Transcript
The transcription below was provided by Taylor Adkins.
Joseph Weissman (Joe): So, Theory Talk, I don’t know how to describe it. The core of it was to set aside time so that it wasn’t a project. Just to valorize what everyone else was doing because I feel like we’re so pulled between a billion different things today…
INTRO
Hello, and welcome to Theory Talk, a philosophy podcast and critical thinking jam session. I am Joseph Weissman. Taylor Adkins will be back next episode, but this week I am pleased to present to you an interview that I conducted with Andrew Culp, a media theorist and author of a new book called Dark Deleuze. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, go to our Patreon right now and throw us a few pennies. Support independent media in trying times. With that said, please enjoy this interview with Andrew Culp.
I guess if you don’t mind, we can get started and jump in. Welcome to Theory Talk, we are excited to bring into the discussion Andrew Culp, a media theorist who has written a wonderful new book on Deleuze called Dark Deleuze. It says you are a visiting assistant professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman College. Is that still the case?
Andrew Culp (Andrew): That was a couple of years ago. I actually had a stop off at the University of Texas’s science and engineering school in Dallas for a year. And now I have a more or less permanent position at CalArts here in the Los Angeles area.
Joe: That sounds fun! Ok, so I guess the biggest question to frame stuff is: where does this book come from, what’s its genesis, and we can start to pick apart the different things, but I’d just like to hear in your life: is there a particular set of causes or things that led up to it?
Andrew: Absolutely. Not to completely reduce this to the biographical, but I started reading theory when I was in high school because I was a policy debater, which is sort of a niche area. But it actually brings a lot of people through theory. Theory started to become more and more a part of debate in the 1990s. For me, it was just this complete revelation, a new way of seeing the world.
INTERLUDE
Joe: Yeah, that sounds good! I think the last solid thing I got was about: you were talking through debate, which is something I’m vaguely, passingly familiar with, like theory people I know in a personal orbit having gotten a lot of experience in debate with theory through some of that initial contact, I guess especially with Deleuze and Guattari and that kind of material, which strikes me as interesting that they’re getting deployed rhetorically as part of this analytic of arguments. I think this is something neat about Deleuze, and some of this may be close with Deleuze…but don’t let me go off, tell me more about where this Dark Deleuze book comes from.
Andrew: Yeah, so I was involved in debate, reading Foucault at 15, but then I had a sort of internal conflict about it. The theory was really interesting but it made me very cynical towards politics in general. And actually what happened is, I dropped out of debate, went deeper into the theory and began doing political action. In college, I became an anarchist, started doing political activism. I worked a series of professional political organizing jobs for a little while, very much against the mainstream. And then, I went to grad school because I found myself in a situation where I wanted to think more deeply about the concepts than anyone in the political sphere was doing, and I felt like Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari were really sort of my toolbox for getting through. I had read a number of decent things, like post-structuralist feminism, Derrida, Foucault… but the one that really spoke to me was D&G. So I sought out a Deleuze scholar, and in grad school, I supplemented my anarchism with a broader study of the roots behind Anti-Oedipus. So I took a year to learn psychoanalysis, I really delved into Nietzsche, and I really seriously studied Marxism for a while. As a product of this, I came from a specific understanding of D&G. Like many people, it began with A Thousand Plateaus because it felt like the most available – start wherever you want, start picking up concepts, they already direct you that you can pick and choose and start where you want. But then I began studying with Eugene Holland, one of the first people to start working on Anti-Oedipus in a serious way in the American academy. Really going back to the Anti-Oedipus ended up being the cornerstone of how I really think about their work, and I think starting points influence a lot of other people’s perspective of Deleuze. Like, if other people start from a core philosophical perspective and open up with What Is Philosophy?, they are going to have a very different take. Or if they begin with one of Deleuze’s books in the history of philosophy, like Leibniz or Proust or Bergson or Hume… This is not to say I did not go beyond Anti-Oedipus to try on contemporary trends in Deleuze Studies. I tried on new materialism for a little while. I also tried a few of the other trends, and I just had this growing dissatisfaction. What really interested me was political problems, and I felt like the project of Anti-Oedipus was not aging well, so it was time to sort of renew it. I was getting pretty deeply into media theory, and what’s kind of neat about the media theorists is that they have used the “Control Societies” essay that Deleuze wrote in 1990/91 as the cornerstone of their thought, and it is very political. He does not renounce his previous work, but he definitely contextualizes it in a really new way. And yet he does not come back to this. And so, there is this time capsule that needs to be excavated. Dark Deleuze, is returning to the “Control Societies” essay and reworks the wider context of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration through a more sort of “Control Societies” approach.
