Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 11:12:41 -0800
From: "Wilkerson, Richard" <rcwilk-AT-dreamgate.com>
Subject: Re: totalizing


Hi Lois,

   I happened to see your question go across my e scope this morning and 
wanted to interject some notes/thoughts mostly inspired by Deleuze and 
Guattari. (D&G) Sorry if this is too off topic re:lyotard and they list, 
but from what I have read of the Lyotard dialogue, it may be productive.

At 08:30 AM 3/24/02 -0800, you wrote:
  I wonder if  you folks would be willing to ponder with me about what the 
pragmatics of "totalizing" are.

D& G develop the notion that all representation is in a sense a capture and 
if not a totalizing, at least a territorialization.   However, not all 
language or use of it is representational, and they feel that in all 
regimes there will be limits that can be exceeded, are exceeded,  and 
decoded flows will overrun the territory, or escape it at this limit.

In the realm of language, there exists between sense (usually totalized) 
and nonsense (too decoded) a whole array of sub-representational forces 
that can be employed to bring about the ruin of representation and allow 
for diverse tangents and trajectories. Lacanians follow this a bit, but for 
them diverse must, theoretically, always be perverse as the decoded flows 
are so often tied up at the spots we call "taboo."      In a way, this is 
what a lot  of therapies do was well in teaching the patient to follow 
rather than fleeing the pain.  As Jung would say, learning the opus contra 
naturum, learning to sniff out what others turn their nose from.

  But D & G take a somewhat different angle and don't see all subversive 
pragmatics tied up around a libido that is eternally cut off from its 
object.  True, both Lacan and D&G see the waking conscious ego pretty cut 
off from desire and the Real, but D&G see desire connecting with the Real 
at a sub-representational level.  (the "Real" here being something like 
'unmediated connectivity of swarms of partial objects becoming' )

  In terms of summarizing how a language, or any regime of forces, might 
move without producing totalizing or producing grand narratives:

1.  and...and...and.... Finding ways of breaking into the totalized flows 
(everything flows, food, skin, women, furniture, capitalism, words, 
sentences, paragraphs... mountains over time are just river-fodder)  and 
making new, real, connections. Here real connections are 
sub-representational, multiplicities, productions.  One point of departure 
here with language is where and how is language employed to produce partial 
objects, heterogeneous assemblages that can cut into the territorialized 
flows and produce swarms of new intensive becomings?  and...and...and....

2. or...or...or...  There is always a back-lash, a moment when productions 
stop and become distributed. How to keep these distributions from being 
swallowed by a perspective, a viewpoint, a group?  If the initial 
production (D&G call the first one a connective synthesis) produces 
producing rather than objects, there is a temporary zone of indeterminate 
consistency. There is a distribution across a plane, but not a distribution 
of the same,  but of something else. D&G refer to this moment as the 
Disjunctive Synthesis.  The contradiction in terms refers to the tension 
needed to keep the distributed system from being a controlled system. That 
is, they hold to a kind of process theory yet continue to use words to 
describe it. To do this, the words and concepts must themselves flow, must 
continue to overflow themselves.  We experience this as imagination, but 
this would be misleading to call it as such since imagination is often an 
illegitimate child of the disjunctive synthesis.  Better to say that this 
is a moment of anti-production where partial objects, sub-representational 
trajectories stop producing connections for a moment and record all 
possible (and impossible) alternatives.
or...or...or...

3.  Finally, a Conjunctive Synthesis.  Yes, there is still ego, there is 
still subjectivity, there is still self, but these are produced alongside 
the process, along with everything else.  When the first two synthesis go 
well, there is a chance of producing not a god-self, but a nomad-selves, 
polyvocal intensity that enjoys and consumes the pleasures of transversal 
becomings.  Is subject without fixed identity possible in language?  One 
thinks of the old marxist story of the cop who say "Hey you1" and the 
person that turns to the call.  Our totalizing operates as 
such.  Something  in the text calls and we answer and become the subject of 
that text.   How to sidestep identification with superior group ,nation, 
team, totem, clan, team...  this is the nomad that can produce lines of 
escape and subvert fascist totalization.  its not so much that these forms 
of identity are shunned, but that the nomad can stay in the passage between 
them all, can draw upon the vast disjunctive
synthesis, can return to the connective synthesis, and stay IN the passage 
of intensive states.  (I am everyone, anyone)

Can we write and...and..and ?  Will language permit or...or...or 
?  Probably not in its representational modes, but all systems exceed 
themselves.  Somewhere between the Snark and the latest Supreme Court 
decision there is an opening produced by the collision of series. True, we 
can't talk *about* it, but we can talk it, produce it, make it.   And we 
can re-make it, but not in these sense of re-production of the same, but in 
the repetition of difference.


  - Richard