The Truth of Extinction; Enlightenment and Extinction, Conclusion

Kaput

Freud's concept of the death-drive found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle can be said to have a philosophical analogy in the concept of the "will to know." This death-drive that we elaborated on with the help of Brassier in the last post showed us the curious nature of the human being that mentally repeats it's traumatic events in order to muster the anxiety required to buffer the shock of any future traumatic event. While Freud's reasoning in Beyond the Pleasure Principle made this phenomena less curious, it still seemed strange for any organism to constantly relive a state of anxiety regardless of any possible shock that may occur in the future (notice how futural time here plays the pivotal role in creating anxiety. It's here where Heidegger as a psycho-theorist works best rather than a philosophical critic that makes claims like "science does not think" for example). Beyond the patient, the philosopher can be said to reappropriate the death-drive in their incessant drive to know. From this, we can understand that the will to know is a drive to death. We will come to understand this in the conclusion of Enlightenment and Extinction. This is important because Brassier isn't grounding the enlightenment of extinction simply on the solar catastrophe he refers to in Lyotard's account of the suns incineration, but on the mental phenomena of the repetition of trauma, and it's philosophical analog in the drive to know. In this sense, I think it would be erroneous to classify him simply as a "nominalist." He has engaged in the theoretical constructs of Dasein rigorously while also engaging in the scientific-material conditions of the universe. This engagement is rigorously sincere to me. This sincerity will lead us to faithfully understand Enlightenment and Extinction. Lets then try to understand as faithfully as possible the analog of the death-drive in the will to know. Much beyond the responsibility to the author is an opportunity for discovery. The only thing holding one back from taking this opportunity is the fear of extinction.

"...it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the 'horror' concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being become intelligible. Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears." This explanation of the lack of purpose for being is at a distance from the commonly understood classical existentialism. One isn't simply "left with nothing" because extinction is absolute. On the other hand, one is precisely "left with nothing" because of extinction. The import for Brassier is not to take on a state of consternation, or apathy because of this extinction (notice the taking on which I hope to distinguish from an enlightenment of extinction where nothing personally is being taken on) . Being "left with nothing" need not be existentially symbolized. This existential symbolization is certainly a possibility but one that is relative to symbolic being. Instead, this "gain in intelligibility" that occurs with the enlightenment of extinction does not have to be understood as an affirmation of being's existence, nor an ethical impulse for political freedom. Simply put, the enlightenment can occur completely independent of the subject that it happens to. The concept of "horror" is specifically quoted by Brassier in order to reapporpraite what was once understood as horror into a non-existential connotation. What was at once horrific is now simply understood (thereby losing its "horrific" element). This move past the ontology of being towards a "pure" epistemology loses it's horrific element then. Horror happens to the ontologically invested. Again, this is one possibility; the possibility of an epistemological ontology. Extinction then disables what we can understand as "vital ontology." What was once to be taken as constitutive of life (Aristotelian: growth, or Heideggerian: temporal dying, for example) is now understood through the enlightenment of extinction. We understood this in the last post through Freud's discovery of the death-drive and Brassier's appropriation of the death-drive in cosmological repetition. This enlightenment of extinction is specifically epistemological though, meaning a matter of knowledge. In this sense, it wouldn't be inaccurate to see Brassier as an idealist because of his thinking that thought can come to understand extinction. This idealism is simply not ontologically invested. This thinking, this will to know is always a reduction. Every attempt to know is an attempt to "get at the bottom of things," and when it appears that there is ostensibly nothing more to discover, this sense of "horror" (existentially understood) finds that the will to know was a will to get at nothing. The act of incessant reduction simply discovers itself as an operation of incessant reduction to discover nothing. This nothing is specifically understood philosophically as the "in itself." The will to nothing forms a trace of the "in itself" that's nothing other than its own drive. The philosophically understood "in itself" then is the trace of nothing as the recognition of its own drive to know. But this "in itself" need not be understood philosophically, meaning unitarily in order to establish a "sufficient philosophy." The will to know can simply borrow verbiage from philosophy and use it tyrannically. It would be tyrannical in the sense that it need not feel the compulsion to reference the historical inception of the concept. In this sense, the "in itself" understood non-philosophically could be called historically irresponsible from the philosophical perspective. It's here where the "pure" epistemological break with ontology simply doesn't recognize the classical gestures of philosophy, philosophical gestures that we can say are historically ethical. The use of a concept without reference to its historical inception is closer to what is called "the real," because an expression happens without the ethical responsibility towards history. In this sense, what is called "the real" happens every time something is stated without reference to context or pretext (It's with this in mind that it's not so odd to see how ethical of a thinker Derrida was, broadly speaking). The trace then of the "in itself" is not an ethical drive, but a tyrannical drive to know itself as its own drive. In the drive to know nothing ("in itself"), concepts are used and disregarded at will.

"In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. This binding coincides with the objectification of thinking understood as the adequation without correspondence between the objective reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise. It is this adequation that constitutes the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction." The death-drive as the will to know for Brassier becomes equal to what is understood as the "in-itself." When seeking something called the "in-itself" what is found is the will to know. This understanding of the will to know is without end because it seeks nothing. It seeks nothing in the sense that it incessant reduces "substances," and in doing so finds something that is epistemically nothing. Thinking then is understood as the "reality of extinction," and the "subjective knowledge of trauma" experienced by a subject without any correspondence between "reality," and "subjectivity;" in other words, without causality between "reality" and "subjectivity." The will to know resembles extinction, and is experienced traumatically by the subject. There is no experience of extinction, and there is an experience of trauma. Subjective trauma and the reality of extinction are absolutely different, but thinking is understood by both concepts. When one acknowledges this truth, one must acknowledge that their thinking is a trace of nothing. In this sense, one is passively in death. In the act of knowing, one is already dead, because the drive to know is knowing nothing. Death is the knowing of the nothing that already happens. If philosophy is the will to know, it's not the static affirmation of something, nor the justification a subjective trauma it may experience. It's the "organon of extinction." We can say that it's "death as text," or "the textual form of death." What we learn here is that while death may have different forms, this has nothing to do with the absolute reality of extinction, not only on physical-material grounds, but on the grounds of what is called "subjectivity." What is called "subjectivity" is not alive but always dead. Because nothing takes on a different form, in this case of what's called "subjectivity," doesn't mean that it's not driven towards its own extinction. What we can say then is that there are different forms in which death always happens, none of which are alive if they are always grounded in death. Death has different ways of happening and repeating itself. It's these different ways of happening and repeating itself that are open to speculation. The question is: how are different forms always dying? Every question put forth to philosophy then is always a will to know nothing. This text of the drive to know nothing is philosophy. Within nothing, discoveries are always made with no end in sight. These discoveries with no end in sight don't have to take on the possibility of "existential conundrums," and/or "political consequences" for example. If the will to know is always the will to know nothing, then there are no "existential conundrums" because there is no meaning to be desired in the will to know. But what if a form of nothing doesn't follow its own drive? If Dasein as a form of nothing stops driving to know, then what is happening? How is it? How does a form stop its extinctive drive. It's crucial to allow these questions to happen without any pejorative adjectives in its questions. If one is faithful towards their own drive, there will be no room for the personality that would allow for the pejorative disposition. In other words, the death-drive is without ideology. As a preliminary question, it can be asked: "How does control happen to the extinctive drive?" How does the drive break? Maybe more pointedly, does the drive take a break, and if so, how does it take a break.

Cosmological Death-Drive; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 11

Ride the death drive. An organic experience of entropy.

