The Will to Nothing; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 10

Someone literally willing nothing.

With Brassier's repudiation of Heidegger and Deleuze's conceptions of time as being anthropomorphic and specifically temporal, Brassier moves onto the pure movement of time as nothing, crystallized in Nietzsche's concept of the will to power. Brassier reappraises this notion though as a will to nothing. Nietzsche's writing has been extraordinary for thinking nothingness regardless of his seeing of the will's direct object in power. The fact that his writing is still fresh today within the domain of "thinking the death of thought," is a testament to his unconscious quest for utmost honesty; honesty not as a virtue in itself, but as a compulsion of a certain organism to simply will something absolutely independent of itself. Brassier acknowledges this power found in Nietzsche's writing but tweaks it towards its absolute logical extension; that the will that wills itself can't be understood as willing power, but as willing something that is so absolutely void of substance that at most we can say that the "will wills nothing." We can fully understand this through the tenor of Nietzsche's aphorisms which makes his insistence on power as the ground of existence curious. It's not worth trying to personally analyze the reasons behind this. For one, they would be boring, and two, it takes away justice to be done to the actual sway of Nietzche's writing which is most striking about great writers rather than solidified concepts that often serve as cursory introductions to the very writing of an author that transcends those solidified concepts. This post then will be a reappraisal of the concept of the will to power rather than a reappraisal of Nietzche's writing. We will understand the absolute logical conclusion that can be drawn from the will to power into the will to nothing with the help of Brassier. Being will no longer be understood ontologically, either in it's finitude or micro-biological aspects of difference. Instead it will be understood as a pure difference that couldn't possibly signify an ontology classically understood. The questions of being then becomes a non-question because there's nothing to question. Rather, the question of being becomes the question of nothing. The substance that ontology would like to premise its thought is non-substantial. Ontology then becomes something that can preliminarily be called "non-ontology," but even this idea couldn't be understood in a dialectical distinction to ontology. It would have to be understood purely as nothing regardless of the ostensible duality that the "non" signifies within the context of "ontology" (It's here where Laruelle's concept of "unilateral duality" explained earlier by Brassier is important to understand).

"For Nietzsche, 'will to power' is a synonym for the world interpreted as a chaotic multiplicity of conflicting forces - 'This world is will to power- and nothing besides!' which is to say, a synonym for 'becoming,' then to think the will in its being is to think the being of becoming in its essentially dissimulatory, inherently self-differentiating 'essence' as a flux of perpetual transformation. Thus, the affirmation of recurrence marks the moment when the will comes to know that it cannot know itself in itself because its knowable aspect necessarily corresponds to nothing - since there is nothing, no aspect of the will 'in-itself', for it to correspond to or adequately represent." Lets first distinguish between an immediate understanding of the will to power and the one we want to establish as the will to nothing. An immediate understanding of the will to power would echo a Hobbesian sentiment that conveys a political characteristic. You could conjure up ideas of absolute imperialism in this concept and you wouldn't be wrong considering the recorded time of actual peace in our archived history of the world (which ranges somewhere between 0 and 32 seconds). On the other hand, one can understand the concept of the will to power on a much more personal level. One can see it very simply when one is playing a game against anyone. One is always trying to win, or quitting because they don't want to compete thinking they can't compete, which can often lead to the quitter uttering a masked humiliatory sentiment such as "I don't believe in competition." With Nietzsche, we gain a concept of the will that's devoid of all morality, or at the very least reduced to the fact that if there is a morality in the process of phenomenal power, it's an interpretation of the phenomena and not the phenomena itself. This connotation is what Brassier will want to reappropriate. Because the phenomenal world is interpreted as chaotic forces that are always in conflict with each other doesn't lead to a logical jump of saying that power guides these conflicting forces. It can certainly be interpreted that way, but it can just as easily not be interpreted that way and stay reduced to it's dissimulatory nature. The idea of conflicting forces doesn't have to be understood anthropomorphically as personal conflicts understood in the immediate conception of the will to power. Instead, conflicting forces can be understood simply as entropy; meaning different things are always happening. That this difference can be interpreted as chaotic and conflicting is for the interpretation of an interpreter, not for anything preemptively understood as "the real." If we accept that the will to power for Brassier is a synonym for 'becoming,' then the concept of the will to power transitions into the will to nothing because no substance underlies the concept. What's "self-differentiating" and always in a "flux of perpetual transformation" is something different from the connotations one thinks of when thinking of power. One is taken back to the laconic phrases of Heraclitus. But the idea of "flux" need not symbolize an end point for the power of conceptual thinking, and this is what leads Brassier in a Q and A to say that he's an idealist because he thinks highly of the power of thinking to be able to out-think itself into what it's not. So the speculative opportunity of this nihilism doesn't end in an eternal look-of-awe into something normatively understood as "the void," but into an active movement that's wholly nothing. Thinking about this wholly nothing gains speculative help from the idea of eternal recurrence elaborated by Nietzsche. Briefly, the idea of eternal recurrence is the idea that what happens will always happen again making the idea of free will a non-factor in any sort of action-being; for what will happen now will have always happened and what has always happened will eventually happen again. In this sense, any choice that one thinks they are making at their own discretion has already been made an eternity of times. The ostensible "will" of this eternal recurrence though can't be known. We can describe it but we know that we can't because the "phenomena" is not knowable, or rather, is not a matter of knowledge. We can say that something will happen again that has already happened, but this isn't recurrence in itself because there is no static identity to recurrence. As we stated above, if we accept the will to power as the will to nothing - which is synonymous with "becoming"- and this becoming we understand as inherently self-differentiating, then the will to nothing would be an eternal self-differentiation of recurrence. So then, what is it to grasp the eternal self-differentiation of recurrence? We can first grasp it very simply as difference and repetition, self-differentiation and recurrence. We can understand it as the eternal phenomena of continual differences always reoccurring. The self-differentiating nature in recurrence points to nothing that can be known because no identity can be understood with something that is inherently always in a state of difference (Derrida). If nothing can be known, and the will wills nothing, then the will can't know anything. In other words, what the will "is," is not a matter of knowledge. At the very most, we can vaguely conceptualize the will as a pure process and nothing else. Even this concept of "process" needs to be annotated with a non-dialectical character though, putting the concept of process into the original reduction of the wills direct object to nothing. No aspect of the will can "correspond to or adequately represent" anything. It's important to make clear that the matter at hand seems to be an epistemological issue. While we can say that the will is "nothing," we can also say that it's "something that happens." But this later qualification doesn't pertain to the knowledge one may think it would like to convey. When someone says that at the very most "something happens" in reference to the will, this statement is non-declarative. It's not made in order to archive a truth or establish a philosophy. It's something that's said without any substance, but nonetheless something that is said. It's important to not make this statement into a conviction or declaration. There's nothing in this statement that points to anything personal. If we allow ourselves this, the will then is non-representational, and so one would go too far in establishing the will's "movement" as one synonymous with power. We can certainly understand the idea of the will to power within our context of being (Dasein) but this doesn't always have to be the case. Whatever the will is as becoming is not symbolic, and so is henceforth nothing, epistemologically speaking. The trick is in thinking the will not as it pertains to knowledge for us, but as non-knowledge, or non-ontology, or simply as nothing. The trick again is in thinking non-thought if something called "the real" can be appropriated. This transition from the will to power to the will to nothing is in this sense exactly not an epistemological event, or rather an attempt at making it a non-epistemological event. No new knowledge is gained when the will is understood as willing nothing. If anything, knowledge is lost. With the will to power we could give an innumerable amount of examples of powers sway over the word, but the will to nothing has no examples since it's nature is always self-differentiating, and this self-differentiation doesn't signify a Heraclitean aphorism (it can, but it doesn't have to), it simply signifies nothing. At the very least, it's important to understand that self-differentiating and conflicting phenomena doesn't necessarily point to some sort of conscious or unconscious power being waged in behalf of micro-biological organisms or nothingness itself. It simply points to something that is not a matter of knowledge, and hence close to something called "the real."

