Introduction to the Real; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 7

As real as it gets...really.

In the last post we learned from Brassier and Laruelle of the decision made by philosophers who make a division between something called "the real" and "the ideal" whereby empirical reality ("the real") gets moved into ideality by transcendental functions of the mind. This decision can most easily be traced to Kant's Critiques. We then bracketed this decision from the attempt to understand the real after the explanation of this decision. What then is "the real" independent of this correlation between empirical and transcendental conditions? Laruelle defines it as the "real of the last instance." We gave it a preliminary definition; "It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking." In other words, it's whatever "is" independent of the fact that we are ideal beings. This post will be an attempt at an introduction to "the real" defined through Brassier and Laruelle. It will be an expansion of the "real of the last instance" which we elaborated on in the last post. Brassier starts this off in a distinction between objectivity and objectification. "'Objectivity' can be redefined to index the reality which subsists independently of conditions of objectification tethered to transcendental subjectivity, whether the latter be called 'Dasein' or 'Life.' What is original in Laruelle's work is in defining conditions under which thinking does not intend, reflect, or represent its object but rather mimes its unobjectifable opacity insofar as the latter is identical-in-the-last-instance with a real which is 'foreclosed' to objectification." This passage is enormously helpful in further understanding Laruelle's "real in the last instance" concept. At first Brassier distinguishes "objectivity" independent of "objectification" meaning that the real is independent of the mind taking something from something called "the real" and doing something with it. The word "objectivity" indexes reality independent of being's objectification of the former. It belongs to itself independent of all the abstractions nominated for the human being whether that be the Heideggerian concept of the being that is there, or the basic concept of an all encompassing spiritual-teleological life form enveloping the world. "The real" has nothing to do with these concepts. There must be more to "the real" though besides these gestures of de-objectification. We find this in the concept of the "real of the last instance." This real of the last instance is a place where thinking intends nothing nor does it reflect on anything. It does nothing, but it's there. It doesn't see an object for itself (like we would like to ascribe generally to the mind) and then take this object and represent it in mirror-form for us. The real in the last instance doesn't do what we think it does. Thinking as the real in the last instance "mimes its unobjectifiable opacity." Lets pause for a second to understand this. Reality is unobjectifiable and opaque. This "last instance" is not a matter of knowing anything about this last instance and hence is unobjectifiable because it's not matter of knowledge (epistemology). Thinking mimes this non-matter. It imitates what doesn't matter. It imitates what was never a problem for matter. The real in the last instance as "unobjectifiable opacity" is "foreclosed" to objectification. So whatever thinking is doing in this real in the last instance, it's not objectifying. Rather, Brassier gives us the verb of "mime" to describe the behavior of thought in this foreclosed reality. Brassier leads us to a concept of the mind that is imitating what is completely inimitable. Thus for Laruelle, "It is though we were to insist that the 'matter' of materialism should cognize itself and be capable of its own theorisation without having to pass through dialectical identity or some other philosophical apparatus designed to ensure the reversibility between the known object and the knowledge of the object." Matter happens to thought. Thought mimes the material which means absolutely nothing to us. The philosopher comes up with the idea that the mind "grabs" the material and puts it into ordered categories. This is the presumptive decision of the philosopher discussed in the last post. Thought "in the last instance" is merely something that mimes something that's unobjectifiable which is at an absolute distance from a "philosophical apparatus" that would create a dialectic between the real and ideal. Rather, there is no dialectic at all between the real and ideality. This is what is referred to as "identity without unity." "Identity without unity and duality without distinction are the hallmarks of determination-in-the-last-instance insofar as its structure is that of what Laruelle calls a 'unilateral duality.' By effectuating a unilateral duality between thought and thing, determination-in-the-last-instance manifests a non-correlational adequation between the real and ideal without re-incorporating the former within the latter, whether through the machinery of symbolic inscription or the faculty of intellectual intuition." Identity (ideality) happens to being not because of some unity to something that happened before it. Ideality was an occasional circumstance that happened that has no unity expect to itself which expresses "things." Nonetheless, we see "thing" and our "thinking" of the material thing that has no matter whatsoever. Seeing these two things though doesn't mean that there is a connection between the two. Because "thinking" sees something called "thing" that ostensibly happened to it, doesn't mean that this "thing" actually exists, nor does it mean that "thought" had anything to do with making this material into its own form. While there is certainly a duality for us in terms of making the assumption that there was a causality for our objectifying nature, this has nothing to do with the unilateral operation that happened on its own. The real is not ideal. No matter how much thinking at the very most mimes the nothing of the real, this miming has nothing to say about the real because the real by its very nature doesn't say anything. At the very most, thought comes to represent the real through symbols and even thinks itself the function that the real has to go through (absolute idealism). Thought thinks itself privy to something it can never know about. While this is a feature of thinking, this doesn't mean anything for the real. Because thought thinks it can distinguish between reality and ideality, doesn't mean that whatever is called "reality" is anything. "The real" is always at an absolute distance. The distance is so absolute that we understand Lacan's insistence in synonymizing it with "the impossible."

