Revolutionary Repression; Anti-Oedipus, Part 11

La Chinoise. When you have nothing to do and no imagination, you come up with shit hobbies.

As we are just about at the conclusion of Anti-Oedipus, we find D&G charmingly berating all forms of the Oedipus complex at the greatest distances that would seem protected under "social critique." Luckily for us as readers of D&G, we are warmed by the aggression of the Schizoanalytical tactic. It reaches everywhere. Wherever the despotic complex is formed in a territory, D&G move to unmask it. To their credit, they do this at a time when this would seem unfashionable (Paris: 1968-1972). Undoing the limits of Oedipus would have its limits for most people, those limits being fashion-sense (understood in the most abstract sense possible; ideology). For D&G though, they're sort of having an immense satirical laugh at the card carriers, much like the spectators we talked about in the last post who watch people in the ring throwing phantom punches at each other who didn't know that there was a small audience outside of them, laughing at them. Luckily for us, we get to join in the laughter if we're honest enough with ourselves like D&G have been able to accomplish. Yes, we are more alienated than ever before, but we are laughing like we've never laughed before. Almost at the end of Anti-Oedipus, D&G distinguish between the subject-group and the revolutionary-group. This will be a strong step forward for the idea of Schizoanalysis because it will negate the negative style that one thinks is being outside of Oedipus, opposed to Oedipus. In general, the opposing force will be someone in the ring we laugh at. Instead of Ivan Drago, it will be Glass Joe (Rock IV and Punchout!). It won't be the machine that destroys ("Whatever he is, He destroys!"), it will be the fighter who really doesn't know how to fight ("Watch the jaw!! Don't hit my jaw!"). A key to understanding this distinction made by D&G is the distinction between interest and unconscious desire. More specifically, it will be the area where unconscious desire trails off into an interest of any sort. Its most hilarious manifestation will be in the class-warrior who really has nothing to do (which actually isn't what's funny), and no imagination to go along with it (this is the funny part). It's here where interest as negation manifests. It's here where students pretend to empathize with labor unions. The laborers will labor for untold amounts of time unconsciously trying to grasp their sisyphean predicament while students have their summers off doing nothing but sitting around criticizing circumstances they aren't part of, in other words, people with bad hobbies (This phenomena was not just stationary to late 60's Paris, but is evident today in many different political structures). D&G go into this phenomena in a more appropriate and abstract way for the sake of Schizoanalysis. It would be easy to do what I just did, but it at least serves as a setup to what D&G want to describe in the interest-consciousness, and how it's most inconspicuous forms must be midwifed. With that being said, D&G are very trustworthy authors. They owe no allegiance to anything, and in turn do the "work" of Schizoanalysis faithfully.

"It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so - and even remain fascist and police-like - from the standpoint of its libidinal investment. Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire." The investment into a class interest can remain fascist and police-like. The investment into any interest is an invested interest that breaks with a flow and stays in the break (there are plenty plenty plenty examples of this in modern feminist theory. Some of these thinkers are the exact definition of despotic). What at first seems like an opening of a flow that will break and flow on its own can quickly become a police-state dialogue where if one doesn't follow the codes, they will be shown how things are still backwards after all this time of thinking that "things have moved forward." This forcing forward (forced progression) is a code that doesn't flow, but breaks at an ideology of the marginalized, the ideology of the slave, the loser. What an unconscious investment would "be" is not this investment manifested into an interest. The machine of desire that flows and breaks forever is at a distance from an investment into a social field, the social field with interested parties. The unconscious desire, the desiring machine is not interested. It happens on its own without conception, without goal. When one has an interested goal, this is not to be taken as a molecular desire that happens at a schizophrenic "pace." It's to be taken as a molar aggregate of ideas trying to be accomplished, in other words, ideology. This apparatus of interest won't take the place of the eternal movement of the molecular desiring machines that flow and break at their own "pace." Certainly, pure desire can manifest into ideology, and this is how ideology is possible in the first place, but this unchecked ideology isn't the "purity" that one seeks when one is trying to find the naked body. It's a style that will clothe the nakedness that one was initially seeking. One takes off the pants, doesn't like what they see, so puts on thrift-store jeans. Again, having your cake and eating it to without knowing that you're as full as someone who regularly eats at Applebees. The question is checking the ideology when it becomes just that, and breaking right there, and flowing again wherever the unconscious desire takes it. "A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom...the phenomena of group 'superegoization,' narcissism, and hierarchy - the mechanisms for the repression of desire." The group who seizes power for the betterment of what's already going on (the implicit logic of a group who wants to seize power) is subjugated under its own weight of wanting something different. The desire for difference (the interest for difference) is the opposite pole of unconscious desire, which may just appear the same to an outside perspective. When desiring-production becomes ideology, the agents are enslaved to their own ideology for the reason of being satisfied in the creativity found in their unconscious desiring-production. What they felt in that one moment, what they felt in that one break, was enough. The agents are full (they are fat). These revolutionary agents won't diet from their full feeling of being creative once. Instead, this spontaneous creativity of unconscious production will become an ideology trying to create that one moment as a memory that they hope will never cease. It will relive a moment in memory that will never be the same as the moment that wants to be created again. This privileged memory is ideology. This unchecked creativity is ideology. Ideology is fat. The unconscious desire that flowed is subjugated to the socius where it becomes a "fixed support." This "fixed support" is personal satisfaction. In the socius, the revolutionary memory is at home. It's at home in the negation of something that's ostensibly outside of itself. It defines itself in marginalization. It meets others who define themselves in marginalization. It becomes a power group of self-defined marginalized people (anyone who would tell you that they listen to indie music). The surplus-value that is gained in this revolutionary manifestation will have its own market. It's not just the kids who go to the clothing stores that sell the razor blade bracelets. It's the adults who are noticeably satisfied when eating a tomato from Whole Foods. The marginalized find their home in the surplus-market, the surplus-market that they thought was opposed to their unconscious desire. When did it happen that one man or one woman became satisfied in one creative act? When did they let ideology take the place of their unconscious desire? The satisfied personality: how did it happen? The satisfied marginalized group are coded to the degree of superegoization. If you don't like this band, you don't get the raw emotion of music! If you don't eat this organic egg from a chickens ass then you're eating bad food that's eating away at your soul! Don't do that! Don't do this! You should be doing this! You should be doing that! Ok....Mommy. Ok....Daddy. Or you could just get pregnant already and get it over with. Or you could just let the semen go, if you had the balls. How amazingly unnoticeable narcissism can be! How unnoticeable the mommy-daddy complex can be. You don't actually have to be mommy or daddy. You can be the super-mommy and daddy. You can be the infertile judge. The pride of abstinence and infertility, this hyper-mommy and daddy, this hyper-law and territory. The superego, the secret narcissism of the revolutionary...the salient repression of desire. Those who are prideful enough to take the position of the forward-movers are Oedipus. They know the way forward. They look into the sun in pictures. They look over the horizon. They run at the moment of real intensity. "A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego." D&G define the subject-group contrary to the revolutionary-group. Think of it literally. What is a subject group? It's a group of subjects. Nothing more can be said of it. It's a group of people that have no reason for being in a group in the first place, yet, they're in a group. The revolutionary-group on the other hand has a very specific reason for their group. To create ideological revolution! The subject-group though without a formal definition have libidinal investments. They are vital, not ideological. They have energy. This vital energy is revolutionary. What manifests from this vital energy is not revolutionary. Nonetheless, this unconscious libidinal vital energy penetrates into the social field, but subordinates it's object to it's own desire. The social field is at the guidance of unconscious desiring production. The social field doesn't even exist. It's a byproduct of a molecular process. This molecular process, these disjunctions at the molecular level are ignorant of the molar aggregate (the socius). Desiring-production happens on a body without organs, and the production keeps producing and flowing while breaking at spots to flow other ways. This is the subject-group that goes on its own. It invents mortal formations, meaning that what it spontaneously creates doesn't become aggrandized into ideology. It doesn't become satisfied in one creative moment where it would create its own memory as an ideology. Instead, it moves away from its creative form no matter how "satisfied it felt" into something else that would happen ignorant of any personal satisfaction that would happen to it. It's forms are always mortal. They will always die because they will always break from points and flow to new places without recognition of a temporality (this subject-group is really schizophrenic in the fact that it would be without temporality). The subject-group will cross over multiple stable lines it doesn't know are horizontal at unknown multiplicities. The lines, the horizontal lines of symbolic determination can only watch in ignorance at the transversal nature of the subject/schizo-group. It can only watch in amazement, and then eventually in marginalization. Ideology and the horizontal watch things pass by. They watch phenomena pass by as unmovable rocks themselves. There's light speed, and then there's no speed. The subject-group has no hierarchy or a superego. There is no territory. There is no "frontier." There are places always crossed and creations always left behind with no trace of memory for those places. This schizo flows, breaks, creates, and never stops in some place called home, some territory that had always been waiting for me.

