paranoia and schizophrenia x 2 (for redionysus and cj stivale), which makes
four.
Regarding:
> 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.>>
redionysus@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> 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
>
> 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.
A belated response:
My postie reading is spotty (esp. Lacan & neo-psychoanalysis) so I'm
not clear about the particular way you're situating DG. I follow your
remarks on reading Kant as utopian, but I'm not sure where you're coming
from in your defense of psychoanalysis against their criticism. (This
preface in case I'm simply misunderstanding you or answering you at cross
purposes below). Anyway, for what it's worth, a clarification on the
points you ask about:
Regarding the unconscious/preconscious, I refer to the remarks in section
5 of chapter 4 of AO.
DG explicitly deny that preconscious, "selfish interests"
are a sufficient explanation for the forms that desire
takes. Desire invests the social body directly, in either a
paranoiac or a schizophrenic mode, and "interest" comes at a
second (and derivative?) moment. "Interest always comes
after." (AO 346) "There is an unconscious libidinal
investment of desire that does not necessarily coincide with
the preconsicous investments of interest, and that explains
how the latter can be perturbed and perverted in 'the most
somber organization,' *below all ideology*." (AO 345) Even in selfish
class ideologies, there is a dimension of pure love for the machine.
"Desire is agape."
I take this to mean, among other things, that the kind of
desire one is investing is just as important as the
"structures" one is investing it in: is it paranoid or
schizo? A "preconsciously" revolutionary group can have an
unconsciously paranoid investment, which makes it useless at
best and dangerous at worst. DG appear to believe that
ideological criticism remains stuck at the preconcious level
of "interests" and cannot reach to the dimension where
differences in *kinds* of desire are produced.
"Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to remember,
that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty.
Here as elsewhere the concept of ideology is an execrable
concept that hides the real problems..." (AO 344). Or more
provocatively, "There is no ideology and never has been" (I
forget where).
About paranoia and schizophrenia as poles of desire: I get
this from Brian Massumi's *User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia*, pp. 106-141. For example:
"Every society responds to both attractors. A social
formation is defined by its particular mix of becoming-other
and becoming-the-same, schizophrenia and paranoia, fascism
and anarchy. The attractors are limit-states, unreachable
extremes lying at the opposite ends of a continuum of
potential syntheses of interiority and the outside, closure
and open-endedness. Social and political systems can be
tracked along the continuum according to which extreme they
are approaching, in other words their preferred
impossibility: the pure immanence of continual social self-
invention (permanent revolution) or the pure transcendence
of perfect and enduring order (paradise)--an unviably
superabstract line of escape, or the viciously abstract
circle of domestic peace through violence."
(Note: Massumi remarks that this is not a binary
distinction, because "anarchy-schizophrenia effectively
*encompasses* fascism-paranoia. Theirs is not a formal
distinction between two binary opposites but a real
distinction between modes of dynamic interaction and
directions of movement." 118)
I don't know enough to address the other points you make
about DG. Have you read Massumi's book? He argues forcefully
that they do not belong to the schools of thought in whose
terms you seem to be situating and evaluating them (e.g., you see them
as treating the entry into the symbolic when they reject the whole
symbolic/imaginary/real thing), in fact that they are neither
poststructuralists or
ideological critics at all as those categories have come to be defined
out of various structuralisms. "Many of the thinkers they
are commonly compared to (Barthes, Althusser, Derrida,
Kristeva, Baudrillard)...can still be said to repose in the
shadow of Saussure's tree...Other authors whose names do not
necessarily spring to mind offer a more compatible
philosophical constellation (Simondon, Prigogine and
Stengers, Bakhtin, Ducrot, Klossowski; in addition to the
more obvious names of Spinoza, Bergson, and Foucault.)"
(178)
This distinction in kinds of desire is relevant to the
discussion about flamewars and Charles Stivale's Rhiz.
Cyberspace artice. Charles reminds me in his addendum, quite
rightly, that no particular form (including the black hole)
is absolutely good or bad in DG's view. But it seems to me
that this pragmatic relativism of form is related to an
ethics of desire that is much less relativisitic, perhaps
not relativistic at all. DG tend to speak of the
paranoid/schizophrenic distinction as a kind of absolute
ethical distinction, don't they? In his intro to AO Foucault
praises them in these terms: "The Christian moralists sought
out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. D.
and G., for their part, pursue the slightest traces of
fascism in the body." DG close AO with: "We'll never go too
far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows.
For the new earth...is not to be found in the neurotic or
perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or
assign it goals...this process...is always and already
complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds." (AO
382).