In opposition to Deleuze and Heidegger's ontologies, Brassier casts Nietzsche's will to power reappropriated as the will to nothing which we discussed in the last post. The will to nothing becomes extended and more specific through Freud's concept of the death-drive found in his groundbreaking work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Brassier will want to extend the concept of Freud's death-drive into a cosmological framework, meaning an explanation of how organic life always tends towards it's entropic and non-organic nothingness. It's an extension of Freud's original concept in the sense that Brassier will find exact scientific phenomena to represent the death-drive beyond being, most specifically in the suns incineration roughly 4.5 billion years from now. First though, I think it's important to understand Freud's concept of the death-drive and Brassier does this wonderfully. We won't be understanding Freud on our own terms as if we had more authority to speak on the subject than Brassier (even if we did). Instead, we will let Brassier speak for himself regarding the concept of the death-drive. This will help us understand the initial concept of the death-drive and will also help is in understanding this concept within a cosmological context. The concept of the death-drive is one of the most important philosophical insights of the 20th century. It's something that confounded Freud before and during the Beyond the Pleasure Principle text. Freud though was never someone to stop a reduction when in the process of understanding anything (which makes him more of a philosopher than a psychoanalyst.) The understanding of the death-drive within the context of ontology will serve as the grounds for understanding it through the context of cosmology. Only when we can wipe away our teleological presupposition of vitalism can we come to grips of the sense of the death-drive concept. Brassier will help us with Freud, and then we can fully understand the farther reaching extension of arguably Freud's most important work.

"The phenomenon that motivates Freud's investigation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that of traumatic neurosis. The latter gives rise to a 'compulsion to repeat,' wherein the sufferer compulsively relives the traumatic incident in his or her dreams. Yet if the function of dreams is primarily that of wish-fulfillment, in conformity with the pleasure principle, which strives to maximize pleasure- where pleasure is defined as a diminution of excitation - and to minimize displeasure - where displeasure is defined as an increase in excitation- then traumatic neurosis poses a problem for psychoanalysis because it resists explanation in terms of the pleasure principle: why is the patient compelled to relive a shatteringly unpleasurable experience?" When Freud confronts traumatic neurosis in his patients, he's confounded by the fact that the patients repeat the traumatic event(s) that happened to them. This is at odds with what Freud preliminarily called the "pleasure principle," which simply put means that beings are driven to pleasure. What beings are driven towards in this classical concept of the pleasure principle is fulfillment of wishes. Beings wish and hope things for themselves and the pleasure principle defines beings in terms of the drive to attain the things they ideally wish and hope for. They are driven by their dreams. It's important to understand more specifically how Freud understood pleasure. Pleasure was firstly the drive to attain ones wishes. But more specifically, it was the "diminution of excitation" and an "increase in excitation." So contrary to the idea that pleasure would mean that one would be overly excited, pleasure is the diminution of excitation. In other words, the more placid one would be would signify a more maximal state of pleasure. This is important to highlight because it can be seen that someone who's overexcited is ostensibly experiencing "pleasure," whereas for Freud, this anxiety was neurotic and not pleasurable. That being said, how come patients were reliving their traumatic experiences not only in their dreams, but in their non-dream states where images would float into someones mind of the traumatic experience. Why was there a temptation and curiosity to relive something that was painful? In general, how is this perversity possible (How is a fetish possible?)? If Freud's patients, and anyone in general relives traumatic events either in dream states or non-dream states, then how much of the pleasure principle is really a principle? This is what leads Freud to write Beyond the Pleasure Principle and give an answer to the repetitive acts of trauma in his patients. Brassier writes, "Freud's answer is that through this repetition, the psyche is striving to muster the anxiety required in order to achieve a successful binding of the excess of excitation released by the traumatic breaching of its defenses." The psyche of the patient then is driven to continually allow anxiety to enter into their psyche in order to successfully bind to the original excitation of the traumatic event. The psyche is driven to equal the anxiety that was originally caused by the traumatic event. The psyche is driven to match the anxiety of a traumatic event. Why does it do this? "The compulsion to repeat consists in an attempt on the part of the unconscious to relive the traumatic incident in a condition of anxious anticipation that will allow it to buffer the shock, thereby compensating for the impotent terror that disabled the organism and staunching the excessive influx of excitation brought about by a massive psychic wound." The patient then repeats the traumatic event in their mind to "buffer the shock" of another hypothetical traumatic experience of the same kind. By repeating a traumatic event in ones mind, any new traumatic event won't be new to it. The patient will already have something in their own mind that they have experienced over and over again by the neurotic repetition of anxiety that drives to equal the hypothetical future traumatic experience. Any future experience of trauma will be staunched because the patient has relived the anxiety of trauma so much that the actual experience of trauma will be nothing new. The patient then is always in a state of anxiety anticipating a traumatic event. The patient can't know if the traumatic event will happen again or not. All that matters to the subconscious mind of the patient is that something traumatic has happened and could happen again, and the patient believes the traumatic event will happen again. If they didn't, they wouldn't hold in anticipation for something they know wasn't going to happen (just because it happened before). "The excessive influx of excitation brought about by a massive psychic wound" will be matched by the subconscious repetition of anxiety it knows will happen to itself, even though it may very well never happen again in reality. They key for the subconscious is to buffer shock specifically. Shock is the traumatic experience. Anxiety is a diminutive form of shock. It's a livable form of shock. One will never be shocked if they're always in a state of anxiety. If the subconscious keeps repeating the anxiety of a traumatic event (a trace of the traumatic event), no shock can happen to it because it constantly keeps shocking itself in smaller, more livable degrees than the initial shock that happened to itself. But for however much shock is buffered by the subconscious repetition of anxiety, this repetition of anxiety is anything but the pleasure principle. If the pleasure principle is defined as the diminution of excitation, then the drive to relive a trace of a traumatic experience is not a pleasurable drive. It's not a pleasurable drive to keep exciting oneself into small states of anxiety. If the preliminary concept of the pleasure principle given by Freud was to be an axiom for the operation of the subconscious, then the subconscious would simply forget about a traumatic event, and wouldn't feel the need to relive it in small states of anxiety in order to staunch massive excitation caused in a shock. The subconscious would say to itself: "because it happened once, doesn't mean it will happen again." If the subconscious said this to itself, it would do the opposite of repeating a traumatic event. It would end the traumatic event in the assertion that one event doesn't mean that the same exact event will happen again, or even more simply, that one event doesn't cause another event. In Freud's thought in Beyond the Pleasure Principle though, the subconscious is overwhelmed by the wound of the traumatic experience to rationally be able to reason with itself. It's here where the rationality of conscious life can take hold of the subconscious' death-drive proclivities by consciously reasserting to oneself that "I will always be shocked by something." This negates the subconscious drive to relive a traumatic experience in order to buffer a hypothetical future one because one is always constantly aware that something "shocking" can happen. Instead of constant bubbling anxiety, there's an acceptance of the constant possibility of traumatic events. Shocks will come and die away. In this sense, conscious life is retraining the ostensible function of the subconscious defined in Freud's death-drive to accept shock as something that will always happen, instead of letting one shock fester to shield from a hypothetical future shock. This is a digression from the post, but something I will want to explore later.

