Social Inscription

Abstract

Let’s observe that the status of two categories advanced in the previous chapters remains unresolved. On the one hand, the tripartite distinction between inscription, registration and interpretation (or, to use our term, realization) advanced by Freud, which was used to characterize the relative situation of markets, the market and the social, remains a mere analogy. Analogy may play a heuristic role in philosophy, but must be absolutely no more than this. If philosophy is and remains essentially Platonic, this is due to its unbending commitment to real definition, something which analogical argument can never provide. That ours is a intelluctual culture of extrinsic connections, forged through habitual similarities, is no justification for the plague of analogy in ‘theory’ today — the need for a critique of analogical reasoning is pressing. In a nutshell, the analogy between psychic structure and the situation of the market will have to be made into a real identity. On the other hand, the mechanism of evaluation, according to which intensive price is captured and transformed into value, remains unexplained.

A minimal social theory — Elementary thesis of Deleuze and Guattari’s social analysis — First discriminant between social forms: hierarchy — Second discriminant between social forms: resonance — The social surface I:inscription and exchange — The social surface II: quasi-cause