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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