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.

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.

Ghost Stories & Nightmares Published

Please check out this wonderful new publication, Three Word Chant, by the folks at Giles Corey Press.

If you like what you see, please consider donating some startup funds to get the print version of their summer catalogue off the ground.

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.]

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.

desire

But what is it that I am referring to when I say “desire”? In a few words, I refer to three processes. First: the impulse of attraction, which draws us towards certain universes, and the impulse of repulsion, which pushes us away from others without us knowing exactly why, blindly guided by the affects that each of these encounters generates in our body. Second: the forms of expression that we create in order to bring into the visible and utterable the sensible states that such connections and disconnections progressively produce in our subjectivity. Third: the metamorphoses of ourselves and of our territories of existence, which are fabricated in this process.

–Suely Rolnik, “Deleuze, Schizoanalyst”

New Download: Social Typology in D&G’s Anti-Oedipus

Chart of the social typology in part 3 (the ‘anthropology’ chapter) of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Available here.

picking the right midwife for the birth of the post-human

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism was, therefore similar in motivation to psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and certain forms of Marxism and existentialism; all these movements depicted ‘man’ as the being who is _other than mere_ life, whose desire for what is not immediate and present separates him from all positive being and compels him to enter some structure of deferral of present desire for the sake of an anticipated and collectively recognized human end.

Resonance: A New Image of Communication

As the phrase goes, “the communication between two terms generates an independent third.”

Resonance isn’t found by plumbing the interiority of two singularities, or even their overlap. (A U B)

Rather, resonance is an external force in-between singularities that incites forms of content and expression.

Dominic Smith’s response article to Badiou’s Clamour of Being is an amazing descriptive piece that lays the groundwork for theorizing this form of inter-action:

Politics today is nothing more than the expression of the domination of dead structures over the entire range of living production

The historical communist parties, prisoners of antiquated paradigms of production, did not even succeed in imagining the revolutionary force of the social mode of production which was in the process of emerging. Incapable of separating themselves from centralist organizational models deriving from a paradigmatic split between the avant-garde and the masses, they found themselves disoriented and frightened in the face of the unexpected self-organization of a social movement.