The transition from the will to power to the will to nothingness is not a subtle one, but for thinking it appears subtle. The move isn't the easiest in the world because thinking something without an intentional-direct object is contrary to a metaphysics of thinking. It's something that one lets simmer after an initial understanding. Much like Laruelle's concept of unilateral duality, the more the idea simmers, the more it becomes "appropriate." Of course, a brief but close reading of Nietzsche will acquire a deeper perspective of the will as becoming, and hence as the will that wills nothing, and that eternally reoccurs. For better or worse, it's in Nietzsche's style that we can best attain this perspective and not necessarily in a scientific understanding of the will. If there were a scientific understanding of the will, it would learn from science but would appear philosophical in style. It's not as if scientists concern themselves with the will to nothingness, not yet at least (it's not a matter of discovery). But being in the work of science is something like the will willing nothing. In regards to the speculative-philosophical perspective though, it takes a certain style to conjure this perspective and there's never been anyone before or after Nietzsche to do this. To understand this, the best thing to do is let Nietzsche speak for himself: "Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated, which comes to the same thing); the present must not be justified in reference to the future, not the past by reference to the present. Becoming is of equivalent value at every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in relation to which the word 'value' would have meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated..." - The Will to Power. The world is a different nothing. The world is nothing different.

Temporal Dying and Dying in Time; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 8

An example of the spiritualization of death in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal, perfectly slighted by the maternal figure. 5:12-6:20.

Before moving further in the concept of "the real," Brassier needs to repudiate the spiritualization of death that has become conspicuous in 20th century thought. This is in order to give credence to a real that is purely being-nothing, which means at an absolute independence from subjectivity. Brassier will want to show how Laruelle's "unilaterlization" that "lies at the heart of the diachronicity...which indexes the asymmetry of thought and being" constitutes a real time that is not temporal. We will distinguish between objective time and subjective temporality in this post. If we are to understand "the real" that happens completely on its own without reference to anything, then this will first need to be understood at the expense of temporal dying which finds its spiritualization through Heidegger. If the idea of Diachronicity is a "time" that happens completely independent of human subjectivity, then the idea of "time" itself will be something different than the explanation of "time" given by Heidegger where "time" is the "who" of subjectivity, and ultimately the "who" of Dasein, meaning "time" is absolutely the structure of Dasein, and nothing else. This circumscription of time by Heidegger that has certainly held a strong sway over philosophy in the 20th century into the 21st century has kept philosophy from looking past its veiled mystical proclivities. If this last statement holds any ground, it should point to the curious nature of certain philosophers who ignore science in its discoveries, and who rely on an idea of transcendental "pure reason" that's ostensibly able to make discoveries that ground the work of science. But how much of this ostensible "pure reason" is actual discovery and how much of it is a pretense for privileging a neo-platonic conception of the universe where there is always something beyond us, making one self-satisfied in the belief of a transcendental-invisible realm that can never be accounted for, except by pure subjectivity? This is a question for an honesty that may not be possible for Dasein. If this explanation of temporal privilege holds ground, then it will serve as an introduction to this post that will distinguish the difference between dying in time and temporal time, or between absolute death, and spiritual death. We will come to learn the basics of Heidegger's temporal dying as Dasein's utmost possibility in difference to absolute bio-physical death that happens without subjective privilege of its own possibility. For all intents and purposes, Brassier takes a sledgehammer to the temporal-subjective interpretation of death in the next passage.

