“Strictly speaking, it cannot be said that a body
that is dropped has a speed, however fast it falls;
rather it has an infinitely decreasing slowness in accordance with the law of falling bodies. Laminar movement that striates space, that goes from one point to another, is weighty; but rapidity, celerity, applies only to movement that deviates to the minimum extent and thereafter assumes a vortical motion, occupying a smooth space, actually drawing smooth space itself.”
– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari,
Nomadology: The War Machine, 2010 [1980], pp. 30-31
What Deleuze and Guattari help us to think in this fragment is what it could mean to figure stuff out together. Each of these terms warrants attention. ‘Figuring’ is a concept of how entities exist and persist. ‘Stuff’ refers to the dust in our eyes, the sand storm that envelops us, to the anger of the Earth, and to the intransparency of the contemporary to itself. ‘Out’ is indicative of the directionality of our inventions: figuring is fugitive. ‘Together’ is what we were, are, and will be. And how felicitous that ‘figure’ also points to us in the very act of figuring out! That ‘figuring’ and ‘together’ refer to one and the same accomplishment. To figure, then, is always to configure, to figure together. Configuring is a pleonasm we embrace because it multiplies us, decreasing the chances of us, a figure, being fixed to some ground. Figures are not fixtures, they are fugitive in relation to such fixtures, to orders, and they have blurred outlines. A certain vagueness surrounds our figuring stuff out – and the figuring out never does away with the vagueness, never replaces figure with fixture, blur with diagrammatic σχέμᾰ.
We are and will continue to be a vague outline. In Dutch, we can say ‘Wat een vaag figuur!’ [literally: what a vague figure!] when we cannot identify something or somebody but can neither deny that they have affected us. Vague, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us by way of the history of mathematics, is not some inadequate excuse for a lack of rigour. Likewise, William James spoke of the ‘vagueness of the universe’ – but not as a run-up to some kind of Cartesian doubt. Vague refers to an absolutely rigorous conception of the figure: not a circle and yet undeniably and unmistakably round. Vague is any line that deviates, however minimally, and goes out looking for space, for the tiniest little interruptions in which to curl and escape. Escape is made here not by moving at some immensely impressive speed, which will always remain nothing more than a way to exhaust ourselves and be pulled back into order, but by figuring out what else can be done here and now, immediately and already.
(Of course, we can and do run from the police, but we can immediately see how it is more conducive to our survival if we can jump through an open window of a friendly home where we would be welcome to hide in the basement. Now it is not us but the police who exhaust themselves by looking for us, while we laugh and eat with the people we know, with the ones we know we can count on to figure stuff out together.)
What is vague – figure – is not what is contained in a space but what invents space, reshapes it, in such a way that it becomes possible to say: ‘See? That’s where we’re at.’ One could say that ‘figuring out’ is that to which Deleuze and Guattari invite us, those of us who still feel some residual attachment to the name ‘working class,’ and which spells out how we might figure out what we, this mass of figures and fixtures, actually want.
What we want to suggest is that figuring stuff out together is a good way of thinking about this question of ‘the working class’ and its apparently revolutionary prospects. Deleuze and Guattari express as immediately as they can how this cannot merely be a question of occupying a space – for however long we are able to – but must at once be a matter of actually drawing space itself. Which means that no extent of occupation, not even a counter-imperial formation (e.g., BRICS) able to resist and perhaps even push back the West, will result in what we want. Because what we want can only be the result of an occupation that succeeds, by way of constant and inevitable failure, to actually draw space itself. We are not on Schmittian terrain here: the occupation we seek and enact is not a Landnahme, it cannot be both figuring out what we want and conquest. This is the ruse of fascism: to claim that conquest is what we want, when in fact fascism thrives on libidinal energies that have nothing to do with figuring out, together, what it is we want. Conquest is merely where we’re led as long as we haven’t started figuring stuff out. And the point of any antagonism is not to oppose a circle with another circle, but to figure stuff out together, to get around and surround. To learn from Shahram Khosravi, we might call this defeat as method.[i] We guess this method makes us traitors but we think we can endure that configuration. And if we don’t, we trust others will figure things out.
