting over to a thousand plateaus where they have a little bit more cautionary approach, uh, in their tone, at least, um, where you definitely like, uh, nicely embody their exhortations that one must proceed with caution and sobriety. Um, so in detangling capitalist markets from just markets in general,

Can you talk to us a little bit about capitalist markets, apparatuses of capture, what are axiomatics? There are many ways we can kind of approach that. Well, those are two good ways in right there that you've mentioned. One of the things that's fascinating about a pair of books called Capitalism and Schizophrenia is how, in the eight years that separated them, how much their thought changed. As I point out,

schizophrenia doesn't even merit an index entry in a thousand plateaus. They almost never mention it. And so for me, it's been very interesting to try to figure out what has changed between antiediapers and a thousand plateaus. Caution is certainly part of it.

But one of the things is that they realized that as capitalism evolved, and particularly under the impact of computers and the digital revolution, schizophrenic scrambling codes was not going to have enough leverage against the capitalist social formation. So they will pretty much stop talking about schizophrenia after Antioedipus.

And schizophrenia was itself misunderstood by a lot of readers as just anything goes. But what they did insist upon was that, even in the Antietapus, was that lines of flight, schizophrenic lines of flight, had to intersect with others and sort of attain a critical mass to have any impact on history. Yeah, the collective. Yes, exactly. There had to be a collective aspect to that.

But the other two changes that are, I think, even more dramatic, or at least as dramatic between Volume 1 and Volume 2, is the fact that in The Thousand Plateaus, capital is called an apparatus of capture, whereas in Antioedipus, it would be called the socius, the focal point of investment of desire in any social formation.

But, and this is also in the first volume, they talk about schizophrenia as the universal tendency in history. When they get to a thousand plateaus, they are in a way against history. Each plateau has a date on it that can't be lined up in any linear fashion. And so what they say is that it's not history that's universal, not schizophrenia. It's the market. It's the only universal thing in capitalism.

And that's why the calling capital an apparatus of capture is so important. What they are underlining is that there are dynamics of the market which have to do with buying and selling and so forth.

And that these dynamics get captured by capital and redirected to produce surplus value to be privately appropriated instead of wealth to be enjoyed collectively.

And so the apparatus of capture, calling capital an apparatus of capture, really enables us to drive a wedge between market dynamics and capitalist market dynamics, which is what both of these books of mine have been focused on. Now, the other transformation has to do with axiomatics itself. And let me start by saying that

In Antioedipus, in the first volume, there is one axiomatic. Axiomatic is a singular. There is the axiomatic is the capitalist axiomatic.

And that when we get to Thousand Plateaus, there's an economic axiomatic, which is capitalist. There's a legal axiomatic, and there's a scientific axiomatic. So there are three of them in play in the second volume, which for me becomes very important. So what is axiomatics? Why is it useful for them to begin with? An axiomatic in mathematics is a structure of propositions that are...

are axiomatic in the sense that they are given. There's no justifying them. You either adopt them or not. And once you've adopted a certain set of axiomatic propositions, you can generate any number of what mathematicians call models of realization. You can instantiate this abstract structure, the axiomatic, by plugging in contents to its terms and seeing how they interact, seeing what the result is.

And they see capitalism as an axiomatic of that nature. Yeah. That is to say, you have two abstract categories, liquid wealth on one hand and indeterminate labor power on the other. Mm-hmm.

And you can put them together in any number of ways. You can invest in this kind of factory or in that kind of factory, in which case you'll have to train labor power in this way or that way. And you'll produce these goods or that goods, those goods. So the axiomatic, the capitalist axiomatic, now talking about just the singular one in the Antioedipus,

is using axiomatics for mathematics as a way for them to account for the extraordinary flexibility of capitalism and how it can move from producing one thing to another, move from one country to another country. Because it's abstract and because it's axiomatic in that sense, it can be realized in any number of different models and

Which they include the socialist states of Eastern Europe, you know, state capitalism a la China, the former Soviet Union, our capitalism, liberal democratic capitalism. All of these are different models of realization for a capitalist axiomatic, which as it at its base is just bring together liquid capital and resources, natural and human, and produce surplus value. Yeah. If I could jump in this.

