Debate on the Web - View Single Post - Deleuze and Guattari's Process in the beginning of Anti-Oedipus explained

Lazzarone · February 20th, 2005, 10:38 AM

1. scu : "In the simplest of terms, ideology functions by creating a dialogue in which the individual internalizes the idea that they are an agent of that ideology."

desiring-machines operate on a deeper level than ideology: "how poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-option of it by a social order. ... as for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this 'form of content' that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier." (p133)

one of the main lines of thought that anti-oedipus pursues is, 'why do the masses desire fascism?' and "it is not a question of ideology" (p104) - that's only the crust of the bread of production: "libidinal economy is no less objective than political economy, and the political no less subjective than the libidinal, even though the two correspond to two modes of different investments of the same reality as social reality. there is an unconscious libidinal investment of desire that does not necessarily coincide with the preconscious investments of interest, and that explains how the latter can be perturbed and perverted in 'the most somber organization,' BELOW ALL IDEOLOGY." (p345)

this would also be d&g's response to a book like 'what's a matter with kansas?', which claims that rural folk have been duped into voting against their own interests: "that is why, when subjects, individually, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests - when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat - it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled" (p104) - interests and ideologies always come after the infrastructure of desire.

2. there's no distinction between desire and social production. the 'idea behind the car' is the very platonic idealism d&g wish to smash. desire is merely objective (immanent): "there is no particular form of existence that can be labeled 'psychic reality'. ... there is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other. ... desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production." (p27, 28, 30) - as such, there's no individual fantasy, only group fantasies that have grown in particular individuals. this turns psychoanalysis on its head and points towards a 'material psychiatry', or schizoanalysis.

3. scu : "As I understand it, and please make a note if I am incorrect, the paranoiac-machine and the miraculating-machine function within the "disjunctive production of recordings," and the celibate-machine fucntions within the third level, "the consumptive production of consumptions"."

the paranoic machine operates through a *connective* synthesis, the miraculating machine a *disjunctive* synthesis, the celibate machine a *conjunctive* synthesis. (you mix up the first two again in the paragraph equating the miraculating with the connective. for a good review, see pages 36-41.) -- this correlates to marx's three-part dissection of capitalism - production, distribution, and consumption. d&g update this a little, however, putting production in all parts of the process, and reconstituting distribution as 'recording' and consumption as 'consummation'.

{one might ask how all this avoids becoming a hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis)? in fact, one of the objections deleuze ran up against was 'he's so anti-hegel he reifies hegel'. -- d&g would respond that all three of these parts are syntheses, and that they all occur simultaneously. they'd also say there's no evolution toward a harmonious whole, no final completion of the process (p42 - 'we believe only in totalities that are peripheral'; p43 - 'the whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which neither unifies nor totalizes'). plus, that most ideas in the book travel in threes makes it much easier to understand, once you get going and start piling the three-part distinctions on top of one another (as we will below).}

4. scu : "Intensive quantities, again, please make a note if this is incorrect, are the new recordings, which for D-G remain nameless. For Freud, it is the Oedipus complex. D-G do not reject the Oedipus complex as such, but they do reject the Freudian insistence that this is the sole framework for reorganization, reterritorialization. In Marxian terms, the reorganization is through ideology. The ideological superstructure produced in the transition to capitalism is the reterritorialization of ideology; the consciousness and language produced between the reorganization of economic means of production (previously present in the body of the despot, or the age of feudalism) and the ideological means of production (previously the church, now the educational system; economics is taught rather than theology). This reterritorialization is the celibate-machine."

intensive qualities correlate to the celibate machine (paranoic being repulsive, and miraculating attractive); it's the miraculating machine that produces recordings; and reterritorializations and deterritorializations can occur at all levels of the process (although you're onto something because territorialization/reterritorialization/deterritorialization isn't a bad way to map this [footnote 1]). i realize this is all jargon if you haven't walked through the text, so let me try a(n overly-)simple metaphor:

imagine you're in a dreamless sleep. this equates to the body without organs. pure unproductivity.