Joe: Yeah, I like the characterization as a return. I tried to describe it to a friend as enacting something of a return to Deleuze, but for very specific themes, and I like that you brought up control society. So maybe that can be the first big question I would want you to answer. The one that stuck out to me is this theme of secrecy and opacity. And honestly, it strikes me as at odds with mainstream Marxism, and I wonder if you can comment on that? I feel Marx himself even says something, I could be wrong, about how a communist dare not… that in order to be accountable to each other as a solidary revolutionary mass, we have to not put on masks? I feel like there’s an implicit sort of critique…I wonder if you can unpack some of that.
Andrew: Absolutely. My entry point for talking about secrecy is media studies, and my target is Google. Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt met a policy wonk in Iraq when during reconstruction – a really odd context, or maybe a revealing one, to think that Google wants to be part of the US imperial nation-building project – together, they found an affinity, and they wrote a book about new media in which they posed Google to be this huge geo-political power to address all the political problems around the globe for the next few decades or century. Their answer is what they call “connectivity.” Within it is a hidden libertarian politics of increasing transparency, information transmission, and making everything increasingly visible; really, it is a variation on cybernetics, which, I think, automatically hooks back into the “Control Societies” essay. And you know, people have not really talked about this as much in terms of the “Control Society” essay. The notion of control comes from Norbert Wiener, the progenitor of cybernetics theory, talking about control as the governing mechanism of a cybernetic network. Control is not just some cryptic neologism that Deleuze comes up with. It actually has a really basis in a particular technical and social approach to an epistemology of how to see the world as well as a political technology about how to manage the world. So there is already this transparency politics, and I really like Paul Preciado’s take on this dimension of control. It does not come through in Dark Deleuze because I am playing pretty close to a lot of Deleuze’s textual materials. But Preciado, whom most people know through Testo Junkie – which is about self-experimentation with testosterone gel outside of a medical protocol – published a really short essay (“Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology”) that is the Cliff Notes version of that book, in which he talks about pharmaco-pornographic power. That is how he diagnoses power today. The pharmaco- is the medium through which power tends to operate as biological, and it is controlled through a pharmacological approach, which we are familiar with through biopolitics. But there is also the pharmakon via Derrida. The pornographic dimension is the one that really interests me because it is a semiotics about exposure that seems very present within net-culture, the internet, and the turn toward the libertarian obsession with transparency and information (even for the Democratic left-wing policy wonks). So the pharmaco-pornographic is circulating in the background of Dark Deleuze, and I think that it is the very contemporary version of control.
On the secret, you can delve right into the D&G texts. There are these wonderful ten pages or so in A Thousand Plateaus about the secret. It is easy to miss, because it does not necessarily add up to some of their bigger theories in A Thousand Plateaus, but their first target is Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s theory is that governments intrinsically operate in secret. What would follow from her idea is that it is an immediately resistant political mechanism to make visible the secret operations of a government. D&G believe the opposite. They think that governments are not intrinsically secret, and the secret does not always work to the favor of the government. In fact, they think that secrecy or opacity or obscurity is actually primarily an operation of minorities and the minoritarian. When you finally get to the segmentarity plateau, you see them talking about non-delimited minorities: a minority that cannot be captured via an axiom or principle. You cannot pass a law to protect them. There is something about them that keeps them on the margins. They are unquantifiable to a certain extent. The something there that you cannot turn into a measured quanta that suddenly becomes an excess. This is a very familiar post-structuralist argument: excess or supplement or différance or the refugee– every theorist has their own term for it. It is the thing that escapes the structure somehow. But for D&G, they raise that into the political principle of the line of flight, and the line of flight always comes out of the thing that is not contained by the structure of the social institution that dominates. So, for me, I think secrecy is absolutely important. And yes, this goes against certain democracy theories and certain social-democratic approaches to Marx’s politics, but there have been a lot of communists who have operated in secrecy. There are 9th century dissident communists that have been made popular recently, like Auguste Blanqui, who Invisible Committee has written about and Peter Hallward is doing a project on right now. He is a very interesting figure to return to. I mean, Marx hated him, of course. Marx thought that he had an aristocratic approach to politics. But Blanqui believed in a conspiracy of communists, and there are a number of other figures from the 19th century that are kind of interesting. This links up with contemporary anarchism – it is the black bloc and antifa to a certain extent. The idea is that there are forms of politics that would lose when they go toe-to-toe with the pornographic politics of the state and dominant culture. We see this observation in play in doxxing wars online – that transparency is used to target individuals and make their lives really difficult. It is a battle of appearances or war of appearances, where non-appearance or non-existence can often be an essential tactic to build asymmetry between the contemporary liberal democratic politics that exist today and potential alternatives to it…