We have a couple different concepts happening here. We have "determination-in-the-last-instance" along with "unilateral duality." To be more specific, "determination-in-the-last-instance" is "unilateral duality." We have to be careful in describing this because of how easy it is to present a correlative sense to the process that is trying to be described. Fortunately, Brassier is very careful in his logic and words when describing this process. "Unilateralization is foreclosed to reflection: it can only be effectuated non-thetically, that is to say, non-auto-positionally. Being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being; it is not transcendent...it is not the real which causes thought, but rather objectifying transcendence. Thus determination-in-the-last-instance requires objectifying transcendence even as it modifies it." The unilateral process that happens to the occasioned subject is not open to reflection. Thought can't reflect on the unilateral process because it was never remembering anything in the process. It didn't exist as a "mind" (we will see the phenomenological function of memory in the next chapter with Brasser's account of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.). Unilateralization doesn't happen from a "position." We are in a "position" as beings but reality is never in a position precisely because it's not beings. If we allow Heidegger to call being the being that is there, then we understand ourselves as positional beings. We are always somewhere looking around for something to do. This is our absolute limits. Reality though is not in a position where it's somewhere looking around for something to do. It's form isn't the form of the occasional Dasein. This is what Brassier means when he says "being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being." Reality knows nothing of us and we know nothing of it precisely because knowledge is not a matter for reality and is a matter for us. The salient point to be understood is that if we want to encounter whatever is ostensibly called "the real," it can't come from the classical sense of "who we are," meaning the positional-being well-elaborated by Heidegger in Book 1 of Being and Time. Reality doesn't matter. At the very least, when encountering "the real," it doesn't come from a position and obviously doesn't take a position. As was stated above, it's unilateral and we can further understand this by understanding that it's absolutely affirmative. It doesn't listen to anyone nor does it respond to anyone consciously. It happens on its own without the habit of memory getting in the way (the minds differentiation from reality comes fundamentally from memory and memory alone which we will go into in a future post). "The real" is not pacifistic, nor literally and figuratively understanding. It's totalitarian. We can infer micro-biological reactions in the process of unilateralization but these reactions wouldn't be dialectical and would only be our observations of the real of the unilateral. A question abounds. What is the real (as unilateral) under the guise of observation? More specifically what is the real to consciousness which is no longer dialectical? How much can "the real" still be understood even when the logic of "unilateral duality" usurps dialectical logic? At the very least, we understand that it's transcendence that causes thought, not what we call "material reality." Thought happens to itself. "Reality" doesn't cause thinking. Curiously though, "for thinking to effectuate the foreclosure of its real cause, it must be occasioned by its ideal cause." In other words, the only way we can know that we can't know about "reality" is by the transcendence of thought "letting us know" that we can't know anything called "the real" that we nonetheless ask about. Ideality provides the foundation for our asking of questions that are not a matter of the question-answer dialectic. At the same time though, sense is in thought. We have the sense to understand that while ideality has opened up the possibility of the foreclosure of "the real," we have enough sense to not keep asking questions about something called "the real," but instead to follow "the real" in its unilateral process without asking questions. In this sense, thought opens us to "the real" to be exactly what it's not; a miming dialectical representation of what we call "the real." This doesn't mean that we are in some sort of Hegelian circularity between the real and the ideal where thought would realize itself as what it's not. Instead no distinction is being made in what we call "the real" which happens to be "the real." "The real" doesn't stop for an answer nor listen to what "everyone has to say." It moves on without distinction from what the memory distinguishes as the past. Memory will serve as the difference to "the real." It will serve as the sole difference to "the real" which complicates thinking's being able to think unilateralization because it always remembers something from the past which makes it stop and reflect. The problem and explanation of memory will come in one of the next two posts.