D&G are faithful to their anti-psychiatry instincts in Schizoanalysis by taking the revolutionary style to task. It's here where they find ideology at its most pervasive, and it's most perverted. It's here where they find the cult of negativity, the cult of misanthropy. The marginalized style always finds its home. It has its territory. It has it's law. It has its mother and father for however much it thinks it would like to displace these archetypes. It's in this marginalized style where repression is most prideful. It's where the marginalized style will never admit to being prideful while at the same time thinking it knows exactly what the world's woes are. Always a woe. Never a yes. Always something that needs to be changed. Never a placid and passing observation at something that will always pass. The pride in difference...the fascist personality. The mask of "purity" that can so easily be interpreted from another party fuels this repression. This repression of unconscious desire is hidden under the sunshine and lollipop image under the sun. "Images, nothing but images." Look at me being free. I am here, and you are there. You are at the center, and I am at the outside, but I can still have everything that you have, but I can do more! My surplus-existence is greater than yours! You see? I'm ahead of the game. You are behind. I was one of the chosen few amongst others in a group. You know when you see one of those people and think to yourself, "they just know." I have this instinct, and you don't. I am an angel. I am an angel brought down to the earth to save it from all its iniquities. I am the image of where things need to progress, and you, you are not the image of where things need to progress, and little do I know this is what makes me who I am. This is what gives me my angelic pride. This is what represses my unconscious desire; the fact that you are there and I am here, the fact that I think of you as a lowly being who should be more like me, but don't come to close to me, or there will no longer be a marginalized group of us angels anymore. I will have no outside to stand in. There will be no center to differentiate myself from. I won't be special. Actually, I'm not a sign of "purity" where you need to progress to. I am a forced difference in order to show you where you can't get to. You can't be me.

Myth to Infinity; Anti-Oedipus, Part 10

The desire to be the myth of desire (not illustrated: the future anxiety that happens when feeling one has to play the role of the hero).

The negation of psychoanalytical methodology as the starting point of Schizoanalysis will continue throughout the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus. Each negation serves as a movement away from classical psychoanalysis. A formal theory may not come to us. A formal theory of Schizoanalysis may be implicit in the repudiation of psychoanalysis by D&G. It may be so simple that it requires no formal methodology expect for understanding the methodology of psychoanalysis (the understanding negates its "axiomatic" premise). Myth as an objective material entity takes its final blow in the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus. We will find Myth as the privileged entity of psychoanalysis, and capitalize it in this post to point towards its privileged place in analysis. It will be important to understand Myth as the guiding factor of psychoanalysis and the analytical session between patient and analyst (slave and master). When this is understood, we will find D&G putting Myth in contrast to desiring-production in order to open up Schizoanalysis. Myth will be the stable entity in which man looks to understand its nature through the auspices of psychoanalysis. D&G will find this more than problematic. The myth is the image. It is the fantasy as opposed to spontaneous reality. This "stable signifier" will point all dreams towards a represented interpretation. This interpretation, this "dream book," will always be the case without knowing why one interpretation of a dream is stable. One privileges the archaic symbolism of Medusa for example and consigns their life and random dream-sequences to this representation without understanding the myth of Medusa. The Gods are alive in psychoanalysis. They are alive and well. The believer of interpretation will find this as a nuanced position after-Christianity. Why one God? How about many Gods (but only so many Gods that are able to fit in one book, in one analyst's mind, so as to put a limitation in this nuanced position in order to get to the eventual goal, the personality)? Pantheism will represent a new age of thinking, the old way of thinking; A nuanced position of a nostalgia no longer condemned to its previous history, but separated by a length of time whereby the subject is unaware of their nostalgic personality in general. What at once was antiquated becomes nuanced, and the inverse operation will happen over time. The dialectical slug fest will happen without anyone watching outside the ring for the dialectical personality. The Myth will reign supreme for the sake of the surplus-personality (the never ending enjoyment at looking to symbols of the past to see what one is like). This post then will attempt to dismantle Myth from being through the work of D&G in this last chapter of Anti-Oedipus. On the way, the implicit "idea" of Schizoanalysis will become more apparent. Schizoanalysis may always be implicit, but just because something is always implicit, doesn't mean that it won't be apparent.