INTERLUDE
Joe: So, we’re about to dip back into the interview. I’ve asked Andrew a question about the abolition of fossil fuel and destroying the conditional structures demanding more than policy thinking, so you’ll hear his response to that…
Andrew: We are absolutely in an epistemological crisis, in part due to liberalist notions of policy and government. For a long time, people thought that environmental degradation was due to a lack of information. And so we set some scientists, some experts on it. They produced a lot of really helpful information to tell us how and why environmental degradation was happening. Even back in the 1980s and early ‘90s, they were saying, “hey the information that we are getting back is so bad that we need to operate according to a ‘precautionary principle,’ because the jury is still out but there are consequences are so dire that we need to start acting now.” And from then until today, there has been a rising tide of people who are pro-environmental, but it has not led to significant governmental, inter-governmental, or extra-governmental change on a mass scale. I think that marks the crisis that we are in, that may be pointing to a collapse moment, where something has to emerge in order to adequately address a lot of these environmental problems. Perhaps it is not even in the interest of a lot of the people running the political systems to make serious change. Environmentalists recently have tried to make the pro-government argument that, “oh, environmental catastrophe will cost us too much money in the long run,” but I think a lot of Marxists or other radical analysts say that crisis and crisis management is a big business. It is very profitable to certain people. And if God forbid, there are people who do not actually care about the majority of the population, then there are those who are happy to make a dime on things becoming more precarious for most of the globe…
INTERLUDE
Joe: Guattari sort of proposes this problems of widgets, of decomposing technological lines into tiny components that you can reconfigure, which you can reassemble based on these minimal elements. It implies an explosion of the industrial process, and it almost demands fully automating everything in a certain way so that people can get around to designing these pure elements of a new technosphere. It does seem like there’s possible revolutions there combined with machines and new ways…I get that it’s easy for that to blend into: let’s just disrupt everything and automate everyone out of work. Maybe you can encapsulate some of your thoughts on this?
Andrew: I think it is clear that D&G are not allergic to technology in a way that is similar to how they are not allergic to drugs. Maybe this is a good comparison to draw. One of the big disagreements that Guattari has with Lacan is that Lacan, like many Freudians, thinks that the talking-cure is the only way through. For them, it should not be combined with parallel approaches, like the usage of medication, or like D&G, who open analysis to social context, groups, and, even the territory of where things are happening or the historical moment that it is in. What is really refreshing about Guattari is that he starts intersecting all of the different potential layers, structures, and scales that can each produce a different result when you bring in the context or when you start introducing medication. This results in an approach that seeks to cause a breakthrough not a breakdown, which they quote from R. D. Laing, the famous British anti-psychiatrist. That said, I think their use of technology is experimental rather than institutional. From Guattari, this experimentation takes the form of living at a psychiatric facility where he is constantly interacting with patients and trying to help them experiment with how to make a breakthrough. But that clinic was also an experiment living, like if people are going to live there permanently, what does it mean to live in this sort of alternative space?
Deleuze, as a philosopher, wants to employ an experimental method, and I think that we get a new sort of epistemology as a result. That is something that I work out in Dark Deleuze. I think that the knowledge they produce is contingent, it is temporary, and it is not meant to be cumulative. What I say is that in regards to thought, (and this is one of the few moments that Deleuze draws on Heidegger) thought is rare, does not happen very much, is painful, and is inconvenient. We rise to the occasion of thought when all of our habits of thinking and all of our images of thought break down and are no longer capable. It is only in that moment of the breakdown that you can make a breakthrough. What I contribute is that thought is forced onto us when there is something so intolerable that we do not know how to deal with it.