The Decision; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 6

Lacan's constipation in trying to understand the real; 6:10 - 7:15

In the last post we ended off by saying "..we can make a good guess at where Brassier is headed; a non-correlation between between being and thought." We will understand this non-correlative thought more concretely through his elaboration of Francois Laruelle. We need to understand Brassier's theoretical acquaintance with Laruelle to fully understand the salient point of Laruelle's "non-philosophy," which will guide us to non-correlationism. There is much to gain from Laurelle's "non-philosophy" that comes across as a giant step for philosophy once fully understood. Laruelle identifies an essence of philosophy that leads him to analyze how philosophers think. Instead of coming up with a philosophical system in distinction and reference to previous philosophers, he instead analyzes how philosophers think. This analysis is a great step forward because of its originality and power. Laruelle does not rely on psychological concepts to define the philosophical thinker that tend to be turgid in description and lacking in precise rigor nor concepts of logic that would presume all the possibilities for philosophical thought. Instead, he finds one basic premise that every philosophers starts off at. What he finds is something he calls "the decision." As philosophers trying to understand something called "the real," this decision implicitly made by philosophers needs to be understood and open to bright lighting. Brassier explains Laruelle's position as such: "Every decision divides immanence between an empirical datum which it supposes as given through the a priori factum, and a transcendental immanence which it has to invoke as already given in order to guarantee the unity of a presupposed factum and a posited datum." First, lets understand the concept of "immanence." We understand immanence as a state of being within. The "real" of what is happening within is trying to be understood by philosophers. Now, a decision is made to how this immanence is to be understood. The implicit decision is a division between an outside and an inside. "The real" happens by a dialectical logic for the philosopher. This stems most notably from German idealism but find it's way into the neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology in the early 20th century. We first have an empirical datum which we only first come to know through a priori categories elaborated systematically in Kant's first Critique. We come to know this empirical datum through transcendental categories of the mind that synthesize this "hyletic data" into human conception. The unity of what is presupposed as already having to happen and what is posited by the human being naturally is a theoretical structure decided on by the philosopher. What is happening is an attempt by a philosopher at an explanation of pure causation between outside and inside. This correlation says very simply that "I can think and talk about something because something outside of myself happened to me that gave me the impulse to talk about this very thing that I'm positing, but I only know this thing to be outside of myself as I'm talking about it because I'm first able to think about it." What's privileged in this pseudo-steam of conscious statement is a synthetic causation between outside and inside; that I'm able to think only because something happened to me from outside of myself. Laruelle identifies three "distinct structural moments" which constitute this decision. First, there's an inventory of a priori's established by philosophers. These a priori conditions of experience are understood in Kant's first Critique as "transcendental categories." The most obvious one is the transcendental aesthetic that places space and time as the experiential grounds for the causal movement into concept (The Idea). Secondly, there is the "gathering-together" (synthesis) of a prioris by a single transcendental category. This synthesis is "said to be 'transcendental' then because it is supposed to exceed experience absolutely..." This transcendental synthesis then exists beyond the conditions of experience. This we can call the "correlative mechanism" that moves the conditions of experience happening to something other than itself into conceptualization (the Idea). Laruelle refers to this as the pure phenomenological Ego in Husserl's Phenomenology; "pure," meaning we have no choice that our mind synthesizes everything that is ostensibly happening outside of it. Thirdly, we have a unification of the single transcendental synthesis with the a priori categories of synthesis, meaning we see how the conditions of experience were understood through an extra-empirical mechanism of a single "gathering-together" mechanism. We make the connection (correlation) between the idea that there were things outside of ourselves that first needed to be the case and things inside of ourselves that had to be the case to make sense of what was outside of us. We remember this synthesis of rationalism and empiricism specifically in Kant's Critique when he states, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience...But though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." In other words, just because knowledge had a place where it first began for us, doesn't mean that this first place constitutes all of what makes knowledge necessary. For Kant, it arises out of the transcendental faculty unifying the conditions of experience. But lets keep something in mind in this analysis of Kant. Kant was specifically focused on epistemology, i.e. knowledge. So his analysis was always in reference to knowledge for us. Now, just because something happened to us where we happen to gain something called "knowledge," doesn't mean that this exteriority to ourselves is a matter of knowledge in itself. Certainly all experience can't be accounted for as a reference for us. We certainly only see experience for us, but we should also see that seeing experience for us is a relative "function" of something we happen to call "experience." The philosophers "real" is understood not through an empirical or contingent sense but through the sense that makes Ideas possible in the first place (knowledge). For the philosopher, the decision is made that reality conditions ideality without interest into how "the real constitutes itself." "The decisional complex of transcendence, immanence, and the transcendental is ultimately determined by unobjectifiable immanence which Laruelle identifies with 'the real.'"

