La Chinoise. When you have nothing to do and no imagination, you come up with shit hobbies.As we are just about at the conclusion of Anti-Oedipus, we find D&G charmingly berating all forms of the Oedipus complex at the greatest distances that would seem protected under "social critique." Luckily for us as readers of D&G, we are warmed by the aggression of the Schizoanalytical tactic. It reaches everywhere. Wherever the despotic complex is formed in a territory, D&G move to unmask it. To their credit, they do this at a time when this would seem unfashionable (Paris: 1968-1972). Undoing the limits of Oedipus would have its limits for most people, those limits being fashion-sense (understood in the most abstract sense possible; ideology). For D&G though, they're sort of having an immense satirical laugh at the card carriers, much like the spectators we talked about in the last post who watch people in the ring throwing phantom punches at each other who didn't know that there was a small audience outside of them, laughing at them. Luckily for us, we get to join in the laughter if we're honest enough with ourselves like D&G have been able to accomplish. Yes, we are more alienated than ever before, but we are laughing like we've never laughed before. Almost at the end of Anti-Oedipus, D&G distinguish between the subject-group and the revolutionary-group. This will be a strong step forward for the idea of Schizoanalysis because it will negate the negative style that one thinks is being outside of Oedipus, opposed to Oedipus. In general, the opposing force will be someone in the ring we laugh at. Instead of Ivan Drago, it will be Glass Joe (Rock IV and Punchout!). It won't be the machine that destroys ("Whatever he is, He destroys!"), it will be the fighter who really doesn't know how to fight ("Watch the jaw!! Don't hit my jaw!"). A key to understanding this distinction made by D&G is the distinction between interest and unconscious desire. More specifically, it will be the area where unconscious desire trails off into an interest of any sort. Its most hilarious manifestation will be in the class-warrior who really has nothing to do (which actually isn't what's funny), and no imagination to go along with it (this is the funny part). It's here where interest as negation manifests. It's here where students pretend to empathize with labor unions. The laborers will labor for untold amounts of time unconsciously trying to grasp their sisyphean predicament while students have their summers off doing nothing but sitting around criticizing circumstances they aren't part of, in other words, people with bad hobbies (This phenomena was not just stationary to late 60's Paris, but is evident today in many different political structures). D&G go into this phenomena in a more appropriate and abstract way for the sake of Schizoanalysis. It would be easy to do what I just did, but it at least serves as a setup to what D&G want to describe in the interest-consciousness, and how it's most inconspicuous forms must be midwifed. With that being said, D&G are very trustworthy authors. They owe no allegiance to anything, and in turn do the "work" of Schizoanalysis faithfully.
"It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so - and even remain fascist and police-like - from the standpoint of its libidinal investment. Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire." The investment into a class interest can remain fascist and police-like. The investment into any interest is an invested interest that breaks with a flow and stays in the break (there are plenty plenty plenty examples of this in modern feminist theory. Some of these thinkers are the exact definition of despotic). What at first seems like an opening of a flow that will break and flow on its own can quickly become a police-state dialogue where if one doesn't follow the codes, they will be shown how things are still backwards after all this time of thinking that "things have moved forward." This forcing forward (forced progression) is a code that doesn't flow, but breaks at an ideology of the marginalized, the ideology of the slave, the loser. What an unconscious investment would "be" is not this investment manifested into an interest. The machine of desire that flows and breaks forever is at a distance from an investment into a social field, the social field with interested parties. The unconscious desire, the desiring machine is not interested. It happens on its own without conception, without goal. When one has an interested goal, this is not to be taken as a molecular desire that happens at a schizophrenic "pace." It's to be taken as a molar aggregate of ideas trying to be accomplished, in other words, ideology. This apparatus of interest won't take the place of the eternal movement of the molecular desiring machines that flow and break at their own "pace." Certainly, pure desire can manifest into ideology, and this is how ideology is possible in the first place, but this unchecked ideology isn't the "purity" that one seeks when one is trying to find the naked body. It's a style that will clothe the nakedness that one was initially seeking. One takes off the pants, doesn't like what they see, so puts on thrift-store jeans. Again, having your cake and eating it to without knowing that you're as full as someone who regularly eats at Applebees. The question is checking the ideology when it becomes just that, and breaking right there, and flowing again wherever the unconscious desire takes it. "A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom...the phenomena of group 'superegoization,' narcissism, and hierarchy - the mechanisms for the repression of desire." The group who seizes power for the betterment of what's already going on (the implicit logic of a group who wants to seize power) is subjugated under its own weight of wanting