then BAM!, an alarm clock machine interrupts you. suddenly a slice of reality pierces your BwO, and you can't stop the 'and ... and then ... and then'-nature of what's happening. and this is where your libido kicks in, probably wanting to throw the clock out the window, because under the burden of waking up early everyday, you've developed a constant sense of paranoia about the sudden withdrawal from your sleep.

then sleep begins to attract you again, and you start to detach yourself from the necessity of waking up on-time, drifting off in half-dreams. maybe you even imagine yourself waking up, going about your daily routine, as a way of avoiding it. you record these different dream-scenarios, delaying : 'either i get up, or i go back to sleep,' [five minutes pass] 'either i don't shower, or don't eat,' [ten minutes pass] 'or i create an impossible world without time, hmmmmm' - 'either... or... or... or...'.

these two machines working you over are in opposition: first you're connected into reality against your will (connective synthesis) and the next thing you know you're using your will to disconnect from reality (disjunctive synthesis); first you're like someone with o.c.d. next to an un-flushed toilet (neurotic) and the next thing you know you're a pervert in line at the titty bar (psychotic)... what brings together these two opposing forces?

the answer is the same person who is telling the story - a subject. this subject doesn't pre-exist the story, but they are produced as one part alongside the others. at the same time as it consummates the process, a subject is only a residual effect; it's a totality alright, but at the periphery (conjunctive synthesis). 'so it's.... so it's... (me!)'. now you're the schizo who finally has awakened to go for a walk.

{of course, the above is only a metaphor, about a book constantly advising us to discard metaphors. for one, i put the events in a linear order of clear separations when reality doesn't work like that - all parts of the process really occur at the same time, overlapping and interrupting one another. and i also kinda mis-situated the body without organs, since it's the force that's repelled by the alarm clock. and so on.}

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

regardless, it's all just a way of simplifying these these equations:

a. paranoic machine
= production = connective synthesis = flow (hyle) = withdrawal/selection (prevelevement) = neurosis = libido = 'and ... and then'

b. miraculating machine
= distribution (recording) = disjunctive synthesis = code (chains & schizzes) = detachment = perversion = numen = 'either.. or...'

c. celibate machine
= consumption (consummation) = conjunctive synthesis = subject = residue (residuelle) = schizophrenia = voluptus = 'so it's...'

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

also important to keep in mind is that a machine is a system of interruptions, machines make patterned breaks in energy flows, that's all. i'd like to add digressions into detail here, but this is close enough for government work. [footnote 2]

5. anyway, to return to the original quotation from scu - i would say that d&g do in fact reject the oedipus complex as such : "it is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the love attachment of children to their mothers and fathers. it is a question of knowing what the place and the function of parents are within desiring-production, rather than doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within the restricted code of oedipus. ... by boxing the life of the child up within the oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, we cannot help but fail to understand the production of the unconscious itself, and the collective mechanisms that have an immediate bearing on the unconscious... the unconscious is an orphan ... insofar as psychoanalysis cloaks insanity in the mantle of a "parental complex," and regards the patterns of self-punishment resulting from oedipus as a confession of guilt, its theories are not at all radical or innovative. on the contrary: it is completing the task begun by nineteenth-century psychology, namely, to develop a moralized, familial discourse of mental pathology, linking madness to the 'half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the family[.]' ... hence, instead of participating in an understaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping european humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effect to do away with this problem once and for all." (p50)

oedipus, no doubt, existed before psychoanalysis, and the authors have no qualms about situating it in a socio-political context; but the oedipus complex is exactly what they discuss above - a necessarily repressive project.

this brings us to marx. d&g part company with the base/superstructure approach (as well as marx's antropological elevation of man above nature) when they say "we make no distinction between man and nature... man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other - not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product." (p4)

that, and capitalism in its postmodern form has no need of ideological belief anymore : "above all, there is no longer any need of belief, and the capitalist is merely striking a pose when he bemoans the fact that nowadays no one believes in anything any more. language no longer signifies something that must be believed, it indicates rather what is going to be done, something that the shrewd or the competent are able to decode, to half understand." (p250)

this reveals the brutal, amoral relationship between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, where (schizophrenic) capitalism desires the absence of limits, and this is crucial to texts such as hardt&negri's empire. the superstructure falls into the base of material production - why revert to myth (dreams, fantasy, ideology)? ... hence the need to destroy the illusions: "destroy, destroy. the task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction - a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. destroy oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration. ... schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions. destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. and when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent. ... the task of schizoanalysis is that of learning what a subject's desiring-machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in the machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what becomings in each case. moreover, this positive task cannot be separated from indispensable destructions, the destruction of the molar aggregates, the structures and representations that prevent the machine from functioning. ... the task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others."

and this explains why i wouldn't call them structuralists, since they wish to destroy 'oedipus-as-structure' (p107) - post-structuralists perhaps?