Now that we have analyzed the decision the philosopher makes when trying to understand "the real," we can bracket out this philosophical decision when trying to understand something called "the real." "By suspending the premise that decision co-constitutes the real, thought comes to realize that it can have a relation to a real instance which is neither empirically presupposed nor transcendentally posited as determining, but defined by thought as already-determined and determining for it - a 'real of the last instance' in accordance with which thought can approach the circle of transcendental synthesis from a place which is 'always-already' outside of it." We can understand what we call "the real" then not in terms of a correlation between an empirical and transcendental decision made by philosophers that always must be in reference to our possibility, but the fact that thought is already determined independent of a theoretical system that would like to account for it. It's the case that we are already thinking. Kant's system isn't needed to understand "the real." In a certain sense this a return to the Cartesian method with a specific injuction not to move into the Kantian decision. We know in the "real of the last instance" that we are thinking beings and what happened "before" this is "always-already" outside of thought's purview. We know at the very least that we are always and already thinking. But what is this "real of the last instance?" It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking. More precisely, it's the moment we are thinking at that exact moment we are thinking (without necessarily knowing we are thinking. Again, this "real" is at a distance from epistemology). The last instance of "the real" is already a thought, but it's at a shorter distance than the system built by Kant and Hegel to establish how thought came to be. It's this division from System that allows to find something called a "real in the last instance." Still, what is happening in this "real in the last instance, if anything at all?" At the very least, we know that "the use of the modifiers 'already' and 'without' in describing the 'real of the last-instance' is effectively shorthand for 'non-decisional.'" In other words, when we understand the "the real" in terms of having no choice in what happens, we understand that we make no decision in what happens to us, nor does "the real" assume some mystical/spiritual position that already makes decisions specifically for us. Neither what we call "the real," nor what we understand as Kantian synthesizing acts of the mind make decisions. "The real" happens independent of a decision. It happens in it's own way independent of what we would philosophically understand to be a "teleological presupposition." Lets let Laruelle speak for himself here. "To the extent that philosophy exploits 'transcendence' or 'being' in a privileged and dominant manner [...] the essence of transcendence or being according to their philosophical usage is the 'auto,' that is to say, the idea of philosophy's absolute autonomy in the form of a circle, of a self-reference such as becomes apparent in the dimensions of auto-donation and auto-position." From this, we understand that Laruelle sees the decision of the philosopher as privileging concepts of "being" and "transcendence" which is the essence of philosophy. What these concepts entail is a use of the concept "auto," meaning that the concept of being for example means that something automatically happens without decision. But this is what we understood above as Laruelle's non-philosophy. We understood it as non-decisional. We must distinguish between "auto-position" and "non-auto-decision." When Laruelle understands the decision made by Kantian and post Kantian philosophy, it's in the circularity between what's given (donated) and the position taken from the donation. Heidegger for example puts us in the position of the being of Being who thinks its own finitude by the modality of temporality. We are automatically in a position in other words with Heidegger's privileged-subjectivity . The idea conveyed by Laruelle in the form of a non-decisional non-philosophy is different from being put into an automatic position of being. The idea of non-decisionality obviates the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity as a duality (dialectical logic) in the first place. While Phenomenology would lay out what automatically happens to us without us having any knowledge of it, this non-decisional non-philosophy has no idea of "something happening to us automatically." This makes sense in the context of a "real in the last instance" because we are not yet at something we can identify as "being us." As was stated above, we are at a smaller distance with the "real in the last instance" than the system being constructed for the possibility of thought by Kant and Hegel. While "auto-positional" puts us in an automatic position we cant escape ("being"), "non-decisional" doesn't make available the philosophical decision to put us in an automatic place at all.

