razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: guattari

  • Reading Notes 29 8 2015

    Reading Notes 29 8 2015

    (Caveat – reading notes are NEITHER summaries NOR commentaries, they operate as individuated sets of connections and references, individuated on my own research paths.)

    Gary Genosko, A-signifying semiotics, The public journal of semiotics II (1), January 2008, pp 11-21

    (I’ve been struck by the a-signifying and machinic recently, so this is part of some research into that area.)

    The essay is short and tight, with the use of ATM / magstripes to illustrate the role of a-signifying semiotics (ASS).  ‘Reorientation’ argument, attempting to place AAS on the table for semioticians.  (1) suspend hierarchy of sign/signal, where signal is lower in status because of capacity to be “computed quantitatively irrespective of their possible meaning” (def. Eco), (2) quantitative / machinic aspect of signals to be theorised as positive, not negative.  Signals as subset of ASS, the latter theory being what underpins the retheorisation of the signal.

    Signals are ASS to the extent they transmit information.  But ASS [“non linguistic information transfer” (p12)] fundamentally are: non-representational, non-mental, strict and precise.  Operation through ‘part-signs’ (aka. particle-signs, point-signs).  No ‘lack’ of meaning in ASS (not “denying something to someone” p13) and not reducible to a behaviourist model.  ASS part of the route by which the Ucs. can be theorised outside structuralist and psychoanlaytic models.  (The ‘exit from language’).

    Signifying semiologies (SS) form on “the stratified planes of expression and content” which are “linguistified”.  The SS structured by “the axes of syntagm and paradigm” (syntagmatic = series of terms (c0-present), paradigmatic = constellation of terms, indeterminate (lacking co-presence).  Bosteels suggests ASS ‘add a third, diagrammatic axis’ but “this is a conservative maneuver, at best” (p14).  Nor enough to take ASS as ‘disturbing’ binary of SS, as this still allows despotic signifier to reign – “It would be easy to trap a third axis in the prodcution of a certain kind of subjectivity if it was always linked to a specific expression substance like a despotic signifier.  This despotism may be deposed if it is linguistic, but it’s relation to power, even the power of the psychoanalyst, is not vanquished” p14).  [The despotism that comes to mind here is that of the therapist, guru, ‘master’, even if they use extreme non-linguistic forms (Primal therapy perhaps as an example here?  What about art therapy, eg the LSD therapy with holocuast survivors, or ‘art brut’?  A connection with the logic of sensation here perhaps but a very different ‘tone’ in that concept compared to ASS?).]

    [ASS deployed in ‘cultural’ analysis would appear to be strictly opposed to the Geertzian model but would they ground an ‘experimental science in search of law’?  That seems unlikely, but if not then what prevents law- or function-procedures from operating or being established?]

    ASS ” ‘automate’ dominant significations by ‘organizing systems of redundancy’ on the levels of expression and content: automation entails normalization, invariance and consensus” and also “stabilization”(p14) and as such are inherently political (micro-p) rather than ‘scientific’.  (The ASS ‘operationalise local power’ and such operations are ‘encoded in the magstripe‘.)

    SS in fact rely upon ASS, the former being deployed as ‘tools’.  [Is there here an ‘ideology’ type idea of the SS as ‘illusions’ benefiting, for example, class interests.  The central difference being that there are no ‘ideas’ necessary in this type of activity, no ‘ideology’ is needed for ‘ideology’ to operate.  Ideology, itself, as a kind of SS, deployed by an ASS.  Is this a latent / manifest divide again?]

    ASS is machinic, machine is not limited to technical devices but despite this Guattari’s “repeated description of how the a-signifying semiotics trigger processes within informatic networks highlights the interactions initiated with a plastic card bearing a magnetic stripe in activating access to a bank or credit account, engaging an elaborate authentication process, makes it clear that we are dealing with a complex info-technological network.” (p15)  [This does sound as though there is something specific to modern capitalism with regard ASS, but even if ASS derived from or depended on ‘complex info-technological networks’ (ITN) it would seem appropriate to describe the brain as just such an ITN, particularly once engaged in technics, particularly if that technics is one of things rather than ideas (here I’m thinking of Barad – “Apparatuses are not Kantian conceptual frameworks: they are physical arrangements” – Barad, 2007, 129).  There is something in the ‘trigger’ that makes me think of neuro-biological structures as well.  This would push ASS into a space where they might perhaps be able to ground an Ucs on something other than meanings / language.  Still, even if an ‘extended’ brain (via technics), how far would this be capable of being operationalised?  Into the Earth itself?  Or stopping at the World? (ASS of evolutionary dynamics, extended phenotype perhaps, pushing into the Earth and beyond the World?)]