.k (kevin.sanchez@gmail.com)

[1] see, the trouble is that capitalism is only a relative deterritorialization, not an absolute one like schizophrenia. capitalism reterritorializes with one hand what it deterritorializes with the other (p257). but this reterritorialization isn't the same as that done by the despotic state, although the state can also serve this function (as a neo-archaism). rather it's a question of the axiomatic (p233), and this relates to the work marx did in deriving the laws of capital. also see p246.

[2] later (see p261) this three-part distinction maps onto types of social organization: an underlying territorial machine (earth), a trascendent imperial machine (despot), a modern immanent machine (capital). you can trace the development of our history with this model: first there's territorial codes [primitive and savage], then the universal state (urstaat) over-codes [imperial and barbaric], then schizophrenic money de-codes ['civilized' and capitalist]. "Fetishes, idols, images, and simulacra - here we have the whole series: territorial fetishes, despotic idols or symbols, then everything is recapitulated in the images of capitalism, which shapes them and reduced them to the Oedipal simulacrum". (p267) see also p35 - the neurotic, the pervert, the schizo (and p66).

_____

appendix - it also may help to explain the various fallacious conclusions of psychoanalysis which d&g call 'paralogisms' (following kant). the first three each deal with a synthesis respectively. misusing the connective synthesis is extrapolation - this means extrapolating a partial object into a transcendent one. e.g. a child rolls a model train into a tunnel, and the shrink says, 'so you wanna fuck your mom?'. when you keep to the partial and nonspecific use of this synthesis, then you're keeping things real; but when you get global and specific (reducing everything to the parental and conjugal), then you're illegit.

secondly, misusing the disjunctive synthesis is a double-bind, setting up a contradictory situation. 'you can choose any color, so long as it's green'. wrongly this is exclusive and restrictive - imaginary and symbolic; rightly this is inclusive or nonrestrictive.

thirdly, there's application. this equates to applying a mis-identification to someone: 'you're one of us'. wrong : segregative and biunivocal - segregative and familial; right : nomadic and polyvocal.

there's two more paralogisms - displacement and afterward. displacement is like a forbidden fruit trick. you're prohibited from doing something in order to persuade you that your true desire is to break the prohibition. "the law tells us : you will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so *that's* what I wanted!" (p114). on p115, three terms help explain things (which i won't go into) : repressing representation, repressed representative, and displaced represented.

afterward is the devilishness of cartesianism: all things become charted on a grid where oedipus comes first and 'actual factors' (symptoms of neurosis and psychosis, problems of living, etc.) come after. it's a way of prioritizing myth and treating units of desiring-production afterward. d&g claim that even jung, adler, and reich do this, whatever their disagreements with freud; the authors argue instead that oedipus is purely reactionary, that oedipus depends on the actual factor of desiring-production, not the other way around. see p127-9. so the oedipus complex doesn't explain neurosis. to the contrary, neurosis explains why we continue to depend on the oedipus complex.

so these are the paralogism (or tricks, if you like) that you'll continually run into when you're being oedipalized by anyone - doctors, teachers, parents... they'll take one tiny object and blow its meaning out of all proportion - extrapolation (which equates to the notion of 'ontological lack'). they'll give you a contradictory choice - 'only you can stop yourself from misbehaving' (meaning we respect your power to choose, so long as you choose the way we want you to) - double-bind (which equates to law and guilt). they'll identify you in structures which have little bearing on who you are - 'c'mon, you're better than this; you're a <insert your family name here>' - application (which equates to signifier and signification). they'll use their prohibitions to prove you wanted to break them - displacement. and if all else fails, they'll just presuppose whatever problems you're having result from whatever system they use to diagnose those problems - afterward.
_