Brassier states "If the death-drive qua compulsion to repeat is the originary, primordial motive force driving organic life, this is because the motor of repetition - the repeating instance - is this trace of the aboriginal trauma of organic individuation. This death-drive understood as repetition of the inorganic is the repetition of the death which gave birth to the organism - a death that cannot be satisfactorily repeated, not only because the organism which bears its trace did not yet experience it, but also because that trace is the marker of an exorbitant death, one that even in dying, the organism cannot successfully repeat." Here we find the move from the death-drive understood in Freud's sense to the death-drive understood through the framework of Deleuze's concept of repetition that grounds everything. In the psychoanalytical patient, we saw the drive to constantly repeat trauma that put them in a constant state of anxiety, working against their own ostensible "pleasure principle." With Brassier (with the help of Deleuze's meticulously detailed account of repetition in Difference and Repetition), we find the cosmological context for the death drive as the repetition of death. The psychoanalytical patient had a subconscious that repeated the anxiety of trauma that would lead towards its death, not towards its pleasure. The organic in general is driven by a repetition of death just the same way. In this sense, the subconscious classically understood is analogous to the cosmological repetition of the inorganic. The inorganic constantly repeats itself, thereby creating nothing. But this repetition of death "gave birth to the organism." The inorganic constantly repeats itself, and in doing so, creates constant nothings, one of them being what we call the "organism." Being is a "form" of death. It's one that has been repeated, and one which we see with the same functions in our own species. But this death can't be repeated. The death that happened where we are the trace of that death is not something that we can say was the cause of us. Nor can we go back and live any death in general, because being (as idea) has no access to the death-event. This "exorbitant death" is beyond the bounds of reason and image. It's non-symbolic and non-causal. Again, we have to let Laruelle's concept of "unilateral duality" simmer to fully appreciate the non-correlative aspect of identity without difference, and "process" without causality. Even our experience of dying which once thought itself able to ground death can't discover the repetition of death. As we stated in a prior post, the anticipation of dying is at an absolute distance from pure death. We are the trace of a death, not the death itself. If nothing happens, and something is a "form" of nothing, then this "form" is not nothing, nor can this "form" repeat nothing. The organism cannot repeat the death-possibility that breaks nothing. At the very most, we can say with Brassier that this "repeating instance - is this trace of the aboriginal trauma of organic individuation." The trauma of individuation; this concept of the repetition of death is but a trace of inorganic repetition. To speculate just a little further in somewhat of a sporting interest, we can say: "Something had to live to be able to die."

Rupturing Causality; Anti-Oedipus, Conclusion

"When a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it can cause a hurricane in another part of the world." Why do some people get off on this shit?

There has been one consistent theme throughout Anti-Oedipus, and that's been the extrication of the personality which can synonymously be understood as ideology. The incessant criticisms of psychoanalysis have been instinctively grounded in the idea that there are people who want you to be you, without tracing the phenomena of the personality to places like Platonic substantiality, and places much prior to that in the filiative structures of primitive civilization which D&G elaborate on in chapter three of Anti-Oedipus. Schizoanalysis as an attack on psychoanalysis can be summed up as criticizing the goal of analysis: to find your place within the social structure (Oedipus). Time and time again, D&G will state that psychoanalysis will make itself into its own truth without recognizing its own development and own metaphysics (even to the point of not recognizing who "Freud" really was, or wrote). To make it even more plain, analysis is really ignorant. Schizoanalysis will form itself by knocking out psychoanalysis as a truth unto itself. D&G's insistence on the disjunctive molecular aspects to vital life are directly opposed to the molar aggregate that sums things up, that sums up the body as a you. In psychoanalysis this "molar-gesture" is the process of "finding yourself." When taken to a phenomenological level, which D&G do without recognizing it (it's somewhat obvious that D&G have never really read the primary texts of phenomenology, and that their language would gain a clarity with this type of reading), they find causality as the sort of metaphysical operation that causes the personality as goal. This is an important step because it doesn't simply trace the aims of psychoanalysis to Plato, aggrandized mythology, or even surplus-value, but to a much more fundamental level of being in causality. With that being said, I think it's time to move onto anti-correlationist theory in my own reading with Speculative Realism. After this text, I will be taking on Brassier's Nihil Unbound to become acquainted with this thought. D&G get to this at the end of Anti-Oedipus but only after their focal interest is put in place (Schizoanalysis instead of psychoanalysis). This isn't because of a "lack" on their part (Deleuze wrote Difference and Repetition before his works with Guattari), but because of a "sociological move" in their thought and writing, the sociological move that Husserl implicitly warned against for philosophy in his Crises. In the end, Anti-Oedipus is one book that was influenced by sociology (Guatarri) as much as philosophy (Deleuze). It's an important book because sometimes theory without any examples in the socius is very difficult to understand. But make no mistake, Anti-Oedipus is proclaiming a way of being that is better off for being, in other words, it's being sociological. We can have fun with this book in its criticism of modern modes of being, but it's always important to realize that things will always phenomenally happen on their own regardless of a persons critique of anything. It's here where I stand faithful to phenomenology regardless of how powerful a book Anti-Oedipus was. The pure observation of the phenomenologist still stands as the most faithful to experience as is, even if it's obviously figurative in it's mode of expressing experience as is. Nonetheless, we can certainly learn much for ourselves as living beings living now with Anti-Oedipus. This book can help us avoid some pretty nasty traps while we have to live. For this, I respect this text and would easily recommend it. Lets move onto D&G finding their way into causality as the metaphysical grounds for personal interests and the personality in general.

