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

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 5:26 am
by d63
I'm sorry, Bill. Please believe me when I say I am not purposely ignoring you:

just too little time.

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

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 12:44 pm
by Bill Wiltrack
.



Am I correct in assuming that you are doing some sort of stimulant when you write and that you are around the age of ~ 60?




.

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

Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2014 11:20 pm
by d63
Actually: Busch lite and Jager and I'm 52 going on 53 in September.

As far as stimulants: there is coffee. As far as like speed or cocaine: I'm afraid my heart would pop.

I'm alright with taking a hit of pot after doing my main writing, but that always leads to those poetic flights you've seen from me from time to time.

That said, I swear, Bill, you are always at the back of my mind. The only reason I haven't responded to your inquiry is because I keep getting pulled in other directions in the small window I have to post. I am committed to getting to it. Anyway:

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

Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2014 11:20 pm
by d63
Got attacked by a couple of trolls yesterday which was as surprising as it was disconcerting in that I had recently been noting how few if any of them I had been encountering lately on any of the boards I had been haunting. So when these 2 came at me, it was a lot like back in the 90’s when I took on the impression that the prejudice that I had seen back in the 70’s –especially against African Americans- was a thing of the past, then had people close to me go on racist rants.

It came as always: with a clear tone of heckling. I was basically doing what the OP asked me to do when 2 little goons (they always work in packs (took on some strange territorial reaction over a string that wasn’t theirs and accused me of spamming –spamming, as I understand it, being those annoying e-mail ads you find in your inbox. Granted, it can be done on the boards in the form of ad-bots which most moderators do an effective job of keeping out. But when I asked them how it was I was “spamming” they danced around the subject. Now my first question was, at the time, was what it was, exactly, they meant by “spamming”. The second went deeper in asking what it was they thought they meant by it in that it was as if they had simply pulled it out their asses as a kind of buzzword in order to denigrate me for something else I had done to offend them. My guess is, having been asked to describe society in 3 or less words, I said:

“Sick with Capitalism.”

Apparently, they’re a couple of tea baggers or Randheads resorting to the same kind of tactics that such ideological thugs usually do.

My last question was pretty much inspired by John Oliver, whose show I have been watching religiously:

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

But such goons still being around, I am reminded of the import of such a philosopher as Deleuze in the day and age of message boards and the drive-by approach it has to philosophical discourse. First of all, we can see in the TlB (Troll-like Behavior ( why Deleuze and Guattarri would give privilege to the schizophrenic process over the neurotic, the neurotic being clearly indicated in the paranoid/fascistic center the TlB tends to inhabit. There is a kind of hysteria about it. Not just in these 2 goon’s desire to protect the integrity of a territory that wasn’t theirs in the first place, but in the goons who are constantly assailing you with accusations of not being objective enough or not using the scientific method like they do or who endlessly bitch about strings not being serious or staying on topic enough –that is while spending most of their time starting strings that bitch about not being serious or staying on topic enough. Once again:

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

The scary thing about it is that these behaviors are reinforced through TlBs in the professional ranks. Note, for instance, Searle’s claim that Derrida is for people that know nothing about philosophy or Hawking’s claim that science will make philosophy obsolete. When did intellectual pursuit get so territorial? When did it become a matter of telling people what they can’t do in its name? When did it get so neurotic and full of blockages of the flows of energy? And why is it so important to be able to claim to be engaging in “real philosophy”?

It all seems a lot simpler to me. There are a lot of different people out there seeking understanding through a lot of different methods. And in a free, non-fascistic, and democratic society, they would have every right to do so. For instance, Searle has every right to call what Derrida or Deleuze have done literature. I seriously doubt it would have any real effect on the continental method anyway. At the same time, I would suggest that if similar TlBs (especially on these boards (feel they have the right method to pursue understanding, they simply use those methods and let the results speak for themselves. But when it comes to other people’s methods (as long as they’re not hurting anyone (they need to mind their own fucking business. If it offends you that much, don’t buy the book. It’s that simple. Only a neurotic or hysteric (a paranoid/fascist center (would worry about something so trivial.