"The ambiguity of psychoanalysis in relation to myth or tragedy has the following explanation: psychoanalysis undoes them as objective representations, and discovers in them the figures of a universal libido; but it reanimates them, and promotes them as subjective representations that extend the mythic and tragic content to infinity. Psychoanalysis does treat myth and tragedy, but it treats them as the dreams and the fantasies of private man, Homo familia..." For D&G, the Myth simply gets privileged over the materialist-reality that they see in desiring-machines partial objects. Myth is no longer simply a representation that has become an object for us. We no longer see Thanatos as a fun image of death that one happens to represent, but in turn don't take seriously because we are having fun with images; instead we see this figure through the analyst as a figure of a universal libido, a transcendental signifier that will give you an exact meaning to your life in this exact presence. Invested in these images is the energy of the world rather than a relative historical period with its own Gods, heroes, and villains. We will look back to these images to define ourselves and will pay the analyst to help us identify ourselves with antique images. These ultimate "subjective representations" go on infinitely. The content of these representations are infinitely meaningful, in other words, irreducible. The absolute limit of the Myth serves as its own infinite meaning. When I realize that I have Thanatos in me, I know who I am. I am Thanatos; a relative symbol of an age that had it's own way of interpreting phenomena. But for me, the symbol isn't relative; it's infinite and irreducible. I have found myself! I am Thanatos and nothing else. The personality has become fulfilled. I know now how to act, dress, and talk in the ostensible image of Thanatos. I'm settled. I have a dark vision of the world. Don't come near me! You don't want to feel my dark power! I am the power (masters of the universe)! But I may find someone like me. Another Thanatos. Male and female Thanatoses. I have my friends who are like me and my marriage with someone else who understands me (There was a time where we explored our myths more carefully, but only so much as to solidify and satisfy the personality). We are all settled together in distinction from others who have their own Myths who don't match ours. We're all having kids and visiting the psychoanalyst though. This we can share in common. Oedipus we can share in common. We can all be our own little Myths (our own little cartoons), and be in a slug fest in the dialectical ring where phantom punches are thrown without knowing who the spectators of the event are. Just throw another myth in the ring and we will keep talking on behalf of ourselves not knowing how or why we're talking on behalf of ourselves to other mythologies. At no point do either of us no who's outside the ring (the non-personality can imagine a crowd of laughter witnessing people throwing phantom punches at each other). Psychoanalysis won't show us other ways of being for D&G. Instead, myth and tragedy will become transferred to the "private person" as we have showed above. What am I personally? I am an irreducible myth from the past. As a personality, I dream of a myth. I dream to be a myth. I dream to be a tragedy. I fantasize about being the death desire incarnate no matter how shitty this feels, as long as I am this. No matter what happens to me, I am first and foremost a representation, a personality. I am of the same family, the same symbol, the same myth. How do I find out who I am? I learn about symbols from the past and ask nothing about their own development, their own myths. I don't see the infinite displacement of myths to previous myths, but rather find the myth that I like, and stay put. I find my territory in a symbolic past figure. The mother in me is satisfied in the home of Thantos's fatherly law. I will lay down the absolute nature of finitude and death, but only insofar as there's a feminine place for this to happen, over and over again...in the same place, over and over again. I am in the territorial law. Death is my life. Who's out there who thinks that there's always only life? C'mon in the ring and lets argue about it. All the while we are getting roasted by people outside the ring at our over zealous enthusiasm for our personalities. I belong to a family in distinction from other families. We are each are our own private families in distinction from other families. We are all families. We are the myth of the family. "What acts in myth and tragedy at the level of objective elements is therefore reappropriated and raised to a higher level by psychoanalysis, but as an unconscious dimension of subjective representation (myth as humanity's dream)." Psychoanalysts aren't even aware of their own myth that they created. The representation of the Myth as the signifier of all vital life is lifted to that level while no longer recognizing this privileged level. Subjective representation is a myth. The subject can be stated simply as some sort of Myth that's irreducible. The unconscious has been given its substance for the subject. It's a stable symbol from the past. It's not a constant flow that always changes to different surroundings, contexts, and environments, but a stable personality that influences everything outside of itself. This is the dream of humanity; the stable personality. To be more precise; it's the myth of the stable personality. The unconscious desire that breaks with one "event" then flows to another is not the unconscious of being. The unconscious is always invested with representations that want to satisfy a settlement. The investments will be different settlements, but they will always be settlements (they will always be territories). I may be different from you, but I am just like you, so we're really the same. Horray! We're all settled in our differences. Now, lets make sure everyone stays put in their differences so we have an equal amount of different people making the world as flattened and horizontal as possible. Everyone gets the candy. Everyone has their cake and eats it too. Everyone hates and loves each other, and believes this is how phenomena has always happened! The belief of life and death. The grand judge believes in these things. The Hegelian judge watches the spectacle and mythologizes the spectacle. The observational myth; the scientist. The scientist who makes sure to let others know that they don't believe in anything without realizing they believe in their science and their disbelief (already two beliefs in one "non-believer"!). As D&G say, "the condition of a denial that preserves belief without believing in it." Psychoanalysis would like to free the subject from a "problem," but doesn't realize that this benevolent utilitarianism depends on an already written and unexplored book of myths and tragedies. The dreams and fantasies of the patient are understood in terms of Myth by the analyst. Is psychoanalysis that much different from dream interpretation? Dream interpretation is more sly with injecting a sense of "well-being" in the client by grounding it's practice in not letting the client know ahead of time that there will be "positive results" (even though this is the intention of the dream interpreter). The analyst on the other hand lets you know from the start that there is a problem and they are going to try to fix it (to be fair though, the patient, the slave, first finds a problem for themselves before seeking out a "cure" for the problem that they found for themselves). In general, what would happen to psychoanalysis if it didn't have an archive of myths to rely on (an archive of myths that it has no intention of tracing for itself)? But it does have any archive of myths, an archive of representations. "Images, nothing but images. What is left in the end is an intimate familial theater, the theater of private man, which is no longer either desiring-production or objective representation. The unconscious as a stage. A whole theater put in the place of production, a theater that disfigures this production even more than could tragedy and myth when reduced to their meager ancient resources." The patient is left with images. They are Medusa OR Thanatos. If the patient doesn't understand archaic images like the nuanced pantheist then these archaic images will simply be displaced to a more simple book of familial bonds. They all represent. They all create images for one who needs a satisfied personality as their "cure." Whether one likes understanding themselves by familial bonds or by archaic representation, it's all the same. It's all an investment in the unconscious of symbols in place of production. Instead of the break-flows of pure production, the theater takes its place in which there are roles that the patient needs to play in order to be "cured" of their own sicknesses. On the stage, one is the Father or Mother. One is the "bad child." One is the "good child." The "bad child" can find its archaic representation in Thanatos if it wanted to (if the patient wasn't satisfied so the analyst conferred to their internal myth book to ground familial relationships in Myth). One is never not nothing. One is always somewhere in Oedipus. The relative myth will confirm this. The analyst doesn't dive into the details of the Myth and the patient doesn't either because the patient trusts the analyst is under the assurance of an archaism (the long time that has separated the present from the past that gives the past an irreducible authority because it has been remembered). No one explores the authority of history. History will ground the "cure." History will find the "problem." Oedipus as image will be the unconscious as it displaces the pure production of breaks and flows that always happen to it.