This analysis of the philosopher's decision relative to understanding "the real" will help us with understanding what Laruelle will specifically refer to as "the real" in the next post. Bracketing out the philosopher's decision of having to see "the real" in terms of a synthesis between ostensible empirical and transcendental conditions is a giant step for thought being able to think something called "the real" without the history of philosophy weighing so heavily on it.

Market Acceleration; Anti-Oedipus, Part 8

Purchasing power at the speed of schizophrenia

Chapter three of Anti-Oedipus is difficult to say the least; not simply because D&G are at first conceptually difficult to understand (like most philosophy), but because they play it loose with their terminology. That don't take great pains in describing exactly what a decoded flow is nor do they take pains in describing exactly what deterritorialization is even though one can infer what they're talking about. They will use these words in many different contexts making it difficult to stabilize the word for the reader, which of course is always the point when reading someone like D&G. On top of this, they throw the word axiomatic at the reader in distinction from decoded flows and deterritorialization in regards to describing the way capitalism functions. If the reader doesn't pay super close attention to the contexts in which these concepts are being used, they will easily get lost. This post will have it's theme, and that is the further schizophrenization of capitalism insisted by D&G, but much of this post will be an attempt at gaining clarity on these aforesaid concepts. They are crucial to understand because they form the crux of the book, but once the reader understands how they're using the concepts, they will witness small conceptual shifts which make them go back to the original usage. In the end, the concepts will have different senses, and different senses that will be understood only by laborious close readings. It would have helped if D&G were more clear by giving specific examples. As the readers of this text, we will have to be more clear about what they are referring to in different contexts with these concepts. It's important to understand because once the reader gains clarity on the conceptual foundation of Anti-Oedipus, it is very profound. You just gotta work at it. Chapter three in Anti-Oedipus traces primitive formation to barbaric formations to capitalistic formation. It's an ethnological trace that finds desire in each field of social-formation, and it's completion in capitalism. Each state-of-being has it's own mode of statehood whereby a primitive formation is coded, the barbaric formation is despotically overcoded in order to fulfill the nexus between familial alliances and the despot, and capitalism that's defined specifically by D&G as "the conjunction of all decoded and deterritorialized flows." This post will focus specifically on how they see capitalism as not have a territory and not having a code, and this is easy to understand by simply understanding a competitive market economy that creates needs at will that owe no allegiance to anything other than it's own process, it's own production. The profound analysis by D&G will come in what D&G see as after-capitalism, which we will see is the turning of capitalism from it's current nature of relative schizophrenia, to a nature that is absolute schizophrenia. Along the way we hope to gain clarity on their conceptual lexicon aforementioned.