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

Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2014 8:32 pm
by d63
“Can anyone mind fuck me with something philosophical? Haven't really been mind fucked in a while and I miss the feeling haha”

First of all, Vincent, this is the kind of thing that brought me to love philosophy even though I prefer to think of myself as a writer who happens to love philosophy when I have no desire to actually be a philosopher. And I think the main reason I love it like I do is because it has become a kind of methadone-like stand in for the psychedelics I use to do (especially in the 70’s ( before I reached middle age and became a little less physically and dispositionally tolerant to such radical alterations of brain chemistry –a gravitation I assume underlies your desire to be “mind-fucked”.

Anyway, for shits and giggles, I’m going to try to fuse Sartre and Gilles Deleuze in terms of the relationship established (that is by you reading this (between you, this post, and me.

The first thing to recognize is that from a god’s-eye perspective, all three factors, as objects, occupy a certain space/time dimension. I am writing this right now. I am creating object that you will read at a later point in time. And even though you will be reading it long after I have written it and will likely not be there when you do, it will be as if I am there telling it to you, that is with everything in my environment (for instance: the music I am listening to (bleeding into it and fusing into the environment within which you are reading it. As I am writing this, it is as if I am reaching into the future which is your present.

On top of that, even if I were standing in front of you right now saying this, we would still be, from a god’s-eye perspective, 2 objects occupying each other’s space. Except in this case, we occupy 2 different times and 2 different spaces that are somehow connected by this post –as if it were some kind of wormhole.

Now you say to yourself: I am reading D’s post. Then you say to yourself: I am looking at myself reading D’s post. And you follow that with: I am looking at myself looking at myself looking at D’s post. And you could go on like that forever until you’re like 2 mirrors reflecting each other. But what you can never truly look at is what is looking out of you. There is, within you, this perceiving thing you can never truly look at much as there is this perceiving thing in me looking out as it writes this post for you –from a different point in time and space, that is, that has found a portal through this post and has, in some weird way, created a common space (and time (between us.

And I assume that what you mean by being “mind-fucked” is that you want to be destabilized. And that was the point of the above via Sartre.

But it gets even more destabilizing when you consider Deleuze’s metaphysical core in Difference and Repetition: the recognition that a repetition, even at its purest, must always be a different instance of the same thing. This post appears to be a stable object in your space. It doesn’t move. Still, in order to sustain its position in your space (and that is even if you don’t read it and just stare at it (it has to repeat itself for you. You, of course, could get a superficial experience of this by blinking or looking away. But even if you don’t, despite the experience of a continuum you have, you are still always looking at the same object at a different point in time. In some subtle sense, it’s a lot like the trails you tend to experience on psychedelics.

(And speaking of which: the realists try to act as if reality is just out there and that, for us, it is not really happening inside the head. But anyone who has done psychedelics knows better. If that were true, the psychedelic experience would be one of reality looking like it normally does and hallucinations superimposed on it. But those who know better know better. It is, rather, an experience of reality being altered all together –usually in the sense of some deep dream-like cartoon.)

Not sure how you are experiencing this. But you tend to know you have assimilated it when you’re no longer sure if you’re walking on solid ground, even when you’re stone cold sober.

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

Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2014 8:38 pm
by d63
?:can you really read Deleuze (w/ and w/out Guattarri (without reading yourself into it.... Can you do that with any writer?

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

Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2014 9:36 pm
by d63
“So why did you ask the question?”

Why else? To start a discourse.

“Just look at Deleuze. What did he do?”

D & G refer to this in The Anti-Oedipus (pg. 109):

“Malcolm Lowry says of his work: it’s anything you want it to be, so long as it works –“it works too, believe me, as I have found out”- a machinery. But on condition that meaning be nothing other than use, that it become a firm principle only if we have at our disposal “immanent criteria” capable of determining the legitimate uses, as opposed to the illegitimate ones that relate use instead to a hypothetical meaning and re-establish a kind of transcendence.”

