More definitions, whee!

I just finished up part four of chapter one (decided to take the rest of June off from schoolwork). Here are some thoughts and attempts to work through them.

My current guess on neurosis: D&G say that Oedipus is the result of repression of production (p. 24)...this can also be seen in the discussion of the neurotic (p. 35), whose purpose is to reduce residual territoralities (body without organs-?, p. 33) to Oedipus...so the problem here is that the neurotic tries to repress the body without organs instead of production (which would be by desiring-machines?)...this then links with capitalism, I think, in that we can see capitalism as another attempt to treat a body without organs (money) as a desiring-machine...so, then, the problem of the neurotic would be parallel with the workings of capitalism.

Next, my current guess on schizophrenia: D&G note that schizophrenia deterritorializes and seeks the limit of capitalism ("desiring-production as the limit of social production," p. 35)...however, it is both produced and repressed by capitalism (p. 34) as a result of capitalism's disconnection from the socius and the resulting inability to codify the socius, where production actually takes place (p. 33)...schizophrenia, then, is a balance for the improper territoralizing done by capitalism...so can we see schizophrenia as a product of the double-bind* of capitalism?

Anyway, just my thoughts for now. Hopefully they'll be helpful or will spark some responses so that Josh doesn't die of blog atrophy. :D


* This is Gregory Bateson's suggestion for the genesis of schizophrenia -- the parents (usually the mother, of course) say one thing while communicating the other. This totally confuses the kid and the result is a person who cannot distinguish what is reality from what is not. I'm not using the term here as an individual genesis for schizophrenia, since D&G would probably say it has something to do with society moreso than parenting. I think they'd also say that the schizophrenic sees reality more clearly rather than is stuck between reality and non-reality.

bemoaning the deadness...

...of the blog

interesting post by David Byrne

I've been taunted in the past for this, but my home page is David Byrne's journal/blog. It makes good reading over breakfast and crusty, sleepy eyes. His post "Maquinas y Almas" on 25 June is interesting and relevant to some of the things we've talked about. He avoids waxing tooo philosophical...

here is the link

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

link to a spankign new blog

this is a new blog authored by the one and only Matthew Pierce. Seriously, check it out

www.struggin.blogspot.com

[3] The Subject and Enjoyment

There were at least two things in my post about the BwO that were too briefly discussed, or improperly emphasized. I'll briefly mention these things to begin this post. First, as I mentioned in our discussion, an understanding of morphogenesis is key to understanding the BwO. Manuel DeLanda defines the BwO (in the fifth section of the lecture series posted below) as "matter inhabited by pure intensities, capable without any prior organization—without any prior biological, physical, or even chemical organization—to express itself," (my emphasis added). This expression is born from the intensities that play themselves out on the surface of the body, from the the forces of repulsion and attraction; the form that the binary machines take is attributable to the analog expressive forces (such as temperature, speed, pressure, and concentration) of nature. This leads directly to the second improperly emphasized feature of my previous post: the notion of becoming. The depth of meaning in this word is at the heart of morphogenesis and Anti-Oedipus. Therefore I think it is best discussed later, and, I hope, at length.

[3] The Subject and Enjoyment

Once recorded, this sliding, rootless construct falls back on production—containing the vital energy of production of production. However, as a result of the disjunctive synthesis, the consumption phase following the recording process is now constituted by the production of recording. It is important to acknowledge the shift: consumption is now constituted in some way by the identity, not constitutive (as it was in production of production). This is the work of D&G's subject, as I understand it. A subject can be conceptualized because of the substance of its expression... constituted, how?. The subject has a face: the paranoic and miraculating machines adjacent to the amorphous flow, turned outward.

This subject, however, has a limited existence as it has thus far been described. It comes into existence only by "being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state"; it is not reified and consumable on its own, but under the influence of the signified. The attraction of a new machine shows the ambition of identity/signifier to be taken materially—on its own (the result of vital energy force in production of production being continually siphoned off and transformed). The addition of this machine to the face forms "a new alliance between desiring-machines and the body without organs so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism"; the signifier can now be taken literally. Enjoyment. The identity + celebate machine is able to pin down the signifier (Lacan, 1977), diverting more of the vital energy into reifying itself and its signifying capacity: "so it's...." The celebate machine, a.k.a. the bachelor machine, a.k.a. the spoke-maker (as I envision it) appropriates for the BwO various points of disjunction, expanding its signifying capacity to the maximum. I'll defer to D&G, page 20, to summarize this progression:

"...by means of the paranoic machine and the miraculating machine, the proportions of attraction and repulsion on the body without organs produce, starting at zero, a series of states in the celibate machine; ...the subject is born of each state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state that determines him at a given moment, consuming-consummating all these states that cause him to be born and reborn..."