Any attempt to define, to call forth or compose the working class must pretend that this collective exists because of how it occupies space. More specifically, it must pretend that it occupies the point of production, the work place, the factory, the job, the gig, the nodes in the logistical web of capitalism at which capital is materially dependent on labour because labour is what produces value. Any working class politics must somehow pretend that it is this occupation that calibrates working class power. Along these lines, many have put their money on the figure of the working class as the vehicle for socialist reconstruction. Disagreements have been organized around the correct definition, interpellation or composition of the working class, always agitated by its latest failure to provoke capitalism’s demise. And of course it is at this point where what pretends to be ‘working class politics’ starts to get tangled up in a mixture of space and time. The working class exists because it occupies space – it is a real abstraction – but at the same time it is what it is not (yet), since it is in the process of developing, of assuming, at a point in time, a historical role, and as such it is faced with uneven development and uneven temporalities, with what Bloch called ‘synchronous nonsynchronicity.’ It is a subject that is what it is not yet, it has spatial presence but not yet exhaustively so. Indeed, whenever we gather at the point of production, we never meet the working class but something much more vague, blurred, ambiguous and, frankly, sometimes downright reactionary and cruel, bent on fixes and fixtures rather than figures and (dis)figuration.
We don’t necessarily mean to bring political economy’s dialectics to a standstill here, but what we particularly don’t like about this working class politics, what we don’t want, is the centrality of work – in fact, what we’d prefer not to configure with are both the ‘working’ and the ‘class.’ It seems to us that that’s not the stuff we’d like to be made of. If we as academic workers want to be in solidarity with others, we would prefer that solidarity not be based on work, specifically not on the way capital configures work as labour, on what we do for a boss, for a wage, on what we produce, on what we do according to accountants – in short: on what can be expressed as or in terms of value. We think it is a mistake to practice solidarity along those lines, because those lines keep us in our place, occupied in the very act of occupying and, most importantly, incapable of (re)drawing space itself, of figuring stuff out together. Perhaps there’s a problem with the very figure of solidarity here, premised as it is on the ‘solid,’ on fixture rather than figure. As long as we accept the figure of the worker – where a worker is any animal that endures suffering while being productive – and presume that this figure is what will ultimately liberate us, we are confined to occupations, to class struggle and the price setting affordances of the strike and worker militancy. The fugitive movement/moment of our figuring – the ‘out’ of our figuring – then comes down to the negative modality of refusal. And it’s not that we’d refuse refusal, we’re just worried about what’s refused in and by this refusal: what ways of figuring out are submerged under the demand to issue demands by way of the strike? And what belief is required from us – what faith in the capitalist phantasmagoria – if we are to assume, as Mario Tronti said, that our refusal to give capital what it wants rests on the fact that we produce value? What metaphysics of ‘value’ are we strong-armed into under the guise of tough-minded ‘materialism’? What if all that we produce is shit? Would that be so bad? Indeed, don’t we excitedly exclaim: “That’s the shit!”?
Our commitments to vagueness take us out of the materialism of matter-in-place. And so we seek not to be confined/configured to the epistemology of political economy (sorry boys), to supposedly materialist analyses of our actual conditions. Before anything else, such analyses will entail that there must be an order and a hierarchy of liberation, that we who are figuring stuff out will have to be liberated as workers first and only then as Muslims, as children, as Black, as trans, as criminals, as migrants, as indigenous, as disabled, as lagging behind, as defective. As if power is only bargaining power. And as if work (still) has the coherence that could dialectically configure a subjectivity, a working class. In this nostalgic working class future, there can be no figuring out what we want together, no commune, only an indefinite occupation of work places in which our liberation only ever requires our stronger attachment to the work place (in our case this is all too often expressed in the myth of the ‘pure university,’ the one before ‘neoliberalism,’ where the use-value of the ‘life of the mind’ blossomed blissfully unaware of the exchange value that started to impede upon it since… when?). And in this working class future, there is only our even more militant belief in value-as-production and production-as-value, and our even greater investment in work, value, and class. Before you know it, the only things we think we want are wages or, God forbid, ownership.