D&G remark on how Nietzsche broke with The Birth of Tragedy when he stopped believing in tragic representation. Nietzsche who actually became sick when witnessing Wagner's anthemic and nationalistic operas in distinction to his tragedies knew that tragic representation was still representation. It was still raising an object to the Mother-Father status. It was still raising an idol to a place where a certain code is the law which we stated in this post. The idol would not "go away" after idealized tragedy though, it would move into non-belief. Non-belief becomes the idol of alienated modern man. The image of alienation becomes represented as the girl out in the street acting as if she were impoverished, and as the boy who understands her "troubles" who also attends protests for the sake of it. The myth of alienation would seem to be the final myth. It seems close towards there being no more representation. But how commercial can nothingness be! This still will be seen. And if the logic of representation is circular, then it could just as easily be the case that a more tangible idol will take the place of alienation eventually. If Myth finds its grounds in the nuance of pantheism (synonymous with proud ecology), then everything is just becoming more Greek and Egyptian. Where and when will representation no longer happen? When will the unconscious simply produce and flow? It's that simple. It is nothing; the nothingness that produces and flows and that's it. This production and flow as nothing is no longer a character. D&G will throw away their ladder to the unconscious as production. The unconscious will be somewhere with no center. It will happen on its own in a way that's passive to the point of there being no representation. There will be no theater. No one will be watching. No one will know that their unconscious is performing for an audience. No one will be clapping, and no one will be throwing phantom punches looking for approval for these phantoms (without knowing it: the Oedipus unconscious). The theater as the myth and grounds of the human unconscious; this is the case for the human all too human. The question is for how long? Forever? And if it's at one time not the case, will it be a question? Production will no longer be a question. There will be no answer, there will be no problem, and there will be no "cure." The unconscious will flow and break at its own speed with no concept applied to it. Conceptual existence as representative being will be something else that's not this dialect. It will happen on its own. There is no need to throw anything away, or to oppose anything, or to be anything.

The Repression of Father and Mother; Anti-Oedipus, Part 9

Power Combo

The final chapter of Anti-Oedipus is D&G's introduction to Schizoanalysis. This is where we will throw off the shackles of psychoanalysis and move into another form of analysis. We will come to see that this form of analysis isn't meant to be seen as some development from psychoanalysis, mainly because how different it is in its purpose (Schizoanalysis doesn't give itself the purpose of "the cure"). It's a vastly different field. It's not a field actually, but a way of thinking that's at a large distance from psychoanalysis. In the first pages of this chapter, D&G continue to elaborate their theory based on repudiating psychoanalysis though, so Schizoanalysis is still the negation of Psychoanalysis, and as we come to the final pages of the book, we may find that this is precisely the purpose of Schizoanalysis; the negation of Psychoanalysis. As their analysis becomes more detailed, more insights will manifest. In this post, we will discuss how the first act of the child is the repression of the father and mothers unconscious. But as we learned before through this entire book and what we will discuss now, the flow of ones "life" isn't defined by familial structures. Instead, these familial structures serve as a derivative to desire investing itself into a social field. In other words, Mother and Father become manifest from a social field that desire has "found." As we learned before, Mother and Father are certainly relations in the flow of a "developing period" of a child, but doesn't come close to enveloping all the intensities that happen to the body experiencing these intensities. Classical Psychoanalysis which grounds ones relationship relative to ones family in the familial triangulation (Oedipus) is missing the grounds of the spontaneity of desire (Schizophrenia) which forms what is classically understood as a "person." D&G make sure to point this out, not only to deprivilege the throne of Oedipus in it's mythologizing of the paternal and familial complex, but to ground any analysis in general on the abstraction of a "social field." Analysis understandably becomes so general and large after this that it becomes impossible to ground analysis in a "cure" because of the relativity of the schizophrenic desire in the social field. Rather, by becoming aware of the social field in general as the grounds for desire's investment, the cure is negated by the general abstraction. (general enough to the point where there is no specific "cure.") The "cure" in there being no cure is the realization of the social field as the grounds for one's desire instead of a final step towards an acquiescence with the family. It remains to be seen if D&G will call the social field a relative "aggregate" of desires investment. In other words, did the world as we know it have to happen, or could something else, something wholly other, happen in the flow of desire. This we will find in the conclusion of the book, and if we don't we will discuss it in the final post on this book. For now, we will find neurotic repression in something grounding Father and Mother, not grounded in Father and Mother.