"On the one hand, in fact, the investment of interest fundamentally conceals the paranoiac investment of desire, and reinforces it as much as it conceals it: it covers over the irrational character of the paranoiac investment under an existing order of interests, of causes and means, of aims and reasons; or else the investment of interest itself gives rise to and creates those interests that rationalize the paranoiac investment; or yet again, an effectively revolutionary preconscious investment fully maintains a paranoiac investment at the level of the libido, to the extent that the new socius continues to subordinate the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." Something to understand right off the bat is the synonymous nature between "preconscious investment" and personal interest. The preconscious is a Freudian term signifying an archive of things that we can remember. It may be something that is in the back of our minds that we aren't consciously thinking of right now. One can take a personal interest into something, forget about it, but it still remains in their mind somewhere. This place where it remains and where it can be recalled is refereed to as the preconscious level. For D&G, when one invests themselves with a personal interest, they are concealing their natural desire. When one gives oneself a goal, something to specifically be interested in (in differentiation from others), this is opposed to the unconscious desire that has no interest, but simply has intensities. This irrationality becomes repressed under personality interests; things that you would like to see yourself doing. You have reason to believe that this is the proper course of action to take. You have means for achieving your goals. There are certain events that have caused you to have aims. For example, I had a dream (an "epiphany") of someone playing guitar. I think to myself that this must mean something. This epiphany causes me to aim towards being this epiphany. This sign showed the way. This sign signified my existence. This interest that I invested in myself by the cause of a random "meaning sequence" (please recognize the irony) can rationalize the unconscious intensity that happens to my body and this is easy to understand. Instead of seeing my body as going through a process of neuro-physiological intensity in the moment where things happened because of spontaneous breaks within a flow, I break with the break and stop the flow. I invest interest in that break where I stop to see what's going on. I don't break and continue on flowing. I like the break. I settle in the break. I am the break. I invest in the break and aggrandize the break. The break becomes an interest. I see it as something. At this point, the unconscious desire (desiring-machines) moves into preconscious desire. I remember the break because it satisfied me. It had value. I will add more value to it (surplus-value) by making a memory of the break. Again, I am the break. I will be the ideology of this break. The preconscious is a memory attached to the personality during a process of unconscious desire. Actually the personality happens because of this attachment. How the process of this attachment happens is a question put towards phenomenology. This new ideology, this new socius will continue to "subordinate the entire production of desire." Desire will be subordinated to ideology and revolutionary interests. Now, "revolutionary interests" does not simply have to have Marxian connotations. To be sure it can, but "revolutionary interests" can simply be taken as any preconscious interest at all, in other words, ideology. Anything that I take to be me and I solidify as me is a "revolutionary interest" in the sense that the unconscious break had enough power to create a personality. This is revolutionary on a purely physiological level; essentially the creation of the personality. On the other hand, we can take "revolutionary interests" literally and have it mean a personal ideology that wants to create a sociological revolution where the person thinks it would be "liberating the masses" for X,Y,Z, etc reasons (you fill in the blank of all the boring reasons that there could possibly be). Either way and in each case, we have something called "interested parties." Heidegger's ontology in Being and Time would strikingly understand this under the category of "looking around for something to do." We dive deeper into the foundations of the subordination of desire though when we understand the "revolution" in the first instance where what happens unconsciously becomes ideology in the most general sense. This will need to be addressed later on in other texts (again, phenomenology does this figuratively). This preconscious investment that manifests "interested parties," "subordinates the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." The higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality. What does this mean? Again, the interest of the revolution is just that, an interest, not a desire. It's something that somebody thinks that they have to do, not what they love to do (eros). The break happened, the flow stopped, and revolution became idealized. Now what are the "inevitable sequences of causality?" These inevitable sequences of causality are everything that happens after desire becomes idealized into an interest. Desire becomes this. Because I think this way, I have to do this. Because I had this epiphany about this, I have to do these things. Because I see people earning a lesser wage than they're entitled to whom I never met, I have to protest on behalf of their struggle that I never experienced for myself. My life is devoted to a cause because its my sole interest in life. I am coded. I believe in this, so therefore I do this (I believe therefore I am: Ideology). After I do this, I do something else to further the cause. When I become ideology, pure causality follows in things that have to happen because of my personality. I'm coded to do things because I clinged onto a break in pure desire. D&G ask us, the preconsciously invested, to do something different. They ask us to "discover the necessity for a different sort of investment." They ask us to "perform a kind of rupture with causality as well as a calling in question of aims and interests." When we are preconsciously invested, we have shown that we are "interested parties." We are ideologies. We are personalities. But when we recognize this, we can discover a new way of investment. This investment is rupturing causality. What does this mean? This precisely means to break the break that has caused us to break and go back into the flow. Instead of finding "what to do next" after we are in a break that we somehow become satisfied in (value), we don't find what this ideology causes in is. Instead, we break with the ideology and let no cause happen to us in the name of the ideology that has broken us. We defer back to unconscious desire. What we do here is preconsciously invest into unconscious desire itself so we enter back into unconscious desire, in other words; enter back into the flow instead of breaking at the break. D&G aren't saying that one can't take a break. D&G aren't saying that the unconscious doesn't break in the flow. It's quite the opposite for D&G. There are breaks in the break-flow of unconscious desire. All of Anti-Oedipus has been grounded in the theory of the schizophrenic break-flow, but it must be noted that they have been using the flow against the breaks for obvious reasons. The breaks become satisfied (ideology is like taking a vacation from the unconscious). The flows keep moving while the breaks stop moving. When the breaks become anthropomorphized, it's here where being needs to invest back into itself, back into its unconscious desire. "This cannot be achieved except at the cost of, and by means of a rupture with, causality. Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other." D&G refer back to the subject-group in distinction to the subjugated-group (which we discussed in the last post) where the subjugated-group is defined by "an order of causes and aims, and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relations that determined the large aggregates under a formation of sovereignty." This is in distinction to the subject-group who "have as their sole cause a rupture with causality." Certainly, this subject-group will have its own "objective factors" that can be traced in a causal series where we can find out how the rupture of causality was possible in the first place, but this account is for the "reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place." In other words, the "memory-traces" being done by the schizophrenic subject-group will be the task of finding out where and how intensities happen to the body. It won't investigate how a personality is formed. It will recognize where the body trembled. It won't idealize this trembling, but will simply mark it out as something that happened and move on. The subject group will find where desire has happened to itself. It will see where it happened and when it happened. It will constantly discover the intensity of unconscious desires and move onto other places. This "constant discovering" will be the breaks in the subject group. Discovering is breaking. When not discovering, it will be flowing. Being will be the unconscious desire of the schizophrenic break-flow in the subject-group. This is what Schizoanalysis would "look like." It will find things that are happening to "itself" and forget about them as quickly as them came. It won't ask "what do we do next with this?" There is nothing next to do. Something happened, and that's it. It would be an amnesiatic "work." For the unconscious doesn't have a memory. It simply reacts to an environment outside of itself...all together as a body without organs.

This is obviously a massive leap that D&G want us to take in Anti-Oedipus. They don't ask us to accomplish the Schizoanalytical task all in one time. It's obvious that they wouldn't ask this of the reader becomes it's not a task to be accomplished but a preconscious investment that will happen all the time. If it could be classified as a "task," it would be eternal much like phenomenology. As phenomenology never ends as a descriptive science of phenomena, schizoanalysis would never end as an understanding of momentary breaks within a flow. The key movement in schizoanalysis that is somewhat of a "radical" gesture is this modification of "preconscious investment." Instead of remembering something and storing phenomena for recall, the preconscious would invest into not remembering anything at all, except forgetting something that it may remember. It would literally invest into forgetting. Implied in forgetfulness is a motive to forget, meaning something was remembered. Something in phenomena happened to a body at a certain intense degree that had enough of an impact to be invested into a preconscious. In schizoanalysis though, the subject realizes this impact, opens itself up to it in its entirety, and then forgets it flowing back into phenomena. Schizoanalysis then could be understood as a different attempt at negating repression. While psychoanalysis tends to harbor on a "repressed feeling" by continually following the chain of this "repressed feeling" to a father-mother complex or an archaic mythology, schizoanalysis wouldn't harbor the "repression" or even call it a "repression." Instead it would say that an intensity happened to the body and would open itself up to that intensity. That intensity somehow was invested into the preconscious, but in schizoanalysis, the preconscious is programmed to forget the intensity to move on in the flow, instead of breaking in the break, which would define you as you. There is no "a-ha" moment in schizoanalysis. There is no "so this is what that meant!" in schizoanalysis. There is something that happened to a body which the body realizes and soon forgets once it's enlightened by this realization. It breaks, then flows, then breaks again, and flows again...on and on. As a final note, the last passage of Anti-Oedipus will fully clarify the "task" for D&G and schizoanalysis.
"The task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these - in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repressing of desire. Completing this process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed."

The Dependency in Pyschoanalysis; Anti-Oedipus, Part 3

Lets try to get to the bottom of your sickness...to find new sicknesses.

It's always just a matter of time before D&G take their analysis to the analyst's couch. I say this because it's been taken up in every chapter of Anti-Oedipus thus far, and for good reason. If Anti-Oedipus wants to act as a counterweight to established psychoanalysis, then an obvious sign is the analyst's couch, more specifically, the analysis session. I must note though that this certainly doesn't cover the breadth and scope of their investigations. They cover a plethora of authors reactions towards being oedipalized, and thus far spend most of their time explaining the theory of desiring-machines independent of the oedipal-form that everyone functions in. Going into this more "pure" theory of disjunctions, flows, breaks, intensities, etc., is something I haven't found myself wanting to write on, not because it isn't important (it's the most important ideas of the book), but because after going into the pure theory of Husserl with basically no examples I've become exhausted. I will eventually spend a post on explaining the pure theory of how the schizophrenic/psychotic as the body without organs operates as a pure productive machine like a factory instead of as something that could be explained by a "despotic signifier," paternal-theory, and oedipalization in general. When posting though, I try to let the words of the book teach out to me (as words that I want to elaborate on). In this sense, I write on what speaks to me, as the words (ideas) that pop out to me the most. The dependency placed upon the subject in psychoanalytical practice is no doubt an easy subject and a post like this won't be difficult at all. It will be fun and easy. But after doing an analysis of Husserl's Ideas I, I feel like I deserve a couple presents in the form of easy posts. A post like this is fun for everyone. Everyone gets it, I like the idea of people getting it , and we're all grotesquely satisfied in getting things. Yep, it's Christmas in the fall. Sometimes you just gotta give and take, rather than just taking it assbackwords from a phenomenologist. So lets enjoy ourselves while we can, before the winter comes, where one of the texts for analysis will probably be Husserl's expanded work and lectures on Internal Time Consciousness (where the anus will fully be opened).