Just really quickly there, because I mean, you're this is beautiful the way you're setting it up. I just want to like throw in one example that I think is, I guess, kind of useful here in the idea of its flexibility and its abstraction. You know, often what is one example? And I want you to I want you to continue. But the I think of things like rainbow capitalism, where, you know, at one point there might have been like like.

If you are going to sell apparel to gay people and the gay community,

That is bad inherently. And I'm upset about the content of what, you know, like people would have moral oppositions to the content of what is being sold. But then you get places like Target and they're like, well, I don't know. Rainbow flags sell pretty good. I don't actually, you know, I don't actually give a shit if people are gay or not, but I know they'll buy. So it's this idea of like bringing those two things together where it's less about the content. It's not about a way of life. It's not so much about,

making people happy and healthy and like feeling connected in the world. It's, you know, the cynical side of that, of the abstraction is like, I don't actually care. Will it make money? It's just like throwing an example. Sorry. No, that's great because this is, this is what they talk about the cynical side of capitalist perversion because, um,

Now, this may be jumping ahead a little bit, but there are two sides to the market. Or put it this way, one way of distinguishing capitalist markets from markets in general is the cynical perversion of capitalist markets, which is we don't care what we produce. As long as people buy it, we're good. And so there's a radical cynicism to do with capitalist production since it's really aiming for something abstract, which is more surplus value.

But the other side of the market is this, that if one could free markets from capital, what it does is it lifts us above subsistence economy. Because if you don't have a market, you have to produce everything that you need yourself. So there's a sense in which, and I make this distinction between perversity and perversion in the book,

Perversion is what capital does to markets. Perversity is a feature of markets because it turns you away from directly consuming what you produce and opens up a whole world of possible objects of consumption to you. And that's perversity in a good sense, what Freud and then Marcuse and Norman O'Brown did.

at the extreme, would call polymorphous perversity, that you get satisfaction not just from ingesting nourishment,

but from enjoying Mexican cuisine one night and then Thai cuisine the next night or whatever. So perversity is the positive side of markets in my terminology, and perversion is what capital, as an apparatus of capture, imposes on markets. And your example of selling rainbow capitalism or green capitalism, there are a number of versions of it. Sure.

is that capital will go as far as it can to accommodate demands as long as it can profit from them. But it doesn't change, as you said very much a few minutes ago, it doesn't change the system. You're just buying into the system in a different way. And so it doesn't change things.

So and with that, so like we've transitioned from, I guess, kind of like the or with the abstraction. And it seems to be like in the first in Antiochus, that is the axiomatic is like that singular. So when we move to the multiple, could you could you talk a little bit more about like when when capitalism is now an apparatus of capture that can act?

add-on and remove axioms. What does that look like a little bit? I mean, I guess we've kind of talked about it. Well, this is an important feature of the capitalist axiomatic that explains its flexibility, but also the fact that it can span the globe and operate in different ways in different regions. How can I put this? Well... I mean, if I...

I don't know enough about this to like ad lib as much, but like I think of like tariffs as perhaps being something. Well, yeah. Like something that can be turned on and off. Yes. Let me begin with a slightly, I think, a simpler one to deal with, which is the one that they that the Liz and Grothory mentioned, I think, once or twice, which is.

So you have a capitalist enterprise which realizes that if it produces its cars or car parts in Mexico, it has much cheaper labor costs. So it'll send its factory over to Mexico.

And then this is what happened under Clinton. You had a massive globalization of supply chains and the working class in this country were decimated by that shift. And let's say, to jump ahead a little bit, let's say some canny legislators enacted a law in the legal axiomatic that said that workers

I don't know, jobs couldn't be shipped overseas or parts couldn't be shipped back. That's what tariffs do. It prevents people from shipping things back that are produced elsewhere, which is supposed to then bolster the prospects for the working class here. Yeah, right.

