[Audiobook] Daniel W Smith – Deleuze’s Politics: Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, and Nomadology in Anti-Oedipus & A Thousand Plateaus (2009)

I just uploaded these lectures, which I listened to a couple years ago. They are perhaps the best introduction to the politics of Deleuze and Guattari but is also rewarding for more advanced scholars. I’m sorry for the quality – I tried to clean them up, but they’re not perfect. awc

Also available here.

Daniel W Smith discussed Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s works Anti-Oedipus & A Thousand Plateaus at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum 2009. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Purdue University, is a leading expert of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. In these lectures, he lucidly outlines the theories and implications of the most political sections of Deleuze and Guattari’s work while giving special attention to the primary source materials and philosophical arguments that the authors utilized to make their argument.

Day 1: Anti-Oedipus & Desire
In this talk, Smith discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s ambitious reworking of psychoanalysis, especially with their notions of desire and the unconscious.

Day 2: Anti-Oedipus & The Human (missing part 2)
On this day of talks, Smith describes the anthropology chapter of Anti-Oedipus. In the first lecture, Smith covers the Savage and Despotic formations. Unfortunately, the second lecture, in which Smith described the Capitalism formation, was not recorded.

Day 3: A Thousand Plateaus & Nomadology
On this day, Smith presents Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology from A Thousand Plateaus, with an eye to their description of society without a state. The second lecture is dedicated to question & answer.

The reading materials for the lectures was
– Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men,” 139 – 271 Continuum Version, 141 – 164 Minnesota Version.
– Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine,” & “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture,” 387 – 522 Continuum Version, 351- 473 Minnesota Version.

DISCLAIMER:
The original recordings picked up substantial feedback that punctuated the lecture with high-pitched pinging noises that made it nearly unlistenable. I tried to eliminate as much of the feedback as possible, but ended up thinning out Smith’s voice.

I have uploaded the originals as well, but would not suggest trying to listen to them.

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New Downloads: Anti-Oedipus Documents, 3 Syntheses & 5 Paralogisms

In the downloads section, I’ve uploaded my charts for the three syntheses of the unconscious and the five paralogisms from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. There are some gaps in it, so if anyone wants to suggest additions, I’d be more than happy to consider including them. Enjoy!

Also, there’s a cool concept map of desiring-production that I found here, but it’s not my own.

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Empire & The Grid

Yesterday, Matt asked a wonderful question about my theory of subjection in Empire and its relevance to Massumi’s use of “the grid” in the introduction to Parables For the Virtual.

Let me first preface this by saying that I believe Empire has already overcome the problem of the grid. It’s now just a problem for cultural studies and other disciplines that linger on old models of social analysis. In contrast to Empire, subjection in The Social State is absolutely indicative of a grid-type model of power, as are parts of the Modern State. ***Therefore: struggles against hierarchy and binary exclusion may benefit Empire rather than confront it.***

At the beginning Parables, Massumi claims that most cultural studies uses a social model premised on structural positions (“feminine,” “black,” etc). This is an application of an argument he inherits from Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari develop an elaborate critique of certain Fruedo-Lacanian psychoanalytic models that use a grid. They spare Lacan himself (Guattari was once the heir-apparent to Lacan’s ecole freudienne and remained under analysis even after the publication of AO), but are not so kind to his more dogmatic followers, such as Serge Leclaire.

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Prelude (edited)

Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is among the simplest.

Half a century ago, an anarchist scholar decided to write a heroic story of peasants.[1] When bodies were piling up in Vietnam, he thought that people actually cared about peasants for once. Even then, his task had not been easy, given that peasants serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are performed. But in the archives he uncovered books and records to wield against those who had discounted his lowly peasants.

The heroic peasants were a good start for the scholar. But, after national liberation struggles began claiming that the heart of the nation beat within the peasant, the scholar found an even more elusive class of people: hill peoples, those who buck authorities with a run to the hills. Through diligent scholarship, he was able to bring together an impressive array of theories and terms to describe why certain peoples are poor materials for state-making.

The scholar loved the hill people’s slash-and-burn culture the most. Dismissed by others as hillbilly backwardness, he knew that their whole way of life was an elaborate trick that they used to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted: it had all changed after World War II. Most States used technologies, both mechanical and human, to eliminate their “dark twins” hiding in the mountains. Space was spanned and the hill sanctuaries were found, he said. The peoples still in the hills were the last ones to escape, and they are on the verge on disappearing, he lamented.

Not far away, a similar discovery was made.

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A Prelude to Escape

Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is also the simplest.