And yet, our disagreement with all of this cannot be that we think we are wasting time by investing so much of our credit in this figure of the working class. That would imply that we already know what to do, what we want, where to occupy, how to live before we figured stuff out together. More fundamentally, we think only capital can waste our time, wastes our time as a way to make time scarce, as a way to grant us our weekend and to make us want our wage and our office space, and (this is where the little fascist in us surfaces for real) to make us want and demand respect for our rank. Instead, we want to figure out how we can learn from our failures, and that includes the failures of the working class. Time is never wasted in the pursuit of working class power because at each step of its failures we can learn something, we are figuring stuff out together. At each moment of worker repression, capital shows a small segment of its hand, of what it is apparently prepared to do in order to remain in power (i.e., genocide). As long as we organize our pessimism by remembering that a worker revolution has never taken place and will never take place, we can endlessly pursue it without thereby wasting time or risk getting distracted from the ‘real’ struggle. As Rosa Luxemburg said (though she said it too optimistically), we will learn from our failures nonetheless. And this is because figuring stuff out together cannot be repressed by capital. What capital requires in order to persist, is not an animal that suffers while productive. Capital accumulates just as well by killing us, slowly or quickly. What capital does require is us figuring stuff out together. This living capacity of not merely occupying but actually drawing space is what scaffolds the demonic machine of social reproduction/death that is named ‘capital.’ What we want to suggest is that everything and everybody depends on us figuring stuff out together, and this holds particularly also for the stuff called ‘work.’
This should already explode any credence in the current speculation over ‘AI.’ The brainless technologies thus designated are designed and used in order to capture our capacities for figuring stuff out together. It is not that we are necessarily sceptical about whether these technologies can ‘work,’ as ‘work’ is being reconceived according to what ‘AI’ apparently can do. Yet, whatever ‘working’ could entail is nonetheless entirely premised on the private capture of our capacity to figure stuff out together. As any tech billionaire will readily admit, that ‘AI’ will be made to ‘work’ will never mean that we would no longer be required to work in order to gain access to the stuff we need to survive. So to any billionaire’s threat of replacement, we can reply that we can dream of no higher utopia than to be replaced at work.
Which is to say, of course, that striated spaces are predatory on smooth spaces, that fixtures require figures, that they remain figures, that faculty members remain students, that citizens remain barbarians, and that our value is tabulated on the basis of our vagueness. If we start here when we figure stuff out together, we think we won’t be so easily seduced into wanting the very thing capital wants: that we account for ourselves in terms of value and pretend that we are not in this shit together. This, at least, is how we, at our point of shitty production, would like to account for our situation, for our (dis)figurations, for shit being so fucked up. It means that nothing we write here about figuring is figurative speech. There are no metaphors or analogies here, only movement outside of the fixtures capital would like us to credit ourselves with. Of course, this is nonetheless speech, perhaps it is merely speech. Vaguely, we remember William James: “What an awful trade that of a professor is – paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.”[ii] Shit, shit, shit. But then, as Benjamin said, the entire universe is filled with languages – redemption is entirely a matter of translation. Go figure!
* This text was previously published in the July 2026 issue of Twijfel, the student-run philosophy journal at Erasmus University. It was also written as a farewell letter to the student activists who, for some years, organized protests and occupations under the name OccupyEUR at the occasion of their decision to disband.
[i] Find Khosravi’s essay Defeat as Method here: https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/71/khosravi.php
[ii] James, W. 1920 [1892]. ‘Letter to Miss Grace Norton’, 28 December, in: ‘Familiar Letters of William James – II’ (edited by Henry James), The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/96may/nitrous/jamii.htm.