So you can add and subtract axioms that way. You say, okay, I can get cheaper labor costs there. I'll move my factory over there and sort of capture that working population in the axiomatic.

And then here a legislature comes along and makes that axiom unprofitable. So you have to withdraw that axiom and figure out some other axiom to institute to defend your profit margins. So we've already jumped ahead to the way two of those axioms interact, but it's very important to understand that

not only is the axiomatic abstract, but it's an open system. It's always susceptible to changes. And the thing is that capital changes its axioms much faster than most legislators can adapt to. And so, you know, the states...

are always playing catch up and they're getting farther and farther behind in my opinion. But the point of the flexibility is that it enables capital to move around and to find the most propitious places to extract surplus value. And it's very difficult to constrain it, to rein it in. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And I can't remember in which text this comes out. And just like, I guess, add another example of this idea of like a legal axiom that is in a certain sense boxing in the the the capitalist production axiom. Right. There are things like carbon taxes, you

limits that are put on things that constrain the system in such a way that offset some of the most like glaring aspects of like, and this, this is partially if I just like, you know,

Another thing with this is like the great irony of the neoliberal use of the term free markets. Oh, yes. It's not, you know, as what did Trump do? He starts talking about how they need to free up capitalists from capitalism.

state axioms that are hampering their ability to fuck over people. So it's like free for the capitalist class in a certain sense, but that does not mean that it's actually free. Absolutely not. And I want to get to that in a minute because that was a great point. But the other thing I wanted to say is that this axiomatic works on the consumption side too. You have something like hip-hop, which started out to be a very contestatory cultural form

now completely absorbed into the capitalist axiomatic. So you just have the music industry extending its axioms to gobble up or to capture anything that has a potential market, even though the content may seem to be countercultural or anti-capitalist or whatever. So that's another good example of the way the axiomatic is operating on an abstract level. And

And cynically, if you will. And therefore, the content is pretty much immaterial. Yeah. Kendrick Lamar just performed at the Halftime Show and I was watching it. I'm like,

This is what the lyrics don't like. Why are there all these flags here? Like American flag, everything's red, white and blue. And I know and like all of the New York Times are saying, well, you see, he was winking at and critiquing. I'm like, I don't think that's what's happening here. Yeah. I wasn't convinced by the New York Times either. But yeah. But but the point is that the the axiomatic is abstract, as you say, and therefore it can accommodate just about anything. Right. Yeah.

But to go back to your point about the legal axiomatic, you're absolutely right that on a number of counts, one is that there are legal axioms that constrain capital, Clean Air Act, you know, all kinds of regulations, etc.

consumer protection things. So one of the differences between the first and second volume is that instead of looking at economic formations as totalities, modes of production, they say we have to understand social formations in terms of machinic processes. And the same is true, I would argue, although they don't go quite this far, for the state. The state isn't simply the tool of a ruling class, even if proportionally it is.

Because illegal axioms can be instituted that constrain capital, as you say. And in fact, there's a book that came out five or six years ago called The Code of Capital that shows that not only are markets not free under capitalism, they are constructed in order for capital to be able to take a privileged position over all other economic actors in society. So the market is...

structured to favor capital. And so one of the things that I don't get to it in this book, but in subsequent essays, I've suggested that there could be legal axioms, for example, that would grant life rights to

And then capital would have to address those rights and make allowances for them. And in fact, there have been a number of countries, like there are maybe half a dozen by now, Panama and the United Kingdom are the most recent that I know of, that have in fact enacted rights of life.

And this could represent, if it expanded, a legal constraint of the legal axiomatic on the capitalist axiomatic. Yes. Yeah, and that reminds me of like

You know, just like it's a similar type of thing where the idea of granting and I can't say that I actually remember in detail what's going on. The idea of like granting an environment rights, even not just like people like right of life, but like this this mountain or national park is whatever has rights is it seems crazy to a lot of people. But then you think about it and you're like.