    “Triggering is the key action of part-signs”. (p17).  Guattari cited – “algorithmic, algebraic and topological logics, recordings and data processing systems that utilize mathematics, sciences, technical protocols, harmonic and polyphonic musics, neither denote nor represent in images the morphemes of a referent wholly constituted, but rather produce these through their own machinic characteristics” (p18).  Constraint does not close the machine but is the condition of its productivity within the space of ‘machinic potentialities’.

    The role of triggering – Guattari “extricates himself from the Piercean trap of subsuming diagrams under Icons” (p17), distinguishing between the semiotic regimes of the image (symbolic) and the diagram (a-signifying).  This is a “relatively straightforward … splitting of diagrams from icons and substitution of reproductive fro productive force” (p18).

    Brief paragraph on the Hjelmslevian form/content appropriation that Guattari makes (p18-19).

    Final section (V) on the connection to politics (an ‘essential’ connection) via the role of information and organisation.  “Repetitive machinic signaletic stimuli are the stuff of the info capitalist technoverse” (p19).  The ‘means of escape’ [always this question] – “the key to overcoming this straightjacket of technological deterministic formal correspondence would be to look at the alternative ontological universes opened by a-signifying semiotics and the kind of subjectivities attached to them” (p20).

    Other references:

    Karen Barad, Meeting the universe halfway, Duke 2007.

  • The class war in our heads

    The class war in our heads

    1469799942301.jpg_5631408793549855746Why bother with Freud today, a century after his work and ideas first began to have their effect?  Is psychoanalysis really taken seriously anymore?  Isn’t the whole dirty, sorry, splintered image of psychoanalysis something to be forgotten, something to put behind us as one more moment of false enlightenment?

    The image of psychoanalysis within the Western intellectual realm is deeply problematic, rejected by many as inherently unscientific, accused by others of being little more than charlatanism and self-serving duplicity and yet the practice remains, indeed it often appears like it is increasingly called for by health practitioners and state services.  If the intellectuals tend to relegate psychoanalysis to curious theory, the state and capital still find it to have some place in the tools of modern governance.  Why bother with Freud today?  One answer is that we have no option to consider Freud again and again because in modern capitalist society, if we are to think against the stream, against the state, against capital, then we are faced with the effects of Freudianism, of psychoanalysis, in the very tissue of our lives.  In the realm of advertising and public relations we encounter the legacy of Edward Bernays and the tradition of manufacturing consent, in the clinical practices of everyday life we find human lives can be affected, often positively, by psychoanalytic techniques and in the malaise or revolutionary politics we re-encounter – time and again – the problems of self-repression group psychology that Reich so notoriously placed centre stage.  The fact that Freud still haunts our streets and minds might, however, suggest a more radical surgery is needed, that we need to redouble our efforts to unmask the charlatans, convince others of the unscientific nature of the whole practice and finally eject the psychoanalysts from polite society.

    A lingering doubt remains, however, that this is not the right course of action.  Not least this arises because of the peculiar polarisation of positions that can be encountered in modern debates about agency, politics, the mind and consciousness.

    On one side we find the neuroscientists who increasingly develop their capacity to understand the wiring of the brain as well as their skill at re-engineering the mind.  There is no avoiding the fact that neuroscience is rapidly developing into one of the most fascinating and powerful new tools in the human arsenal of war against the given, a war led by science, which finds wonder and joy in the subjugation of nature and the extension of the possibilities of human life.  Neuroscience does already and will increasingly offer new possibilities for liberation and yet this is not its central purpose and it has equal potential to provide weapons of mass subjugation.  Neuroscience is powerless to answer the question of who rules the technology, who wields the policies and potentials of the capacities it will unleash.  It will no doubt produce those who cry out at the conversion once more of ploughshares into weapons but it has no inherent capacity to prevent such conversion and the likelihood of those who rule successfully using such tools as weapons is, as always with any technology, bordering on the absolute.   Nor does it have any power over the risks of the profit potential of the mass deployment of neuroscientific techniques, the insidious conversion of yet another piece of knowledge into a simple means of extending the range of exchange values regardless of the consequences.  Neither the state, nor the capitalist, care much for ethics, empowerment or human extension other than as means to their own inherent goals – those goals, as always, being distinct from often humanistic concerns that might motivate the neuroscientists.

