Greg Polly writes:
<<Still: I have some "Kantian" friends who appear to think in
the whole lingo...yet if you listen to them, you can hear
not only that they, too, want to send out their rhizomatic
shoots but that their investment in this discourse isn't so
much about control and the Court of Reason as about
protecting a space in which they can play and discover in an
open-ended way. There's no question that the whole discourse
of consensus can be a form of control: anyone who's ever
held a minority position knows just how majoritarian it can
be in operation. Yet sometimes the Kantian/Habermasian talk
can express a different kind of desire, perhaps a frustrated
attempt to prevent paranoid invasions, to maintain what
little rhizomatic play one has been able to preserve, or a
dream of having a larger space for "composing" in a "non-
purposive" way. A bad discursive investment, maybe...but of
course the anarchist alternative is easy to parody, too. I
guess I'm not disagreeing about the consensus point, I just
feel a caveat about unconscious vs preconscious investments
bubbling up, the idea that you have to listen to the desire
behind the "ideology" (which DG always say they don't
believe in anyway, since the unconscious investment is what
comes first). It seems tome the liberal/consensus position may block a
run toward the schizo pole, but it sometimes has a real distaste
and hostility for movements toward the paranoid pole of desire--and this may
be important to keep in mind in certain situations. I'm curious to know what
people think about this.>>
I would like to say that I have found this internal dialogue occuring in
myself as I begin to question D/G and to read Kant and Habermas. What I
realize in part, and I would have to say I'm still rather shy to assert this,
is that what Kant is attempting to describe is a utopian position, but he
seems to be read historically as writing descriptively.
When you read it as utopian, it becomes less of an apologetic for bourgeious
society and more of a subtle, rather privledged, wish for it to improve.
What I think becomes clearer after Kant, and this begins to be a real problem
for Habermas' viability is that the semiotic is coded with class and gender.
What D&G realize is that we must imagine another inroad into the symbolic (in
order to maintain social law, communication, a democratic public sphere) but
it cannot be through Oedipus, because this structres all of the above on the
basis of class, race and gender exclusion. I'm not sure that I would
characterize this position as rhizomatic, but certainly a move which is
parallell in interest to those which caused DG to develop the rhizome model.
<<... I just
feel a caveat about unconscious vs preconscious investments
bubbling up, the idea that you have to listen to the desire
behind the "ideology" (which DG always say they don't
believe in anyway, since the unconscious investment is what
comes first). It seems tome the liberal/consensus position may block a
run toward the schizo pole, but it sometimes has a real distaste
and hostility for movements toward the paranoid pole of desire--and this may
be important to keep in mind in certain situations. >>
This One of the things which seems to me to be problematic about the rhizome
work (I don't remember any actual statement about the Uc coming before the Pc
they don't make the mistake that explicitly do they?) But what my mentor has
been trying to beat into my head for the past two years is that their work
turns Freud on its head. That is they read Freud (and I guess you can make
whatever parallells you want with my above statement on Kant) as prescriptive
rather than descriptive. I have found Juliet Mitchell's book *PsychoAnalysis
and Feminism* really helpful with this, because it seems from Riech and Lang
that they inherit this mistake. In other words, Freud is not Oedipus, or
Oedipus as a natural condition of society, or the only imaginable entry into
the symbolic (although Lacan will confuse this too). He is begining with
symptomatic adults and working *backwards* to a description of a social
structure which is common to them. This is the production of the bourgeois
family, one which is heightened as its social ties diminish and it becomes,
like fish swimming in an ever shrinking bowl, more and more self corrupting.
If you mean that we don't understand desire except through its articulation
and ennunciation in ideology, yes, I think that is right, and even if not
explicitly, DG do say that.
I'm not completely sure what to make of the last lines about the schitzo and
paranoid poles... this may be a gap in my understanding of DG, I never really
found a context for these terms, and your citation seems equally ambiguous.
What I can say, even as bait for further discussion, is that I would demand
the *articulation of the situation* in order to devise strategy. We are not
talking about a-historical situations. The move toward concensus within
capital is rediculous, witness TV news or TV in general of course (R.
Williams & the British School). There is a difference between populism and
constructing (or even imagining at this point- for there is a politics to our
silence of the imagination) a social sphere where these issues, conflicts of
interest and desire can be worked out *without* class interest and violence
or the threat if violence (to which it is always coupled). (and I realize we
are back at Kant and Habermas). Kristen Ross' *The Emergence of Social Space:
Rimbaud and the Paris Commune* seems one of the only models (or histotical
reconstructions) of such a space and interesects this issue on several
levels. Lefebvre's work makes similar inroads which I am now finding very
fruitful.
So the utopian postion is different than the one which wants to construct
under the current conditions. In my own work, I find myself strategically
aligning myself with the @ groups in action, but with the more clearly with
the those more aware of *class* interest philosophically. We are faced with
the question raised in the statement of that old philosopher of Praxis: "Men
make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given or transmitted from the past. The tradition of
all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the *brain* of the living."