What what did we do when we said that corporations were individuals? You know, and it's like a similar type of thing. It's like, well, we kind of it's a similar type of thing where you have a legal infrastructure that is bestowing certain rights and privileges, defenses and offenses onto capital, onto corporations in a certain way. So what happens when we start instead of.

You know, we started bestowing those things on places that they would want to exploit as raw material.

That would be like one way of bringing these two things together, right? Yes. And that's what these – Panama and the United Kingdom, I may have misspoken, but when they talk about right to life, they're talking about more than human life. They're talking about nature, if you will, but life with a capital L or environments. And that's potentially – I say potentially –

Very important. And in fact, generally speaking, the European Union has many, the legal axiomatic of the European Union places many more constraints on capital there than the legal axiomatic here does. And one of the things that Pister points out in her book on the code of capital is that

um, capitalists will seek the legal structure that's most conducive to their privilege. Yes. And, and, and, um, and incorporate there. Yeah. And I, I, I can't help, but, you know, think of, I was just listening earlier to, I think it was democracy. Now they had a, uh,

a journalist on talking about, I think what he called the PayPal, PayPal gang of all of the South Africans, Elon Musk, what's his name? Oh, the other,

the other guy, a teal teal, a lot of these like big capitalists and like, despite being born in Germany with teal or South Africa with Musk and all these, you know, they all seem to end up in America, which might be part of this. Like we, to, I guess kind of like put this in perspective of this, like we, they are simultaneously clearly have global ambitions, right?

You know, but why are they local locating themselves here in a certain sense of that? If that kind of makes if that gets to that point of this is a space in which the legal axioms are more conducive.

to capital accumulation and it gives them absolutely and that's why must move his headquarters from california to texas oh yeah on an even smaller scale yes exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah it's um it's bleak you know just just seeing some of the things like i was uh rereading through parts of your text um thinking about

Just the past, you know, I guess month month of of things that have happened. And I'm just like, this is crazy. Like the text has become all the more relevant in ways that are unfortunate.

Yes, they are unfortunate. If only nomad citizenship were becoming more relevant instead, right? No, absolutely. But to connect this discussion of legal axiomatics with one of the prospects that I examine in nomad citizenship, I draw on Gibson Graham's work.

who show that even if we live in quote-unquote a capitalist society, there are many economic activities that are not capitalist. And they spent two books at least foregrounding how there are alternate economies already there, here, within a capitalist society. And

One can imagine legal axiomatics that instead of giving, for example, capitalist production priority over cooperative production,

Would do the exact opposite. Or instead of privileging the corporation as a person, would grant rights to watersheds or aquifers or you name it instead and give them priority over capital. Yes. And so you'd have a very different landscape.

where the legal axiomatic would interact with the capitalist axiomatic in a very different way. Yeah, and I would just add to, with Gibson Graham, I think you also mentioned this, but this was a big book, I guess now 10 years ago. Everyone referred to it as the mushroom book,

is it Antsing? I, it's on my shelf somewhere. Is that mushroom at the end of the world? Yes. A similar thing of like talking about the harvesting of these mushrooms, um, say in like Seattle and Washington, the, what value looks like amongst the hunters, how that gets translated into like a global, um, like how that gets like redistributed. I think they were going to Japan. It's been a while since I've read it. Um,

And how forests, you know, they don't necessarily thrive under those conditions of a very rigid system based on maximizing production. Like if you try to have the socially engineered forest, you end up killing the forest. Yeah. Yeah. That is a similar type of thing of like we're already that is already here in a certain sense. Capitalism isn't.

a monolith in that sense, but it is privileged above all others. Right. Exactly. Which I think, yeah. Yes, exactly. And that's why the notion of a free market is, is a smoke screen. It's an illusion. Yeah. The market, if you look at it, and this is what the book, the code of capital does in detail over several centuries is,

to look at how the legal axiomatic has systematically given privilege to one form of capitalist capital after another. First it was land and then, and now it's technology and now it's derivatives or whatever it is. So the, the, the way the, the legal axiomatic privileges capital is, is,

is an important feature of conceiving it as an apparatus of capture and not as associates. That's why I think the evolution of that thought has been so productive. Ah, yeah. Okay. No, that I'm bringing, it's bringing out some things. It's like, cause in anti-Oedipus capital is like, it's the body. It's the thing that denies all. Right. But,

And so then they talk about like the state and science and this is an antithesis as in service of and, you know, which which it is. But in a thousand plateaus, it is restructured such that capitalism, the end all be all. It is just one among many that is being privileged systematically. Yes. I see that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And this, of course, you know, this comes up every time.