"It is the occlusion of temporality's bio-physical instantiation which inflates phenomenological death into an impossible possibility - but an impossibility which is recoded as the condition for the possibility of everything else. Yet to say that that impossibility is the ultimate condition of possibility is still to say that it never happens. Just as the transcendental conditions of representation cannot be represented, so death as quasi-transcendental condition for all happening cannot itself happen. This sophism points not so much to the un-actualizability of death as to the irreality of the phenomenological attempt to absolutize the disjunction between its possibility and its actuality. I can certainly anticipate the actuality of my own death, but the reality of the latter cannot be reduced to my anticipation of its actuality because the reality of the time of death remains incommensurable with the temporality of its anticipation." Death for Heidegger is "impossible possibility" in so far as death is 1. unable to be experienced and 2. the ground for the experience of "presence." What this means is that Dasein (human being) can never know its own death. It's not an epistemological matter. One can't possibly "know" ones death in its absolute "presence." At the same time, the foreboding of the eventual death that everyone experiences in others (not in themselves) is what makes "presence" (consciousness) possible. So while death for Heidegger cannot be understood in itself (ontically), it functions as the ground to human existence since it's something "to come." In this sense, the question of death becomes the question of dying for Heidegger. Instead of asking about death, Dasein's should ask about "dying" because this is what death actually is according to Heidegger. It's the non-present possibility that grounds existence. It's the process of always being-towards-death, and not the absolute bio-physical reality of the death instance. Being-towards-death is the absolute function of subjectivity. As a generalization of part I of Being and Time, all categories ascribed by Heidegger to Dasein are all looking-ahead which for Heidegger shows Dasein's constant (albeit unconscious) attention towards its own death as its eventual possibility. The verbiage though of the "impossible possible" still points to the fact that death is impossible. In other words, for Heidegger, it's always possible to be dying but never to die. One can always be in the Heraclitian process but one can never simply die. While death can ground Dasein, it can never actually "happen" because it's impossible. This raises the question for what exactly the word "happening" is and a cursory realization of how cloudy this concept has become through the idea of phenomenology. Like this impossibility of possibility in regards to death, the transcendental conditions of representations cannot be represented, which is to say that the transcendental conditions of death cannot "happen." Death for Heidegger then is merely a transcendental condition that forms the Dasein (human experience) and constitutes its existentiality. It's something that actually never happens. Regardless of how many people and things we know die, this actually isn't what's happening for Heidegger, but this is already assuming too much for Heidegger because he isn't interested in understanding anything beyond human possibility. But as Brassier sharply lets us know, this idea of death points "not so much to the un-actualizability of death as to the irreality of the phenomenological attempt to absolutize the disjunction between its possibility and its actuality." Because phenomenology (working within the confines of human consciousness) can’t realize the space outside of human consciousness, doesn't mean that death isn't something that actually happens. To put it more simply, just because we are self-conscious beings who can't think outside of ourselves, doesn't mean that there isn't something outside of ourselves that isn't "experienceable." Working within consciousness, we only have the "who" of Dasein (transcendentally understood as the "we") and so all reality is grounded on what we do (ontology). The premise for this phenomenological impulse is not dishonest nor necessarily presumptuous though. It simply thinks it can't know anything other than itself. But there comes a point where the phenomenological method of absolute naiveté has to be understood as somewhat disingenuous, or rather, one can simply escape out of the phenomenological attitude as quickly as they came in. One can understand that another has died and isn't coming back as quickly as one can enter into a mindset that the process of dying functions as the axiom to human existence. Brassier surmises this perfectly in final passage of the quote above. We will quote it again for extra recognition: “I can certainly anticipate the actuality of my own death, but the reality of the latter cannot be reduced to my anticipation of its actuality because the reality of the time of death remains incommensurable with the temporality of its anticipation." In other words, my knowledge of my eventual death is at an absolute difference with the fact that I will die. I can know that I'm going to die. I can "anticipate" that something will happen to me called "death," but because I can't ever know this "death," doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Because I'm limited to only being able to anticipate my absolute finitude doesn't mean that something called "death" doesn't absolutely happen to myself as a biological organism independent of my temporal-memorial consciousness. Just because I'm limited to only knowing what dying is, 1. doesn't mean that death can't happen to me from without, and 2. doesn't mean that dying and death are the same things. In fact they are very different things. If I can only think of what dying is and not of what death is, then they must be very different things. This is very easily solved when we understand that we can't have a 1st person understanding of what we call "death" but can absolutely witness a 3rd person observation of "death," while phenomenologically speaking, we can have an "ecstatic" experience of dying, but this wouldn't be a "knowing." This knowing of an "ecstatic" experience of dying would be a transcendental figuration for Dasein which for Heidegger is the ontological ground for Dasein. The transition in Heidegger's thinking into this "ecstatic" being is where modern philosophers don't realize that this shouldn't be considered a "transition of thinking." More specifically, thinking doesn't happen in ekstasis (The closest Heidegger will come is in privileging poetry as being able "to speak for experience"). Regardless of this phenomenological digression, death is a happening that is not a matter of knowing for us, but just because it's not a possibility for our experience and knowing, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. In this sense we can understand "happening" in a much broader sense than "knowing" and "experience." At the very least, we can say that something happens absolutely independent of my knowing it to happen, even if it happens to me (from some ostensible 3rd person outside perspective). Temporality does not equal time. My anticipatory human nature that thinks in terms of a past, present, and future is at an absolute distance from the diachronicity that separates the nervous system from everything else that could ever possibly happen.