In terms of technology, I think that yes, absolutely, there is an acceleration, there is an attempt to cobble together some technological solutions, some technological approaches. But unlike practical reason, I think it is much more like how Marshall McLuhan thinks about the probe. You know, D&G bring up the probe as well when they are talking about semiotics in A Thousand Plateaus. A probe is something that experiments within a context like a Petri dish to see what the result is. But they do not engineer a whole omnibus solution, which I would say would be royal science, the thing they seek to avoid in the nomadology plateaus. In conclusion, D&G are certainly not allergic to technology, but it is something that needs to be used in a far different way than how technology is generally used today. Technology should become a line of flight rather found a molar institution.
Joe: Yeah, I like that. One of the things I think about is cryptocurrency, which is kind of a new technology, but it’s profoundly inflected with these neoreactionary politics. There’s an aspect of the conservative revolution, a kind of resurgence of global fascism that is part and parcel of certain aspects of the new information technologies. But there’s also new revolutionary possibilities there…
Andrew: Yes. The most enthusiastic people behind cryptocurrencies are neoreactionary, libertarian, conservative types because they think it is a way of disarticulating the money supply from the state, where money is directed through the sovereign status of a nation state and their central bank. Cryptocurrencies are parasitic on already-existing currencies, so I do not think they are actually inventing a solution to sovereign currencies, they are just thinking of a way to extrapolate from them in the same way you that commodities and commodity futures are traded on Wall Street. But there are a couple of interesting projects: there is Future Art Base, a group in Aalto University, Finland that is influenced by Franco “Bifo” Birardi that do really wild art experimentation. They began with created an investment fund and went on to play around with cryptocurrency. They call their fund the Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative. It is based on an algorithm that they developed that they call The Parasite.It is meant to be a parasite on already-existing traders, and for the first year or two of operations, they made extraordinary gains, some ludicrous amount. Then, at some time it completely crashed, it bottoms out, they almost completely lost their shirts. They learned that it is interesting as artists to experiment with money and cryptocurrencies, but they are not going to come up with a silver bullet solution. And that it is always a kind of art project (where the point need not to be to make money), or they back off it when they lose money and call it an art project. But then one of the main figures behind it left Finland and went to Silicon Valley, and he created an art project where they are using cryptocurrencies to raise money to funnel into art projects and to fund art projects. The idea there is absolutely what we are talking about: experimental ways of thinking about cryptocurrency, not in a way that simply valorizes cryptocurrencies, but as a way of creating transversal connections to things outside the currency itself and how we think of currencies, to come up with…well, for them it is alternative worlds, for them it is still very old school D&G – “we want a world where many worlds are possible,” create transversal connections, make flows molecularly expand – that is what they are doing, and it is kinda interesting. But I think that the one major problem with cryptocurrencies is that for them to even be produced requires electricity, since it has to be mined by huge banks of computers and huge server farms. That means that cryptocurrency mining it is at root antagonistic to environmentalism because of its incredible electricity use. [And since reviewing the projects, I would also say that their approach to value may run contrary to the politics of communism as outlined through the “value-critique” school of Marxism to which I generally adhere.]
Joe: Totally, and I suspect that this is maybe even why Land likes it so much…because there’s this cold indifference to the world as it is. I guess I wonder: don’t we…we certainly also need technological experimentation. I feel like, even if this is an art project, it strikes me that we need to try to understand how we can use these things and repurpose them if they have technical merit, even regardless of who created the idea. It’s interesting today in this divided world we live in how it can be easy to be resistant to a good idea just because it comes out of somebody’s mouth whom we’ve heard a lot of complaints about…
Andrew: This is Nietzsche’s critique of genesis. In [Foucault’s] “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,”republished in the Language, Counter-Memory, Practice anthology, he lays out his most systematic approach to genealogy. Perhaps Foucault’s most important argument in it is that he does not search for origins, because according to his reading of Nietzsche, an origin does not determine something’s direction. Things are always strategically reappropriated, and they can eventually run counter to their original purpose. They can go oblique to its original purpose, and it is through these constant transformations that we need to study things in combination. This is where Foucault goes to the dispositif, and from Deleuze and Guattari, we get the assemblage. I think if we have political, social, cultural, or aesthetic interests, we need to be constantly experimenting with things to see if we can reappropriate them and put them to use for wildly different purposes.