Anytime any corporations being bad and you say you want to boycott something and the government literally puts into law that it's illegal to boycott something. I mean, that's just like, oh, it's a free market. Okay, I'm going to use my choice not to buy from South Africa in the 90s, right? And then they're all like, no, you can't do that by law. Absolutely. You've given away the... I guess that is the...

I guess kind of the most explicit demonstration of what free market means, quote unquote, as opposed to actually being, instead of actually being a free market where like it's focused more on, or it isn't, I think you call it sloped or slanted. I love that. Yeah. Instead of it already being set up in such a way that it is always,

designed to create surplus value and continue accumulation, it's like, well, what if it was just actually even, you know, that, that would actually be a free market, you know, like, but the slope is kind of betraying that. Yeah. And that slope is there because, um,

imperative to produce surplus value to pay debt. I mean, you have outstanding debt, you must produce more and more to pay it off. So that slope is definitely a characteristic of the capitalist market. And if one can imagine a level playing field market, so to speak, where

You wouldn't have that debt to pay off and there wouldn't be any actors who were so big that they could control prices. Yes. Everyone would be a price taker instead of a price maker. So there are all kinds of features about markets. Among them, the fact that they enable in what's called the technical division of labor, they enable us to produce wealth at an unbelievable rate. Yeah.

Now, there's a downside to that, which is environmental, of course. But even – well, there's technology as another axiomatic that's –

is important to recognize as an axiomatic because science and technology can be used to exploit and destroy natural resources, but they also could be designed to conserve or save natural resources. And there again, it's a matter of an abstract system which produces knowledge, and then it's the question of how it's applied, which determines whether it's going to be helpful or hurtful for the environment.

Yeah, that's the and that's the like just to like bring out, you know, it's kind of a weird instead of it just being like science and technology. You know, I feel like at least in I guess I to like historicize it in like post-World War Two were like, oh, science led to the bomb. It led to the space race. There's good, there's bad. But like it's progress to the point where all the scientists are now going, hey, the Earth is on fire.

And all of a sudden it's no longer useful. You know, we have this type of like construction of an alternative science reality where, you know, fracking doesn't cause cancer. And, you know, just to bring out that that distinction of like.

It is, you know, the idea. And I think that because I think this is a, you know, some people are like science all the way. Some people are like science is inherently colonial, which it is. And I'm not trying to poopoo either of those distinctions. But in both cases, the idea of collapsing it entirely of like, no, it's like you need to hold the idea of an abstract or what you might say unbiased, you know, like that idea, that ideal in a certain sense.

And it's not just giving up on that. Like, don't give up on that, but also don't count on it. You know, it's like you need to keep these things in tension where we can try our best to try to understand things and to better life. But yes, I agree, except that I'm not sure. I don't think you can say I'm biased.

Here's the way, I know you have problems about it too, but here's the way the 1,000 Plateaus enables us to think about that. There are two kinds of science or two forms of science, problematic science and state science or royal science. And what they say is that, well, one of the things they say about the interaction between these two is that

Royal science always is fed problems to address by problematic science. Yes. And problematic science says, okay, there's this problem. Where can we look in the abstract scientific knowledge to address this problem? Yes.

But, so what science gets funded? Well, it's science that serves the accumulation of surplus value. One can imagine science being funded to determine the effect of cigarette smoke on lung cancer. Sure. And for a while, that was very effective science. Yeah. In constraining capital. I think that those days may be over with this regime. They don't want science at all, as you said. Right.