    On the other side, however, we find too often the simplistic claim that no matter how much the physicalist tells us about the psychical, there will always remain some leftover capacity to choose, to act against our natures, to make ourselves differently in the face of our biological destiny or structure.  We can affirm, in the face of the physical, the irreducibility of the psychical, although this crude dualism is often couched in far more sophisticated terms nowadays.  The realm of freedom, of self-giving laws, of loyalty to the idea, of choice, this, we are told, trumps the scanners and chemicals and scalpels.  If only that were so but who, today, can seriously hold to a concept of some mysterious power that appears to resist the physical in a simply willful way.  We can no more avoid our brains than we can gravity.  And yet…

    It is not for a middle path that we need to look again, yet again, at Freud.  It is, instead, because of a completely different option opened up by Freud (and by Marx and Nietzsche), one that is not inherently fixed on the often unthought assumption that the goal is to determine the way things are determined, by reasons or causes or a mixture of both perhaps.  Freud offers one of the routes to the senses of production within which we might find both the production of determinations and the production of indeterminations.  These senses of production, modes of production, are more than simply determinations because they are the conditions of any concrete determinations.    They are – and this cannot be avoided – far more complex processes than any to be found in either the physical or the psychical.  The very distinction between a mind and a body is resultant from, grounded in, such modes of production and is no more a natural fact than the division between the ‘races’ or ‘genders’ or ‘classes’.  To put it crudely – and with a view to shunning away from this text all who are already inherently agents of capitalism – there is a class war in our heads.  Freud is worth turning to again because he was perhaps the first to encounter this, even if he distorted it as he did so.  To fight this war we cannot simply discard those tools of the enemy that work, they must instead be turned from weapons back into ploughshares.

    If this emphasis on the class war suggests a partisan relation to the material at hand, then so be it.  Only those who are too stupid to know that tools need to work no matter what task they are used for would think that such partisanship perverts enquiry.  This emphasis is, of course, one that places universal abstractions and absolute truths in the service of some wider goal, the goal of the liberation of the working class and the oppressed from the disgusting spectacle of capitalism.  This language, however, is riddled with connotations that have little practical use any more.  The days of the Communist Party – official or otherwise – are over, the mass party having given way to the mass movement and thence into the mass war.  We have been living in the Third World War for the last twenty years at least, probably longer, a war not amongst nation states and the capitalist class but a war against the working class and the oppressed.  Yet the greatest single fact of this war is it is always ‘over there’.  If the front lines of the war ever reach you in the form of guns and bombs and drones this is just the particular technology deployed in specific geopolitical spaces.  At all other times the war ‘over there’ goes on everywhere and nowhere and the casualties mount up in so-called ‘symptoms of modernity’ – mental health problems, curious behaviours, collective impotence and the failure of politics as a place of solutions.   At one point the class war occurred in the factory and the streets.  Now it has occupied the mind.  There is a class war in your brain.

    This is to state baldly, polemically, what needs to be argued for, it is little more than assertion at this stage and the task at hand is to offer some insight into this war and some tools with which to fight it that are not already in the hands of the enemy – and there is without doubt an enemy.  We are not ‘all in this together’ nor have we ever been.  We may only hope that if we fight and win we might be able, at some point, to remove the enemy from reality and consign the very concept to what will eventually become a pre-history of the new earth.