"Institutional analysis tries to trace its difficult path between the repressive asylum and the legalistic hospital on the one hand, and the contractual psychoanalysis on the other. From the outset the psychoanalytic relationship modeled itself after the contractual relationship of the most traditional bourgeois medicine: the feigned exclusion of a third party; the hypocritical role of money, to which psychoanalysis brought farcical new justifications; the pretended time limitation that contradicts itself by reproducing debt to infinity, by feeding an inexhaustible transference, and by always nursing new 'conflicts.'" Psychoanalysis finds itself as a place where people can really be helped out. This is in distinction from the asylum; the place traced by analysis (where the psychotic was housed) as repressive. The legalistic hospital had to worry about just that, legality. The hospital is no place to treat the psychotic because it has to worry too much about what's legal and what's not legal (E.G. the administration of drugs). The hospital with it's infinite medicine wouldn't treat the patient, but gives them substances that would hope to change their condition. The hospital doesn't really care about a "progressive" cure for the psychotic patient. The doctor knows there's medicine that will change the neural-biological patterns of one's brain. Why waste a bunch of time on a "progressive cure" when one can just take some pills (If anyone didn't notice, I'm being somewhat sympathetic to the purely physiological doctor, the biologically-deterministic doctor.) The asylum and the legal hospital are in contrast to the psychoanalyst who makes this contrast for themselves (which is nothing new; establishing ones methods against other methods in order for ones methods to be seen as better). D&G move onto to criticize psychoanalysis for pretending to think that there isn't a third person in the room. This third person is money. Simply put, if I go to see a psychoanalyst (a therapist) I have to pay them money. Analysts don't do this stuff for free. They are there to cure you from your illness you think you have and for this to happen you have to give them something in return (the old and ageless ritual of being in debt and owing something to someone for this debt). We who are sick and think the analyst will "cure" us give them money. It's not necessary to go into money as value because it would be ridiculous to think that this could be covered in one post and not simply refereed to other infinite sources. With that being said, notice how D&G emphasize the "feigned exclusion of a third party." It's as if one's not even aware that money is playing a part in the analytical session. It's as if one pays for the session and then forget that it held any value to them, or rather, that the money one's giving is being "well spent," meaning one implicitly knows their money is going to a good place. The psychoanalytical session then will forget about the fact that one just paid money to the analyst who will cure you. Right now, it's just you and the analyst, and the money that has been exchanged and forgot about as if the analyst really didn't need it and you didn't really want to give it. You are in the non-judgmental zone where everything is done for free and the analyst just really wants to "cure" you. It's here where psychoanalysis brought "new justifications" to its practice. You were only allowed a certain time to air your grievances, usually an hour by today's standards. But this time limit has nothing to do with the fact that the analyst has other clients that they need to "cure." It has to do with a self-imposed law of psychoanalysis whereby the person who needs to be cured should only go through their "talk-therapy" an hour at a time. You can't exercise your demons all in one shot. It has to be a slow, arduous process whereby you keep coming back to the analyst for one hour sessions for a prolonged period of time, maybe forever. Maybe an "inexhaustible transference" whereby you never stop talking to your analyst that was supposed to "cure" you in the first place in turn not making you come back to them over and over again. As the patient, you may feel that you have realized your sickness and have resolved it, but only in proportion to how dependent you are on your analyst, which depends on how much they think you are cured or not. You may feel yourself coming to new realizations during an analysis, in the "non-judgmental zone." The analyst though may sneak something in and say "I think we are just skimming the surface. This is good!" (A Good; A topical Realization). Your realization that you have "resolved a conflict" because of the session then becomes marked as "just skimming the surface"; as if the resolution was not enough, as if part of the realization was to look deeper down for more problems that weren't there in the first place and to find resolutions for these non-problems as part of the process in solving ones initial "sickness." Here is where the analyst will find "new conflicts." Just when you thought you figured everything out, the analyst tells you that you haven't, and consequentially, you have to keep coming back to them to figure out the new problems that they have just given that person. One (back to the One from the You) may ask oneself, "where does this ever end?" and D&G elude to this in a sharp passage from Anti-Oedipus. "We are astonished when we hear that a terminated analysis is by that very fact a failure even if this proposition is accompanied by the analyst's little smile." If one asks oneself the question, "Where will this ever end," then they may realize the interminable character of analysis. They then express this to their analyst and the analysis is then deemed a "failure." In other words, anytime an analysis ends, it's a failure. A successful analysis is one that never ends. A successful analysis is one where one's an eternal client of the analyst; an eternal return customer to the analyst. One almost forms a friendship, except in this friendship, ones pays the other to be ones friend. A true loser. Later on, D&G state "We are surprised when we hear a knowledgeable analyst mention, in passing, that one of his 'patients' still dreams of being invited to eat or have a drink at his place, after several years of analysis, as if this were not a tiny sign of the abject dependence to which analysis reduced the patients". The screw of this statement lies in the passivity of the psychoanalyst; their passive nature (things stated in passing to other colleagues with a sense of pride that their patients still think of them.) Is the analyst aware of the dependency they created for their subjects, their patients? Does the analyst think to themselves, "Well, I've been dealing with this girl for over a year now. Anyone that I have a clinical relationship with for that long of a time I'm bound to have dreams about and think about at the very least." And the same would go for the patient. This is an open question. This is an ethical question to be sure. In the voice of D&G though, they speak in fire here referring to the analyst who wouldn't think that it was the "abject dependence" of the analysis. In the practicing of thinking that there is something that needs to be cured (a distinction from psychoanalysis; but I still state with a sense of condescension), how can one ward off the fact that the cure is not in bending our knees, is not in lying on a couch, is not in participation in the master-slave dialectic, but in the realization of a larger and much more general master-slave dichotomy; in other words, Oedipus. D&G go into Freud's last days where he was animated with a sense of feeling "hopeless, disenchanted, tired, and at the same time a serenity, a certitude in the finished work. It is Freud's testament [Psychoanalysis]. He is going to die, and knows it. He knows something is wrong in psychoanalysis. The cure tends to be more and more interminable!" Freud would not live to see what would become of the discipline that he created for better or worse. He's filled with ambivalence towards the project regardless of knowing he created something vast under his name. Freud asks himself if a current "conflict" can be exhausted and if the one who is sick can be forewarned against ulterior conflicts that could create "conflicts," not only in themselves but by the analyst who can arise new conflicts for preventive purposes. Why would a conflict be brought to ones attention for a preventive purpose? To warn someone of something? To warn someone of something that has yet to happen to them? To warn them of something that ostensibly happened to them that never happened to them? The ghosts that the patient and analyst can conjure up together are infinite. The problem lies in the patient or analyst thinking there's a problem in the first place, and consequentially, that there's a cure to this "problem."

The problem of there "being problems" is not something the analyst has a grasp of beyond reassuring that they too have problems, making a herd of people with problems. The analyst may even confess to the patient that they go through analysis too with someone else. This certainly reassures the patient that they are not alone in their problems. Everyone needs help. Everyone needs to find a professional analyst to get to the "deep core" of what's bothering them. But something isn't simply bothering them. What's bothersome gets privileged into the grand narrative of a problem. What was once called malaise is now called clinical-depression. What was once called the jitters is now called Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD to be more specific. The acronym certainly serves its purpose of making an illness official). What was at once a little nuisance becomes a problem of life or death, or rather a problem for those who don't have any real problems (because there may not be any). The transitions from annoyances to problems is where psychoanalysis finds its bread. The transition from a humanity who at once was able to survive and "be happy" with little in their lives to a humanity who fears just about everything is where psychoanalysis finds its privileged place in medicine. As was stated in the post before, it was always going to happen. But where does psychoanalysis go when it becomes detached from the idea of people-problems, if it finds its way out into the open where people don't constitute universal significance, but create significance themselves? People, who created their own problems. It's here where I would simply refer to Part I of Heidegger's Being and Time as a way of understanding the ontology of Dasein being. The idea of "problems" tend to slip away nicely after reading this breakthrough account of our-being. For D&G though, they will move onto what's called "Schizoanalysis." This we will elaborate on in future posts.