An identity finishes itself in any new state not before it finishes the other. The fortuitousness of an identity, discussed on pg21, is theorized at length in "Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds" by Dorothy Holland & Friends. I'm running short of time, so perhaps somebody could pick up the baton here?

Quickly, I think it is interesting to note the differences in the applications of the word "center" and "circle" throughout section [3]. At times it contains a single machine, and at others it seems to contain all machines discussed thus far. This apparent ambiguity feeds their concept of the multiplicity, and buttresses my analogy of "movable skin."

later,
josh

The BwO

In my last post I talked about desiring machines. I had said, briefly sketched, that DMs are process that induce different types of production and are typified by a certain sort of synthesis, in this case connective synthesis (and…and then…and). The machine connects man and nature and is a node for the production of production. By the end of their analysis on DMs, D&G bring out the Body without Organs (the BwO).

(pg 8) “The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable … DMs work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down … nonetheless [the BwO] is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product … It is a body without an image”

The BwO is related to the DM in the fact that it brings together binary opposites. This implies that you can’t have one without the other in the same way, for Christianity, you can’t have God without the Devil. This makes sense as we have seen the anus connected to the mouth. You can’t have production without consumption and its sumptuous by-products.

(pg 9) But even weirder and wilder still is the fact that the DM needs, and tries to insert itself, into the BwO. This process of repulsion is the paranoiac-machine. The way I read paranoia and persecution is through the proliferation of connections that the clinical paranoiac produces. In clinical paranoia, the patient is forever and always connecting every sign (overcoding) to everything else (“they are out to get me, they are outside my window, they have poisoned my food, etc”) and hence the DM, through its production, is trying to connect to everything everywhere and the BwO won’t allow it. The reasons for this are many.

(pg 11) But the BwO is concerned with two things as far as production is concerned: one, the recording of production and the miraculous nature of production. "The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs." What we see from this is that on the BwO, DMs code desire. Second that DMs become sectors of signification. What is really interesting, however, is that it seems as if DMs spring forth from the BwO (hence the miraculous). We know this can’t happen and hence the miraculous moment of the BwO; it is the appearance of an impossible production.

If we identify the BwO as capital (or sterile money) than the terms “socius” and “relative surplus value” all start circulating (miraculating) around the DM (or another term would be labor). In the capitalist machine, what labor does (as a desiring machine) is produce goods. The moment those goods are tinged with surplus value we end up getting more for less and hence the producer ends up losing (shutting off anus and mouth) their relation (value) to their work. Instead of the labor producing money and capital, the miracle (and in turn impossible production) is that it looks as if capital is producing money, not the labor itself! Socius, then, are all the factors that go into making capital assume its matriculating status—through paying people the same wage for more goods per hour (relative surplus value) to the recording of desire onto these goods (consumption). The value of labor/production is determined on capital (outside of economics, which is easy to visualize, how would the DM/BwO look like in other fields such as science, biology, etc…) Technology is implicated in this crude design as it speeds up labor for more production at the same pay.

What ends up happening to the BwO is that it institutes desire for things that you don’t necessarily need. The recording process is the right of those who control the relative surplus value. The BwO, as miraculous recorder, can be seen in concrete examples, through advertising. Advertising is a good example of the BwO because it lacks depth, is undifferentiated and falls under the anti-productive rubric of a BwO. Capital, as I said earlier, is another BwO. As Hardt says: “Capital is a body without organs in these two respects. First, production or labor is recorded or coded or really given value in capital, on the surface of the body without organs (the role of money will be central here). Second, while capital is unproductive, it appears to be productive as if through a miracle and thus masks the real productive processes. This second aspect of capital as the body without organs is precisely what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the fact that the production process is masked or eclipsed. "... we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production.”

Finally, the reason why the BwO is disjunctive is because of it overlaps and writes through the connective synthesis of the DM. For example, Labor is the real process of production while Capital inscribes a false writing of production: in the final analysis, we believe it is capital that created the production, not the labor. Capital can be thought of as oedipal as well as it assumes the many forms of desire. Disjunction (either/or of the tree of genealogy) has us pick between one and the other and branch out from there. Oedipus is all over that!