I have also read, somewhere, that it is not so much a matter of what it means, but how it works. And this, I think, comes out of a sense of the text as machine, in itself, exchanging flows of energy with the reader while the reader exchanges flows of energy with it. This suggests a relationship in which meaning is not fixed, but not a free for all either –even with the free indirect discourse that Deleuze (and Lacan (tend to employ. This is why I fully agree with the point:

“ that's [to interpret Deleuze without reading yourself into it] not possible but necessary in a certain way if you try to understand what the author says. Being Deleuze would be easier to understand him? Anyway, as he would say, what cares is what pass, the rest doesn't matter. lol”

Even if we do tend to read ourselves into it (even the professional philosophers and interpreters such as Professor Buchanan (this is not to say there can be no bad interpretations of Deleuze. It still has to stand up to the reality of the text. And I would argue that it has to be like that in order for the text to stand up against the test of time. As the above quote also suggested, quoting Deleuze, it seems to be a matter of what filters, built from other philosophical texts one has previously read and their other experiences, one brings into the reading. This may be why, for instance, in the process of reading the Anti-Oedipus, I’m noticing far more emphasis on the Oedipal complex and incest than I remember seeing in either Buchanan’s or Holland’s interpretive text. It may be because, both books being written after 2000, psychoanalysis, along with the concepts of Oedipus and incest, has pretty much been pushed to the sidelines by psycho-biology. Now-a-days (and I know this from personal experience with someone close to me (psychiatry is still about listening to the patient, but has greatly departed from Freud in that the point is mainly to figure out how to adjust dosages. Faith in the talking cure is not as prominent as it was back in Freud’s day.

Still, Deleuze (as well as Lacan (remains relevant because of the post-structuralist/modern cynicism as concerns language that he epitomized. As a respected peer points out:

“Well, first of all language itself does not have a meaning. It is it's structure that makes its arbitrary symbols appear as meaning…. The question is what meaning you are looking for. Otherwise you can give it a meaning as you can apply it to anything arbitrary because of the structure you are a part of.”

As Deleuze, Lacan, and even Foucault and Derrida, seem to be suggesting: language is an agreement and human construct and, by virtue of that, not as stable as we would like to think it is. In fact, if you look at most of the authoritarian movements that have emerged throughout our history on to today, one of the primary characteristics at work seems to be tendency to confuse language for reality: to fix meaning. So it seems to no wonder that Deleuze would have spent his whole career changing the agreement and the rules of that human construct. He seems to hold an instinctual aversion to understanding the minute it moves from our raw engagement with reality to our attempt to articulate it through language: representation. Still he has to use language to articulate the point and seems to resent it. It’s no wonder he would ask us to engage in that process by reading ourselves into it as long as we don’t do so for illegitimate purposes.

He seems almost pragmatic (in the sense of Rorty (in that sense.

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

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 5:28 am
by d63
It’s kind of a last hurrah in that I am at the end of this particular study: about the last 40 pages of The Anti-Oedipus plus footnotes. Then I move on. But I’m going to attempt, yet again, another fumbling assessment of what I’m getting (perhaps directly/perhaps through osmosis (from the book.

The first thing to understand is that our individual psychic repression (that which Freud pointed to (is basically the product of social repression. And this is where Freud went wrong (via the Oedipal complex (in that he made psychic repression a personal problem rather than a social one –that is when he actually hinted at the social element by tying it so closely to the family arrangement in which the individual developed within. And this aspect of it has haunted psychoanalysis ever since: its role in providing a smokescreen for the social forms of repression at work in the individual.

We can see this at work involved in the Oedipal overcoding at work in the relationship between the analyst and the patient via the Oedipal mythology: the problem lies in the patient’s desire to screw the maternal (so that’s what I wanted all along (the Lacanian feminine (and destroy the paternal (the phallic masculine (and the fragmentation of mind and Ego that results from the patient’s refusal to leave the pre-mirror phase which is feminine in nature. Therefore, the only solution is to complete the mirror phase by consolidating oneself to the wholeness of the father figure via the authority of the psychoanalyst and the mythologies of the symbolic order.

“So that’s what I wanted all along!”

This dynamic, in turn, poisons every aspect of the spectrum that runs from desiring production to social production. It comes down to an argument of: the feminine bad: that which is associated with molecular and multiple impulses at work in the child in their first encounters with the mother; the masculine good: that which is associated with the molar and single minded pursuits of the father as they initiate us into the symbolic order. And we can see the associations at work here. In its most obvious form, it is homosexuality bad; heterosexuality good. But it does take more subtle forms that go back to Plato’s Greece in which, humanity having just crawled out of the muck, it was a matter of civilization good /nature bad –a notion that was not questioned until, after years of despots based on Plato’s model, Rousseau came along and argued that man (note the use of the term “man” (should, by nature, be happy, but that society is what stood in the way. This de-territorialization was eventually re-territorialized by Capitalism in its emphasis on rugged individualism (the masculine (as compared to caring for others (the feminine: only an effeminate philosopher would use their knowledge for the sake of others as compared to using it as an expression of the will to power. Knowledge is power, right?