Lets start off with an attempt at getting a closer understanding of three concepts aforementioned. What is the capitalist axiomatic? "How much flexibility there is in the axiomatic of capitalism, always read to widen its own limits so as to add a new axiom to a previously saturated system! You say you want an axiom for wage earners, for the working class and the unions? Well then, let's see what we can do-and thereafter profit will flow alongside wages, side by side, reflux and afflux." Traditionally speaking, an "axiom" belong to mathematics whereby random variables that require no proof of their own existence form an absolute truth-equation for themselves. Other statements are logically derived from an axiom. We see this in any geometrical proof. One is granted an axiom in which proofs are formed. The question comes up regarding the existence of these random variables that could possibly form an absolute solid proof. These are questions that Husserl would attempt to understand in Phenomenology and most specially in his Origins of Geometry that we went into prior posts regarding Derrida's involvement with that text. What we do know is that an axiom, mathematically speaking doesn't concern itself with its imaginary variables. In other words, mathematicians aren't ethnologists. We can infer from D&G's usage of "axiom" in terms of capitalism that it's an equation in which random variables are put into the equation to bring about other equations that work. An axiom for the "working class and the unions" would be a code itself, but not the code that would end up being decoded by capitalism, but a code with the flexibility to always change relative to profit increasing side by side with the axioms for the wage earner. In this sense, the axiom of capitalism isn't a code, it is it's constant movement for profit and surplus by whatever means necessary without any archaic code getting in the way of this schizophrenic axiom. The capital-axiom then is one where surplus-value is always added no matter what other axiom is included within it's own domain. Capital form will have to be flexible to respect wage earners while increasing it's own profit for itself. It will have to figure out ways for example to raise the earnings of a worker, while not losing the money it's raising from the worker (E.G. taxes). So "axiom" for D&G takes on a very different sense than the one classically understood in Euclidean Geometry. What they have in common is the fact that they're unaware of the genealogical origins of the variables they use for a specific cause; one for understanding for it's own sake and the other for the constant extension of surplus-capital. Surplus-value isn't exclusive to capital though. It's within desire itself and can be found easily in understanding for it's own sake (why we're all in graduate school). Deterritorialization is easier to understand. We can think of this literally as having no home. Literally, we can think of this as Native Americans being moved from their own home by English colonialism. We can think of this as the action of colonialism in general. What happens here is that what was once considered home to a certain group of people is no longer their home. Instead this group will have to adapt to colonization. This term gains a greater understanding through Marx when he expresses the relationship in Das Kapital between colonization and industry. In other words, a group of people are moved from their territory into an industrial place where the people aren't producing what they're used to producing, but are producing from and for the colonists. What takes precedence over home here is production for the sake of production. It doesn't matter who produces, as long as a surplus is being created for the sake of capitals axiom. Anyone from any place who at once was within a territorilzation in the body without organs (which was "originally" deterritorialized) will be moved into a deterritorialization for the sake of the captial-axiom. Now what is it to be decoded for D&G? This goes along with the process of deterritorialization. When something is decoded, it means to convert a code into a different one. What was at once coded and overcoded becomes decoded into the captial-axiom. What was once understood as a "primal relationship" between father and son now becomes a decoded relationship where the "traditional relationship" between the two no longer forms the meaning once understood traditionally. It becomes decoded into the work of the capital-axiom of production for the sake of production. An example of understanding this decoding is an example of understanding a "traditional relationship" between a father and son whereby the father instills certain codes and morals in the child. Under the capital-axiom, this gets converted into coding a sort of morality for surplus, meaning, the son must make money for the sake of money. He must produce for the sake of production. Morality becomes capital. In this example, the sons relationship to the father is to please him by showing him that he is fulfilling the captial-axiom without either of them knowing what they're fulfilling. Euphemisms will be put in place for this decoded axiom like "hard-work" for example. The son will want to be hardworking without knowing it's at the service of the capital-axiom of creating a seemingly infinite surplus. The capital-axiom is operating here, but so is the ostensible morality that is established between father-mother-son. This oedipal triangulation is simply no longer a matter of alliance or a purpose that would be the desire to be pedagogical (on the parental organisms part), but the lack of recognition that the pedagogy is of the service for the capital-desire. Deterritorialization and decoding happen together. One no longer has a home where they have codes in their home. They are constantly moved to different territories where the codes of the former territory are being changed for the capital-axiom (capital-surplus-value). With this being said, I hope there is a more clear understanding of these important concepts that D&G use and of course I would love to hear an expansion/modification of these terms from readers of the D&G corpus. Now, the topic of this post was called "Market Acceleration." As D&G saw transitions from savage-being to barbarian-being to capital-being, they are looking for what is after-capital. As they trace desire with its similarities (but different modalities) through different time-being periods they want to trace ahead past capitalism and psychoanalysis to a schizophrenic capitalism and schizophrenia in general. "So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relations with money, and recording - while refusing to recognize it - an entire system of monetary dependencies at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats...Is there a revolutionary path? Is there one? - To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advices Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist 'economic solution'? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to 'accelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it..." We understand from prior posts the dependency in psychoanalysis and the analysts turning a blind eye to the money it receives from the patient who demands a cure, creating an infinite cycle of "sickness" for the patient who demands a cure, and the monetary compensation the analyst receives for finding a cure that the patient demands. The analysts "intimate relation with money" obviously is of no help to D&G. In other words, what happens after-capital is not being-in-capital going to other people to cure them of sicknesses where capital is used as the exact transaction between the parties. Nor is it a withdrawal from the capital-axiom; the world market where by this "economic solution" is another version of the Italian Fascism of WW2 where the state operates a market independent of markets outside of itself (other countries). A market without imports and exports is not a solution (Where could one start stating how bad of an idea this is? Or is it simply just a fascist economy?). The possible movement into something called after-capitalism for now would be an accelerated capitalism where markets happen at such a speed that no one would be able to predict the what would happen. D&G ask if we aren't decoded and deterritorialized enough. For however much we don't have a code in terms of using capital to buy things we think we need but we really don't need, and don't belong to a home that would code us with something other than the capital-axiom, maybe we aren't far enough? Maybe the process needs to be more accelerated? What would this market acceleration that we could understand as schizophrenic look like? Lets go back to the distinction we made at first in this post between relative schizophrenia and absolute schizophrenia. We will understand this distinction in terms of the neurotic and schizophrenic respectively. What is relative schizophrenia? In the capital-axiom, the neurotic doesn't realize the things it thinks it needs. It's deterritorialized in the sense that there is not an exclusive code of needs, besides needing. To be more direct, I can think I need anything at any time. Now to further understand this we need to understand this in distinction to what Schizophrenic Capitalism would look like. What is Schizophrenic Capitalism? Schizophrenic Capitalism on the other hand does not have a structured unconscious (which Lacan describes. But as D&G tell us, no matter how much Lacan brings us to the despotism of our unconscious, he still gives it a privileged place by understanding it as a structural despotism) that thinks it needs to need. There is an accelerated movement to differences independent of the neurotic structure of conscious or unconscious needs. The schizophrenic is "absolutely deterritorilized" while the neurotic is in a "relative deterritorialization." The neurotic is "not at home" relative to where it's at (it's need to be at home). The ironic paradox of the neurotic is its search for pleasure (home) that is never-ending; it's home in never finding a home that makes it sick. For example, the neurotic affirmation that will fetishize always "being in different places" without recognizing the eternal sickness in thinking this difference serves as a "cure" to an imaginary "existential angst." The neurotic conscious here is absolutely sick, and because of it, it's obvious that it will seek out a "cure" for not understanding it's own need to need. The neurotic is sick because it doesn't realize that it's being forced to think it needs things it doesn't need, and is in anxiety from not knowing what it would be like to not need anything. The analyst will serve as the conductor of appropriating the time whereby the patient can move onto a new home (a new need) which will become exhausted (as happens to all needs) whereby the analyst will move the patient onto needing something else. The neurotic man in the capital-axiom is at home in not being at home. This neurotic-being is sickness. It never knows why its not where it wants to be, not knowing it will never be there. A Contrario, the schizophrenic capitalist doesn't have an unconsciousness that's structured like this. For the schizophrenic, it's not a structure, but the break-flows that D&G elude to throughout Anti-Oedipus. It moves onto one place where it may purchase things with capital, gets sick of it (without knowing that it is sick from not needing it anymore), breaks with this investment, and flows onto something else where it knows not where it will invest. There is no future advance for the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic flows independent of time at it's own rapid speed; rapid compared to the neurotic who takes time to be sick from the nostalgia of not being interested in what it once invested in, and owned, and unconsciously thought was it's identity. This should serve as a preliminary distinction between two different "capitalists," and on the way, it should serve as a further distinction between the neurotic and the schizophrenic in regards to the way the capital-axiom happens to them. The question would then be if you could say that the capital-axiom applies to the schizophrenic. Without it's attention to the axiom of surplus, it wouldn't. It would operate in some abstract "market place" where the unpredictability of the schizophrenic would operate independent of surplus-value because of the Market not "knowing" the break-flows of the schizophrenic. The capital-axiom state would combust to the spontaneous flow of the schizophrenic. It seems D&G are leading us into a state of entropy other than something that could be called a "schizophrenic economy," but we aren't sure yet until we finish the analysis of chapter three, and most importantly, concentrate on what Schizoanalysis would be as a "social field."