But I think it's important to recognize that it's not a matter of being unbiased. It's a matter of which bias is informing science, which bias is funding science, because there are good biases. And science can help us. Science can help us once—I think science can help us if we get the biases right, if we understand what problems—

Environmental problems, for example, health problems, mental health problems have arisen and then men look for science to address it. Yeah, so no, that's an important distinction. Yeah, unbiased wasn't quite the, yeah, as you kind of said, it isn't quite the right terminology. I was thinking of like Max Liberon has this, has a great book. They're a science and technology, indigenous science and technology book.

science and technology studies scientist and scholar. And they talk about like how to continue the work of science with risk. And I guess, yeah, unbiased is not correct. The is not so much the right way of phrasing it, but it's like how to continue that pursuit, which I was characterizing as unbiased in a way that.

actually does like acknowledges the um the the inherent biasness but like still wanting to continue the pursuit and trying to do that ethically in a different yes but which is the yeah the the distinction of uh state versus nomad science uh as well as how they get you know how nomad science is

Used by state science in many ways or and and by capital as well. And this brings us back to the apparatus of capture of like, oh, here's this thing. And it gets captured, brought in, funded in a certain way that then furthers capital accumulation, as opposed to, as you're saying, actually like addressing climate change. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Well, I've loved talking to you, but I understand that it's been a long conversation. So I just want to make sure before we go any further, are there any other aspects from the text that you want to bring out for the listeners? Or, I mean, we've read through this thing a number of times.

Well, I will say just to tie the bow on this notion of science as an axiomatic, that what makes science an axiomatic are two things, maybe. One is that if it succeeds, whatever knowledge is produced is achieved.

valid everywhere. Yes, right. So one of the things that Francis Bacon did at the dawn of modern science was to say, was to suggest that people go around to workshops and learn from artisans what they were doing and then take it back to the laboratory, take it out of context and formulate it in abstract principles that then could be applied anywhere. Right.

And we know that we have basic science, so-called, and then we have applied science and technology, which are models of realization of abstract scientific knowledge. So it corresponds to the structure of an axiomatic, the way Deleuze and Guattari define it, just in the way that we saw the capitalist axiomatic is abstract, its contents are abstract.

And the legal axiomatic is also, in principle, abstract in the sense that everyone is equal before the law. And in principle, laws are promulgated.

to apply to everyone equally and to address problems that everyone has. So the addition of legal and scientific axioms to the analysis of social formations in Thousand Plateaus, I think, was a tremendous step forward and enables us to understand what the legal axioms

I guess you say what the legal axiomatic contributes to capitalism, but better yet, how the capitalist axiomatic is actually founded on based on legal axioms. Yes. And since it is states that control the formulation and enforcement of those axioms, to the extent that the state can be mobilized, um,

for environmental defense, for example. And that's an open question. Can the state be retooled to constrain capitalism with other axioms? But it seems to me that's the opening that A Thousand Plateaus suggests that anti-Oedipus never really got to. I mean, they say at the end of anti-Oedipus, we have no political platform to propose anti-Oedipus.

And it's not as if they propose a political platform in A Thousand Plateaus either, but their analysis is much more nuanced in the second volume. And it does give us, I think, views of how the interaction among these axioms could be changed for the better. Yeah.

Yeah. And just to, I guess, to thread back through sadism as well, as you talked about capitalism also being built on legal and the state on these legal axioms in a similar way. It's like there's a perhaps like a sadistic, you know, if all and I guess to bring it between these two texts, if.

The state and capital in Antioedipus seems like a monolith. That means that anything that looks like a state period is inherently sadistic slash masochistic. It's perverse or it is a perversion. Whereas in A Thousand Plateaus, instead of giving a final answer, it at least decenters that from being the only form or the only, I guess, eh.