And note the irony of Rousseau’s masculine take on nature evolving into a feminine take as concerns environmental issues in the face of global Capitalism:

“Those Greenpeace hippies must be a bunch of faggots that want to fuck their mother earth and destroy Capitalism.”

Note the strange twists of logic it must take to have this mentality.

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

Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2014 10:11 pm
by d63
Reading Tartaglia’s study of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, I had one of those ah-hah epiphanies that came as they usually do: after a long period of gestation in which the concept has always been there in the empathetic sense of being understood in the cognitive sense of knowing all the definitions, but not fully assimilated to the point of being sympathetic with it. It usually comes with one of those moments when you pick a random point in a book and are able to focus on it, as compared to just reading through to get to the end of a particular section. Sometimes it can even come with a couple of hits of really good weed –or a combination of both.

But this one came from reading through to the end of a particular section of Tartaglia’s study and involved the concept of Hermeneutics. And what made the impact of this particular epiphany particularly strong was the realization that what was being described was pretty much the cornerstone of my process. As Tartaglia describes it:

“The hermeneutic method, as it has been understood ever since Heidegger adopted it from Dilthey, is essentially the method of immersion: we immerse ourselves into the phenomenon to be understood (a text, an exotic culture, an historical epoch, etc.) in order to understand it from the inside out. This means not starting out with fixed preconceptions about what needs to be understood, but rather building up familiarity and then systematising the understanding we acquire later on.” -Tartaglia, James (2007-08-14). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rorty and the Mirror of Nature (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks) (p. 180). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

This basically puts some shine on my assertion that the process of the intellectually and creatively curious is basically one of a relationship: that of turning content into form via form. And it is the same process by which we form friendships. We start with the other as a composite whole: how they look, what they say, and what we know about them via our common social circles. And we stick with them as they reveal more about themselves through a process of unfolding in which they become more beautiful to us as we see what was hidden become more and more what we see at the surface that we interact with on a superficial level. In other words, they become more beautiful when we can interact with their complexity without having to put a lot of thought into it.

And we do as much with a particular philosopher or book of philosophy.

“A crucial feature of this approach is the so-called 'hermeneutic circle', which is the idea that you cannot understand the whole until you understand the parts, and you cannot understand the parts until you understand the whole. The only way to break into the circle, then, is to 'play back and forth between guesses' (319), as Rorty puts it, the hope being that you will eventually pick up a 'new angle on things' (321). What you do not do, if you are being hermeneutic, is start from some unquestionable starting point or foundation and build up from there. Rather, you just jump in and try to get into the swing of things, just as you might join a conversation before having any clear idea what the topic is.” -Tartaglia, James (2007-08-14). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rorty and the Mirror of Nature (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks) (p. 180). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Hence: my process: and the connection with the concept of Hermeneutics in the admission that I have little interest in telling anyone what “the Truth” is and more interest in describing a process I have been blessed with being able to engage in. I am far more interested in stringing together a perfect sentence about reality then telling you what reality actually is, more resonance and seduction than a desire to tell anyone how they should think. As compared to scientific discourse, Hermeneutics is about engaging in the pleasure of discourse for the sake of discourse: just to see what happens.

And excuse the cheap segway into my Deleuze board (which I would miss if I couldn’t find such cheap segways (but I can’t help but feel that the French approach to philosophy (the free indirect discourse (invites the hermeneutic approach. I can’t help but feel that French philosophy (w/ its deep ties to dissent (would rather be literature than ever make claims to “the Truth” which is an expression of state philosophy.

I mean compare that to Dennett and Searle (American philosophers (who both celebrate the achievements of producer/consumer Capitalism through clear exposition.