something different. The desire for difference (the interest for difference) is the opposite pole of unconscious desire, which may just appear the same to an outside perspective. When desiring-production becomes ideology, the agents are enslaved to their own ideology for the reason of being satisfied in the creativity found in their unconscious desiring-production. What they felt in that one moment, what they felt in that one break, was enough. The agents are full (they are fat). These revolutionary agents won't diet from their full feeling of being creative once. Instead, this spontaneous creativity of unconscious production will become an ideology trying to create that one moment as a memory that they hope will never cease. It will relive a moment in memory that will never be the same as the moment that wants to be created again. This privileged memory is ideology. This unchecked creativity is ideology. Ideology is fat. The unconscious desire that flowed is subjugated to the socius where it becomes a "fixed support." This "fixed support" is personal satisfaction. In the socius, the revolutionary memory is at home. It's at home in the negation of something that's ostensibly outside of itself. It defines itself in marginalization. It meets others who define themselves in marginalization. It becomes a power group of self-defined marginalized people (anyone who would tell you that they listen to indie music). The surplus-value that is gained in this revolutionary manifestation will have its own market. It's not just the kids who go to the clothing stores that sell the razor blade bracelets. It's the adults who are noticeably satisfied when eating a tomato from Whole Foods. The marginalized find their home in the surplus-market, the surplus-market that they thought was opposed to their unconscious desire. When did it happen that one man or one woman became satisfied in one creative act? When did they let ideology take the place of their unconscious desire? The satisfied personality: how did it happen? The satisfied marginalized group are coded to the degree of superegoization. If you don't like this band, you don't get the raw emotion of music! If you don't eat this organic egg from a chickens ass then you're eating bad food that's eating away at your soul! Don't do that! Don't do this! You should be doing this! You should be doing that! Ok....Mommy. Ok....Daddy. Or you could just get pregnant already and get it over with. Or you could just let the semen go, if you had the balls. How amazingly unnoticeable narcissism can be! How unnoticeable the mommy-daddy complex can be. You don't actually have to be mommy or daddy. You can be the super-mommy and daddy. You can be the infertile judge. The pride of abstinence and infertility, this hyper-mommy and daddy, this hyper-law and territory. The superego, the secret narcissism of the revolutionary...the salient repression of desire. Those who are prideful enough to take the position of the forward-movers are Oedipus. They know the way forward. They look into the sun in pictures. They look over the horizon. They run at the moment of real intensity. "A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego." D&G define the subject-group contrary to the revolutionary-group. Think of it literally. What is a subject group? It's a group of subjects. Nothing more can be said of it. It's a group of people that have no reason for being in a group in the first place, yet, they're in a group. The revolutionary-group on the other hand has a very specific reason for their group. To create ideological revolution! The subject-group though without a formal definition have libidinal investments. They are vital, not ideological. They have energy. This vital energy is revolutionary. What manifests from this vital energy is not revolutionary. Nonetheless, this unconscious libidinal vital energy penetrates into the social field, but subordinates it's object to it's own desire. The social field is at the guidance of unconscious desiring production. The social field doesn't even exist. It's a byproduct of a molecular process. This molecular process, these disjunctions at the molecular level are ignorant of the molar aggregate (the socius). Desiring-production happens on a body without organs, and the production keeps producing and flowing while breaking at spots to flow other ways. This is the subject-group that goes on its own. It invents mortal formations, meaning that what it spontaneously creates doesn't become aggrandized into ideology. It doesn't become satisfied in one creative moment where it would create its own memory as an ideology. Instead, it moves away from its creative form no matter how "satisfied it felt" into something else that would happen ignorant of any personal satisfaction that would happen to it. It's forms are always mortal. They will always die because they will always break from points and flow to new places without recognition of a temporality (this subject-group is really schizophrenic in the fact that it would be without temporality). The subject-group will cross over multiple stable lines it doesn't know are horizontal at unknown multiplicities. The lines, the horizontal lines of symbolic determination can only watch in ignorance at the transversal nature of the subject/schizo-group. It can only watch in amazement, and then eventually in marginalization. Ideology and the horizontal watch things pass by. They watch phenomena pass by as unmovable rocks themselves. There's light speed, and then there's no speed. The subject-group has no hierarchy or a superego. There is no territory. There is no "frontier." There are places always crossed and creations always left behind with no trace of memory for those places. This schizo flows, breaks, creates, and never stops in some place called home, some territory that had always been waiting for me.