    The cards are on the table.  Our first question arises from the basic problem, which is not an intellectual one, abstract and polite, but a problem of determinate social production.  The question is then, what, in the face of the onslaught of a capitalist society, can Freud offer us as tools of understanding and weapons of survival?  If you want the polite, but insidiously abstracted version of this question, we might naively say something like “In the face of life, how can Freud offer us means of coping, or helping others cope?”  If we did, however, use such insipid words then we would, at once, be complicit with the very problem that forces us to find weapons of survival in the first place.   This thus brings us to our second question – does psychoanalysis offer us the means by which we might arm ourselves?  The response to this is firmly, hysterically, negative.  The prison warder is no friend, even if the prisoner must at times smile and say “yes sir”.  We are not left with a simple rejection, however, and it is because of a curious problem that arises – we are not the first to note this of course – between Freud and psychoanalysis as an institution that we will explore whether the tools are instead to be found in schizoanalysis.  We think schizoanalysis might offer weapons of liberation – and we say ‘might’ very consciously and explicitly because we are not yet, perhaps never will be, certain of this.  The ghost of Freud will therefore be joined by those of Deleuze and Guattari.  Hopefully we have, at this point, driven away the last of the readers we wish to avoid.

     

     

  • City psychosis.

    City psychosis.

    The twentieth century witnessed the rapid urbanization of the world’s population. The global proportion of urban population increased from a mere 13 per cent in 1900 to 29 per cent in 1950 and, according to the 2005 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, reached 49 per cent in 2005. Since the world is projected to continue to urbanize, 60 per cent of the global population is expected to live in cities by 2030. The rising numbers of urban dwellers give the best indication of the scale of these unprecedented trends: the urban population increased from 220 million in 1900 to 732 million in 1950, and is estimated to have reached 3.2 billion in 2005, thus more than quadrupling since 1950. According to the latest United Nations population projections, 4.9 billion people are expected to be urban dwellers in 2030. – Source: World Urbanization Prospects: the 2005 Revision

    Inspired by a reading of Lewis Mumford’s ‘The city in history’ I’m currently beginning a slow process of thinking about the role of the City in the human ecology.  I turned to Mumford because of the scattered references to his work in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project, and that has already proved productive, not least because of the realization that the ‘paranoid/schizoid’ poles that run throughout that project seem to have some roots in Mumford that I had not registered before.  In Chapter Two, for example, Mumford develops his idea of the City as an ‘implosion’ event in human culture that arises from a dynamic between neolithic ‘villages’ and paleolithic ‘hunters’ which gradually produces the role of Kingship, the catalyst for the implosion event of the City.  With this implosion event, dominated by a central authority, a new  “collective personality structure” (p.60) develops.  The idea that this new collective personality structure is one that connects a paranoid to a schizoid position is clear, for example, in the following:

    Not merely did the walled city give a permanent collective structure to the paranoid claims and delusions of kingship, augmenting suspicion, hostility, non-cooperation, but the division of labour and castes, pushed to the extreme, normalized schizophrenia; while the compulsive repetitious labour imposed on a large part of the urban population under slavery, reproduced the structure of a compulsion neurosis. (p59-60)

    Mumford is enjoyable to read, so far at least, because of his richly interpretative and evocative approach.  He develops a very broad synthesis of ideas and histories in order to tell something like an ‘origin myth’ and this is both the strength and weakness of his book so far.  At times he seems to be simply telling a story, at other times attempting to synthesise existing knowledge, always hovering on the edge of actually showing anything to be the case, instead maintaining this suggestive dynamic, hence why it seems akin to an ‘origin myth’ that is being presented.  That said, this is only the initial impression from the first couple of chapters of the work and is something that I hope changes as I work through his large text.  It would be disappointing to find that ‘origin myth’ style continues for all 650 or so pages, which I doubt it does, but it’s still interesting to encounter it.

    Reading Mumford prompted me to look at some of the data regarding urbanization and some very limited research brought up the recent ‘transition point’ shift taht made the news around about 2006.  The shift from rural to urban world population crossed the 50% urban population mark in 2006-2007 and is still climbing. Using data from the World Bank, as presented by Google, this shift can be seen in the following:

    (UPDATE: missing graph it was here once but got lost in server migrations at some point and reconstructing it now would be a right pita, ML 2022)

    Although a more interesting graph is the one that represents this growth in terms of regions, as follows:

    (UPDATE: again, missing graph it was here once but got lost in server migrations at some point andreconstructing it now would be a right pita, ML 2022)

    In the regionally differentiated graph it’s clear that all areas of the world are subject to the same basic direction of urbanisation, although unsurprisingly it is North America that has the highest ratio of urbanised population.

