Ray Brassier - Concrete Rules And Abstract Machines

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: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. 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

  This talk is an examination of the final, and I think still the shortest plateau in A Thousand Plateaus, but in a way, what I'm going to try to do here is to try to use it as a kind of, as an optic through which to kind of get a handle on what they are, what this book is trying to do. Because it's a pretty…

• 00:05:06

  Recognizing and releasing the positive traits characteristic of the en forme is a practical matter, and one that is moreover constrained by certain rules. What sorts of rules? Because real or abstract matter cannot be represented within material reality, the rules or practical injunctions governing the constructions…

• 00:11:17

  So, this is why I think, this, the geology of morals plateau, the third plateau, is absolutely crucial to understanding the whole book. And I think it gives a lie to the claim, Deleuze and Gautier's claim that the plateaus can be read in any order. That's not true. If you don't read, if you haven't understood…

• 00:16:24

  But this division is real, not ideal. It's not dialectical. It's not in our heads. It's not a function of representation. The strata are real. Strata split and segment, but they also conjoin and connect. So, D&G time and again insists on the real as opposed to the formal distinction between content and expression…

• 00:21:31

  It's not simply a series of connections between empirical, you know, empirically tractable properties, or things like behavioral dispositions. So, tensors then, are the operators of torsion through which deformalization composes intensities, sine particles, and flows on the plane of consistency. What does this mean…

• 00:27:38

  A concrete rule allows you to put something to a state of continuous variation. Quote again, Constant is not opposed to variable. It is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other kind of treatment, or continuous. Or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules correspond to the first kind of treatment…

• 00:34:32

  And I'm just going to skip to the last sentence. So, what is selected for? What is retained and preserved and therefore created, what consists, is only that which increases the number of connections at each level of division or composition, thus in descending as well as ascending order. That which cannot be divided…

• 00:41:12

  Okay. But then the kind of the, you know, by enforcing, the more you enforce the eminence of the criteria of evaluation, or the more you insist on the necessary concretion of the rules, then the more it becomes difficult to say, well, who's going to tell you whether or not something is deterritorializing…