Brassier finds it necessary to destabilize this anthropomorphic idea of time from diachronic time. Philosophy rarely has a sense or appreciation of scientific time and often has the compulsion to understand it in terms of the human being. Again, this points to the compulsive correlationism assumed by philosophy; that everything outside of the human being has to be in reference to the human being, and more grotesquely in the new 21st century, that everything that we are as human beings, has to be in reference to a "larger world outside of us" (rarely does this "care" to situate the human being in the context of a larger-vaster world recognize the possibility of the larger-vaster world being able to cause volcanic explosions at will or causing meteors to smash structures to bits). This ideality of philosophy is what will lead Heidegger to point-blank call the scientific use of time "vulgar." Why is it vulgar? It's vulgar because it doesn't have any interest in human beings which for Heidegger had to be a problem for his project of fundamental ontology. Limiting the task of fundamental ontology to an existential analytic is Heidegger's work though. Ontology isn't limited to an existential analytic. We learned before in Enlightenment and Extinction of Badiou's ontology composed in the expansive problems of set-theory regardless of his eventual movement into the evental circumstance for human beings at the end of Being and Event. What is ontology not in reference to us? What is being not in reference to us? How can we think the non-dialectical logic of "unilateral duality" understood by Laruelle where anything that comes after something called "the real" has nothing to do with something we understand afterwards as something called "the real?" How can we understand duality without dialectical logic? How can we understand unilateralization without identity? Brassier asks more precise preliminary questions: "How does thought think a world without thought? Or more urgently: How does thought think the death of thinking?"

Introduction to Schizoanalysis; Anti-Oedipus, Part 6

Human computers on a picnic look much like regular humans on a picnic

The disfiguring of what was normally understood as unconscious material in classical psychoanalysis, and which we hopefully clarified to some degree in past posts has been done for the sake of a movement towards what D&G in Anti-Oedipus call "Schizoanalysis." They will devote the entire final chapter of the book to this "practice." We are not there yet but the hints are starting to pop up in their chapter before on the nature of colonization as it pertains to an always and already social investment into a territoriality that slowly becomes coded by the axis of desire and the socius. This theory is heavy and deserves it's own time. Ultimately it deserves to be read on its own in the primary source. As we are in this theory though, we can see obvious hints at what schizoanalysis will be; as an absolute distinction from psychoanalysis. We will see how important it was for D&G to distinguish between the Ethnologist and the Psychoanalyst, between the person who asks about the use of a certain civilizations practices and the person who asks about the meaning of those practices respectively. The psychoanalyst who asks about the meaning of a ritual for example adds a code to something that's happening in a "present," meaning that something is happening in which they observe and are then able to understand. This function of the psychoanalyst at first glance isn't different from the Ethnologist. The styles are different though. The Ethnologist isn't looking to record a supplement to the event, rather it sees how something is functioning. This difference is crucial; the difference between seeing how something functions and giving meaning to an event. It's on these grounds that Schizoanalysis will find much in common with the Ethnologist in distinction from the Psychoanalyst. The unconscious will gain it's ostensible disfigured flow back from the structure of meaning placed upon it by the phenomena of Oedipus, and advanced further by the psychoanalyst (Oedipus believed in by the analyst). We will introduce this "method" now. "Method" is put into quotations because Schizoanalysis is obviously not a method, if by method we understand a structure in which we are consciously trying to make something of something; more specifically, practicing a psychoanalytical method at the benefit of the patient. It's somewhat accurate to refer to the picture above and see it as providing a program. It's like the insertion of a new chip into something that was previously called "consciousness." It's not dialectical. It's not metaphysical. It's not psychoanalytical. It's an abrupt change as quick as tectonic plates shift during earthquakes. It's not necessarily hospitable. It's volcanic without knowing it's a volcanic action. It's a disjunctive unconsciousness that nonetheless all happens in a space, as a body without organs.

"Shizoanalysis foregoes all interpretation because it forgoes discovering an unconscious material: the unconscious does not mean anything. On the other hand the unconscious constructs machines, which are machines of desire, whose use and function schizoanalysis discovers in their immanent relationship with social machines. The unconscious does not speak, it engineers. It is not expressive or representative, but productive. A symbol is nothing other than a social machine that functions as a desiring-machine, a desiring-machine that functions within the social machine, an investment of the social machine by desire." Not only does Schizoanalysis differentiate itself from psychoanalysis in the content of the unconscious, but doesn't find any content in the unconscious at all. For the Schizoanalyst, there is no meaning behind anything. We don't pear behind a human to find the paternal repressions that manifest themselves in mental sicknesses. We don't pear behind a human to find archetypes of a primordial civilization that give universal significance to us, a universal significance that's fat (weights a lot). We don't search behind the human for something that's called it's meaning. On the other hand, the unconscious does have a function for D&G; A function, not a meaning. The function of the unconscious creates other functions purely understood. These are processes that simply happen regardless of their appearance and representation to others (A reading of a Speculative Realist text will help immensely when trying to understand this. By the same token, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations would put one in this state of pure nothingness. For my own thinking, it will be important to see how Brassier offers this differently in his Nihil Unbound from Husserl. This text will be next). The unconscious functions to create other functions. It's an infinite multiplicity of functions never absorbed into the Parmendiean "one" where we would have something called a general "functionality." The function machine that has been laid out by D&G is the desiring-machine; the machine that looks to move it's way outwards (to be sure, a start for Oedipus). Desire though can't be seen in itself. Desire is seen as we learned from prior posts in it's connection to the socius. We see desire in the person apologizing to another person in order to be in good faith with the other person. We see desire in wanting to publish a book because one thinks that what one is saying is worth someones else's time. These are very modern examples, but we see how desire can't be seen in itself, but only with it's attachment towards "social machines," meaning, the function of communication, of people encountering other people. Schizoanalysis finds desire operating here in the socius. It discovers the relationship between desire and the socius and doesn't feign to see desire in itself, not attached to anything in something called "pure reason." This unconscious that attaches itself to social machines doesn't speak but engineers. In a strong sense, it's despotic in it's own right. It doesn't create dialogue with another in order to come to a resolution of a problem it never had. It operates independent of the voice, of the voice of the other, of the voice of you. It moves in it's own way and supplants its existence independent of the voice that may comment on it's movement. If it had a voice, it would be Heraclitean. It would be submissive to the disjunctive flow of the non-vocal space of Being. This unconscious does not need to express the fact of it's own existence, it doesn't even know it exists or that something like existence is actually happening. There is no need to represent the phenomena in the voice or the pictograph, even if we come to see that there has been a function within the desire of the unconscious to represent itself. This desire to represent itself understood most perfectly by Hegel is being as representation. The function that happens inside this and outside of our understanding functions on its own. The functional unconscious produces. It may even produce representation but it doesn't speak about representation. We speak about representation. If we see something that happens whereby in real time something is being carved out into space, this vision is ours of an unconscious doing what's doing without vision. We see the carving, the unconscious carves. Again, we, as the socius, see desire. The unconscious as desire does not happen to nothing, it happens to the socius whereby the socius sees something in it, and adds a meaning to it (coding). If one can be in a place where they are always producing without knowing they're producing, or reflecting back to their production, this would be the unconscious in itself. In other words, it would be nothing. When desire attaches itself to the social machine, a symbol gets put out. This is representation. Representation is manifested from pure desire where it expresses desire (not in order to express desire, but where it expresses desire). This spatial creation is a function without meaning. The Symbol is in the socius already. The Symbol is being understood and exchanged amongst being. Desire has moved into the socius where desire becomes the supplementation of representation. Desire is in fact representation for a time, the time that only we see. Unconscious desire is always attached to this time that we see (the socius). "Large molar machines presuppose pre-established connections that are not explained by their functioning, since the latter results from them. Only desiring-machines produce connections according to which they function, and function by improvising and forming the connections." The key to this statement lies in the specific words. "The large molar machine," for example, social formation, happen already at a micro-unconscious level. These micro-connections don't explain themselves. The explanation of their functioning is a result of the very fact of their functioning. Here we posit a correlation between the unconscious and consciousness for consciousness, not for micro-level functioning. The molar machine feels the desire to explain the function of it's manifestation. The unconscious desire creates improvised connections which function in ways we see. We apply the category of "functionality" to the unconscious. The "function" though happens on its own. The desiring-machine produces, it doesn't explain. Schizoanalysis doesn't ask about what the production means. It sees coding happening, it even sees meaning happening, but sees all this as a production. "A magical chain brings together plant life, pieces of organs, a shred of clothing, an image of daddy, formulas and words: we shall not ask what it means, but what kind of machine is assembled in this manner - what kind of flows and breaks in the flows, in relation to other breaks and other flows." What does this machine do? This is the question to the person that was once a patient in psychoanalysis. What do you do, not what's the matter with you? Representations are certainly assembled, but what kind of machine makes this happen? How's it possible for you to have representations? Not why is it possible for you to have representations, but "how did this happen?" What kind of machine functions? How does it produce representations? How does it produce Oedipus? How does Oedipus function? Where did the connection happen where you desired your mother in another affiliate branch? How did something become a mother (How was something represented)? How does this all function. Schizoanalysis is the exploration of functionality, not the meaning of you.