"It appears that, in the common social field, the first thing that son represses, or has to repress, or tries to repress, is the unconscious of the father and the mother. The failure of that repression is the basis of neuroses. But this communication of unconsciouses does not by any means take the family as its principle; it takes as its principle the commonality of the social field insofar as it is the object of the investment of desire. In all respects the family is never determining, but is always determined, first as a stimulus of departure, then as an aggregate of destination, and finally as an intermediary or an interception of communication." D&G does away at with the chicken and egg conundrum at the beginning of this chapter making the question of what comes first between the father and son a non-question (the argument for this on their behalf one will have to read for themselves). Instead, we have the social field where everything is already immanent. Father and son are already established (master-slave in another sense) in the social field. The son, as the formal slave, first represses the unconscious of the father and mother. The unconscious of the father and the mother we will see later on as the law and territoriality respectively. The son then is seen as a flow trying to repress the law and territorialization, and we can understand this easily. In a very concrete sense, the son as a newborn is schizophrenic. It moves where it wants to move and does what it wants to do without knowing its moving or doing. This flow becomes intercepted by the father and mother whereby the flow (the son) will try to repress it in order to do what it already does. When it fails to do this by continual insistence from a paternal-complex to form into a territorialized law, it will develop neuroses. In other words, it will develop fears with what to do with itself, feeling the weight of ambivalence towards it's first flow on one hand, and the law and territorilization on the other. This ambivalence, this indecisiveness will cause neuroses (which can be easily understood simply as fear in not knowing what to do.). The key for D&G though is that the paternal figures don't form neuroses by themselves. It's not as if paternal figures want their sons and daughters to become neurotic. The paternal figures don't know any better when they're acting dependent to a social field. They may think that "this is the right course of action for the son," but they don't ask how a "right course of action" is possible in the first place (possibly why children are born in the first place independent of "mistakes"). The family is not the principle of unconscious repression. Rather, the family is principled under the social field. One way to look at this directly is thinking about expecting parents who have an unconscious "knowledge" of how a child is going to be raised. They may even buy books on it and asks friends on upbringing. All of these characteristics belong to the unconscious of the paternal figures which is grounded in abstract social reality; the social field. In other words, before parents are parents, they were first in a social field. They were sons and daughters (schizophrenics) before becoming parents (neurotics). Desire is already invested into the social field. The "desire for children" for example is already invested in the social field. Even its negation in the form of "I don't want to have children," is an affirmation of the social fields desire to have children. The negation comes after the affirmation of the desire and supplements the reality by giving the substance another context (the negation), that nevertheless is affirmative (a "transcendental affirmation" that is both the affirmation and negation of a desire). Regardless of whether one "wants kids or not," this is dependent on the social field's first insistence that this is a desirable question to answer. This is what is common to the social field, in this case, a question. The family, mechanically speaking, is a "stimulus of departure." Desire is a stimulus. Desire are random stimuluses. Desire gets on its way with its investment in the social field through the mechanism of the family. The family is a mechanism of desire's investment (intention?) into the general and abstract social field. After the departure, it's finally an "intermediary or an interception of communication." The mechanics of the family mediates communication in general, and this mediation can be understood as an interception of the "communication" being done by the schizophrenic (child). The child is unaware of its "communication" with what is "outside itself." (It's important to put outside itself in quotations to signify a bracketing move that allows us as readers to try to understand what would be going on in itself, while at the same time understanding this impossibility of this ever being understood (gestures of Husserl and Derrida)). This child is the schizophrenic. The mediation of formal communication starts its path of neuroticism. The mediation is an interception. It's a difference. It's a change. "If the familial investment is only a dependence or an application of the unconscious investments of the social field - and if this is just as true of the child as of the adult; if it is true that the child, through the mommy-territoriality and the daddy-law, already aims for the schizzes and the encoded or axiomated flows of the social field - then we must transport the essential difference to the heart of this domain." The social field is the difference of mediation. Desire's investment into the social field manifests the family. The social field is not just the adult (acting as the mother and father) though, but the child. We talked about the child above as the schizophrenic, but here we now understand it as always and already on it's way towards a social field. It's born into a social field where the parents act out the social desire. Certainly there is a difference between the child potentially as parent and the child as parent (in other words, the parent). We are working in degrees here. The child is not "purely" schizophrenic. It works off degrees to where it's more schizophrenic from its inception towards its more-than-possible investment into the social field. Being between child and adult is being in-between schizophrenia and neurosis. The child plays its role in the social field without first knowing it in being under the auspices of the social field manifested in the social functions paternal mechanism. That the child is not culpable for its investment into the social field is the difference between it and the paternal mechanism of the social field. The domain of the social field in which desire "found" its way is the difference from the dependence and application of the familial mechanism within that very social field. The difference is between dependence and application. The application is dependent on the desire invested in the application. For clarity's sake, lets flesh out the "mommy-territoriality and the daddy-law" in hopes of making the above more understandable. The "daddy-law" is obvious enough. It's the male paternal figure (who can either be "organically" male or female) who establishes the law to the child or slave. It's the word and book that is followed for the function of the social field. "Mommy-territoriality," on the other hand is the place for the law. If law is time, territoriality is space. If the father is time, the mother is space. The female paternal figure (who can either be "organically" male or female) literally sits at home. It provides the stable place for teaching. It provides the home for the child. It unconsciously provides the sense-of-home to the child by providing a place for it to always be. The child is being invested in not moving from a place. The law needs space for its time. It finds it in the maternity of home. Being in a home is being in a territory. Being in a home (territorialization) is different from not being in a home and being deterritoralized constantly like gypsies (who we can obviously say does not operate in Oedipus, who provide an interesting case of desire investing in something different than the social field, than Oedipus). The child, father and mother are all invested in the social field. The schizophrenic on it's way towards the social field, the territorial-neurotic, and the neurotic-law are all in the social field. The social field as the domain of desires investment is the object of all dependencies, that no one consciously knows about, until the unconscious is opened.