February 20th, 2005, 10:38 AM	#11
Lazzarone Regular Name: Kevin Sanchez School: Hard Knocks Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Austin, Tejas Posts: 1,591	1. scu : "In the simplest of terms, ideology functions by creating a dialogue in which the individual internalizes the idea that they are an agent of that ideology." desiring-machines operate on a deeper level than ideology: "how poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-option of it by a social order. ... as for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this 'form of content' that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier." (p133) one of the main lines of thought that anti-oedipus pursues is, 'why do the masses desire fascism?' and "it is not a question of ideology" (p104) - that's only the crust of the bread of production: "libidinal economy is no less objective than political economy, and the political no less subjective than the libidinal, even though the two correspond to two modes of different investments of the same reality as social reality. there is an unconscious libidinal investment of desire that does not necessarily coincide with the preconscious investments of interest, and that explains how the latter can be perturbed and perverted in 'the most somber organization,' BELOW ALL IDEOLOGY." (p345) this would also be d&g's response to a book like 'what's a matter with kansas?', which claims that rural folk have been duped into voting against their own interests: "that is why, when subjects, individually, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests - when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat - it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled" (p104) - interests and ideologies always come after the infrastructure of desire. 2. there's no distinction between desire and social production. the 'idea behind the car' is the very platonic idealism d&g wish to smash. desire is merely objective (immanent): "there is no particular form of existence that can be labeled 'psychic reality'. ... there is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other. ... desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production." (p27, 28, 30) - as such, *there's no individual fantasy, only group fantasies that have grown in particular individuals. this turns psychoanalysis on its head and points towards a 'material psychiatry', or schizoanalysis. 3. scu : "As I understand it, and please make a note if I am incorrect, the paranoiac-machine and the miraculating-machine function within the "disjunctive production of recordings," and the celibate-machine fucntions within the third level, "the consumptive production of consumptions"." the paranoic machine operates through a connective* synthesis, the miraculating machine a disjunctive synthesis, the celibate machine a conjunctive synthesis. (you mix up the first two again in the paragraph equating the miraculating with the connective. for a good review, see pages 36-41.) -- this correlates to marx's three-part dissection of capitalism - production, distribution, and consumption. d&g update this a little, however, putting production in all parts of the process, and reconstituting distribution as 'recording' and consumption as 'consummation'. {one might ask how all this avoids becoming a hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis)? in fact, one of the objections deleuze ran up against was 'he's so anti-hegel he reifies hegel'. -- d&g would respond that all three of these parts are syntheses, and that they all occur simultaneously. they'd also say there's no evolution toward a harmonious whole, no final completion of the process (p42 - 'we believe only in totalities that are peripheral'; p43 - 'the whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which neither unifies nor totalizes'). plus, that most ideas in the book travel in threes makes it much easier to understand, once you get going and start piling the three-part distinctions on top of one another (as we will below).} 4. scu : "Intensive quantities, again, please make a note if this is incorrect, are the new recordings, which for D-G remain nameless. For Freud, it is the Oedipus complex. D-G do not reject the Oedipus complex as such, but they do reject the Freudian insistence that this is the sole framework for reorganization, reterritorialization. In Marxian terms, the reorganization is through ideology. The ideological superstructure produced in the transition to capitalism is the reterritorialization of ideology; the consciousness and language produced between the reorganization of economic means of production (previously present in the body of the despot, or the age of feudalism) and the ideological means of production (previously the church, now the educational system; economics is taught rather than theology). This reterritorialization is the celibate-machine." intensive qualities correlate to the celibate machine (paranoic being repulsive, and miraculating attractive); it's the miraculating machine that produces recordings; and reterritorializations and deterritorializations can occur at all levels of the process (although you're onto something because territorialization/reterritorialization/deterritorialization isn't a bad way to map this [footnote 1]). i realize this is all jargon if you haven't walked through the text, so let me try a(n overly-)simple metaphor: imagine you're in a dreamless sleep. this equates to the body without organs. pure unproductivity. then BAM!, an alarm clock machine interrupts you. suddenly a slice of reality pierces your BwO, and you can't stop the 'and ... and then ... and then'-nature of what's happening. and this is where your libido kicks in, probably wanting to throw the clock out the window, because under the burden of waking up early everyday, you've developed a constant sense of paranoia about the sudden withdrawal from your sleep. then sleep begins to attract you again, and you start to detach yourself from the necessity of waking up on-time, drifting off in half-dreams. maybe you even imagine yourself waking up, going about your daily routine, as a way of avoiding it. you record these different dream-scenarios, delaying : 'either i get up, or i go back to sleep,' [five minutes pass] 'either i don't shower, or don't eat,' [ten minutes pass] 'or i create an impossible world without time, hmmmmm' - 'either... or... or... or...'