Hopefully, this has been the most difficult part of Anti-Oedipus and there won't be as much labor in trying to interpret important and constantly used phrases that are nevertheless not defined, but only used in contexts. Having a grasp of these three terms (deterritorilzation, decoding, the axiomatic) is the key to understanding not only chapter three but I think both chapters that came before. With any book, after you read it once, you get a better understanding of it the second time around. The final chapter on Schizoanalysis will be much easier to read understanding these concepts to a larger degree than initially understood, or basically not understood at all at first. Within our analysis of schizophrenia and Schizoanalysis so far, it's going to be interesting to see how D&G place the Schizophrenic into a "functioning" ontological space. Maybe it won't be functioning, classically understood. I really can't say what is to come in the final chapter of Anti-Oedipus, and this of course is exciting. We procured hints at what this space would look like from the post on the introduction to Schizoanalysis and the way in which a "schizophrenic capitalist" would operate; at it's own speed (not recognizing time), breaking from something that its desire is currently invested in, flowing into something else for desire to become invested in, not being neurotically sick about a memory of the past where a desire was invested in an object, functioning within a flow not ascribing a meaning to whatever is "currently" being invested; in general, a real-time theater where the unconscious functions not as a language, but as a process. We will have to distinguish between Schizoanalysis and schizophrenia. Schizoanalysis is just that, an analysis, and in that sense a structured explanation to a phenomena which may run into the same problems of Phenomenology (finding the limits of Phenomenology as a hypothetical explanation of what happens in something called "real-time"). If the analysis of schizo consciousness is understanding its functionality (which we learned it was from D&G in a past post on Schizoanalysis), then this is certainly at a distance from the experience of the schizophrenic. Here we will ask what exactly the "method" of Schizoanalysis is trying to accomplish then. To be a schizophrenic? To privilege the schizophrenic being? To watch it's functionality independent of meaning? All of these possibilities have problems that I'm sure we will end up going into at the closing of the text. We will defer and refer to the final chapter of Anti-Oedipus to let D&G answer these questions for us first.

Interpretation of Lacan's Cigar Win

"I want to speak, but I just can't get it up"

I asked my brother what he thought of Lacan's cigars the other day, not Lacan himself, but just his cigars, and this is what he emailed me back,

"looks like a limp penis sticking out of his mouth for which his unconscious displays his impotence, castration from the Other but in his mouth so a verbal impotence. Lacan said that he would often go into lectures w/o planned speech, this signifying a verbal impotence of sorts. But limp or not its still a phallus and will press ahead despite its impotence"

Amazing. Certain interpretation Win.