    Now graphs are terrible things in many ways, delusion engines of the highest degree if taken uncritically, and so I’m not exactly sure quite what these graphs show and wouldn’t want to make any claims about what’s really going on behind these data sets. However, graphs derive their delusionary capacities from their ability to present ‘seemings’, that is, to show how something seems to be operating. Given this rather large caveat, one of the things that seems to be shown in these graphs is that there is a rather uniform and reasonably drastic increase in urbanisation between the years of 1960 and 2012. It also seems that the data within this particular window is a little odd. I haven’t been able to find an easy source for data that goes back, say, to 1860, let alone 1760 or even earlier but one of the things that seems rather obvious is that whatever the function that is operational within the 1960-2012 framework, it must be a different function from that which was operating, for example, between 1760 and 1960 and that seems to be the case for one very simple reason. If we were to take the left hand side of the graph and simply push the numbers down to zero on the basis on some sort of pattern available from the snapshot in the graphs (Rational Health Warning, see footnote *1), it would seem that such a ‘zero urban population point’ would occur around about 1850. That seems a little odd, not least because the City is a function of human life for far longer than the last 170 years. In fact it might reasonably be thought that the City has been one of the central, perhaps even the most central, feature of human life for anywhere between the last two to four thousand years (cf. Mumford). Of course, ‘urbanization’ and the ratio of the urban to rural population is a different phenomena from ‘the City’ so it might be wrong to conflate the two and in addition the ‘1850’ origin moment points towards something like the heart of the industrial capitalist revolution.

    What this data suggests to me is two-fold.  Firstly, that it seems like the urbanization dynamic is strong and rapidly transforming the social relations of the world on a grand scale.  Secondly, more speculatively, that this is a new dynamic.  It’s this second point that interests me after beginning the Mumford and in particular after encountering his idea that the City itself is an implosion event, one that operates like a threshold moment the effects of which are a rapid development of productive forces.  If the new rise of the city, the rapid increase in urbanization, is a contemporary event then one thing that suggests itself is that a new ‘implosion event’ might be on the horizon or – more likely – might be the horizon within which we are living.  Whilst this is deeply connected to capitalist social relations, in may ways it’s also a separate and autonomous dynamic.  If the first implosion event of the City brought forth, as Mumford suggests, a quite radical development of the productive forces then it seems reasonable to think that a new implosion event might do something similar.  Given that the first implosion event also involved some shift in the collective personality, it would again seem reasonable to extrapolate another such shift.  The question that suggests itself, then, is what sort of city psychosis is developing?  If the Kingship role is no longer dominant and the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ spectrum that goes with it is perhaps being superseded, what is the city psychosis of the future?

    (Citations from Lewis Mumford, The city in history, Pelican 1984.)

    *1. I’m talking, very very informally, about interpolating the data in the graph, which would perhaps best be done with some statistical analytical tools. I’m not equipped to do this but just using data points taken at decade long intervals and noting the difference between one decade and another there is, very roughly, something like a 3% increase from decade to decade, although this does increase in more recent decades reaching 4.92% difference between 2000 and 2010. On the basis of a 3% increase decade by decade, and working back from 33.51% at 1960 gives us a 110 year span for the subtraction to hit zero. This is pretty crude and may well hide some obvious problems, so large pinches of salt please, this is just idle speculation on my part at this moment. For example, the difference in growth between decades from 1960 to 2010 increases each year, from 3.08% between 1960 and 1970 to 4.92% between 2000 and 2010. If I were to look at the pattern of this increase, rather than stop at 3%, then I might find that the increase decreases each decade as we move back in time. The increase would then ‘disappear’ at some point, possibly well before 1850, and a ‘stability’ arise in which urban populations remain steady, or relatively steady. This, intuitively, seems far more likely to be the actual case. It seems, intuitively, that there is some point at which urbanisation moves from relatively stable population to relatively dynamic growth, a point which I would imagine coincides somewhat with the rise or industrial capitalism, but I need to find more data sources (and develop my statistical analytical skills) before I could say anything about this. No doubt there is a lot of work already done on this within geography and so I’ll be looking around in that area for some more material.  The ‘World Urbanization prospects’ report linked above notes that in 1900 the world urban population was around 13 per cent in 1900, which would still, very roughly, fit the very rough ‘3% of total per decade’ increase model, since that model gives 15% at 1900.