Joe: It’s funny. It sounds to me like Brassier’s kind of analysis of Land, where he’s basically saying, because Land wants to be about purely immanent tactics, he gets appropriated over time by these kind of forces of the negative, and there’s valuable stuff in that early CCRU work, in that stuff Land’s doing in the 90s, even though he’s done his best to tarnish it and ruin it in retrospect, he sort of can’t, he can’t get to the transcendental plane he was on before, at least effectively enough to really destroy it for good. I think there’s still value there. I appreciate your critique of Land in the work, and I wonder if you could talk about it a little bit. But it’s sort of recognizing Land as something of a distraction, and it’s returning to Deleuze for a lot of the same themes and finding them in a pure or slightly purer state. I’d be curious if you had thoughts on Nick Land.
Andrew: I am really conflicted on Land because he has been deified recently in a way that I think is absolutely inappropriate. A lot of his initial insights are through creative misreading of texts. For instance, his text on the machinic unconscious (“Machinic Desire”) violates some of the key principles of Anti-Oedipus, where they say that technology is social before it is technical and they do not think that machines do away with something like social composition. For Deleuze and Guattari, machines are never at odds with the human. They are already post-humanist or anti-humanist before you even enter into Anti-Oedipus, and so, for them, the machinic unconscious or machines are not literally the things we have in the factory that are pitted against workers and putting them out of work. They instead provide a different model for thinking about the connections between humans or the human brain. The whole thing of Land being paranoid that he is an android, worried that they are going to do a whole Bladerunner-style Turing test on him and he is going to fail so he should preemptively pull out his guns and shoot down the humans that are coming after him… I think it is interesting, but the humans vs machines drama is overdone.
In fact, the better work that we have on the subject is always a question of cyborgs. Donna Haraway is the popular reference on this, but cyborgs continue to be of interesting relevance. The cyborg is the compositions of the human and the technical: what are the ways we appropriate technical objects and technical machines and incorporate them in not only our bodies, but our lives and our worlds around us. That is really what Deleuze is interested in. He mentions very briefly in a few places the anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan, who wrote a book on gestures as well as on technical enframement, which is an alternative to Heidegger’s approach to enframement. Stiegler has actually done a pretty serious elaboration on Leroi-Gourhan, and I am not in love with Stiegler because he loves to bring everything back to being-towards-death, so he is overcoding everything with this Heideggerian approach. The idea of technical enframement that we get through Deleuze is that humans themselves define their humanity through their composition with the technical objects around them. This is kind of what DeLanda does. Going back to the natural history debate about humans, the domestication of animals, and the stirrup. This is all about: what are technologies that interactively influence the way in which the human and the natural world interface. I think those questions are extremely interesting, and they are still relevant today. Sometimes they get into bad new materialism, where we want to say there is an X-ontology, there’s a fire ontology, an ice ontology, an ontology of alligators, and that is pretty unhelpful. But I think the Science and Technology Studies approach is pretty interesting.
The stuff that Land gave us from the 1990s was just going back to some original sources, pulling on some threads, and making us see a thinker in a new way. Take his idea that we should read Kant through an anthropology, well hey, I think most Kantians (haha) are just not ready for that. Or I heard that he once gave a talk about putting the rat back into rationalism (hahahaha). Since, though, you can tell that his paranoia has given way to a sort of narcissism, and that he is willing to say whatever is shocking enough to get him an audience. His most immediate fanbase are all people who are interested in white supremacist, post-libertarian thought, or some variation of the two. One way I characterize him to some people is that he is part of the pro-corporate wing of the far-right. [There are some who wonder if Land is really on the right.] Buthere are other wings of the far right than the pro-racist, ethno-nationalist versions of the far-right. So when you see him quibbling with those other parts of the far-right, he is just arguing for the corporate side rather than from some crypto-left position. Moreover, there still might be some people who come out of this post-libertarian swamp and read Land and decide to read Bataille or D&G because of it and become leftists, but I think that that is probably pretty rare with most of the people he is interacting with. He is a curiosity because has these artifacts of the critical theory training that he had in the 90s, but I do not think many of his right-wing readers take it terribly seriously.