The Private Theater of Sexual Oedipus; Anti-Oedipus, Part 2

It's not a meatbox, it's a meatlocker.
(regardless of how much it wants to appear virginal)

In the last post we introduced D&G's (Deleuze and Guatarri) Anti-Oedipus by elaborating on the first insights on what desiring-machines were to them. We saw how desiring-machines attach itself to the body-without organs and give the body-without-organs something beyond the blind intensities that happen to it, mainly desires-after-intensities. I noted that the fun of doing analysis on a text like this is how all encompassing the idea of desiring-machines. We can find desire everywhere and can find many ways in which the phenomena of desire is understood as neurotic. One of these most obvious phenomena of desire is in the sexual act and everything that envelops this act. D&G waste no time making a differentiation between sexuality as being oedipalized and sexuality as belonging to the body without organs as a fantastic factory at the end of chapter 1 of Anti-Oedipus. This post will do its best to try and not sensationalize the theme. This is not just because of how easy of a subject it is to sensationalize, but because D&G don't spend loads of time before or after giving Freudian impressions (sexual) to the Oedipus structure. They find it everywhere and give due justice to all it's different forms. One can't help but see it conspicuously in the sexual act though. D&G are very clear about sexuality as desire and make a clear distinction between an oedipalized sexuality and non-oedipalized sexuality. There will be questions coming up though that question both forms and ask about the power of sexual-oedipus that I'm sure D&G were well aware of, but still need to be emphasized so the reader doesn't take the sexual act the way D&G obviously want it to go (non-oedipalization). I won't necessarily defend sexual-oedipus but will viscerally understand its power, as something that may not belong in a marginalized place that they want to put it.

D&G state "..the Oedipal triangulation plays a role in the recording of the process, we find ourselves trapped in the net of a diffuse, generalized oedipalism that radically distorts the life of the child and his later development, the neurotic and the psychotic problems of the adult, and sexuality as a whole." Oedipus, as the tripartite structure of individuality distorts the life of the orphan unconscious (the child) and whatever they understand as "later development." The son or daughter who look above to the father as an idol figure and the mother as another idol figure (another father) distorts the child's virignal mind. Of course this is the case because people that you're always around are going to have an influence on you. But G&D are more specific with the Oedipus-complex they describe. They want to signify not just influence, but paternal injunction on the orphans moves. These injunctions create neurotic and psychotic problems in "later development," and sexuality as a whole. What does being the direct object of injunctions do to the child as it develops into other-child? For D&G, we find this in the way psychoanalysis treats the sexual act and they refer to D.H. Lawrence who wasn't terrified once he learned "what real sexuality was," but terrified in psychoanalysis's understanding of the sexual act. It's important to point out the "revolution" of Freudian thought here as establishing a new way for the sexual act to be understood. Psychoanalysis through Freud emphasized the sexual drive as the root of all of our problems stemming with a relation to paternal figures growing up. Whatever type of sex we prefer and may even sadistically enjoy come from the Oedipus structure as defined by psychoanalysis. There is a problem with this interpretation and it's with the fact that the sexual act was Victorian before it can be classified as oedipalized by psychoanalysis. Certainly, the relationship between Mr.Darcy and Elizabeth in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice serves as an example of a courtship defined by paternal-injunction. This is a question I leave open that I don't want to go into now because it's not the point of the post. But I would like to hear from a D&G scholar what the difference is between oedipal-sexuality and Victorian courtship, and why the oedipal break has to happen at Freud. Regardless of period though, we can understand the sexual act as being defined by injunction, guilt, and power structures. D&G acquiesce with Lawrence's fear of psychoanalysis's understanding of the sexual act. According to D&G, "he had the impression-the purely instinctive impression-that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making it a 'dirty little secret,' the dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of nature and production." There's a lot to extract here and this description of Lawrence by D&G is a key to understanding D&G's understanding of not only the sexual act but how desire should happen in general. It's important to first mark out that D&G found it necessary to call Lawrence's impression a "purely instinctive impression." D&G will continually want to privilege the "purely instinctive" over the oedipalized structure throughout Anti-Oedipus and this statement will show D&G ascribing a primal nature to Lawrence on their own accord, a primal nature that is appropriate. Lawrence feared the bourgeois motif that was characterizing sexuality meaning that he feared that sexuality was being treated as something that one should do or not do at certain times and certain places depending on a middle class status that needed to be upheld in respectability (see? How Victorian is this?). This triangulation is described as artificial because it places limits on the sexual act where there should ostensibly be none in D&G's body without organs. The freedom of sexuality becomes "stifled" by these oedipal-injunctions. Instead of being "fantastic" and "natural," the sexual act becomes constrained by the socius, by paternal triangulation where the child is shown by the parents that sex is a secret, a "dirty little secret." In oedipus, the sexual act becomes recast as a "dirty little secret" instead of being open and natural. It's a secret of the family. A child is under the guidance of the mother and father who both operate as injunction machines (both fathers) where they have the sexual act in privacy away from the child. The child then knows something is happening but sees that it's something that it can't be aware of (and seen). Simply put, the child can't watch their parents have sex. The child looks up at the parents and may see a smirk or a or a subtle attitude of "yeah we do this." The key is in the subtlety. The child never has a clear vision of what's happening when the injunctive parents are being non-injunctive with each other. The child has to guess and eventually see it as some mystery that is being kept from them for reasons the child doesn't understand but is yet being impressed upon by the secret act that is happening right under or over their nose. The secrecy of the act gives it its oedpilization structure by being hidden while at the same time being known, no matter how vague this "knowledge" is. It's something that the child will be allowed to do, but for now, at this young impressionistic age, they are not to be in the graces of this act. From then on, the sexual act becomes a secret, a secret that appears dirty to the child instead of one that flourishes in the "fantastic factory of nature and production." The sexual act then becomes repressed and this repression is understood first and foremost by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis will state that the child is repressing their sexual drive when the act is hidden. Then, the child will open up and act out the sexual act in it's repression mode, under the unconscious state of mind that it's a perverted and secret act, the act that was always kept away from them but that they are now exploring. The "bourgeois motifs" that D&G refer to are the "respect-structure" of the socius. It's the socius with all of its injunctions. The sexual act is no longer "natural" but under the guidance of psychoanalysis's understanding of it as seeing the child brought about by mother and father. The mother and father created the child and the child doesn't have access to the mother and fathers creative impulses from it's inception. The child is always defined by it's relationships to its idolized paternal figures and these relationships include the sexual relationships. Psychoanalysis sees the child as defined by their relations to their parents and so the child is defined by the the parents secret gestures of the sexual act, their hidden acts of the sexuality in this case. For Lawrence and D&G, the sexual act loses it's original "power and potentiality" that it used to have. Lawrence isn't frightened by this original power of the "fantastic factory of nature" but psychoanalysis's understanding of it which is not natural. In nature, sex isn't repugnant like it is under psychoanalysis's understanding of it, the understanding of it that puts it in a "bizarre sort of box." Questions arise here. What is "natural sex?" What is this "bizarre sort of box" that psychoanalysis boxes the sexual act in? For D&G, they clearly like Lawrence's idea of the the "natural sexual act" instead of it as the "dirty little secret." The question is one of the residuum carried into the child's unconscious during it's "budding years." But is there universal grounds for marginalizing the sexual act as a "dirty little secret" that happens in privacy? For however powerful D&G want to make "natural sex," can't it also be the case that this oedipalized, perverted, and "dirty-little-secret" sex can be just as powerful without there being something wrong with it, just because it happened to evolve from the hidden character of parental figures? Why does "nature" have to be privileged over "neurotic" and perverted "unnatural" sex? Is it not possible for intercourse to be more powerful when kept secret, essentially when it's oedipalized? Couldn't it easily be argued that a free and unfettered intercourse in the "public theater" wouldn't hold the value of the "private theater," the later being exclusive and not simply intercourse in the "private theater," but the public acknowledgment of private intercourse by the coquettish, feminine (whose agent can be either male or female), and most importantly, subtle recognition of the act of intercourse? (An example of this subtle public acknowledgment of private intercourse was Zooey Deschanel's character in 500 Days of Summer where she made sure to subtly let Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character know that she had a really good weekend.) The value of the sexual act absolutely goes into surplus-mode. But is this fantasy-in-surplus less than what D&G refer to as the "fantastic nature factory?" Is it not possible for fantasy to simply be more pleasurable than what's "natural?" And if it is, how inappropriate is it that desiring-machines attach itself to the body without organs? Or even more simply put, is desire as oedipalization something that one consciously needs to think is inappropriate? If the idea of a body without organs is a privlidged pure place, wouldn't it better "find itself" by treating oedipal-desire (and surplus-value) in neutrality, as an observation where desire pivots off nothing? The basic question is one of value. If D&G want to place us in a body without organs, a state of mind in "nature" (which Husserl emphasized so much for these very reasons of understanding how things happen) then how much are we being puting in this "natural state" by emphasizing that there is such a thing called a "natural state" that is "fantastic" and obviously privileged over psychoanalytical practice of oedipalizing? If it's all happening, if it's all happened at one time or another, isn't it all "natural?" Even oedipus? The "dirty little secret" found it's way to the body without organs. Is this not a natural movement? It did happen after all.