Why this is an introduction to Schizoanalysis is first and foremost because the actual chapter on Schizoanalysis has not been read yet. A second reason why is because it still functioned at the expense of psychoanalysis that one suspects it may do for awhile. A third reason is because this introduction didn't go into specific microcosmic "flows and breaks in the flows, in relation to other breaks and other flows." These specific break-flows is where Schizoanalysis operates, meaning it operates in different places all the time depending on where a current flow is going. And whenever a break occurs, the flow changes course. The flow doesn't continue on in one direction. The flow isn't Oedipal (until it becomes Oedipus by repressing unconscious breaks in flows). An analysis of break-flows isn't one where there is a paternal analyst who's satisfied in curing a patient from a sickness. It's not a duality between two people under the omnipotence of master-slave morality. It's any numbered and differently placed. In the observation of production, what happens is an observation. When I see a river pass by me in it's flow, I see the fact that I see myself seeing the river as a flow (the Husserlian noema). I'm a production of seeing and judging. In Schizoanalysis I desire to see how what's outside of me responds to me and how I respond to it. Desire attaches itself to the socius. Social-machines see the desire that produces them, and desire sees the social-machines that it attaches itself to. In Schizoanalysis, things are seen. Things are seen as happening at one time, and at another time as not happening. Time loses it's time-consciousness in the sense of it's being-in-fear-towards-death (historicity). Instead, it finds it's internal-time-consciousness in the melody where one note just passed by that happens to be connected to another note, that breaks into a different mode, but somehow still felt connected to what happened priorly. As descriptive experience of how a production functions, it's not very far from Husserlian phenomenology. But we will get a closer look when we enter the actual chapter.

Getting Well; Anti-Oedipus, Part 5

Far right is where you want to be

In the previous post on Anti-Oedipus we noticed invariable characteristics in the schizophrenic. Most specifically, we saw it's adaptations of sexual roles independent of a primary sexuality. This post will deal with somewhat of the same theme as the last. While the last post was a description of the schizophrenic, this post will do more to distinguish the schizo from the neurotic (oedipal-man). At the end of this post, the distinction will be even more clear. We will not only get help from direct expressions of each, but an understanding of the work of the primordial "biological egg;" more specifically, the distinction between induction and structure. The later will carry a symbolic and imaginative description while the former will carry no symbolic description at all serving as the space of the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic will find it's home in the inductors of stimuli that insight the biological egg. We will see where and how induction becomes symbolized in a mask that we know as structure, and more specifically, identity. Identity will be just about analogous to Oedipus. Identity will be the symbol for something that always and already happens. We may even sound like Plato in this post. We sound like Plato in this post but in a vastly different context; 20th century man and not Greek antiquity. And if we sound like Plato, it won't be a Plato that has been oddly solidified as the identity of Plato, but the dialects that ensued in the dialogues, without recognition for the winner. As a reader, I can stand in place for Thrasymachus in The Republic as I can stand in place for Aristophanes in the Symposium. At the end of the dialogue, I am not sure of what Plato is besides people being people. I am winner and loser, dialogue and a Greek bath; Whatever was in that text is up for connection...to be left as quickly as it was connected.