Joe: From where I’m sitting, that’s fair enough. He has done an awful lot to ruin the credibility that I think he did earn. Man, CCRU was amazingly productive, and there was some prescient, stupendous documents in there. But look, let me say some more nice things about Dark Deleuze before this gets much further. It’s an exceptionally well-argued book, it’s a broad and deep reading of Deleuze’s whole work, and it’s extracting something legitimately new and necessary, which I think is a counterpoint to a magical realism today that’s really destructive and which we need to counterpose with some kind of rationalism. That would be the last question I would ask. Beyond Land and in the acceleration space, there is this burgeoning philosophy of intelligence from a critical kind of perspective. Maybe this is where one aspect of acceleration comes from is about: what are the political ramifications of artificial intelligence that kind of plugs into a neo-rationalism and a new critique of synthetic reason and something like this. I guess I’d pose the question about reason or frame it in that way somewhat.
Andrew: Yeah, I think that the turn to rationalism or reason now is something that people are going to have to pay attention to. It seems like it is growing. There are more people who are interested in it. There is finally enough bridge-building work between former analytic approaches and more continental approaches, and so people are going to have to stand up and take notice. We have always had a little bit of this, whether it be Wittgenstein, or more recently Badiou, who is bringing in mathematics in what seems to be more like an analytic approach. And I think the jury is still out on some of the rationalism. I have not read enough of it to really make heads or tails of it, and also I have not seen it really come into the areas that most interest me enough to make me feel like I have to do my homework. Those areas for me are radical politics, queer theory,race studies, media theory. These areas sometimes get the theory a little bit later, but they are always chasing the most recent theory.
In my book, I think that I have a very different approach to knowledge. I gave you a summary of it earlier, but another version is that I am somewhere between skepticism and pessimism. I feel like knowledge is not something that is accumulated, and so that is where some people’s readings of Spinoza and mine diverge. There is this great essay by Sue Ruddick, where she goes through the politics of affect. She contrasts Negri’s reading of Spinoza to what she’s opposing as D&G’s reading of Spinoza. She says that Negri is a joyous communist who wants to build increasing compositions, so it is often focused on bodies or affect, but that is also a product of moving from the first to the second, maybe even the third type of adequate knowledge in the Spinozist model. For her, Negri undertakes an accumulation of knowledge to produce more and more productive encounters, to have a body that is ultimately more capable. It is almost like a capabilities-approach, where it’s all about building capacity, which I should parenthetically say is close to Amartya Sen’s, the prevailing model in development studies right now. Sen’s approach to development is that you need to build the capacity of various regions and peoples. It is not about just dropping resources to them. You need to ‘help them help themselves’ in a certain way, and then they indigenously expand their own capacities and to become a powerhouse. That is very similar to a certain reading of Spinoza, and I would imagine that in some ways that might be enhanced by this question of rationalism or intelligence – intelligence as a faculty separate from but still a supplement or complement to the body. Like Ruddick, I would contrast my own approach to the position of enhancing the body/accumulating practical knowledge.
What interests me in Ruddick’s other approach is how she locates D&G’s reading of Spinoza as one committed to identifying the way in which bodies and passions are used against us. This is the tyrant who is able to enhance our capacities but against our own best interest. This is Marxism, right? What capitalism does is enhance human capacity, but in a way that primarily benefits the capitalist class and, at least for a certain version of Marx, ultimately immiserates the working class, even if it is releasing them from former social coding, which itself was a form of bondage, such as a patriarchy. We have works in Spinoza like Frédéric Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital that also has this: how can our bodies be used against ourselves, how can passionate attachments be used against ourselves? The ultimate prescription Ruddick goes to is the scream, which is from the Bacon book, looking to Deleuze as the philosopher screaming and desubjectifying, tearing things apart. Thought as a shock. Not just a shock as a moment of recollection, like a lightbulb going off, but a shock, something that shakes us out of our habits and makes us approach the world in a new way because we have realized that all of our other ways have been inadequate so far. It is a very different way of thinking about thought. I think there might be connections to Laruelle, but his work is so idiosyncratic. I am trying to get away from quantum theory, although his is a sort of black quantum ontology. But his system also has this sort of skepticism. I like the way in which Galloway has made Laruelle’s thought into a principle of insufficient reason, where you are introducing insufficiency into situations and contexts– I almost see that as the role of thought that comes through in Dark Deleluze. It is about realizing when intelligence and knowledge has broken down and are incapable rather than making knowledge accumulate into a wider resource for action.
Joe: That’s beautiful. Ok, Andrew, thank you so much for taking time to let me ask you questions about your wonderful book Dark Deleuze. Everyone should go out and read it, because it’s absolutely wonderful. Andrew, thanks again for stopping by!
Andrew: Thank you so much!
FIN
Fractal Ontology 