File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/96-08-12.171, message 33


Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 22:17:59 -0400
From: gonsalv-AT-odyssee.net (Ronald Gonsalves)
Subject: re: backdoor man


In response to hf: 

"Both desire and the social are being considered here as immanent, but the
social, I think, depends on an element of "identity" (that it uses for a
foundation), whereas desire does not. Can a notion of "identity" (or "the
same") be considered immanent? If it can, the "subject" can also make a
claim to immanence. If it cannot, how does it arise or come about,
without positing a "nothing else" besides desire and the social?"

Immanence itself could be a trap for the simple reason that immanence is not
some floating philosopheme which transcendental empiricism has somehow
purified. Immanence is the image field of late capitalism: the social or
"capitalism fills its field of immanence with images...images of
destitution, despair, revolt, violence or oppression...[not to mention all
those images of a transcendental Bonum] But starting from nonfigurative
figures or from the breaks-flows that produce them, these images will
themselves be capable of figuring and reproducing only by shaping a human
material whose specific form of reproduction falls outside the social field
that nonetheless determines this form. Private persons are therefore images
of the second order, images of images--that is simulacra that are thus
endowed with an aptitude for representing the first-order images of social
persons" (AO 264)

The breaks and flows of desire thus fall outside the social (could it be
because they are unconscious?) but only come to consciousness, come to live
and breathe, within its field of immanence or the "same...slippery surface":
the recording surface of capitalism (or is it the BwO?), the image-signs of
production, distribution and consumption. This surface of immanence is
detached from the "first stage" passive syntheses which are nothing but
breaks and flows, the impersonal intermingling and interrupted connections
teeming over the surface of the rank globe. The latter is the play of
desiring-organs and Artaud the Metaphysician hates organs: "the anus-machine
and the intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and the stomach-machine,
the stomach-machine and the mouth-machine, the mouth machine and the flow of
milk of a herd of dairy cattle" (AO 36). The liberatory promise of this
recording surface is "the passage" of a "faceless and transpositional
subject...through all possible predicates" (the schizo-hero of AO, 77) but
it usually turns out that "these private persons (or subjects) are formally
delimited in the locus of the restricted family as father, mother and child"
(AO 264). Thus--to simplify--the social is reproduced by a self-policing or
self-subjectification articulated by the proper name, legal personae with
abstract rights and duties (worker, owner, child, geriatric, mentally
disturbed persons etc), the family-work nexus etc. It would be nice if this
constriction of the body, this restricted or safe investment of desire could
be viewed as a backdoor for the volitional subject (if only we could oppress
ourselves!!!), but the Lacanian note sounded by D&G trumpets otherwise :"The
real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as
autoproduction of the unconscious" (AO 26) The subject is barred. Its
investments precede him or her (neither) and it finds itself already caught
up in a "personalized" combination of self-simulacra, abstract social
roles-persons and commodity-signs. Hence "the task of schizoanalysis is to
reach the investments of unconscious desire of the social field" (AO 350)
This is what the subject's claim to immanence implies: a delirious (unc.)
investment of the social image-machine barring any attempt to double back on
the cogito qua cogito...$$$... The social is certainly governed by a
principle of identity. It reduces everything to the same plane but so does
the BwO (as if testifying to its metaphysical provenance)that "serves as a
surface for the recording of the ENTIRE process of prod. of desire" (AO 11,
my emphasis). And where O where can becoming-other disjunct itself? In the
non-existent interstices between the BwO, metaphysics proper and the social
(or are they all the Same?)? No easy task. No comforting illusions

even the rain is metaphysical?
not if you forget your umbrella
see On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral (read Metaphysical) sense
read Spurs too
the critique of metaphysics is not to be found in Deleuze ("difference"
--sans objet petit a--"is crucified", D&R tells us, by metaphysical modes of
representation (the cogito), though WIP tells us that only "the oriental
sage thinks in figures", not yet having ascended to the wonder of the
concept...O the idolatry of the concept...give the little boy back his Ikon
and perhaps he will be happy) though perhaps in a certain reading of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a text which flattens the reader onto the
immanent screen of the reel, the delirious image-repertoire of late
capitalism, metonymies without end organized by metaphors like earth or the
BwO. Hmm a symptom of some kind of repression? Thankfully someone is just
too good a materialist for their own good for does not AO state that "some
kind of full body, that of the earth or the despot, a recording surface, an
apparent objective movement, a fetishistic, perverted, bewitched world are
characteristic of all types of society as a constant of social reproduction"
(11)O parousia what to do?
Hypostatize an enchanted-disenchanted condition of social reproduction as
Being au-dela this mundane materiality. Schizophrenia's recording surface
seems to be nothing more than the hyper-hallucinated recording screen of
capital, which is itself, as all will admit, rather nutty...just
channel-surf for a while..yet in-between the serial killer and the consumer? 

"there is capitalism and schizophrenia and nothing else"

in truth, the rain smells of death
but that's just an other figure
 
RJ


       



   

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