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

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 9:26 pm
by d63
One of the things I’m starting to get from Eugene Holland’s reader guide to the Anti-Oedipus is the inherent opposition between desiring production and anti-production via the former’s inherent tension with social production –that is even though both are basically the same thing. On the other hand, it might be better to say that anti-production is opposed to desiring production while naturally emerging from social production. Let me explain and hope I don’t fuck it up, hope I make more sense to you than it might be making to me.

I would start by pointing out that desiring production works at a subconscious level. It works in the pings, grunts, and silences in the meat of the brain. That is the language of the brain. But evolutionary mandates require that those pings, grunts, and silences connect with other bodies -the brain basically being the ambassador of the body. It is at this point that desiring production translates into social production. But at this point, desiring production comes up against the hard reality of other bodies with their own matrixes of desiring production. Hence: anti-production –and furthermore: the disjunctive syntheses that Deleuze and Guatarri include in the triad of connection, disjunction, and conjunction.

The best analogy I can offer is a point made by Picasso: that taste is the enemy of art. But Picasso was an artist and not a man to clearly define his terms. I would argue that what he was getting at was that taste was rather a hindrance to the creative act, that which any child could engage in, and is also a form of desiring production. Art, on the other hand, is a form of social production in that it is always about group taste while the creative act still remains a form of social production in that it is desiring- production made public. Therefore, from D & G’s perspective, Art becomes a form of anti-production in the way it filters “bad art” from “good art”. From this perspective, it would have been better for Picasso to say that Art (social and anti-production (is the enemy of the creative act: desiring production.

As I have always said: the creative act never seems that far from Deleuze’s mind. Perhaps this is why I have managed to get myself trapped in the web of that goddamn Frenchman.

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

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 10:18 pm
by d63
Dear Diary moment/rhizome 12/10/2018:

The main irony of all this is that I have had to abandon the very agenda Deleuze & Guatarri prescribe in the Anti-Oedipus in order to finally get some satisfaction in what feels like a lifetime pursuit of the Anti-Oedipus. But first (in what will be my most flagrant dear diary moment (a little personal history. When I was younger, I use to think in the rhizomatic/de-centered terms that the Anti-Oedipus was working towards. (Rhizomes didn’t really become an issue until A Thousand Plateaus (it’s not even mentioned in Holland’s book).) My vision of my process was one of bouncing around between all the various disciplines I had played with in order to just see what happens: what hybrids form. But as I got into middle age, I began to feel the pressure of time: the fact that I had, at best, 20 more productive years. And 20 years feel a lot less longer than they do when you’re younger. Still, I couldn’t let go of the rhizomatic approach and found myself doing what you see me doing here (reading every book I could get to everyday and writing about what I got from the process on Facebook (and found myself frustrated when it came to understanding texts like the Anti-Oedipus. This, finally (out of the frustration of just feeling like I was just scratching the surface (and I mean it: damn the French and their weird/obscure philosophies anyway)), led to the approach I am using today (that which is about as un-rhizomatic as it could possibly be) and actually finding it successful: starting with Holland’s secondary text, I’ve read straight through it and am just now finishing with bouncing around it and am about to do another straight through on it. And it has been successful in that I feel like I’ve done a lot more than just scratch the surface. And I plan to do the same with Buchanan’s reader’s guide and then move onto the original text. And while I am excited about it, I can’t help but feel that it creates a kind of tension and contradiction at work in terms of the manifesto at work here.

And in confession, a lot of this comes out of my personal mild form of OCPD: Obsessive/Compulsive Personality Disorder (to be compared w/ OCD which is literally disabling). But I think my ambivalence about the rhizomatic is a little bigger than that. As my respected peer and jam-mate, Alex, points out:

“The problem is that things can get out of hand this way. Look at how fast cultural change has accelerated along with technological change. It's very difficult to keep up with, and so risks alienating the masses (unless they can get used to experiencing the world as a BwO, I guess).

Speaking of which - do D&G ever address the concept of alienation? I find Marx's conception lacking.”

And I agree with him. As James Burke pointed out in one of his TV series back in the 90’s: technology (via Capitalism (was progressing in a way similar to Galileo’s Law of Falling Bodies: at a constant rate of acceleration. And the problem he saw in that was that it seems to lead to a taste for novelty which can translate into a higher stimulus level which cannot always be fulfilled and could lead to despair and alienation. And let’s put in mind here that it is the very kind of acceleration and de-centeredness that Burke describes, or suggests, that is at the heart of the very manifesto (the releasing of desiring production (that the Anti-Oedipus offers, that is given that they see its potential in the dynamics of Capitalism: the constant deteritorialization.