. these two machines working you over are in opposition: first you're connected into reality against your will (connective synthesis) and the next thing you know you're using your will to disconnect from reality (disjunctive synthesis); first you're like someone with o.c.d. next to an un-flushed toilet (neurotic) and the next thing you know you're a pervert in line at the titty bar (psychotic)... what brings together these two opposing forces? the answer is the same person who is telling the story - a subject. this subject doesn't pre-exist the story, but they are produced as one part alongside the others. at the same time as it consummates the process, a subject is only a residual effect; it's a totality alright, but at the periphery (conjunctive synthesis). 'so it's.... so it's... (me!)'. now you're the schizo who finally has awakened to go for a walk. {of course, the above is only a metaphor, about a book constantly advising us to discard metaphors. for one, i put the events in a linear order of clear separations when reality doesn't work like that - all parts of the process really occur at the same time, overlapping and interrupting one another. and i also kinda mis-situated the body without organs, since it's the force that's repelled by the alarm clock. and so on.} +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ regardless, it's all just a way of simplifying these these equations: a. paranoic machine = production = connective synthesis = flow (hyle) = withdrawal/selection (prevelevement) = neurosis = libido = 'and ... and then' b. miraculating machine = distribution (recording) = disjunctive synthesis = code (chains & schizzes) = detachment = perversion = numen = 'either.. or...' c. celibate machine = consumption (consummation) = conjunctive synthesis = subject = residue (residuelle) = schizophrenia = voluptus = 'so it's...' +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ also important to keep in mind is that a machine is a system of interruptions, machines make patterned breaks in energy flows, that's all. i'd like to add digressions into detail here, but this is close enough for government work. [footnote 2] 5. anyway, to return to the original quotation from scu - i would say that d&g do in fact reject the oedipus complex as such : "it is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the love attachment of children to their mothers and fathers. it is a question of knowing what the place and the function of parents are within desiring-production, rather than doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within the restricted code of oedipus. ... by boxing the life of the child up within the oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, we cannot help but fail to understand the production of the unconscious itself, and the collective mechanisms that have an immediate bearing on the unconscious... the unconscious is an orphan ... insofar as psychoanalysis cloaks insanity in the mantle of a "parental complex," and regards the patterns of self-punishment resulting from oedipus as a confession of guilt, its theories are not at all radical or innovative. on the contrary: it is completing the task begun by nineteenth-century psychology, namely, to develop a moralized, familial discourse of mental pathology, linking madness to the 'half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the family[.]' ... hence, instead of participating in an understaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping european humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effect to do away with this problem once and for all." (p50) oedipus, no doubt, existed before psychoanalysis, and the authors have no qualms about situating it in a socio-political context; but the oedipus complex is exactly what they discuss above - a necessarily repressive project. this brings us to marx. d&g part company with the base/superstructure approach (as well as marx's antropological elevation of man above nature) when they say "we make no distinction between man and nature... man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other - not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product." (p4) that, and capitalism in its postmodern form has no need of ideological belief anymore : "above all, there is no longer any need of belief, and the capitalist is merely striking a pose when he bemoans the fact that nowadays no one believes in anything any more. language no longer signifies something that must be believed, it indicates rather what is going to be done, something that the shrewd or the competent are able to decode, to half understand." (p250) this reveals the brutal, amoral relationship between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, where (schizophrenic) capitalism desires the absence of limits, and this is crucial to texts such as hardt&negri's empire. the superstructure falls into the base of material production - why revert to myth (dreams, fantasy, ideology)? ... hence the need to destroy the illusions: "destroy, destroy. the task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction - a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. destroy oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration. ... schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions. destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. and when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent. ... the task of schizoanalysis is that of learning what a subject's desiring-machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in the machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what becomings in each case. moreover, this positive task cannot be separated from indispensable destructions, the destruction of the molar aggregates, the structures and representations that prevent the machine from functioning. ... the task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others." and this explains why i wouldn't call them structuralists, since they wish to destroy 'oedipus-as-structure' (p107) - post-structuralists perhaps? .k (kevin.sanchez@gmail.com) [1] see, the trouble is that capitalism is only a relative deterritorialization, not an absolute one like schizophrenia. capitalism reterritorializes with one hand what it deterritorializes with the other (p257). but this reterritorialization isn't the same as that done by the despotic state, although the state can also serve this function (as a neo-archaism). rather it's a question of the axiomatic (p233), and this relates to the work marx did in deriving the laws of capital. also see p246. [2] later (see p261) this three-part distinction maps onto types of social organization: an underlying territorial machine (earth), a trascendent imperial machine (despot), a modern immanent machine (capital). you can trace the development of our history with this model: first there's territorial codes [primitive and savage], then the universal state (urstaat) over-codes [imperial and barbaric], then schizophrenic money de-codes ['civilized' and capitalist]. "Fetishes, idols, images, and simulacra - here we have the whole series: territorial fetishes, despotic idols or symbols, then everything is recapitulated in the images of capitalism, which shapes them and reduced them to the Oedipal simulacrum". (p267) see also p35 - the neurotic, the pervert, the schizo (and p66). _____ appendix - it also may help to explain the various fallacious conclusions of psychoanalysis which d&g call 'paralogisms' (following kant). the first three each deal with a synthesis respectively. misusing the connective synthesis is extrapolation - this means extrapolating a partial object into a transcendent one. e.g. a child rolls a model train into a tunnel, and the shrink says, 'so you wanna fuck your mom?'. when you keep to the partial and nonspecific use of this synthesis, then you're keeping things real; but when you get global and specific (reducing everything to the parental and conjugal), then you're illegit. secondly, misusing the disjunctive synthesis is a double-bind, setting up a contradictory situation. 'you can choose any color, so long as it's green'. wrongly this is exclusive and restrictive - imaginary and symbolic; rightly this is inclusive or nonrestrictive. thirdly, there's application. this equates to applying a mis-identification to someone: 'you're one of us'. wrong : segregative and biunivocal - segregative and familial; right : nomadic and polyvocal. there's two more paralogisms - displacement and afterward. displacement is like a forbidden fruit trick. you're prohibited from doing something in order to persuade you that your true desire is to break the prohibition. "the law tells us : you will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that's what I wanted!" (p114). on p115, three terms help explain things (which i won't go into) : repressing representation, repressed representative, and displaced represented. afterward is the devilishness of cartesianism: all things become charted on a grid where oedipus comes first and 'actual factors' (symptoms of neurosis and psychosis, problems of living, etc.) come after. it's a way of prioritizing myth and treating units of desiring-production afterward. d&g claim that even jung, adler, and reich do this, whatever their disagreements with freud; the authors argue instead that oedipus is purely reactionary, that oedipus depends on the actual factor of desiring-production, not the other way around. see p127-9. so the oedipus complex doesn't explain neurosis. to the contrary, neurosis explains why we continue to depend on the oedipus complex. so these are the paralogism (or tricks, if you like) that you'll continually run into when you're being oedipalized by anyone - doctors, teachers, parents... they'll take one tiny object and blow its meaning out of all proportion - extrapolation (which equates to the notion of 'ontological lack'). they'll give you a contradictory choice - 'only you can stop yourself from misbehaving' (meaning we respect your power to choose, so long as you choose the way we want you to) - double-bind (which equates to law and guilt). they'll identify you in structures which have little bearing on who you are - 'c'mon, you're better than this; you're a <insert your family name here>' - application (which equates to signifier and signification). they'll use their prohibitions to prove you wanted to break them - displacement. and if all else fails, they'll just presuppose whatever problems you're having result from whatever system they use to diagnose those problems - afterward. _ Last edited by Lazzarone; January 11th, 2010 at 03:44 AM.