  • (This is an exercise in the rational imagination).

    (This is an exercise in the rational imagination).

    1. Imagine a universal intelligence. It isn’t hard to do.

    2. Of course it is hard to do.

    3. But not impossible.

    4. Nothing rules it out…everything rules it in.

    5. Does the imagination pay dividends here? Of a sort. What sorts of dividends? (more…)

  • Diamond time, daimon time.

    Diamond time, daimon time.

    In the instant of diamond time duration incarnates and shatters itself. Many types of duration must exist, this seems to be true almost ‘by definition’. Duration is, after all, a multiplicity. Yet the time that fascinates, that holds attention and throws itself upon us, captures and eludes us, is predominantly the moments of diamond time, daimon time. We uncover these moments not through attention – our attention is always held by this time, this daimon diamond time – but through thought. We are forced to think, in the most perfect example of the forcing of thought, by this encounter with diamond time.

    The eternal return is perhaps the most celebrated thought of the diamond time. The difficulty is often in extracting any sense of the eternal return from the peculiar and slight traces it left, not least in the peculiar way in which the eternal return is brought back to the moment, to the instant logical game of that which is both there and not there, here and not here. There is no instant of the eternal return since it shatters the moment and explodes the instant, taking us directly into the daimon of time, diamond time.

    Time is not a passing, a going or an arriving. Time comes. When it has come it never goes. Almost no human being exists who has not yet had time come to them but there will be some, just as there will some plants, some rocks, some stars for whom time has not yet come – although it will. Aion sits softly on the lap of all and none may avoid the diamond time, no matter may avoid the daimon of time. Aion holds all in time and captures all, in time.

    The encounter, however, is that which thought struggles to arrive at. To encounter time is to become shattered by it, at least at its most potent, in its daimon diamond form. We live as time, of course, we project the horizon of temporality up to and into the moment of the possibility of our impossibility but this living of time, this ecstatic temporality, always lacks that which it dismisses as impossible presence. The transcendental condition of ecstatic temporality is diamond time.

    No doubt it is difficult to extract thought from its almost inevitable subsumption of diamond time into the subject. Kierkegaard perhaps offers the most abject lesson in this loss. The eternal, encountered as truth, God, Christ and the choice loses Aion in the incarnation of the daimon. We seem to be told that it must be the idea, that which is conjured into existence ex nihilo from the pure power of the subject and yet in this case the instant absorbs time rather than embracing it. It sucks up into the present the eternal that simply couldn’t be here in a moment. Diamond time is instead that which none want to encounter, the explosive truth.

  • Marc Ngui | Drawing ‘A Thousand Plateaus’

    Marc Ngui | Drawing ‘A Thousand Plateaus’

    Marc Ngui | Drawing – Art

  • Interest and desire

    Interest and desire

    DSC01950_33863964Larvalsubjects has an interesting post on Marx in the academy over here which has generated a lively discussion in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of agency has risen to the fore again.  This is still something I find disturbing, something I’m not really able to get a grip on fully, since I tend to understand the problem of agency as responding to something like a desire to answer the question ‘what difference can I make?’.  “Where’s the agency“, someone might ask, “in these economic analyses of desire (D&G) or capital (Marx)?  Isn’t it all just a huge machine in which I am nothing?  And if it is a big machine, how did this machine produce it’s own auto-critique?  Isn’t it really the break, the rupture (of the subject), that we need to theorise?  Isn’t consciousness really the most important fact in reality since it is inexplicable by reality?   Me, I’m important, surely – doesn’t my analysis do anything, offer anything – don’t I have the answers, or at least the right to produce answers or the possibility of finding them?”  I’m inclined to dismiss these questions out of hand as the whining desire of a resentiment-filled petit-bourgeois who thinks they’re ‘in charge of their life’ in the first place  but have to recognise that at least some of the charge invested in this response is disproportionate and perhaps related to the other peculiar investments I find myself bound to (revolution, majik, sex).

