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Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines; Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus
"Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines; Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.
Archive condition
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Core idea
These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.
The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.
That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.
How to read this text
Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.
Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Chapter 15 Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines: Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus Ray Brassier Introduction What relation between the abstract and the concrete is at issue here? How do ‘rules’ relate to ‘machines’?
Definition · paragraph 1
Chapter 15 Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines: Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus Ray Brassier Introduction What relation between the abstract and the concrete is at issue here? How do ‘rules’ relate to ‘machines’? To answer this question, we first need to distinguish Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘machinic materialism’ from more familiar types of materialism, whether atomistic (Epicurus, Lucretius), mechanicist (Hobbes, d’Holbach), historical (Marx, Althusser), or physi- calist (Quine, Lewis).
Definition · paragraph 8
concrete rules and abstract machines | 267 a prerequisite for the quantification of writing proclaimed at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus: ‘quantify writing. There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made’ (ATP 4). To quantify writ- ing is to conjugate expression and construction, structured function and deformalisation, stratification and destratification.
Definition · paragraph 8
concrete rules and abstract machines | 267 a prerequisite for the quantification of writing proclaimed at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus: ‘quantify writing.
Definition · paragraph 7
266 | a thousand plateaus and philosophy In its destratifying role, the abstract machine draws the plane of consist- ency by articulating a non-formal function with a formless matter. What it retains of stratic expression is the tensor, the a-signifying sign which indexes a continuum of intensive variation.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.