"If there is one problem that does not exist in schizophrenia, it is the problem of identifications. And if getting well amounts to getting oedipalized, we can easily understand the outbursts of the patient 'who does not want to be cured,' and who treats the analyst as one of the family, then as an ally of the police." This is a funny phrase here by D&G. The schizophrenic who has all the problems that needs to be solved doesn't have one problem, and that's the problem of identity. The schizophrenic doesn't ask themselves "Who am I?" The schizophrenic doesn't frantically run around doing things in order to establish an identity. The schizophrenic isn't even unaware of these actions making them go through a dreaded "existential crisis." It always and already knows that there's an oedipal place that it doesn't want to go in. The schizo goes into outburst mode when trying to be sat down. It doesn't want to stay in one place, it doesn't want to be told what has to be the case (you can open up possibilities to it though), it doesn't want you looking at it with a satisfied look. This look the analyst gives the problem of schizophrenia in which "everything is going to be ok;" this paternal look of consolation where consolation was never sought out, where paternal looks were never the case. For a second the schizo may see the analyst as a father, like I see a computer screen right now, in other words, as something that exists outside and that's it. It may traverse space to find the analyst as an ally of the police which in turn creates an outburst from the non-conscious sense of having to be sat down. It will be anything in one moment and something else the next moment, and any suggestions of staying put raises the anxiety level of the schizo to combustion. The schizo will break out of it's current "identity" not because it doesn't feel at home in the identity at the moment, but because it will get the sneaky suspicion that it can never leave. The analyst will reward the schizo for passing into oedipalization the second the schizo finds a home in an oedipal state. Reward though for the schizo is not part of their consciousness. It can only pass onto something else. As the patient, as the slave in the master-slave dialectic that is euphemized into pyschotherapy; is this schizo "lacking" something? If it's with the analyst, it's lacking oedipus. I am with the analyst as a patient because I am sick. I'm not there to just hang out with the analyst even though the session may be structured that way. I am sick and the analyst is there to cure me. But without oedipus, am I as a schizo sick? Is it not oedipus that makes me sick because I can't bear oedipalization? Because I can't bare knowing I have to stay in the same place for the rest of my life? Because I have to be the same "person" for the rest of my time? The schizo universe doesn't get well. It moves beyond an identity that would be in a state of illness. If I stay here, there are degrees in which I'm personally here. I may not be here at all and may be trying to find my way back to here, and this is where I'm sick. Instead of throwing off the shackles of the personality that I so coveted, and moving onto something I have never been through, I need to find my way back to myself. Always in this body is a sense of self; that glorified term that keeps me at a distance from others, but not too far to the point where I am not distinguishable; the identity/difference logic of Oedipus. You are not this, but you will be. You are not your father, but will be one day. You are not a teacher, but want to teach people about your experiences. The schizo is incensed by this logic. The schizo is one thing and one thing only, and fully, and then something else and something else only, and fully; an inclusive disjunction of eternal flows that break off just right when the identity "feels" expended. D&G compare the schizo to the "biological egg" where "stimuli are not organizers, but mere inductors: ultimately, the nature of these inductors is a matter of indifference." Inductions gets things on its way. Where it goes? Nobody knows. Stimulus is not teleological. It happens as quickly as I strike this keyboard, whereby I could have hit the wrong key making someone behind me laugh at my mistake, making me meet them, and then talking to them about what I'm writing about. This was not an organized process. This was a chaotic flow, Heraclitus's flow (Plato is just as much Heraclitus as he was Parmenides). What D&G say next is of crucial importance. "It was the beginnings of the development that favored the illusion: the simplicity of the beginning-consisting, for example, of cellular divisions-could lead one to believe in some sort of adequation between the inductor and what is induced. But we are well aware that, when considered in terms of its beginnings, a thing is always poorly judged because in order to become apparent, it is forced to simulate structural states and to slip into states of forces that serve it as masks." This strikes many chords. First is the speculative realist/empiricist anti-correlationism. The inductor doesn't know where the stimulus goes. What is induced from the inductor is not known. When something is divided, why is it the case that the division had to happen because of a presupposition? Why does a cell have to have consciousness? Why does it's division refer back to something that did the division, and not rather, the possibility that division didn't have to happen? We can't speak for the cell. We can't speak for the gap, but we do within our thinking, our correlationist thinking. I would go a step further than D&G (as would a speculative realist) in saying that not only is the beginning poorly judged, but can't be judged at all. But we would be correct in saying that we judged something. For something to appear, it has to take on a structural state that becomes the metaphor for something that was never a symbol, that was never a metaphor, but a pure induction, not pure reason, but pure non-identity. What happens at this level is not reason. The beginning is not a reason, just as much as it's new unknown beginning is unaware of something called "the place in which you came from." As a more direct analogy, if I happen to live another life after this one, "I" don't know that this one proceeded it. The mask that appears as the reason of the beginning is just that; our reasonable Kantian representation of something that always and already will happen. Of course, as we learned in prior posts, Kant was well aware of the always and already function of applying our own concepts to non-conceptual experience, so defining the proper name of "Kant" here is as tenuous as the proper name of "Plato" (It's all name-dropping as the desire of history. Infinite symbolization. This is for another day though). As was concluded with phenomenology (and this could be applied to Kant as the certain precursor to Phenomenology), we can have a hypothetical understanding of beginnings, and we can even have fun with it at the limits of philosophy, but it will always be just that; a hypothetical understanding. Whether this hypothesis should be called a mask with all the connotations attached to the word "mask" is another question. Personally, I think this classically understood Platonic verbiage of shadows and masks masks a mask. It gives comfort to some actual reality where the ego feels like they're in the know. The ego isn't hidden in the shadows, but in the light where it needs to admit freely that it's not in the shadows. This is what D&G will call a surplus-code. In this instance, it's the necessity of defining oneself as being in the know, implicitly serving the ego's own purpose of distinguishing itself from others exclusively. (On a side note, if Philosophy should understand it's own desire for understanding beginnings, it should realize the work of Kant and Husserl as hypothetical, not as trying to "unmask" something that was "masked" in reality. The cell can't be known. The beginning before differentiation and division can't be "known," but it can be hypothesized. The concept of the metaphor and hypothesis will serve as the death for the ego's love of unmasking things.) The schizo is aware of none of this. It leaves and enters bodies as quickly as Artaud would fill up notebooks of straight lines. As a final analogy to the nature of schizo, D&G de-oedipalize Oedipus by saying that "parental figures are in no way organizers, but rather inductors or stimuli of varying, vague import that trigger processes of an entierly different nature, processes that are endowed with what amounts to an indifference with regard to the stimulus." This goes back to our example of how we have relationships to the outside world which include parental figures, but the parental figures don't have total and absolute domination over the body. The body goes through it's own intensities and flows like the example of knocking into a toy truck and getting hurt by it. No parent was involved. Nothing was "involved." Something happened to be in the way of the path of a walker in which the walker moved into it. This is descriptive science, not teleological science (as if metaphysics could ever be called a "science.)" Later on we will learn of a distinction made by D&G between the Ethnologist and the Psychoanalyst that covers the distinction between finding the happening of something, and the meaning of something, but for now we see that the parental figures figure as much into the body as much as all other "stimuli of varying, vague import." Relationships will always be formed, but intensities and flows will always happen regardless of structure. The schizophrenic will always be intense in it's current flow regardless of how much it's being forced into oedipalization.