In fact, I would argue that the very experience I have had with it parallels the history that ran from the Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus in which D&G found their selves having to pull back a little.

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

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2018 9:11 pm
by d63
Dear Diary Moment/rhizome 12/21/2018:

As I make the transition to the second stage of my project (from Eugene Holland’s analysis of Schizoanalysis to Buchanan’s reader’s guide to the Anti-Oedipus), I find my initial instincts confirmed right off the bat as concerned what was to come: that I would find my immersion in Buchanan’s book a little more productive (that I would relate to it more ( in that he tends to apply the theory to more concrete situations which is the primary agenda by which I find theory useful and worth pursuing. (Hence the project I have committed to.) I mean it’s like we were separated at birth and bound to the same destiny: Deleuze.

Holland’s book was productive. It really was. But he rarely applied schizoanalysis to real world situations and preferred to work with abstract models very similar to those of Lacan. And this always leads to same old question: what does that have to do with the price of tea in China. The main thing that made it work for me was my own need to apply it to the day to day.

But Buchanan (in a Žižek-like way (goes right to references I can easily understand (including Naomi Klein who I am fully familiar with (which is important given that one of the main blocks for Americans trying to understand Deleuze (w/ & w/out Guatarri (is the references he tends to use which are generally an aspect of French culture and a general comfort with it.

At the same time, I consider the order beneficial in that I can’t wait to see how Holland’s more abstract understanding (or what I got from it (of the 3 syntheses: connection, dysjunction, conjunction (bounces off of Buchanan’s and his application of it to the movie Jaws. And I would note here that Buchanan’s understanding of the syntheses is what led me to see them as a residual effect of a basic storyline –the creative act never seeming that far from the back of Deleuze’s mind.

I’m, yet again, excited with this project (this immersion (if you can’t tell.

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

Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2018 9:20 pm
by d63
Dear Diary Moment/rhizome 12/23/2018:

As I go deeper into Buchanan’s reader guide to the Anti-Oedipus, I’m struck by the difference in approach he took as compared to Holland’s as concerns the model that appears to be at core of the book: the three syntheses of desire/the unconscious and the 5 paralogisms as well as the illegitimate uses of the 3 syntheses that the 5 paralogisms include. And while this might, at a more nominal level, lead to confusion, at a more personal one for me it’s kind of a relief in that (given the clear authority of Buchanan and Holland on the subject (you’re given limited license to read yourself into it. And I truly believe this was exactly the result that D&G were after: the very endgame of their use of a more obscure/oblique/even poetic style of exposition.

And in that spirit, I would like to offer my own highly blue-collarized/clearly superficial version of the model. And I would start with the 3 syntheses (and I am primarily working from its analogical connection with Kant’s 3 syntheses of understanding (apprehension, reproduction, and recognition:

The connective in which the brain (via the senses and desire (collects a series of small objects and pieces them together.

The disjunctive in which the growing complexity of the constructs evolve into conflicts and forms of anti-production.

And, finally, the conjunctive in which these disruptions come to a head and everything settles into an unstable but comparatively livable state –that which Holland described as the emergence of the subject (what we think of as the self (as a kind of aftereffect.

Next I would approach the 3 illegitimate uses of the syntheses which, again, constitute the first 3 of the 5 paralogisms of psychoanalysis:

The illegitimate use of the connective in which it is seen as working towards a fixed end.

The illegitimate use of the disjunctive in which everything is fixed into binaries: man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, white/not-white, etc., etc..

And, finally, the illegitimate use of the conjunctive in which the subject that emerges from all this sees itself (even deludes itself on the matter (as the initial cause of the synthetic process and makes the mistake of seeing itself as a fixed thing with a fixed identity: white, black, gay, heterosexual, etc., etc..

As far as the 5 paralogisms, all that is left are the last 2:

The displacement of confusing the ban on incest as an actual description of desire: as a ban on some impulse that the subject might have had in the first place but might not have either -that is until the ban was brought to their attention.