The problems elaborated on here eventually fall back to the Hegelian dialect for me. In other words, it's simply a matter of being becoming representation, or in this case, desire becoming transformed into a modified "non-pure" desire that is nonetheless part of what's "natural." D&G are operating on a theoretical explanation for being and nothingness whereby they're privileging nothingness to be frank. The theory is certainly interesting and convincing but is somewhat diluted with their allusions to the purity of nature. The desiring-machines are at the same place as the body without organs. As was stated above, they both happened. As a reader of this text, what do you take the text as? You can't take this text as pure philosophy and of course D&G and any defenders of their work would probably say "Good, it's better off that's not philosophy," and this is where the Marxian proclivities come in with D&G; to find theory in wanting to change material conditions of being, in this case the psychological conditions of being which are the material conditions of being. Being an ardent defender of this text puts one in the "anti-person" category rather than the neutrality position of watching the phenomena of being happen on its own. I think it's obvious where I tend to sway on this. Regardless of this confession, Anti-Oedipus is a text that needs to be read closely and understood to the best of the readers ability. There's plenty to learn here regardless of the positions taken. Who knows, maybe they're positions that need to be taken, that would be taken regardless of the pretension of the observer who simply watches the positions being taken with a sense that "these positions were always going to be taken anyways." Actually, this was always in the cards. It was always going to happen. As an observer of the phenomena of position taking, one may always know that positions will be taken, in this case the body without organs as the intensity that's natural to being instead of the oedipalized-structure-being, but they don't know it until they observe it. Something that's being observed by the observer is the desire to want to bring things to a more natural place. As much as the observer wants to come into the scene and shake position-takers into a realization of their meaninglessness, they nonetheless will abstain from this position-taking and watch the position-takers as a part of the phenomena of being that always had to happen, and will happen, and is fine that it's happening...and will enjoy this happening rather than taking a position in this happening. We will open up to D&G and observe what they're doing.

Anti-Oedipus; Introduction (Desiring-Machines)

Where Psychoanalysis gets psychoanalyzed by non-psychoanalytical methods.

The start of a school year; whereby one desires new things, different things or one desires the same things. The intensities of one's experience will sway the organized body regardless of the organized body desiring to see itself a certain way. Here we offer an introduction to these intensities that function in desire-spaces with Deleuze and Guatarri's Anti-Oedipus. Whether one is studying comparative literate, philosophy, or even physical art, these authors will find a way to show up on one's thinking screen. They don't just show up either, they command your attention for reasons you're not quite sure of because you haven't read anything from them. You have general ideas in your head of what "Anti-Oedipus" is trying to convey. At first glance you think to yourself that it's a book about a child not wanting to kill his father to confiscate his mothers love, and if this is your first thought about the book, you would be pretty much right on with the theme. To be more specific, this book starts a movement of sorts that tries to dissemble the Oedipus-complex of psychoanalysis; the Oedpus-complex that would like to understand everyone in terms of their rapport with their parents. And it's not just parents either, it's the paternal image seen in the geometrical "triangulation" of the psyche, a triangulation we will see that won't hold the ground it once had (Father-Mother-Child/Father-Son-Holy Ghost). The hierarchicization that psychoanalysis operates on stems from the emphasis given by Freud to parental complexes in the subject. Of course Freud needs to be distinguished as an author from his different periods like many authors. We will see that Deleuze and Guattari operate off the idea of random intensities much in the same way Freud spoke of intensities in his Project for a Scientific Psychology that we referenced before in the analysis of Derrida's work on Freud. Rather than trying to sum-up the entirety of this text while it's currently being read, we will continue to not be pithy by giving multi-part essays on the text in order to give due diligence to the author. Besides respect though, insights are really enjoyable, almost too enjoyable? The deeper one enters into this text, any text for that matter, the more insights will come to the forefront. It will be interesting to analyze the desire-for-insights within Deleuze and Guarttari's framework that sees desiring-machines as machines that are everywhere that attach to each other and most importantly, attach to something called a body-without-organs. To start off though, every post from now on pertaining to Deleuze and Guattari will be nominalized as "D&G." While respecting the idea of depth and length, it's also important to respect brevity in the form of acronyms for simplicity's sake on these posts, and future posts. Without name-dropping all the references that one will find when reading this text and finding analogies with previous or current authors (maybe even future authors), lets dive into the text, and find ourselves in D&G's world of organisms with drives that are much more complicated and spontaneous than the structure of Oedipus.