How do I know that I'm Well? I know it because someone else thinks they're well and want to resemble this wellness. And if I don't resemble this wellness? Well, I'm not well. Then I go into the analyst (or take drugs) to find out why I'm not well. I go into the analyst to find out about my sickness, to possibly find other sicknesses forming an oedipal dependence of the analyst which we went into in a post before this. I never say to myself though, "Maybe these people who appear well aren't well. Maybe "wellness" is a state that I just happen to pass through which does feel nice, but isn't always going to be the case." I can't always be "well." Sometimes I may be. Sometimes me and the analyst have something in common. Sometimes I can go out into the world and have a beer with an insurance agent. We talk about football. We have something in common. He is well and I am well. Then I tell him what I do and he realizes that I don't own a house yet, and then I am not well. Maybe he's not well either? Maybe he realizes that he doesn't like the fact that he's been stuck in the same place for the past 10 years. We both become sick. I am not him and he is not me. We can't be everything at all times. I can't be the insurance agent and the graduate student. I can be the graduate student and the lover of Giants football though. He can be the insurance agent and a lover of Giants football also. See? All is not so bad. We certainly are different, but not so different that we want to exclude each other into sickness and abnormality. I'm telling ya, disjunctive synthesis finds its experience best in competitive sports. Here's to the Giants and a road victory in Houston this Sunday. The sack attack; everyone gets sacks at different angles and different positions.

The Transsexuality of Schizophrenia; Anti-Oedipus Part 4

Man, Woman, God, 90° tilted square.

The last post ended by highlighting the idea of "Schizoanalysis" that D&G would eventually elaborate on. With their criticism of Oedipus, they are on their way towards this analysis, and the criticism that happens until the "formal" (if it is formal) elaboration of "schizoanalysis" will prove to be important towards understanding schizoanalysis. This idea of schizoanalysis will then first find it's grounds in the criticism of the classical Oedipus structure elaborated on in the past posts and distinguished by D&G as the paralogism of psychoanalysis. The classically defined schizophrenic will obviously be of issue. The easy pathologization of this "condition" will be elaborated on in a different way than one that is understood by psychoanalysis. The main distinction in this post will be between syntheses of contradictory elements and disjunctive syntheses that are affirmed by the schizophrenic according to D&G. This terminology will be used in distinction to psychoanalysis' Oedipus method of seeing a person as having contradictory elements that need to be resolved (always in search for a "cure"). Schizoanalysis will end up finding itself as a method that makes refuse out of the idea of a "cure." Lets move to the beginnings of this new analysis by way of re-understanding the classically understood schizophrenic who affirms an infinite amount of identities according to D&G.