Half a century ago, an anarchic scholar struck out to write a heroic story of peasants. It was when bodies were piling up in Vietnam, indicating to him that people actually cared about peasants for once. Even then, his task had not been easy, given that peasants serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are performed. But in the archives he uncovered books and records to wield against those who had discounted his lowly peasants.

The heroic peasants were a good start for the anarchic scholar. But, after national liberation struggles began claiming that the heart of the nation beat within the peasant, the scholar found an even more elusive class of people: hill peoples, those who buck authorities with a run to the hills. Through diligent scholarship, he was able to bring together an impressive array of theories and terms to describe how people transformed themselves into poor materials for state-making.

What anarchic scholar loved most about the hill peoples’ was their slash-and-burn culture. Most dismiss it as hillbilly backwardness, yet he knew their whole way of life was an elaborate trick to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted. It all changed after World War II. Most States used technologies, both mechanical and human, to eliminated their “dark twins” in the hills. Space was spanned, he said. The peoples still in the hills were the last ones to escape, and they are on the verge on disappearing, he lamented.

Not far away, a similar discovery was made.

A young college student was tired of the usual posturing of campus activism. The daily barrage of manufactured urgency and its subsequent oppression Olympics asphyxiated most of us long ago. But he had a plan to fight Reagan’s imperialist interventions in Latin America. So, after gaining a little know-how in engineering, with a focus on alternative energy, he headed south to make a real contribution to ‘people who could use help.’

But after he got there, the student felt out of place, as if that struggle was not his struggle. The projects he worked on were practical, no doubt. Computer donations from the States were not hurting the people of El Salvador, but they were not really helping that much either. When he looked for guidance, they were kind but blunt. War torn El Salvador did not need engineering solutions to political problems.

Look, just go to the mountains, the comrade later said to the student. The student shot back an incredulous glance. Look, you have mountains here. Just go to the mountains. That’s what we do, get some guns, go to the mountains, and wage a revolution. The student responded thoughtfully, suggesting that, yes, there were mountains in Seattle, but that does not make any sense. A few moments later, with an embarrassed grin, he admitted that it simply does not correspond to his reality at all.

Where the anarchic scholar and the student of revolution agree, we may have silently come to the same conclusion long ago: there is no sense in running to the hills. Before, the hills may have made sense; they were once a place without history, void of space and time. In this non-place, a u-topia, there existed a people without a history. And while it is said that the history of people is the history of class struggle, it would be at least as truthful to say that the history of peoples without history is the history of the struggle for escape. But with the great latticework of surveillance and control that now spans most of the developed world, the veil of spatial isolation has been pierced. So today, the hills cannot make class struggle or freedom a reality.

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A2: Cynical Reason

The problem with the concept of ‘cynical reason’ is not that it gives us no hope but that it presumes that people are in the know and just don’t care. But really, the problem is that people don’t care to know. This means that there is still a power to knowing. Yet such a power has to be used as a weapon and not as a cure. For, if they don’t care to know, truth is only as good as it is more useful than illusion. [Because, the question is not why truth works but why illusion is so effective.]

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televisual subjection

My identity has become that of the speaker, the person who speaks from the television. Like Bakhtin, I would say that the refrain is not based on elements of form, material, or ordinary signification, but on the detachment of an existential “motif” (or leitmotiv) which installs itself like an “attractor” within a sensible and significational chaos. The different components conserve their heterogeneity, but are nevertheless captured by a refrain which couples them at the existential Territory of my self. …. (Guattari, Chaosmosis 17)

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how to give lacan the boot

[it really starts to get good at the 6 minute mark...]

Transversality was to replace transferrence. Why the replacement? Transference works by provoking change through coerced dialogue between analyst-patient. The patient, one-on-one, stuck in a room with nothing but the psychiatric gaze and the ambience of the room, has few options outside the give-and-take channeled through “the talking cure.” Compelled speech generates content that the analyst uses to place the patient on a psychoanalytic grid that charts out various structural positions. Is the patient a hysteric? Then the analyst must evacuate the position of the Big Other. The bottom line: the analyst is to induce the patient into clarifying their Subject position so a diagnosis and adequate counter-reaction be applied. The trouble is that this only works for neurotics – meaning slips for psychotics, preventing the analyst who holds meaning to get any traction.

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Deleuze and Guattari At A Thousand Plateaus An Hour

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A New Communism (Of Singularization) Pt II

Communism has nothing to do with the collectivist barbarism that has come into existence. Communism is the most intense experience of subjectivity, the maximization of the processes of singularization – individuation which represent the capability potential of our collective stock. No universality of man can be extracted from the naked abstraction of social value.

Communism no longer has anything to do with any of this [blind, reductionist collectivism]. It is a matter rather of manifesting the singular as multiplicity, mobility, spatio-temporal variability and creativity.

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