With that being said, Schizoanalysis operates by telling people that they are grounded not in a reality of the family, but in an already invested social field. That the family is a mechanism of the social field shouldn't make the family into an aggrandized mythical signifier. The mechanism should certainly be observed like anything else, but not seeing it's grounds in something more abstract than law and territoriality is the work of psychoanalysts; not just the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysts, but of the western metaphysics of being. As D&G continually say, psychoanalysis is just the final destination of the signifier of Oedipus in the form of the analysts couch. Classical psychoanalysis opens up the idea of analysis which classically finds it's grounds in the family. The analysis does go deeper in psychoanalysis. It investigates the myths that it thinks constitutes the human being. Its problem for D&G and Schizoanalysis is in aggrandizing these myths to the meaning of a problem. Not only is the presupposition of a "problem" a relative insistence of people going to psychoanalysts, but the meaning itself supplements the problem making the problem more than a problem. In other words, "the cure" isn't something merely sought out, but something that's given a meaning (a transcendental meaning). Everyone's sick and they need to be healed. We need to find a cure. This platitude is dispersed to homes everywhere in the social field. This platitude is the law, our law. As D&G will ask us though, "Why Myths?" And when they ask this, they ask us why we believe in myths. It's one thing to read and understand myths (myths amongst many other myths), but it's another thing to privilege Myth to a way of being. The unconscious desire of the social field doesn't open itself up to the agents in this field, until certain agents explore it. Once it's explored thoroughly a process happens whereby you get Philosophy, Psychology, and in this text, Schizoanalysis (amongst thousands of other sciences). Each time that thought broaches the ostensible ground of an experience, it slices through the myth of a supposed "reality." No longer am I constituted first and foremost by my specific mother and father, but the general idea of mother and father everywhere. In other words, I'm constituted by a social field. As I move from the specific family to the generalized family, I move into the general social field. The psychoanalyst is now out of a job. With the ease of a cure, with the ease of the cure that shows that "the cure" is something no longer to be sought out, many people lose their jobs, their homes, and their Heideggerian circumspection (looking around for something to do). The next questions become one of ontology, or a materialist-theory, or in this text, Schizoanalysis. In these three forms of thought alone, parallels are easy to draw.

Réponse à un amour pas retourné par l'ambivalence

Les hommes de Francais ne sont pas tous les waffles.

MICHEL: C'est vraiment louse.
PATRICIA: Qu'est ce qu'il a dit?
VITAL: Il a dit que vous êtes vraiment "une louse".
PATRICIA: Qu'est ce que c'est "louse"?

- Breathless

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.

The Private Ideology of National Public Radio

The unbiased paragon of soft news.

If people listen to NPR because they like the news, that's fine. If they listen to it because they think it comes from some pure objective place, please read the article below regarding Juan Williams being fired from NPR:

"NPR's firing of commentator Juan Williams this week is one of the worst examples of rush to judgment since 9/11.

Mr. Williams, whether one tends to agree with him or not, is immensely respected by his fellow journalists and viewers alike for his ability to conduct himself with dignity and respect in a field where extremes of opinion and low-ball tactics have become all too common. He's mostly a moderate liberal who is able to hear other points of view with respect, and he can be nuanced in his own views.

In these times, Mr. Williams's instinct for finding both middle and common ground is no small feat.

And for what offense has he been pilloried by the censorship squad of NPR? For saying out loud what many Americans think—that he gets nervous when he's on a plane and sees people dressed in traditional Muslim garb.

As an Arab-American of Muslim descent, I am not offended by this because in all honesty I have had the same reaction in similar circumstances. In Berlin a couple of years ago, my flight was delayed because, we were told, one of the passengers, who was in a wheelchair, needed extra assistance. When she finally was brought into the waiting area, she was covered from head to toe in traditional Muslim dress and only her eyes were visible. What happened? I grew nervous. I got on the plane just the same, but with trepidation.

Was my response rational? Yes and no.

It was not Muslims in traditional garb who hijacked those planes on 9/11, and it certainly was not Muslim women in veils and wheelchairs. If anything, an Islamist terrorist wants to blend in, not stand out.

However, it was not a traditional sort of terrorist attack I feared in this case, but perhaps something unexpected: a traditional Muslim woman in a veil, confined to a wheelchair, who was loaded with explosives.

That may make me guilty of an overactive imagination, but perhaps not. Not that many years later, a young Muslim on an international flight into Detroit tried to light explosives in his underwear.

I mention all this for one main reason. I grew up surrounded by Islamic culture, went to Islamic events, and was used to seeing women in traditional Muslim clothing, and yet when that woman appeared at the Berlin airport, I was scared.

That's all Mr. Williams was saying. He didn't say that they should be removed from the plane, treated differently, or anything close to that. He simply said he got nervous. And for that, he was fired.

The reality is that when Muslims cease to be the main perpetrators of terrorism in the world, such fears about traditional garb are bound to vanish. Until such time, the anxiety will remain. In the long run, it's what we do with such fears that matters, not that we have them.

But regarding what happened to Mr. Williams, no one should tolerate such intolerant behavior on the part of NPR. This broadcast network is paid for by the American taxpayers, and as such we all have a stake in its decisions.