"It would be a total misunderstanding of this order of thought if we concluded that the schizophrenic substituted vague syntheses of identification of contradictory elements for disjunctions...He does not substitute syntheses of contradictory elements for disjunctive syntheses; rather, for the exclusive and restrictive use of the disjunctive syntheses; he substitutes an affirmative use." If we can understand what D&G are saying here then it will go a long way towards understanding the theory of Anti-Oedipus. Phenomenology could find its way towards using these concepts if it were concerned with overturning the practice psychoanalysis. First off we need to understand the concept of a "vague syntheses of identification of contradictory elements." What D&G are implying here is an experience where the body (including the mind, that for D&G is body) synthesizes raw hyletic experience into a contradictory elements. When this happens, a process happens (understood most in depth by Husserlian phenomenology) whereby what was at once vague then becomes conceptualized into binary categories, meaning the logic of "either/or." Something is identified as "not this" and something else is identified as "this." For example, I can say (by elaboration), "This here is a tree, but this over here is not a tree, it's a fox." This proceeds into further classifications and categories up to the point of the ego. The ego forms separations that will define itself as this and not that. This is neurotisism for D&G; essentially the need to live as an opposition to something, guided by the paternity of Oedipus. What is not neurotic is the schizophrenic who doesn't substitute pure experience for this formalized/oedipalized experience. To be sure though, the pure experience for the schizophrenic is synthesized, just not oedipalized. What's synthesized in pure hyletic experience for the schizophrenic are disjunctions; pure disjunctions, meaning lateral separations, not vertical separations. Experience doesn't form a personality, but a multitude of differences that roam the stick. The formed disjunctions of experience stay in place as disjunctions that never need to be "fulfilled" into something else. The schizophrenic takes the disjunctively formed experience and affirms it, not consciously, but schizophrenically, meaning there's nothing wrong with being any different disjunction at any time. There's nothing wrong with not being a me. In other words, the schizophrenic doesn't operate off of the need to be a specific disjunction (person) that would then do everything in its power to further establish this personality (me-hood) by seeking the approval of others, whereby the approval and disapproval of others would form injunctions and non-injunctions that would guide that person, thereby making them neurotic and oedipalized. The injunction function of oedipus is not the case for the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic doesn't feel bad that they aren't a "whole" personality, a limited and definite personality. They don't feel bad because they're angry at someone who's trying to oedipalize them, they just don't have the instinct for specificity-formation. Instead of specificity, where opposition by way of the negative personality occurs, non-specificity occurs as affirmation. What is formed in experience as disjunctive parts (partial objects) is affirmed, not negated. Things don't get classified into "I'm not this" in the schizophrenic, instead, the schizophrenic says to the analyst: "Human being? I'm a fucking dinosaur!" And after this, maybe they move onto being a girl regardless of whatever personal sex they are (For example; a lesbian who takes on very feminine traits). The disjunctions of experience are all affirmed, not at the same time, but at different times where one isn't privileged over another. "He does not abolish disjunction by identifying the contradictory elements by means of elaboration; instead he affirms it through a continuous overflight spanning an indivisible distance. He is not simply bisexual, or between the two, or intersexual. He is transsexual. He is trans-alivedead, trans-parentchild. He does not reduce two contraries to an identity of the same; he affirms their distance as that which relates the two as different." The key here is elaboration. Elaboration (as language) forms contradictory elements. The need to represent something (elaboration) forms contradictory elements instead of letting the pure flow of disjunctions happen. Disjunctions are affirmed through different times and different spaces that nonetheless are not different from each other (indivisible). This means that there are separations in formed experience for the schizophrenic, but the separations aren't elaborated on as separations (disjunctive syntheses flow in the neoma purely understood by Husserl in Ideas I). "Oh it's like this", not "It's not this." The schizophrenic is bisexual without knowing it and hence would be more accurate under the appellation of transsexuality. It knows no sex, it sees no difference. The schizophrenic doesn't roam back and forth between homosexuality/lesbianism and being-straight, they just don't care either way. The schizophrenic isn't out to "explore other options." For example, the schizophrenic isn't a girl who pretends to be a lesbian because she couldn't get any guys growing up, who when eventually gets a guy, has an epiphany that they're actually straight (to be sure, the epiphany is told to others as some sort of celebration). The schizophrenic is transsexual from the start and homosexual when oedipalization breaks through (the need for a value-life). Beyond sexuality, they are a parent, an injunctive parent even, and a son. At one time they roam the forests in a gaze of wonder, and at another they say "it's time to go home," and the parent and child never become formed as a parent or child for good. The distance between both is indivisible. They all stem from the body without organs. Singularities open up non-inclusion. "They are all inhabited by a faceless and transpositional subject." The schizophrenic is without personal identification. It's position as subject is beyond being a subject. It's subjectivity is absolutely free without consciousness of identity as contradiction. Beyond sexuality and the example of being a trans-parent and son, there is the schizophrenic God. There is God "as the master of the exclusions and restrictions that derive from the disjunctive syllogism, [contrasted with] an antichrist who is the prince of modifications, determining instead the passage of the subject through all possible predicates. I am God I am not God, I am God I am Man: it is not a matter of a synthesis that would go beyond the negative disjunctions of the derived reality, in an original reality of Man-God, but rather of an inclusive disjunction that carries out the synthesis itself in drifting from one term to another and following the distance between terms. Nothing is primal." By disjunctive syllogism we understand the logic of "A or B, it's not A, so it's B," meaning the logic of "either/or," process of elimination, everything that something is not; in other words, the exclusion function of oedipus whereby the presence of an answer is the "cure", the answer, the presence. This God, this logically-positivist God is the master of excluding a body from being everything that it is. It is western metaphysics, it's Aristotle. The schizophrenic God on the other hand is a "prince of modifications," it is Heraclitus. This God throws the subject through infinite possibilities. The schizophrenic God doesn't "see" disjunctions and then decide to go beyond them into a place where the disjunctions are no longer "seen." The schizophrenic God doesn't start off at "zero" and then want to get to a place where it throws being into a Heraclitean flux. It has no "originality," it doesn't exist in what's understood as "primal." God doesn't create Man in order to take it on a wild journey of infinite possibilities. Disjunctions always and already exist on a body without organs in different flows and different intensities that are all experienced on their own terms. Disjunctions drift into other disjunctions right when one disjunction becomes terminated. He lives and dies. "He is already the mother of a new humanity and can finally die." These all happens in an inclusive space of disjunctions, where the disjunctions are always being affirmed to drift into other disjunctions that will be affirmed. Yes, this, Yes this. Yes this.

It's this nature that D&G find on the body without organs, and it's this nature that they find to be oedipalized way before psychoanalysis, but becomes formalized as oedipus in psychoanalysis. Oedipus lets you know about your differentiations. Oedipus lets you know that you are a child, and that there is your mother, and over there is your father. You as the child, are not your mother or father, even if you drift off into those disjunctions by random occurrence, by spontaneous occurrence. Oedipus demands that you be different, that you be specific, and if you're not, you will "fall into the black night of the undifferentiated." You will be woman when you really are a man. You will be unmotivated when you really are a goal-setter . You will be crazy, when you really are sane. You will be undifferentiated, when you really are different. The dreams of the child are castrated in oedipus. I am now not a dinosaur, but someone who needs to get my homework done (no matter how shitty of a job I did). I am different, just the same way everyone else is different. There's a million mothers in the world. I'm not one of them though. There's a million mid-20 year-olds in the world though. I'm one of them. I'm different just like every single one of them. My dreams are castrated into Oedipus, into where I'm at right now. I am different, just like you, and it has to be this way. I'm not allowed to not be different, unlike...you.