    One of the things that I thin I agree with larval about is that the emphasis of thinkers such as Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere and Zizek seems to be inverse to that of Marx – “Don’t these positions [Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere, Zizek] postulate that change proceeds via consciousness, rather than consciousness, thought, emerging from modes of production?” larval asks.

    (more…)

  • beware desyr: anti-oedipus reading notes

    beware desyr: anti-oedipus reading notes

    One of the re-occurring problems that Deleuze & Guattari address within Anti-Oedipus (AO) is that of the apparently self harming act.  This is perhaps most clearly indicated in the way in which they return to the ‘desire for fascism’ within the masses that Wilhelm Reich attempted to address in his book The mass psychology of fascism.  Reich, whom D&G declare  “the true founder of a materialist psychiatry” (AO: 129), was unsatisfied with any theoretical explanation of the rise of fascism that failed to account for its popular support.  They phrase this in terms of desire – “Desire can never be deceived.  Interests can be deceived, unrecognised, or betrayed, but not desire.  Whence Reich’s cry: no, the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism, and that is what has to be explained” (AO: 279).  The argument is a attempt to allow reality to speak, to let the facts back in, in particular the unpalatable fact that there was this support for fascism (this desire).  Such a fact, the argument presumably goes, means that we are faced with the options of (i) either those who voted and marched and applauded the fascists were somehow duped or else (ii) they willingly and knowingly wanted this state of things (which is taken to be a kind of contradictory situation since it is ‘against their own interests’ for the masses to desire fascism).  Unlike a simple despotism in which the autocrat installs themselves through violence, perhaps aided in some sense by passivity, the fascist regime came to power through a popular passion, through the desire of the masses.  This poses the problem of why people desire that which is against their own interests, why people desire that which oppresses them?

    (more…)

  • The breath as an organ

    The breath as an organ

    DSC01951_33860634The snoring man on the train, just behind and to our left, revolts us. Their noise is more penetrating, more cutting, even though it is lower in decibel than the irritating child a few seats in front with their high pitched and hyperactive voice testing the patience of the father figure accompanying them. The snoring man is filthy in his activity, that rasping breath, that grasping for life calling out to be silenced and with its silence comes death. The sound of the breath is a broken tool that reveals its function, its equipmentality as Heidegger would call it, precisely by being heard. That filthy, contaminating breath, no gentle rythmn of life but a crushed, rushing in-out-in-out intimacy that brings the Other too close, too far within the experience of living together that repulses us within our modernity, repulses us because of its forced confinement amongst each other.
    (more…)

  • Principles and Facts – notes

    Principles and Facts – notes

    There’s an interesting online psych project over here at Project Implicit…an interesting thing mentioned on Thought Capital’s blog post about the use of ’empirical data’ in ’evidenced-based meta-analyses’. I presume these EBMA’s are some sort of peculiar category of philosophical activity, perhaps connected to the idea of ’experimental philosophy’ which, whilst fascinating, seems to sometimes miss the point. Can evidence ever establish particular principles of thought? If not, then is it for a philosophy a question of giving up principles or of giving up evidence? Is there a dichotomy here that cannot (in principle or in fact) be resolved?

    This difficulty, of what we might call the distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris is critical to any attempt to understand transcendental philosophy. There is an argument being made (James Williams, Dan Smith etc) that it is in fact principles that are crucial for Deleuze, that the quid juris has in some sense a priority derivable from an affinity of Deleuze’s method with that expressed by Leibniz ’Principle of Sufficient Reason’. Everything has to have a reason for existing, a ratio existendi, rather than simply a reason for being, ratio essendi. In fact, Smith argue, Leibniz in fact added other epistemological and metaphysical conditions in the PSR with the notions of ratio cognoscendi (a reason for how we can know the thing, the principle of indiscernibles) and a ratio fiendi (reason for becoming out of that which already is or law of continuity preventing arbitrary MacGuffin like inventions during the course of an account). The PSR aims to fulfill all that we would ask for in either of the quid moves, such that a question of fact or principle is capable of being responded to by understanding the sufficient reason for a thing.

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