Anyone who cares about freedom of speech should protest what has been done to this decent and fair man. And even if that were not the case, even if Mr. Williams' views made him a detestable ogre to most, he still has the right to voice them. For many Americans, NPR's consistent tilt to the left has caused them to reject it as a viable source of news.

NPR often embodies the very things it claims to stand against: unfairness, narrow-mindedness and reactionary policies.

I ask all Americans of conscience, most particularly those of Arab and/or Muslim descent, to protest the firing of Juan Williams and to demand that public funding to NPR cease until Mr. Williams's good name has been cleared and he has been rehired (if he still wants to work for this network).

We deserve better from a public radio network funded by taxpayer money."

Mr. Dabul is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304023804575566363119493650.html?mod=ieslice


This post and article is not in regards to whether Juan Williams reaction was irrational, or "right" or "wrong" (Juan Williams admits to himself afterwords in the same interview that it was probably an irrational immediate response to this situation). It's in regards to the impossibility of something called "objective news," and the more grotesque fact that there are self-righteous people who aren't even aware of their presumptuous inclinations in thinking they can provide "objective news" for a "public." Still, more perverse are people who listen to any news broadcast and think they are getting "objective news," not realizing the style that's influencing this thinking.

For further reading, check out this article I wrote for Wedolists.com on NPR:
Ten Problems with NPR

The Visual Theater of Creulty; Anti-Oedipus, Part 7

All eyes on deck. There's a judgment brewin'

Before we get to the elaborated theory of Schizoanalysis that is present to us in the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus, there are more than a couple themes along the way that will give a more direct sense to the later theory. One will be the structure and gap that happens in-between Barbarian civilization and capitalism (Feudalism) and the phenomena of desire in the cultural happening. This will be addressed in the next post. This post though will deal with savage formation which D&G separate from Barbarian civilization and capitalism. More specifically, this post will deal with the beginnings of the categorical structure of social-being in its savage state. We will see parallels between any form of socius and one that others would like to think operated in some purity against later formations of socius that are easily criticized today (Every socius is easily critiqued when protected under "1st amendment" laws). D&G being thorough analysts/ethnologists won't aggressively attack modern forms of structural government over and against contemporary modes government in a Rousseauian fashion that contemporary critics find so easy to do. D&G for better have maturity on their side when writing a theoretical account of political and psychological structures; I.E. they approach the subject as rigorous Ethnologists. We will see in the post that savage formations were graphic, oral, and visual. The visual character of the savage serves as the mediation between the graphic and oral gestures of savage-being. And when I say that they serve as a mediation, I mean to say that they are a certain and very different mode of operation in the world from the word and it's graphme. We will see just how large of a complex is created in being when the visual category manifests. What this entails we will go into next.

