Date:         Tue, 26 Mar 96 14:13:32 EST
From: Charley <CSTIVAL-AT-cms.cc.wayne.edu>
Subject:      Re: pleasures of perversions


On Tue, 26 Mar 1996 11:13:09 EST Karen Ocana said:
>Got it now.  Ed's point was that bodies appear boring from the
>point of view of images i.e. from the point of view of simulacra,
>or from the point of view of perversion.  Logics of Sense and
>its Appendixes (as well as countless other places) is a battering-
>ram against a logics of structuralism in which the Other-structure
>and its world of possibilites and possible worlds relegates perverts,
>children, and other deviants to recumbent and other reproductive
>positions.  Perverts have affinities with erections and other
>deviant images.  They dig others, elemental others, other images
>that double themselves, others to please or punish at will, victims
>or accomplices in crime.  That's the short story of Michel Tournier
>and a World Without Others.  In other words it would seem that what
>relegates others to mere possibility is Mr. or Mrs. Other (again),
>Nobodaddymommy.  (D&G sure got a lot of mileage out of flogging
>that horse)
If Deleuze had left structuralism to remain as the above-mentioned logics...
BUT, in "A Quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?", he gleefully goes ahead
and appropriates structuralism for himself. Here's a taste:
"The first criterion <of structuralism> is the positing of a symbolic order,
irreducible to the orders of the real and the imaginary, deeper than them.
We do not know at all yet what this symbolic element consists of <he goes
on in the subsequent criteria to explore this>. We can say at least that the
corresponding structure has no relationship with a sensible form, nor
with a figure of the imagination, nor with an intelligible essence. It
has nothing to do with a *form*: for structure is not at all defined by an
autonomy of the whole, by an assertion <_pregnance_> of the whole over its
parts, by a Gestalt which would operate in the real and in preception.
Structure is defined, on the contrary, by the nature of certain atomic
elements which claim to account both for the formation of wholes and for
the variation of their parts. It has nothing to do either with *figures*
of the imagination, althought structuralism is riddled with reflections on
rhetoric, metaphor and metonymy, for these figures themselves imply
structural displacements which must accounte for both the literal and
figurative. It has nothing to do finally with essence, for it is a matter
of a cominatory formula <_une combinatoire_> supporting formal elements
which have themselves neither form, nor signification, nor representation,
nor content, nor given empirical reality, nor hypothetical functional model,
nor intelligibility behind appearances. No one has better ascribed the status
of the structure as identical to the "Theory" itself than Louis Althusser --
and the symbolic must be understood as the production of the original and
specific theoretical object." (trans. M. McMahon & C.J. Stivale)
Deleuze goes on to define 6 other criteria after this first on of "the
symbolic": 2. Local or Positional; 3. The Differential and the Singular;
4. The Differenciator, Differenciation; 5. Serial; 6. The Empty Square
<la Case Vide>; and 7. From the Subject to Practice.
(cf. _Le XXe Siecle. Histoire de la philosophie 8_, ed. Francois Chatelet,
Paris: Hachette, 1973, 299-335).
Those familiar with L of S and D and R will no doubt find resonances with
these delineations of "structuralism" a la Deleuze.
CJ Stivale

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