re: name dropping & the fiction of subjectivity


Regarding Redionysus (now named Seamus, hi there)

1. But...but...Deleuze and Guattari don't believe in the "pre-symbolic"**
and think that the pejorative assault on a "retrograde" return to the
mother's body is itself a symptom of molar thinking: it's only molar
thinking that sees schizophrenic desiring-production as a "regressive"
retreat to soupy childhood "fusions." Neoconservatives (and fascists)
are offended above all by such "retreats" to pre-symbolic "fusion," which
are the ultimate offense to the self-constructions of the molar warrior.
(So the accusation of reactivity could go the other way.)

2. I know better than to keep repeating this, but: isn't there somebody
out there among the academic left that can see *some* problem, however
minimal, with constructing an "anti-fascist" ethic with _The Will to
Power_ as an ur-text?

3. I'm not clear why dropping names (whether a good or bad idea) is
equivalent to "denying subjectivity."

4. Would DG agree that we should "actively produce the fiction of
subjectivity"? Don't they break with this whole pomo fixation on "fiction"?
(Somebody who knows, talk about this please.)

5. Assuming we were to agree that we should not deny subjectivity but
actively produce its fiction, still, there are a myriad of fictions that
we could produce. So why is it such a necessity to produce a fiction of
atomistic individuals who can be "held responsible" for their productions
(whether through a name or through the work-as-a-gestalt)? The anecdote
about signatures in the drawing class only makes me think: yes, but what
if the point isn't to produce an individual work that is to be competitively
*graded*?

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** A relevant passage from Massumi, _User's Guide_, pp. 84-5:
(I know this is old news to you hardcore Deleuzers but may be food for
helpful discussion for us youngsters):

[T]he body without organs is *not the fragmented body* of psychoanalysis.
A frequent critique of Deleuze and Guattari casts them as toddler
visionaries in men's clothing preaching a return to the maternal body.
>From within a psychoanalytic framework, those are the only terms in which
their calls for a "return" to the body without organs can be understood:
as a regression to the "pre-Oedipal" body, a denial of the "fact" of
castration. Outside the Oedipally organized Symbolic order there is said
to exist only an undifferentiated infant body (the OwB: organs without a
body) laboring in a prelinguistic state of imaginary confusion between
(fusion with) self and mOther. The only alternative to resigning oneself
to the adult "reality" of desire-as-lack is to exult in an imaginary
union with a long-dead ghost from an incestuous past. This precludes
lucidity of thought in academics and strategic action in politics:
anarchism as an infantile disorder.
This line of reasoning reflects a refusal to accept--or an inability
to understand--the point just made: for Deleuze and Guattari the Oedipal
alternatives of phallus-castration, plenitude-lack,
identity-undifferentiation are retrospecive illusions projected onto the
infantile body. They are the normalized *adult* perspective on it. The
so-called fragmentation exhibited by the "pre-Oedipal" body is in fact
the fractality of part objects...not the debilitating lack of an old
unity but a real capacity for new connection. It is not a negativity in
contrast to which a plenitude might be desired. It is a positive
*faculty* for the production of connective syntheses involving a clear
perception of "necessity" and an experimental assessment of chance (the
chances of exploiting the margin of error in the artifically closed
system of personhood in order to break out of its deterministic
confines). What lies outside of Oedipal subjectivity (actually, beside
it: it is always contemporaneous with identity even if submerged by it)
is an effective superposition of an unaccustomed range of pragmatic
potentials, not a protometaphysical "confusion." A return *to* the body
without organs is actually a return *of* fractality, a resurfacing of the
virtual. Not regression: invention. The body regains the
self-transformative "freedom" accompanying the hyperdifferentiation of
the dissipative structure at a point of bifurcation. Supermolecularity.
Individuation at its most intense. As always, it involves an
increase in "sensitivity" (lucidity), and a multiplication of strategic
options. As well as a raising of stakes. The degree of danger increases
apace with the degree of freedom. There is no invention without a
commensurate dose of instability. All the more reason to make the escape
with the utmost sobriety.



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