>From: daniel haines <
>okay - the point i was trying to make was that your account seemed
>genealogical but spoke the language of "nomadology". you seemed to imply
>that an assemblage has a unity which can be genealogically traced, whereas
>i
>would assume an assemblage is in an (intensive) continuum which can be
>("nomadically") mapped. of course, it's both, facing a BwO and facing
>Strata, in each case. but different terms or concepts apply in each
>direction, right? so what i meant was to suggest that the "mother-infant
>assemblage" describes neither an assemblage as such nor the most important
>one (if it was one!). what do d&g describe in the opening pages of AO? not
>a "mother"-"infant assemblage" but mouth and breast machinically connected.
>these are not equivalent descriptions... it seemed to me that you were
>reinscribing in new terms a rather familial, oedipal scene which, as i
>would
>read them, both AO and ATP try to leave behind? or, if that seems a bit
>hyperbolic, you seemed to be eliding the important differences between a
>molar and a molecular unconscious. a molar identity like that of "mother"
>is not part of any assemblage, it is stratified. assemblages do not involve
>"persons" but intensities, affects - flows of milk - hence my quotations
>about the "anthropomorphic representation of sex" and so on.
i agree with most of this, but i still hold that there is such thing as
molecular identity, as fuzzy as it is. a multiplicity is this kind of
identity. you used the example of the mouth-breast machine, but what is
this except the identificatory grouping of thousands of nerve endings and
milk molecules? in the same way, partial objects on the mother's body will
eventually group together in proximity to form a territorial assemblage that
we can call the mother. a fuzzy aggregate. this is a natural process as
opposed to the phallic intervention which will impose molar identities.
>i wasn't necessarily meaning _you_ were moaning, i was just generalizing
>(as
>ever!)! i just don't see the value in talking about things like "phallic
>situations" or "castration", i guess. it seems profoundly metaphysical and
>i have my doubts about how usefully it illuminates anything. possibly this
>is just because the status of psychoanalysis is very different here (in the
>UK) to in France or America, for example? I don't know.
lol, psychoanalysis has no status in N. America! (at least i hope not).
anyway, i'll take the example of d&g's 'becoming-woman' to show how the
phallus illuminates things. d&g contrast becomings to an 'empty standard'.
the empty standard, the majority, really isn't anybody, it's a nobody. this
empty standard is the phallus. now, becoming-woman, that's the
infant-mother assemblage. becomings-woman/mother, multiple
differenciations/repititions of this important assemblage. why is it so
important? because you need a background territory to deterritorialize off
of, a home to become strong enough...or else you're dead, a dead baby.
scary nightmare stuff. d&g sometimes say that you have to become woman
'first', before reaching the other becomings. both men and women have to
become woman in order to escape the empty standard of the phallus.
>there is a pretty enormous difference between the word "true" and the word
>"veritable", don't you think?! especially in this sort of context. still:
>i'm glad you mention "communication" here as i was pondering this all
>yesterday and i realised that this did start off being about
>communication/miscommunication... and that we seem to have careered into AO
>etc... well, it's always nice to drift, but, i think you'll agree, that
>line
>is hitting a lot of blocks! what i really don't understand (and am
>interested in more than getting into some sort of Lacan/d&g discussion) is
>the way you contrasted a true (or, apparently, "veritable") communication
>with a post-phallic-catastrophe "miscommunication. or -- and this we have
>been discussing, in a way -- why you see subject-formation as a catastrophe
>to begin with. i don't accept "castration" as the basis of
>subject-formation or the origin of desire; nor can i see any reason for
>thinking identity as ever being "fixed", no matter how rigidly it may
>appear
>to be segmented. these ways of thinking seem to me to reproduce a sort of
>post-fall mythology which is profoundly christian and, frankly, barren. by
>the same token, i don't think thinking about communication as part of an
>oppositionally coupled pair with miscommunnication is very productive.
>what
>i suggested before, i think, pointed to some good reasons for
>deconstructing
>the opposition of this conceptual pair, i.e. the essential role of "noise",
>the question of redundancy, the impossibility of absolute determination or
>of total transparency. i'm not sure if the substitution of the word
>"veritable" for the word "true" evaporates these concerns or not? not
>entirely, i think...?
i think we can keep the communication-miscommunication opposition, but as
poles. degrees of communication or miscommunication. two rocks put
together, that's a low degree of communication, a faulty assemblage.
mouth-breast, now there's a veritable machinic connection.
> > it is...that doesn't mean i'm raising it to the transcendental level.
>why
> > can't we talk about castration, as an emprical fact, plain and simple?
>
>possibly because it _isn't_ an empirical fact? or, at least, you don't mean
>the kind of castration which is an "empirical fact" when you use the word
>"castration"!
huh? i don't get that last part.
probably better to say 'empirical occurence'...although the phallus is a
very frequent occurence. all it takes is the father or someone else to walk
into the room, the mother shifts her gaze away from the baby, and voila...
raising an anoedipal child is no easy matter.
:) bobo
>cheers,
>
>dan :) bobo
:) bobo
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