"Savage formations are oral, are vocal, but not because they lack a graphic system: a dance on the earth, a drawing on a wall, a mark on the body are a graphic system, a geo-graphism, a geography. These formations are oral precisely because they possess a graphic system that's independent of the voice, a system that is not aligned on the voices and not subordiante to it, but connected to it, co-ordinated 'in an organization as it were,' and multidimensional." The first key to this statement is the insistence that vocal culture and graphic culture aren't separated. There isn't speech at one time that is separated from a graphic system. But when D&G include "a dance on earth" they mean to expand the concept of inscription to a character far more expansive than the physical writing. The graphic system and inscription are analogous. Not only is the graphic system (inscription) a "drawing of a wall" or a "mark on a body," but a "dance on the earth." Basically, anything that happens to the naked earth (the body without organs) by being is a writing (inscription) on this body without organs. D&G are very aware of making their concepts clear no matter how difficult they seem to be on first glance. Right after they mention these inscriptions, they connotate these inscriptions by calling them a "ge0-graphism," eluding to our point of anything happening to the earth (body without organs) as being an "inscription" to it; and addition to it (or negation. Addition and negation are philosophical concepts that can be applied to these types of phenomena depending on the context of the writing). They spell out clearly that it's a "geography" being good materialists that they are (consistent, which is the most we can ask for from something nominalized as "philosophy"). These modes of being are "oral because they contain a graphic system independent of the voice," showing how the oral isn't necessarily condemned to the mouth. They are connected with the voice instead. There is not the word and then writing. There is already the word and inscription. If we were to look at this metaphysically, we understand that there is already expression and input to the earth. Expression is the writing to the body with organs. The dance that happens spontaneously is a inscription the earth as much as it's an oral expression "on it's own." "On it's own" gets quoted here because it's tied to inscription. Oral expression is inscription. It's already a writing (inscription) to the earth, to the body without organs. Inscription isn't subordinated to the voice, the word, it's the coordination with it that at one and the same time expressed and inscribes, an affectation that effects. No correlation is place between affectation and effect. Instead, they are coordinated in the same space a-temporally. They form their own organization that isn't seen as being vertical but horizontal since they are not correlative, but rise together and inscription and expression. To be brief, something happens to the body without organs by a being that does things. Understanding this abstractly as possible goes far to disengage a correlationist order between the two. But in the inscription and the voice, there exists a third element. There is not only the "dance on the earth" and it's inscription onto something that was never danced on before. There is the eye that perceives everything that's happening. There is the eye as the third party that is neither a "pure" affectation by oral-being, nor a "pure" inscription brought to earth along with the expression of affectation. There is the eye that sees all this happening, and not just the eye physiologically, but the eye as a third form of being that completes the complex of being. "Isn't it necessary to add a third element of the sign: eye-pain, in addition to voice-audition and hand-graphics? In the rituals of affliction the patient does not speak, but receives the spoken word. He does not act, but is passive under the graphic action: he receives the stamp of the sign. And what is his pain if not a pleasure for the eye that regards it, the collective or divine eye that is not motivated by any idea of revenge but is alone capable of grasping the subtle relationship between the sign engraved in the body and the voice issuing from a face - between the mark and the mask. Between these two elements of the code, pain is like the surplus value that the eye extracts taking hold of the effect of active speech on the body, but also of the reaction of the body insofar as it is acted upon." The nuance of this statement is incredible. We will see why as we move through this incredible passage that surmises an ethological description. The voice speaks and inscribes. Inscription is an inscriptive voice. But within this phenomena, there is the phenomena of the eye, the visual aspect that Merleau-Ponty calls the sense, the sense that experiences in the most intense way. D&G go right at the eye as eye-pain, as the eye that sees pain, as the eye that supplements experience by adding pain to it which will form the creditor-debtor relationship described by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals. What does the eye do that sees the coordination of inscription and the voice? In the savage rituals of affliction (E.G. a part of the body being held to fire in order to "absolve" oneself from from an injunction. From this we see how the credit-debit/guilt phenomena starts to manifest), there is a third. Not only a third person, but a third person who has eyes. The "patient" (or in this case, the savage trying to absolve themselves from an injunction by experience of an immediate affliction) does not speak, but receives the spoken word. The "patient" has already spoken, and not they will receive the spoken work for haven spoken. The "patient" stands (or sits there) while being graphicized (think of a cow being brandished). This patient receives a sign that may stay with them forever, and that's the point. The mark of the world, the inscription of the world as expression, inscribes itself to the body without organs through being. But what is the pain of the patient? We don't know the "pain" of the patient without the third party, without the eye. The eye watches in horror at the ostensible cruelty being applied to the "patient." But is this horror really being experienced as cruelty? Or is there a subtle pleasure in the "pain" administered to the patient. As I stated in a post on wedolists.com, "If you’re around someone who noticeably enjoys themselves when you are (pridefully) talking about your shortcomings, you can be sure they are just as prideful as you talking about your shortcomings," I.E. pain is experienced as pleasure, by the eye. Who sees this "ritual of affliction?" The collective and divine eye. We can interpret this as the people in a savage group who circle the event of the ritual, and watch with their eyes at the spectacle. It would be easy for us to say here that the third-person eye gains pleasure out of this event of a sense of vengeance and/or a sense of this ritual not happening to them. But it's not so simple for D&G much to there appreciation of a complex event. The eye grasps "the subtle relationship between the sign engraved in the body and the voice issuing from a face - between the mark and the mask." The eye isn't Oedipalized in savage-being. It doesn't have a sense that "nothing goes right for me" or that the "world is against me." The eye in savage-being is in "the real," to whatever extent we can conceptualize "the real." But yet, in this "real," the eye extracts a surplus-value of pleasure from the ritual event. It doesn't extract pleasure from the fact that someone else is being tortured or that someone else is being afflicted and not them. Rather, the eye is acting on it's own when establishing the relationship between inscription and the voice, between the body and the inscription. In "the real" an affliction is applied to the body which the eye sees, and then the eye sees the reaction of the body coming from the face (simply put, we can think of a scream or some sort of vocal squirm). The eye sees inscription and it's reaction my the word. And what happens with the eye when it sees this? It extract pleasure not from the above stated examples that apply to a relative oedipalized modernity, but from a pure reaction of the eye in the real. The inscription happens in "the real," the word-reaction happens in "the real," and the perceptive-eye happens in "the real," which extracts more out of the previous two "reals" than was happening in them alone. This "pure extraction" as a surplus to the event is a pleasure. The eye sees what's happening between the mark and the mask and something comes out of the eye, an unconscious interpretation of sorts. "These are the three sides of a savage triangle forming a territory of resonance and retention, a theater of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciative eye." What happens in this event, this spectacle, is resonance and retention. The hand (inscription) applied to the body (the voice) where an eye watches this application resonates with the eye and is retained by the eye. The eye retains what happens. It sees the bodies reaction. It sees the squirms. It realizes the relationship between the hand that applies the "afflictive ritual" to the body and the body that receives this affliction. Not only does this event resonate for the third party eye, but the intensity of the event creates a memory for the eye. The eye remembers intensity (as we understand perfectly from Nietzsche in that man forms memory for himself by afflicting himself with intense pain). History is born out of intensity. History is born out of subjective pain. History is born out of a set of important wars whose importance depends not just on the quantity of dead lives, but the quality in which these deaths took place. Memory and (H)istory is formed from intensity to the subject. It's not just the intensity though. It's the tripartite matrix of inscription, the voice, and the eye; where the eye perceives whatever is happening as intensity. It perceives for the first time the theater of cruelty in savage-being and the relationship between the other two characters in the matrix.

The eye in a strong sense is the gap between save-being and barbarian-being which we will elaborate on in the next post. The eye serves as the memory of what an intensity is. It sees and remembers. When it remembers, the event "made an impression" on it. When this impression is made, a memory is made. This memory has an intensity at its disposal, a disposal it may not want to partake in. While D&G have given a commendable analysis of this phenomena by characterizing the event as a relationship between the tripartite matrix that enveloped the phenomena in, it's also easy to understand that this intensity that the eye perceives becomes much more than a relationship. It becomes fear literally in the eye of the beholder. In other words, it becomes oedipalized. The flow of the event is no longer the flow of the event. The event is memorized as something to fear. The fear of intensity. Of course, D&G understand this when they affirm that the eye extracts a surplus-value out of the event but we should be more specific now. This surplus-value that is extracted out of the event we can call "fear." This "fear" though is not to be understood as something that the eye purposely tries to avoid, on the contrary; the eye is enamored with the fear it sees in the event (Why else could you explain why "scary movies" are so popular?). But there are two different ways in which the eye sees the event for us and D&G. For now, we see the event through the eyes of savage-being as a set of relationships. After, in oedipalization, we see the event through the eyes of a surplus-socius, as a desire to see "fear" as something not happening to oneself (as an outside spectator). This personality (or cult, or fetish) of fear is limited to ones own understanding of the relationship of primordial acts. When the memory has become so ingrained (by memories), the question of the relationship between component parts doesn't happen at first, but becomes historicized as an auto-response to an event. This auto-response is oedipus. It knows to fear. It likes to fear. But this knowing and liking never formed the relationship that constituted the event of savage-being that would eventually go on to establish oedipus-man.