4.2 - Schizophrenia and the Outside

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: CCRU Lectures. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Welcome back to lecture 4.2, roughly on the machinic unconscious. So the entire framework which was explained in the previous lecture can be understood as the machinic unconscious. Now, within his text, Circuitries, Nick Land states that reality is imminent to the machinic unconscious. That is to say that our reality…

• 00:03:23

  Turbulent, non-finance, drifts across the global network. Now it's arguable whether or not there is such a thing as runaway capital, as within the entire transcendental framework, capital can only really be understood as a cybernetic, positive-oriented process, or a process which exacerbates the effects…

• 00:06:29

  Because, any attempt at a definition of man, or humanism, comes from a position of man. It comes from man himself. And most recently, Land has made it clear that capitalism, in the positive oriented sense, will finally come to be the thing, which actually allows us to finally define man. Because, the point…

• 00:09:14

  Now, Deleuze and Cotarri describe schizophrenia in Ante-Oedipus, on page 15, as follows. Schizophrenia is like love. There is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity. Schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines. Universal, primary production is the essential reality…

• 00:12:33

  Those and that of the inside don't witness or perceive this process but only understand the event in terms of a retrospective indexed past-present, something that has happened, something that is already representation. All that once was, was once new, and as such, the pure past is a trail of debris left behind…

• 00:15:35

  Burroughs, Deleuze, and Land are both locked into a transcendental Oedipal control system, and a few other radical thinkers allow for the possibility of exit from those structures, and how to perform that exit is the CCRU's aim. Land goes a little further on this line. Oedipus is the final bastion of immunopolitics…

• 00:21:29

  And desiring machines and desiring production, which targets itself at the very limits of production from the inside, is allowing itself to become schizophrenic. So when William Burroughs begins messing around with occultism and magic and sorcery, and he begins to cut up his poems, this is one of the examples…

• 00:25:58

  And it utilizes this information as a means to bolster its own growth. So we have a universal cosmic system of virtuality from which this capitalist form has grown and understood itself with regard to virtual production and production of production. So what capitalism does is takes these extremely abstract…