And the top-down/backward approach in which psychoanalysis admits that there are elements of the Oedipus at work in society as a whole, but subscribe it to an aftereffect of the subject’s familial experience –Capitalism’s way of wiping its hands clean of our experiences of neurosis, hysteria, and paranoia when, in fact, it is the very source of it.

Anyway: that’s just my take. But it’s the steppingstone I have to work from.

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

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2018 9:25 pm
by d63
“It is an error in logic, Deleuze and Guattari argue, to assume it is possible to deduce the nature of what is prohibited from the prohibition itself. For a start, it means assuming that what is prohibited is in fact a real desire, something that we actually long to do, and would not hesitate to do were we not restrained by law. BY the same token, it assumes that the prohibition is put in place solely to prevent or at least inhibit from being performed those acts society deems 'improper'. But the reality is, desire is not that 'guilty' and the law not that 'innocent'."-from Buchanan's reader's guide to the Anti-Oedipus

This, of course (at least to my fellow Deleuzians), is a reference to what Buchanan referred to as the paralogism of fictitious desire and Holland the paralogism of displacement. And it is the easiest for me to relate to. I, for instance, have never desired my mother. At most, I sympathized and empathized with her enough to make her the pole against which I opposed individual issues I had with my father –that is while actually loving him for what he did give me. It was more of a hybrid than an either/or choice. And whatever a psychoanalyst might read into this, I hardly see in it a universal justification for over-coding it with the Oedipal model, of making it about my desire for my mother. I mean while that kind of thing might work on PornHub (which usually involves a stepmother), I hardly feel the DESIRE to watch my mother have sex on video.

That said, we really get at the fault in Freud’s theory when we look at the evil spawn of the Oedipus: the notion of wish fulfillment in dream theory. And in the process of doing so, we may get at the practicality of D&G’s agenda of unleashing desiring production into social production. Say you find yourself in dream in which you’re naked in a bathtub with your mother. Freudian theory would argue that it was about some buried desire: an example of primal repression. But enter Sartre’s Vertigo of the Possible which (something you feel whenever you come to the ledge of a high place (is not so much a matter of a fear of falling as much of a fear of throwing one’s self over. It’s just a spontaneous recognition that the option is available, much as being naked in a tub with your mother is. In other words (sans the Oedipus), we can see dreams as the kind of desiring production described by D&G.

We can see it as a kind of bricolage in which the desiring productions at work randomly take various objects of the mind and juxtaposes them together, see what combinations work for it (attract to the BwO), and retain them for further juxtaposition.

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

Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2018 8:15 pm
by d63
One of the points that Buchanan makes in his reader’s guide to the Anti-Oedipus is that Deleuze and Guattari reverses Freud’s more arborescent model of the unconscious: that in which unruly thoughts inhabit this dark realm at the roots of consciousness and always work at (and sometimes/maybe often actually succeed at (breaking into the conscious world and manipulating it via the social and political. D&G, on the other hand, argue that it is the social and political that (mainly through the Oedipal (manipulates the unconscious by manipulating desiring production.

And there is some actual empirical backing for their position. As a New Yorker article brought to my attention, many in the mental health field have noted an increasing number of the mentally ill suffering from what has been dubbed The Truman Show Complex. Much like Jim Carrey’s character in the movie, they see their selves as always being observed. But what goes even further to the heart of D&G’s position is the conclusion this leads to (that generally accepted among the mental health community): that mental illness (desiring production completely unleashed (provides the framework while culture provides the content. It even becomes more prescient when you consider that D&G argued that the best approach to clinical schizophrenia (psychosis (was the psycho-biological and chemical. They rejected the notion that the cure simply laid in digging into the subject’s past.
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Another way of getting at the nature of the unconscious and desiring production is to (every once in a while (just step back and look at how thought works. It’s not as organized as the analytics would have us believe. It’s more like having a flock of birds hovering safely above you and having individual ones suddenly swoop just above from various trajectories and in different combinations. Some, via language (how would I know what I thought if I didn’t write?), do seem to organize, then fall apart or trail off in order to make room for other combinations.

It only begins to feel more organized as it gets absorbed into the symbolic.
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The thing about philosophy is that it always feels like someone on acid trying to explain their high…. … .. .