(my"*")
------------------
<<Still: I have some "Kantian" friends who appear to think in
the whole lingo...yet if you listen to them, you can hear
not only that they, too, want to send out their rhizomatic
shoots but that their investment in this discourse isn't so
much about control and the Court of Reason as about
protecting a space in which they can play and discover in an
open-ended way. There's no question that the whole discourse
of consensus can be a form of control: anyone who's ever
held a minority position knows just how majoritarian it can
be in operation. Yet sometimes the Kantian/Habermasian talk
can express a different kind of desire, perhaps a frustrated
attempt to prevent paranoid invasions, to maintain what
little rhizomatic play one has been able to preserve, or a
dream of having a larger space for "composing" in a "non-
purposive" way. A bad discursive investment, maybe...but of
course the anarchist alternative is easy to parody, too. I
guess I'm not disagreeing about the consensus point, I just
feel a caveat about unconscious vs preconscious investments
bubbling up, the idea that you have to listen to the desire
behind the "ideology" (which DG always say they don't
believe in anyway, since the unconscious investment is what
comes first). It seems tome the liberal/consensus position may block a
run toward the schizo pole, but it sometimes has a real distaste
and hostility for movements toward the paranoid pole of desire--and this may
be important to keep in mind in certain situations. I'm curious to know what
people think about this.>>
I would like to say that I have found this internal dialogue occuring in
myself as I begin to question D/G and to read Kant and Habermas. What I
realize in part, and I would have to say I'm still rather shy to assert this,
is that what Kant is attempting to describe is a utopian position, but he
seems to be read historically as writing descriptively.
When you read it as utopian, it becomes less of an apologetic for bourgeious
society and more of a subtle, rather privledged, wish for it to improve.
What I think becomes clearer after Kant, and this begins to be a real problem
for Habermas' viability is that the semiotic is coded with class and gender.
What D&G realize is that we must imagine another inroad into the symbolic (in
order to maintain social law, communication, a democratic public sphere) but
it cannot be through Oedipus, because this structres all of the above on the
basis of class, race and gender exclusion. I'm not sure that I would
characterize this position as rhizomatic, but certainly a move which is
parallell in interest to those which caused DG to develop the rhizome model.
<<... I just
feel a caveat about unconscious vs preconscious investments
bubbling up, the idea that you have to listen to the desire
behind the "ideology" (which DG always say they don't
believe in anyway, since the unconscious investment is what
comes first). It seems tome the liberal/consensus position may block a
run toward the schizo pole, but it sometimes has a real distaste
and hostility for movements toward the paranoid pole of desire--and this may
be important to keep in mind in certain situations. >>
This One of the things which seems to me to be problematic about the rhizome
work (I don't remember any actual statement about the Uc coming before the Pc
they don't make the mistake that explicitly do they?) But what my mentor has
been trying to beat into my head for the past two years is that their work
turns Freud on its head. That is they read Freud (and I guess you can make
whatever parallells you want with my above statement on Kant) as prescriptive
rather than descriptive. I have found Juliet Mitchell's book *PsychoAnalysis
and Feminism* really helpful with this, because it seems from Riech and Lang
that they inherit this mistake. In other words, Freud is not Oedipus, or
Oedipus as a natural condition of society, or the only imaginable entry into
the symbolic (although Lacan will confuse this too). He is begining with
symptomatic adults and working *backwards* to a description of a social
structure which is common to them. This is the production of the bourgeois
family, one which is heightened as its social ties diminish and it becomes,
like fish swimming in an ever shrinking bowl, more and more self corrupting.
If you mean that we don't understand desire except through its articulation
and ennunciation in ideology, yes, I think that is right, and even if not
explicitly, DG do say that.
I'm not completely sure what to make of the last lines about the schitzo and
paranoid poles... this may be a gap in my understanding of DG, I never really
found a context for these terms, and your citation seems equally ambiguous.
What I can say, even as bait for further discussion, is that I would demand
the *articulation of the situation* in order to devise strategy. We are not
talking about a-historical situations. The move toward concensus within
capital is rediculous, witness TV news or TV in general of course (R.
Williams & the British School). There is a difference between populism and
constructing (or even imagining at this point- for there is a politics to our
silence of the imagination) a social sphere where these issues, conflicts of
interest and desire can be worked out *without* class interest and violence
or the threat if violence (to which it is always coupled). (and I realize we
are back at Kant and Habermas). Kristen Ross' *The Emergence of Social Space:
Rimbaud and the Paris Commune* seems one of the only models (or histotical
reconstructions) of such a space and interesects this issue on several
levels. Lefebvre's work makes similar inroads which I am now finding very
fruitful.
So the utopian postion is different than the one which wants to construct
under the current conditions. In my own work, I find myself strategically
aligning myself with the @ groups in action, but with the more clearly with
the those more aware of *class* interest philosophically. We are faced with
the question raised in the statement of that old philosopher of Praxis: "Men
make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given or transmitted from the past. The tradition of
all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the *brain* of the living."
(my"*")
------------------