The trick is simply that apparently "schizophrenic" forms
are not always the bearers or generators of geniune
schizophrenic desire. A rhizome can turn bad, a line of
flight can become a line of death--but this is because
paranoid desire can re-congeal *within* such forms and carry
paranoia like a virus into a molecular process (this is how
they analyze German fascism). But paranoia is always the
culprit, isn't it? Not an Evil, but a Bad: unhealthy,
debilitating. So DG counsel a cagey alertness which is
willing to switch off occasionally into territorializing
forms--but always for the purpose of keeping alive the
schizophrenic process in the bigger picture. The relativism
of forms is not for relativism's sake, but is a means to an
particular end. DG keep harping on this apparently
relativist point in order to break down a certain kind of
formalist fetishism which assumes that a particular form is
always the marker of a particular kind of desire. (The point
is made in "Rhizome" vis-a-vis literary forms: "It is not
enough to say 'Long live the multiple,'...No typographical,
lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it
heard.") Nevertheless, schizophrenic *desire* is the Good, paranoid
desire the thing to avoided, rather unambiguously. Somebody tell
me if I'm way offbase here.
So I made a mistake putting my intuition about netgroup
flamewars in terms of a particular *form* (the black hole),
when my real concern had to do with the kind of desire that
develops in them. My only point was this: when you compared
MOO spamming to the netgroup flamewar, Charles, I questioned
the analogy because the flaming practices I've seen in nets
seem much more paranoid than spamming, much more an
expression of and generator of the kind of desire that makes
life ugly. Even when it is harrassing, does spamming have
the same tonality ("admit, admit") as the flame? Does one
feel the impossibility of exit in spamming (the need to
avoid "losing face" with each new round of accusation)?
Massumi has a nice tag for fascist desire: "become one or
die," "become-same or die." This is the desire you can feel
not only in a flame "war," but in all kinds of coy paranoiac
practices which cannot be formally "called" as flaming yet
partake of its psychology (one might define a domain of
"baiting," for example). I'm not sure spamming works with
the same psychology; the fact that one can plausibly
describe it as "white noise" suggests to me that it doesn't
have the same teeth. Maybe some apmming does and this is just a
difference indegree? Even so, it seems to me an important difference
tomark. There's also a recent mutation in public discourse
which complicates the flaming vs. jazzing issue:
neoconservatives have spent a great deal of rhetorical
effort appropriating the style of life-loving wit and
confident satire over the past two decades. There may have
been a time when schizos could evade flamebait with jazz and
laughter, but the satiric riposte is now itself a terrain of
character-competition, and State thinkers are happy to catch
you in its net: I love life more than you, your humor is
resentful while I laugh without a catch in the breath. We
have pleasure on our side. (Camille Paglia loves rock n roll
more than you guys. She wins.) I have a hard time finding
the line of happy escape here. Reminders about the
intermezzo cheer me up, though.
Greg Polly
------------------
four.
Regarding:
> 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.>>
redionysus@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> 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
>
> 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.
A belated response:
My postie reading is spotty (esp. Lacan & neo-psychoanalysis) so I'm
not clear about the particular way you're situating DG. I follow your
remarks on reading Kant as utopian, but I'm not sure where you're coming
from in your defense of psychoanalysis against their criticism. (This
preface in case I'm simply misunderstanding you or answering you at cross
purposes below). Anyway, for what it's worth, a clarification on the
points you ask about:
Regarding the unconscious/preconscious, I refer to the remarks in section
5 of chapter 4 of AO.
DG explicitly deny that preconscious, "selfish interests"
are a sufficient explanation for the forms that desire
takes. Desire invests the social body directly, in either a
paranoiac or a schizophrenic mode, and "interest" comes at a
second (and derivative?) moment. "Interest always comes
after." (AO 346) "There is an unconscious libidinal
investment of desire that does not necessarily coincide with
the preconsicous investments of interest, and that explains
how the latter can be perturbed and perverted in 'the most
somber organization,' *below all ideology*." (AO 345) Even in selfish
class ideologies, there is a dimension of pure love for the machine.
"Desire is agape."
I take this to mean, among other things, that the kind of
desire one is investing is just as important as the
"structures" one is investing it in: is it paranoid or
schizo? A "preconsciously" revolutionary group can have an
unconsciously paranoid investment, which makes it useless at
best and dangerous at worst. DG appear to believe that
ideological criticism remains stuck at the preconcious level
of "interests" and cannot reach to the dimension where
differences in *kinds* of desire are produced.
"Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to remember,
that one wants and makes revolution out of desire, not duty.
Here as elsewhere the concept of ideology is an execrable
concept that hides the real problems..." (AO 344). Or more
provocatively, "There is no ideology and never has been" (I
forget where).
About paranoia and schizophrenia as poles of desire: I get
this from Brian Massumi's *User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia*, pp. 106-141. For example:
"Every society responds to both attractors. A social
formation is defined by its particular mix of becoming-other
and becoming-the-same, schizophrenia and paranoia, fascism
and anarchy. The attractors are limit-states, unreachable
extremes lying at the opposite ends of a continuum of
potential syntheses of interiority and the outside, closure
and open-endedness. Social and political systems can be
tracked along the continuum according to which extreme they
are approaching, in other words their preferred
impossibility: the pure immanence of continual social self-
invention (permanent revolution) or the pure transcendence
of perfect and enduring order (paradise)--an unviably
superabstract line of escape, or the viciously abstract
circle of domestic peace through violence."