D&G are faithful to their anti-psychiatry instincts in Schizoanalysis by taking the revolutionary style to task. It's here where they find ideology at its most pervasive, and it's most perverted. It's here where they find the cult of negativity, the cult of misanthropy. The marginalized style always finds its home. It has its territory. It has it's law. It has its mother and father for however much it thinks it would like to displace these archetypes. It's in this marginalized style where repression is most prideful. It's where the marginalized style will never admit to being prideful while at the same time thinking it knows exactly what the world's woes are. Always a woe. Never a yes. Always something that needs to be changed. Never a placid and passing observation at something that will always pass. The pride in difference...the fascist personality. The mask of "purity" that can so easily be interpreted from another party fuels this repression. This repression of unconscious desire is hidden under the sunshine and lollipop image under the sun. "Images, nothing but images." Look at me being free. I am here, and you are there. You are at the center, and I am at the outside, but I can still have everything that you have, but I can do more! My surplus-existence is greater than yours! You see? I'm ahead of the game. You are behind. I was one of the chosen few amongst others in a group. You know when you see one of those people and think to yourself, "they just know." I have this instinct, and you don't. I am an angel. I am an angel brought down to the earth to save it from all its iniquities. I am the image of where things need to progress, and you, you are not the image of where things need to progress, and little do I know this is what makes me who I am. This is what gives me my angelic pride. This is what represses my unconscious desire; the fact that you are there and I am here, the fact that I think of you as a lowly being who should be more like me, but don't come to close to me, or there will no longer be a marginalized group of us angels anymore. I will have no outside to stand in. There will be no center to differentiate myself from. I won't be special. Actually, I'm not a sign of "purity" where you need to progress to. I am a forced difference in order to show you where you can't get to. You can't be me.
"It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so - and even remain fascist and police-like - from the standpoint of its libidinal investment. Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire." The investment into a class interest can remain fascist and police-like. The investment into any interest is an invested interest that breaks with a flow and stays in the break (there are plenty plenty plenty examples of this in modern feminist theory. Some of these thinkers are the exact definition of despotic). What at first seems like an opening of a flow that will break and flow on its own can quickly become a police-state dialogue where if one doesn't follow the codes, they will be shown how things are still backwards after all this time of thinking that "things have moved forward." This forcing forward (forced progression) is a code that doesn't flow, but breaks at an ideology of the marginalized, the ideology of the slave, the loser. What an unconscious investment would "be" is not this investment manifested into an interest. The machine of desire that flows and breaks forever is at a distance from an investment into a social field, the social field with interested parties. The unconscious desire, the desiring machine is not interested. It happens on its own without conception, without goal. When one has an interested goal, this is not to be taken as a molecular desire that happens at a schizophrenic "pace." It's to be taken as a molar aggregate of ideas trying to be accomplished, in other words, ideology. This apparatus of interest won't take the place of the eternal movement of the molecular desiring machines that flow and break at their own "pace." Certainly, pure desire can manifest into ideology, and this is how ideology is possible in the first place, but this unchecked ideology isn't the "purity" that one seeks when one is trying to find the naked body. It's a style that will clothe the nakedness that one was initially seeking. One takes off the pants, doesn't like what they see, so puts on thrift-store jeans. Again, having your cake and eating it to without knowing that you're as full as someone who regularly eats at Applebees. The question is checking the ideology when it becomes just that, and breaking right there, and flowing again wherever the unconscious desire takes it. "A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom...the phenomena of group 'superegoization,' narcissism, and hierarchy - the mechanisms for the repression of desire." The group who seizes power for the betterment of what's already going on (the implicit logic of a group who wants to seize power) is subjugated under its own weight of wanting something different. The desire for difference (the interest for difference) is the opposite pole of unconscious desire, which may just appear the same to an outside perspective. When desiring-production becomes ideology, the agents are enslaved to their own ideology for the reason of being satisfied in the creativity found in their unconscious desiring-production. What they felt in that one moment, what they felt in that one break, was enough. The agents are full (they are fat). These revolutionary agents won't diet from their full feeling of being creative once. Instead, this spontaneous creativity of unconscious production will become an ideology trying to create that one moment as a memory that they hope will never cease. It will relive a moment in memory that will never be the same as the moment that wants to be created again. This privileged memory is ideology. This unchecked creativity is ideology. Ideology is fat. The unconscious desire that flowed is subjugated to the socius where it becomes a "fixed support." This "fixed support" is personal satisfaction. In the socius, the revolutionary memory is at home. It's at home in the negation of something that's ostensibly outside of itself. It defines itself in marginalization. It meets others who define themselves in marginalization. It becomes a power group of self-defined marginalized people (anyone who would tell you that they listen to indie music). The surplus-value that is gained in this revolutionary manifestation will have its own market. It's not just the kids who go to the clothing stores that sell the razor blade bracelets. It's the adults