[2] The Body without Organs

The metaphor of machines established by D&G gets even more difficult here. This is an unfortunate consequence of the logic. We start zooming out a little bit from the vague and molecular machines of section [1] starting on the bottom of page7 with the producing/product identity. This becomes the Body without Organs (when we stop time), which interacts with other and new machines (when time runs). Each machine is potentially a BwO, and each BwO is potentially an avatar of a machine. I think D&G stick with neutral/vague conceptions for machines in section [2] for clarity sake, as impossible as that seems. Perhaps it is also possible to read this progression as a zooming-in, which necessitates the cohesion of the language. It is certain that at a certain point in their analysis, one should be able to see that any machine is a collection of other machines, and thus zoom-in and -out according to the case. However, these are our first steps, and I think reading it as a zooming-out is helpful.

The section begins with "apparent conflict [arising] between desiring-machines and the [BwO]." This conflict is the result of D&G letting time run again. Any identity desires its own reproduction, in fact, this desire is part of its code. Therefore, it should resist anything that doesn't aid its reproduction. Just when the reader might hope to get some more explanation on the BwO or machines, D&G construct an analytical barrier, making such an explanation impossible: the amorphous counter-flow or the uninterrupted flow or the undifferentiated fluid (all equal). Recall from the previous post how all flows are partial. This is true in the ACTUAL sense, but this flow exists in the MAGICAL sense (no comedy intended, I just can't think of a better word). The BwO (or machine) now resides behind an impenetrable wall—in its own center of significance. The subsequent machines attached to the periphery of this circle must supply the center with enough signifier (semiotics, already—for now, substitute your everyday notion of concept for signifier) to overcome the entropy in the system.

Ok, so the first thing that happens with time running again (BwO becomes "identity") is the repulsion of machines by the BwO. The previous sentence is equal to the following statement: the first thing that happens with time running is the attraction of paranoic-machine. This paranoic-machine is credited with the repulsion of machines. The result of the unproductive state of the BwO and the impenetrability of the center of significance is two-fold:

(1) primary repression. Denying other "identities" access to its "identity"

(2) projection. Projection creates a counter-inside and a counter-outside; the identity is figuring itself in the world against the other; the identity is establishing its "skin" or its boundary of influence.

It can now be noticed that the BwO is an avatar of a desiring machine. It is coupled to another machine, or an other. And, just like the machines by which it is constituted it is walled off by an amorphous fluid in its own center of significance. The dimensionality here is confusing but important.

If the BwO is an avatar of a desiring machine, it must hi-jack desiring production. However, it cannot do this without attracting another machine: the miraculating-machine. Therefore the BwO becomes the hub, and productive elements become the spokes. The capital example on page10 is clear on this point. Labor now seems to emanate from capital. Delirium has set in. (Also, recall our impulse-neurotransmitter model from our meeting). "[T]he essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the productive forces and all the organs of production, and that acts as a quasi cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them."

We have jumped tracks to Delirium and its new way of modeling—from production of production to production of recording, i.e. the identity reproducing itself. A move from synthesis and coupling to a disjunctive synthesis. This disjunction contains the vital energy of production of production, transformed (Numen)—"inscribing it in each and every one of its disjunctions." This is the disjunctive synthesis. Therefore, the "disjunctions are the form that the genealogy of desire assumes" (my italics). D&G ask: is that genealogy Oedipal? They answer No by explaining that the "full body without organs is produced as antiproduction, that is to say it intervenes within the process as such for the sole purpose of rejecting any attempt to impose on it any sort of triangulation implying that it was produced by parents. How could this body have been produced by parents, when by its very nature it is such eloquent witness of its own reproduction (italics mine, calling for a recollection of the entire process explained in section [1])?"

In closing, it is important to note that while organ-machines attach themselves to the BwO, the BwO does not become fixed and organized, but instead floats along the three-dimensional chain of BwOs/machines. If my analysis is right, they are not fixed because of the following four reasons (I'll use the word "identity" to refer to the tangled mess of "BwO/machine") which they extrapolate in an essay on semiotics in A Thousand Plateaus:

(1) Each identity (or links in the chain) has a different speed of deterritorialization, and thus their purviews or signifying capabilities differ.

(2) Each identity has: (a) differential relations maintaining the the distinction between other identities, (b) hierarchies of interpretation, and (c) thresholds in the identity chain.

(3) As hinted at earlier today, the distribution of thresholds and circles of significance changes according to the process.

(4) As mentioned earlier: each identity must supply its unproductive element, the BwO (the distinction between identity and BwO is important here), which resides in its own center of significance, with enough signifier (concept) to overcome the entropy in the system. The miracle of interpretation. The concept is now knowable and fashions itself its own signified (or sound-image). (See Lacan, to whom D&G are greatly indebted here).

I have to quit for today. I'm publishing this without a proofread. I'll post on section [3] tomorrow.

Cheers,
Josh