(Note: Massumi remarks that this is not a binary
distinction, because "anarchy-schizophrenia effectively
*encompasses* fascism-paranoia. Theirs is not a formal
distinction between two binary opposites but a real
distinction between modes of dynamic interaction and
directions of movement." 118)
I don't know enough to address the other points you make
about DG. Have you read Massumi's book? He argues forcefully
that they do not belong to the schools of thought in whose
terms you seem to be situating and evaluating them (e.g., you see them
as treating the entry into the symbolic when they reject the whole
symbolic/imaginary/real thing), in fact that they are neither
poststructuralists or
ideological critics at all as those categories have come to be defined
out of various structuralisms. "Many of the thinkers they
are commonly compared to (Barthes, Althusser, Derrida,
Kristeva, Baudrillard)...can still be said to repose in the
shadow of Saussure's tree...Other authors whose names do not
necessarily spring to mind offer a more compatible
philosophical constellation (Simondon, Prigogine and
Stengers, Bakhtin, Ducrot, Klossowski; in addition to the
more obvious names of Spinoza, Bergson, and Foucault.)"
(178)
This distinction in kinds of desire is relevant to the
discussion about flamewars and Charles Stivale's Rhiz.
Cyberspace artice. Charles reminds me in his addendum, quite
rightly, that no particular form (including the black hole)
is absolutely good or bad in DG's view. But it seems to me
that this pragmatic relativism of form is related to an
ethics of desire that is much less relativisitic, perhaps
not relativistic at all. DG tend to speak of the
paranoid/schizophrenic distinction as a kind of absolute
ethical distinction, don't they? In his intro to AO Foucault
praises them in these terms: "The Christian moralists sought
out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. D.
and G., for their part, pursue the slightest traces of
fascism in the body." DG close AO with: "We'll never go too
far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows.
For the new earth...is not to be found in the neurotic or
perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or
assign it goals...this process...is always and already
complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds." (AO
382).
The trick is simply that apparently "schizophrenic" forms
are not always the bearers or generators of geniune
schizophrenic desire. A rhizome can turn bad, a line of
flight can become a line of death--but this is because
paranoid desire can re-congeal *within* such forms and carry
paranoia like a virus into a molecular process (this is how
they analyze German fascism). But paranoia is always the
culprit, isn't it? Not an Evil, but a Bad: unhealthy,
debilitating. So DG counsel a cagey alertness which is
willing to switch off occasionally into territorializing
forms--but always for the purpose of keeping alive the
schizophrenic process in the bigger picture. The relativism
of forms is not for relativism's sake, but is a means to an
particular end. DG keep harping on this apparently
relativist point in order to break down a certain kind of
formalist fetishism which assumes that a particular form is
always the marker of a particular kind of desire. (The point
is made in "Rhizome" vis-a-vis literary forms: "It is not
enough to say 'Long live the multiple,'...No typographical,
lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it
heard.") Nevertheless, schizophrenic *desire* is the Good, paranoid
desire the thing to avoided, rather unambiguously. Somebody tell
me if I'm way offbase here.
So I made a mistake putting my intuition about netgroup
flamewars in terms of a particular *form* (the black hole),
when my real concern had to do with the kind of desire that
develops in them. My only point was this: when you compared
MOO spamming to the netgroup flamewar, Charles, I questioned
the analogy because the flaming practices I've seen in nets
seem much more paranoid than spamming, much more an
expression of and generator of the kind of desire that makes
life ugly. Even when it is harrassing, does spamming have
the same tonality ("admit, admit") as the flame? Does one
feel the impossibility of exit in spamming (the need to
avoid "losing face" with each new round of accusation)?
Massumi has a nice tag for fascist desire: "become one or
die," "become-same or die." This is the desire you can feel
not only in a flame "war," but in all kinds of coy paranoiac
practices which cannot be formally "called" as flaming yet
partake of its psychology (one might define a domain of
"baiting," for example). I'm not sure spamming works with
the same psychology; the fact that one can plausibly
describe it as "white noise" suggests to me that it doesn't
have the same teeth. Maybe some apmming does and this is just a
difference indegree? Even so, it seems to me an important difference
tomark. There's also a recent mutation in public discourse
which complicates the flaming vs. jazzing issue:
neoconservatives have spent a great deal of rhetorical
effort appropriating the style of life-loving wit and
confident satire over the past two decades. There may have
been a time when schizos could evade flamebait with jazz and
laughter, but the satiric riposte is now itself a terrain of
character-competition, and State thinkers are happy to catch
you in its net: I love life more than you, your humor is
resentful while I laugh without a catch in the breath. We
have pleasure on our side. (Camille Paglia loves rock n roll
more than you guys. She wins.) I have a hard time finding
the line of happy escape here. Reminders about the
intermezzo cheer me up, though.
Greg Polly
------------------