who are noticeably satisfied when eating a tomato from Whole Foods. The marginalized find their home in the surplus-market, the surplus-market that they thought was opposed to their unconscious desire. When did it happen that one man or one woman became satisfied in one creative act? When did they let ideology take the place of their unconscious desire? The satisfied personality: how did it happen? The satisfied marginalized group are coded to the degree of superegoization. If you don't like this band, you don't get the raw emotion of music! If you don't eat this organic egg from a chickens ass then you're eating bad food that's eating away at your soul! Don't do that! Don't do this! You should be doing this! You should be doing that! Ok....Mommy. Ok....Daddy. Or you could just get pregnant already and get it over with. Or you could just let the semen go, if you had the balls. How amazingly unnoticeable narcissism can be! How unnoticeable the mommy-daddy complex can be. You don't actually have to be mommy or daddy. You can be the super-mommy and daddy. You can be the infertile judge. The pride of abstinence and infertility, this hyper-mommy and daddy, this hyper-law and territory. The superego, the secret narcissism of the revolutionary...the salient repression of desire. Those who are prideful enough to take the position of the forward-movers are Oedipus. They know the way forward. They look into the sun in pictures. They look over the horizon. They run at the moment of real intensity. "A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego." D&G define the subject-group contrary to the revolutionary-group. Think of it literally. What is a subject group? It's a group of subjects. Nothing more can be said of it. It's a group of people that have no reason for being in a group in the first place, yet, they're in a group. The revolutionary-group on the other hand has a very specific reason for their group. To create ideological revolution! The subject-group though without a formal definition have libidinal investments. They are vital, not ideological. They have energy. This vital energy is revolutionary. What manifests from this vital energy is not revolutionary. Nonetheless, this unconscious libidinal vital energy penetrates into the social field, but subordinates it's object to it's own desire. The social field is at the guidance of unconscious desiring production. The social field doesn't even exist. It's a byproduct of a molecular process. This molecular process, these disjunctions at the molecular level are ignorant of the molar aggregate (the socius). Desiring-production happens on a body without organs, and the production keeps producing and flowing while breaking at spots to flow other ways. This is the subject-group that goes on its own. It invents mortal formations, meaning that what it spontaneously creates doesn't become aggrandized into ideology. It doesn't become satisfied in one creative moment where it would create its own memory as an ideology. Instead, it moves away from its creative form no matter how "satisfied it felt" into something else that would happen ignorant of any personal satisfaction that would happen to it. It's forms are always mortal. They will always die because they will always break from points and flow to new places without recognition of a temporality (this subject-group is really schizophrenic in the fact that it would be without temporality). The subject-group will cross over multiple stable lines it doesn't know are horizontal at unknown multiplicities. The lines, the horizontal lines of symbolic determination can only watch in ignorance at the transversal nature of the subject/schizo-group. It can only watch in amazement, and then eventually in marginalization. Ideology and the horizontal watch things pass by. They watch phenomena pass by as unmovable rocks themselves. There's light speed, and then there's no speed. The subject-group has no hierarchy or a superego. There is no territory. There is no "frontier." There are places always crossed and creations always left behind with no trace of memory for those places. This schizo flows, breaks, creates, and never stops in some place called home, some territory that had always been waiting for me.
D&G are faithful to their anti-psychiatry instincts in Schizoanalysis by taking the revolutionary style to task. It's here where they find ideology at its most pervasive, and it's most perverted. It's here where they find the cult of negativity, the cult of misanthropy. The marginalized style always finds its home. It has its territory. It has it's law. It has its mother and father for however much it thinks it would like to displace these archetypes. It's in this marginalized style where repression is most prideful. It's where the marginalized style will never admit to being prideful while at the same time thinking it knows exactly what the world's woes are. Always a woe. Never a yes. Always something that needs to be changed. Never a placid and passing observation at something that will always pass. The pride in difference...the fascist personality. The mask of "purity" that can so easily be interpreted from another party fuels this repression. This repression of unconscious desire is hidden under the sunshine and lollipop image under the sun. "Images, nothing but images." Look at me being free. I am here, and you are there. You are at the center, and I am at the outside, but I can still have everything that you have, but I can do more! My surplus-existence is greater than yours! You see? I'm ahead of the game. You are behind. I was one of the chosen few amongst others in a group. You know when you see one of those people and think to yourself, "they just know." I have this instinct, and you don't. I am an angel. I am an angel brought down to the earth to save it from all its iniquities. I am the image of where things need to progress, and you, you are not the image of where things need to progress, and little do I know this is what makes me who I am. This is what gives me my angelic pride. This is what represses my unconscious desire; the fact that you are there and I am here, the fact that I think of you as a lowly being who should be more like me, but don't come to close to me, or there will no longer be a marginalized group of us angels anymore. I will have no outside to stand in. There will be no center to differentiate myself from. I won't be special. Actually, I'm not a sign of "purity" where you need to progress to. I am a forced difference in order to show you where you can't get to. You can't be me.
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