Deleuze and Guatarri Study: the Anti-Oedipus:

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d63
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Re: Deleuze and Guatarri Study: the Anti-Oedipus:

Post by d63 »

Another example of Deleuze and Guattari’s reversal of Freud’s model in which the subconscious percolates up (from the bottom up as compared to D&G’s more rhizomatic model of a feedback loop between the subconscious and the social (into the social is something I have a front row seat to as a progressive living in Nebraska (and here I am inspired by Buchanan’s lean towards the political/social and our shared issues with Capitalism): the way people seem completely saturated with corporate values, the way they seem completely incapable of thinking “outside of the box”.

I mean it: every argument you hear them make for conservative values seems to assume Capitalism like some natural force or something. It’s like a Land of Lotos eaters that, when in crisis, always refer their solutions back to the Lotos. It’s like they’re watching TV ads that suggest we live in a golden age thanks to producer/consumer Capitalism, and actually believe it. Even the democrats, who show a certain degree of distance from profit seeking behaviors, still seem to succumb to market based solutions: see carbon credits and the Affordable Care Act. Still (foolishly or not), I maintain my hope in the democratic platform way over the republican which constitutes little more than lip-service to corporate values.

And this could only be if social pressures (the products of social production (had wormed their very way into the individual psyche and its underlying subconscious and manipulated the desiring production at work in it. Hence: D&G’s agenda of unleashing desiring production into social production as compared to the Freudian agenda of social production containing desiring production.
d63
Posts: 755
Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Deleuze and Guatarri Study: the Anti-Oedipus:

Post by d63 »

Dear Diary Moment/rhizome 1/7/2019:

Today the model/the cognitive map of the Anti-Oedipus (under the guidance of Buchanan –w/residual effects from Holland (took, yet again, another step closer to crystallization, especially as concerns the Body w/out Organs. I have already noted that the BwO emerges in the connective synthesis and initiates the disjunctive synthesis.

But what today’s reading of Buchanan’s reader guide opened me up to was the “why” of that emergence (as well as give me a better understanding (in reverse (of Freud’s primal repression which was problematic for me: in other words, I didn’t actually get it until I got D&G’s understanding of it. As Kyle from South Park put it: I had a thought today. I realized that the reason the BwO (its functional/machinic agenda (emerges in the connective synthesis is to contain desiring production in its unruly state. Hence D&G’s association of it with primal repression which makes no sense at a conscious level: has no meaning. And it is that lack of meaning that allows secondary/social forces to impose meaning on it via the binary (man/woman, straight/gay, black/white, even the subject/BwO (on/off attraction/repulsion choices that the BwO tends to work in.

In other words: this is the point at which social forces (most notably producer/consumer Capitalism (start to impose their selves on the subconscious realm of desiring production and route it into acceptable forms of social production.
*
As I said yesterday: the poetry of philosophy only really sets in when the individual has assimilated the model to such a depth that they find their selves instinctively applying it to the day to day. And I am starting to see that with the 3 syntheses.

Me writing this for instance: I saw a blank space; I had to fill it; I connected thoughts and words freely (the connective of course (until certain impasses emerged (the disjunctive:

“What am I trying to say?”

“Where am I wrong?”

“How will I correct it?”

(The BwO’s regime that emerges being to write a successful post.)

And, finally, the conjunctive experience of being done: of being able to say “I did this” when, in fact, it is the product of a lot of random forces.
d63
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Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Deleuze and Guatarri Study: the Anti-Oedipus:

Post by d63 »

I have, of late, come to question (that is in a ironic way (the internal contradictions of Deleuzianism –w/ and w/out Guattari: the sense that his work, process, and the effects of it has a way of turning on itself: autocritique as D&G put it. For instance, one of the things that Deleuze always seemed focused on was the democratization of philosophy –that is as compared to the classical hierarchical approach. Ironically, this was the point of his rather oblique and seemingly esoteric approach to exposition and meaning: he wanted us to figure it out for ourselves in our own way. The problem, however, is that much of the discourse that goes on around him tends toward the reterritorialization of Deleuze: the question of what he means. Even more significant is the way our reverence for him tends to turn him into a guru figure perfectly equivalent to the paternal in the Oedipal triad that he and Guattari attempted to undermine.

(And do not get me wrong: I still consider Deleuze a part of my holy triad along with Rorty and Žižek.)

What I am arguing here is that Deleuze wandered into the same conundrum that every thinker who works from the nihilistic perspective has: that which recognizes the ungroundedness of things –that is even if they fail to recognize it at work even though the ungroundedness of things is what undermines the dogma of the authoritarian: the nihilistic perspective’s worst enemy.

I truly believe 2 things about Deleuze. First: he truly wanted to (in a truly Promethean way (democratize knowledge and give everyone access to it. He was a lot like Marx in that sense. And despite popular notions: there was hardly an elitist bone in his body. Secondly: he wanted to do it in a rockstar/Promethean kind of way. His ego was there. And it is the legacy of that ego that left us with the paradox of being a liberating force (the Promethean (while trying to not be THE Liberator –that is while falling into the role.
d63
Posts: 755
Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Deleuze and Guatarri Study: the Anti-Oedipus:

Post by d63 »

“For now what is important is that the body-without-organs represents for schizoanalysis not just the locus of repression but the potential for freedom. It can be compared to a kind of tabula rasa, freeing the organism from the purely mechanical repetition of instinctual determination as well as the fixations of neurosis - provided we understand that such a tabula rasa does not exist from the start, but rather gets produced in the course of psychic development by the transformation of energies of connection into energies of recording.” -Holland, Eugene W.. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (p. 31). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

The main thing to understand here is that we don’t start with a Body without Organs. It is, rather, the collective effect of recordings that occur during the disjunctive phase in which oppositions begin to form: white/black, capitalism/socialism, gay/straight, whatever false dichotomy you can think of. This is why we naturally tend to organize our understanding of the world in terms of comparison. It’s why, for instance, we know what a brook is by comparing it to a river, a house compared to a mansion.

My point here, however, is to note the similarity of the BwO with what I have come to experience as a background flux of knowledge from which understanding emerges. Once I came to understand a thing, it rarely (if not never (felt like it was coming out of a void. It felt, rather, like something that was almost there, but then became articulated for me. And I can’t help but correlate it with a dialectic I came across in Arther Lupia’s Uniformed: Why People Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do About It. It described a dialectic that started with information that accumulated into a body of knowledge that resulted in competence in a given desired task. And it is important to understand that entwined in that body of knowledge are our emotional responses to things: much as the disjunctive synthesis records pleasant experiences on the smooth surface the BwO in order to be able to repeat them.

It just seems to me that there is a connection between D&G’s BwO and that background flux of knowledge (that body of knowledge (that acts as a blank space with certain biases (certain repetitions (to all further syntheses of the unconscious.
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