When trying to understand Oedipus's sway on classical psychoanalysis, we first have to uncover desire, more specifically ourselves as desiring-machines. Desiring-machines; pure operations of want. D&G state "the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset...From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialetical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object." For D&G it is inappropriate to see desire as a lack. When one desires something, the traditional logic of this desire is that the desire wants something that it doesn't have. Not so for D&G and not so either for Kant who states "the faculty of being, through its representations, the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations" is the function of desire. In other words, desire is not a want, but a production. A production of desire. If lack is part of the logic of desire, it's because desire produces a lack. First and foremost, desire is a productive machine that afterwords happens to produce a lack in being. The Platonic logic of desire that "forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition" is wrong. This choice doesn't cover the whole of the logic of desire. How then does desire operate for D&G? "If desire is the lack of the real object, its very nature as a real entity depends upon an 'essence of lack' that produces the fantasized object." When we desire, we are desiring something that we don't have, but why is it that we feel we want this thing that we don't have in the first place? Any object, the fantasized object (meaning the object that we want but don't currently have so we fantasize about it) can be sought after because of something called an "essence of lack." More simply put, we can think of this "essence of lack" as a feeling that we aren't getting what we want either in a specific or general way. The nature of desire as lack depends firstly on the production of something we don't have. "The production of something we don't have" though is not simply some "real object" like a rock for instance, but the flow and force of desiring-machines creating (producing) an affect of something outside itself to obtain. This is juxtaposed to the body-without-organs whereby there is no smell, taste, or touch; in other words, a juxtaposition to nothing. At some point though, the body-without-organs becomes something. It becomes attached to desiring-machines where it "breaths, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks." These functions Freud would call the id, the representation of which D&G would call a "mistake" on the grounds that the representation of whatever is classified as the id didn't need to be represented (or it's representation by Freud and philosophy in general is grossly outside something called "the real" or what's called a priori experience). It's important here to clarify that desiring-machines for our purposes can be seen as human-beings. We at first will have to relate to ourselves as human beings much in the way that one has to understand Heidegger's concept of Dasein as Human-Being when the sense of the statement is meant to convey being-there, meaning being in a place where something happens which Heidegger would go on to describe. D&G will see the Human-Being as desiring- machines and they will make sure the reader sees this not as a metaphor but as an actuality which will create a distance between the subject seeing himself through the text of Anti-Oedipus and rather reading into themselves a pure production of desire ignorant of whatever would be classified in the classical personality traits of Freud's tripartite Oedipus-schemata. So for right now, we are reading into the text that something is desiring and by desiring, "we" mean a production of a lack that is first and foremost a production. And the lack that is the production is a production itself. In other words, it's a production of a production. Desire is then understood as production and at the lowest level, this means that "the real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a 'dreamed-of object behind every real object.'" The "real object," whatever that is, is extrinsic. You can call it "natural," or "social." Whatever it is, it conceptually exists outside. Nothing can be said of it because it's not represented. This comes up against Husserl's problem in trying to understand the original motivations of the "first geometers" independent of language. It lies in a place that D&G call a "body-without-organs" meaning a non-represented being. Desiring-machines though operating under the production of desire produces "imaginary objects" that function as a double of whatever was this "extrinsic space." Desire functions not like the body-without-organs. Instead it looks for something else beyond what is already given. What this beyond is, is the "dreamed-of object behind every real object." This flips the Platonic ideal. Instead of seeing beyond representation into truth ("the real"), "we" as desiring-machines see beyond what's "real" into representation as truth. Truth for us is not whatever is called "the real," but the representation of it that is behind everything that's called the "real." This makes sense. Everything is in front of me, and then I (phenomenologically) look into it to find something else, for example, what's it's called, and when I find out what this "real" is called I mark it down on what D&G call the recording surface. Desire produces this reproduction. "If desire produces, its product is real." Desire produces our reality, our truth, and here we must distinguish what we just called "the real" from what the real is now being understood of as "the truth." D&G will regard the real here as something for us, the desiring-machines. The real (truth for us) happens after we are in "passive syntheses" (phenomenological) that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. Partial objects are likened to ruptures for example, and this means intensities independent of any truth value, meaning independent of the de facto situation of being able to represent it. These intensities are units of production. This all happens "as autoproduction of the unconscious." For example, I can have a nervous reaction to anything without anything "about me" influencing this. Desire will always happen. The body-without-organs will be attached to an organic body with desire. In these passive syntheses, "desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is rather the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression." In passive syntheses, in this productive desire, nothing is in lack in the original "real." Ruptures and flows "happen" without regard to an object being grasped. Desire as a machine of production though is a machine that D&G call a "subject," and like how production had to produce something (for D&G, desire), desire finds its own production in the fixed subject. The "residuum" of this producing and the product creates a detachment called "the subject." There is no fixed subject without repression though. This is the residuum of passive experience (passive syntheses), repression. In other words, in a process of passive syntheses, intensities happen to bodies and flows, and "something becomes detached" meaning a difference is setup. A difference from bodies and flows "happens" into something called the "subject" by way of a repression of these intensities that happen to bodies and flow (what D&G call "partial objects"). The detachment from the original "real" is the repression of intensity, and it's in these repressions of intensities that D&G will situate their concept of the neurotic. The neurotic: "the subject" who is always running away from "the real." The subject loses its desire "at the same time that it loses the passive syntheses of these conditions." When desire differentiates into a "subject," the subject sees itself as a difference from the passive syntheses that setup it's own detachment in the subject. The "subject" is the "countereffect" of the process of desire. Desire feels objective existence in all its intensity but just like how it's a machine of pure production (a machine of a machine), it differentiates itself from desire as a "space for intensity" into its next form of production ("the subject") where the form loses its "desire of intensity" and instead produces (desires) needs. In every aspect of this movement, from production, to desire, and finally to the subject, something is common, and that's pure production, in other words, something is made out of something else and differentiated from that previous form (The question of temporality in using the word "previous" is something that won't be addressed here but always stands as an open question). Desire then is not a lack, but a production of a need. One feels that desire is (Platonically) a lack, but this isn't the case. Desire sets out to withdraw itself into a subject that creates for D&G, surplus-needs which is distinguished from the needs of the penury or the dispossessed who "know they are close to grass." The dispossessed who don't feel the need of leftovers, but to live in the real, that they feel has somehow been taken away from them in the socius. The question of Anti-Oedipus then will revolve around the difference between desire that has very few needs (the need to live objectively) and the desire of leftovers (surplus-desire). In this distinction, we will find an absolute parallel between the psychoanalytically regarded "psychotic" and "neurotic" respectively. One can already tell that D&G will try to save the "psychotic" from its marginalized place in the socius by pointing to a more "pure desire" with few needs (which nonetheless are needs) and not a "lack" that classical psychoanalysis would like to find in its subject (Like thinking a psychotic lacks love and getting a hardy laugh from them afterwords). How the phenomena of over-abundant needs "happens," and how psychoanalysis addresses this psychosis as a lack in the subject (wrongly understood as a lack) is what will be the subject of Anti-Oedipus. We will gain further clarifications on the structure of Oedipus as it pertains to not just psychoanalysis but the socius as a whole, and how much psychoanalysis defines the categories of belongingness and distance from a privileged "normalized" center. All these concepts will need to be elaborated on. The fun thing about desire as a theme is that it can be seen everywhere. It is everywhere. Desiring-machines are everywhere. We will be able to go into themes on sexuality, capital, religion, and thought in general because of the all-encompassing nature of desire. We will be able to see it at work subtly and hopefully try to make these subtleties not so subtle.

This introduction then served mostly on a theoretical level defining D&G's understanding of how a pure process happens to a subject as a desire and how that desire changes into desiring more than just a few things. All of this is a production that happens to a production ad infinitum. This introduction can be understood as a general phenomenology of desire, if we are to understand desire purely at a distance from the existential connotations that it will end up taking as the text develops. This general overview of course can be expanded on phenomenologically. The idea of passive syntheses can of course be elaborated on independent of the idea of desiring-machines. A phenomenology of pure intentionality and a psychoanalysis of desire using non-psychoanalytical methods are of course two different approaches. Simply put, one can either read Husserl or D&G. If one isn't satisfied with the way D&G use "passive syntheses" then they can go into the depths of Husserl, but if they are satisfied in the concept of "passive syntheses" then they can move into the insights provided by D&G regarding the phenomena of desire and how it pertains to everything as desiring-machines and how classical psychoanalysis has made an incorrect model in trying to understand desire as a lack, and ultimately classifying certain types of desiring-machines as lacking something that is a "normalized center" for them. These next posts though will develop the themes of Anti-Oedipus. We will stray from the depths of phenomenology and enter into the human-being as desiring-machines. I have a feeling that the next posts will be more interesting for everybody. People would rather see themselves as desiring-beings rather than pure-intentionalities. What makes one interested into reading desire into things instead of intentionality? It's an open question that I think will become more evident as the text develops.