I want to say it's the only form of realization, but instead of it being the only thing and the only option is to destroy and, you know, kind of the accelerationist route, it opens up the ability to, in some sense, it provincializes capital to see how these things get rebuilt into, yeah, together. Yeah, very nice. In fact, one of the ways they talk about capitalism

capital in the second volume instead of taking the mode of production as a given as a sort of Hegelian Marxist totality from which you could then deduce the behavior of workers the behavior of whatever banks

They say that we have to analyze social formations in terms of machinic processes and assess the degree to which the social formation attains and maintains its consistency. Consistency is a major term.

And in the second volume, they had already said in the first volume that capitalism arose contingently. Yes. All these things were there and they happened to sort of glom onto one another and then capitalism took off. But in the second volume, capitalism has to maintain and reproduce its consistency. Right.

And this is one of the ways that, well, Deleuze had always been very close to Althusser in many respects. He quotes Althusser there as early as Difference and Repetition. But Althusser insisted on the importance of reproducing the conditions for capital as a necessary feature of capitalist society.

And obviously the state is, and the legislatures are a major, major part of that. But in the second volume, the... Ideological state apparatuses and reproduction. Yeah. Yeah. Reproduction was the centerpiece of that, of that important essay. And...

Do Liz and Guattari take this up in a big way? I'm not sure they actually quote him directly in that book, but the question of consistency, what does it take for a capitalist society to maintain its consistency in the face of corruption?

you know, XYZ and whatever other contingencies. And you can think of right now, climate catastrophe in the insurance industry. How are they going to maintain their consistency in the face of this? Absolutely. So that's, I think, another of the benefits. I mentioned the number of axiomatics that grows from one to three. I mentioned the universal being attached not no longer to history, but to the market.

And the third thing I think would be the emphasis on consistency and the problem that consistency poses to capitalism. Yeah. No, and that's, you just reminded me that's,

The way I've been thinking about especially the idea of nationality and borders, it seems to seems to me to be a like a response to this issue of consistency of like this isn't like the climate catastrophe is coming. We need to be able to block in and out those who can benefit from.

And continue to benefit from capitalist accumulation from those who are going to be on the receiving end of it, if that makes sense. Like, we need to continue the ability to accumulate and also have a safe space in which we can continue to do that in the United States behind a border wall, X, Y, Z. Right. Like, that is a strategy of attempting to maintain consistency when we are –

The long term is not looking great. Yeah. You know, like the tendency of the falling market, right? And like, how do we keep that up? But it's like the falling, you know, environmental sustainability. Yeah. Yeah. And Guattari was more sensitive to those issues than Deleuze was. Sure. But I nonetheless think that with the...

The switching of the addition of nuance to their analysis of capitalism in the second volume and in the famous control society's essay that Deleuze penned a few years later, that really does enable us to think about capitalism.

climate catastrophe and the role of capitalism in a different way, and not just in a negative way. I mean, we mentioned a while back the

granting of rights to nature in a handful of countries around the globe, if that, and Jason Moore has written about cheap nature as a key element in capitalist accumulation, if those, if the rights of nature could be generalized and enforced,

That would put a severe constraint on capital and would be much better for the environment and for life.

For everyone. And everything. Yes, yes. Yeah, everyone in the universal rights category, including everything. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me. Just before we go, though, is there anything you're working on right now? Well, yes. I have put together a collection of essays that

most of which have been published. Maybe all of them will be by the time this collection comes out, where I trace Deleuze and Guattari's, the evolution of their thought from basically from between the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and also my understanding of their thought as I move from the utopian book, No Man's Citizenship, to

to the perversions book, the critical book. But in the last essays that I will collect in this volume, I do suggest how

The second volume's resources, notably the three axiomatics, the notion of consistency, how they offer a prospect for making the prospects that I suggest in No Man's Citizenship into reality using the legal axiomatic.

So, I've sort of come full circle to try to retain the perspective of A Thousand Plateaus, but to revisit the utopian impulse of nomad citizenship and give it some legs, as it were, some practical ways that those prospects could be realized. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I look forward and I will encourage our listeners to look forward to some thoughts on what is to be done now. Yes, exactly. Thank you, Nathan.