User talk:DoctorMabuse/Sandbox29

Sum, I see that you've restored a paragraph that I deleted. I can see why, I think, since it forms part of the explanation that D&G offer as to how it is that we come to desire our own oppression. I agree that, in addition to telling the reader how D&G address this question, we also need to give at least some indication of the answer that they provide. As it stands at present, however, I don't think that this paragraph manages to do that very accurately.
 * (wikified for any others who read this, and because it's a habit now...)

It's been a while since I was in close contact with AO, so I may be mistaken, but this is how it seems to me: firstly, the relation between the social, familial, and individual doesn't seem right (insofar as it seems rather Freudo-Marxian rather than schizoanalytic). It's not that it 'starts' in the social, 'descends' to the family, and ends up in the individual. Just looking at the chapter cited, for example, notice how they reject the framework posited by Lacan and his followers: no cultural/social a priori (the Symbolic). This is part of a more general rejection: no a priori "terrain" whatsoever (not biological either)--"one thereby plunges deeper into familialism and generalizes it" (101). Perhaps what concerns me about the phrasing is that it might enable the question to be framed within the understanding of the relationship between the terms that D&G explicitly reject: treating the family "as a microcosm, an expressive milieu" (104), in which the social and the individual are mediated via the family (as in the discussion of Cooper's anti-psychiatry). Instead, following Bergson, D&G open up these 'realms': "For the disjointed fragments of Oedipus remain stuck to all the corners of the historical social field, as a battlefield and not a scene from bourgeois theater. Too bad if the psychoanalysts roar their disapproval at this point" (106); mommy and daddy only as fragments, not figures or parts of a structure. We are always "directly coupled" to political and historical elements (107), thanks to the "identical natures" of social production and desiring-production (109). The paragraph merely reverses the false temporal scheme of the psychoanalysts (instead of 'from pre-oedipal mommy, through oedipal daddy, to latency, and "beyond" that, the social' we have 'from the social, through the family, to me'). It's not that these 'social forces,' via the family, eventually invest an individual's desire. That's a kind of base/superstructure model beloved of the DIAMATs (in a kind of 'social being determines unconsciousness'). Rather, it's that desire always immediately invests the field of social forces.

I guess what I mean is that we should make a distinction between the operations of power in an oppressive reality that D&G describe ("the real forces, the real causes on which the triangulation depends" (123)) and the false descriptions of the relationship between society/family/individual that the psychoanalysts (and traditional Marxists) proffer. The paragraph as it stands seems to collapse the two. Of course, through psychoanalytic practice (along with many other organs of bourgeois society, the nuclear family included), its model becomes more than a mere theoretical construct: "Doubtless there are many other forces besides psychoanalysis for oedipalizing the unconscious, rendering it guilty, castrating it. But psychoanalysis reinforces the movement, it invents a last priest" (122).

forces/structure

Now, it seems to me that my presentation of their argument is complicated by D&G's description of the process of "application" (110-114xx). They write that "it is Oedipal applications that depend on the determinations of the subjugated group as an aggregate of departure and on their libidinal investment" (113). These applications involve "a segregative use of the conjunctive syntheses of the unconscious, a use that does not coincide with divisions between classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a dominating class [...]. Oedipus depends on this sort of nationalistic, religious, racist sentiment, and not the reverse: it is not the father who is projected onto the boss, but the boss who is applied to the father" (113-114).

On the basis of this, they address the fundamental question (of desiring oppression): "It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure" (114). Their rejection of ideology as an explanation establishes a distinction between unconsious investments of desire and the preconscious investments according to the interests of a subject (114). This is where the quotation that you've used in the paragraph appears their argument: These investments of an unconscious nature can ensure the general submission to a dominant class by making cuts (coupures) and segregations pass over into a social field, insofar as it is effectively invested by desire and no longer by interests. A form of social production and reproduction, along with its economic and financial mechanisms, its political formations, and so on, can be desired as such, in whole or in part, independently of the interests of the desiring-subject. It was not by means of a metaphor, even a paternal metaphor, that Hitler was able to sexually arouse the fascists. (114) Here they anticipate one of my favourite quotations of AO ("The truth is that sexuality is everywhere..." (322)). Desire invests the flows of social production directly, and this can be either a reactionary investment (a segregative and biunivocal use of the syntheses) or a revolutionary investment (a nomadic and polyvocal use).

The flow of social forces doesn't invest the individual's libido, but rather desire--sweeping the individual up along with 'it'--invests the social flows directly, an investment that can be reactionary or revolutionary. Now, it's true that this distinction is defined in terms of the interests of the dominant and dominated classes (115).

Paralogisms
Illegitimate (idealistic and transcendent) uses of the syntheses of the unconscious: the four paralogisms (120-121; 124-xx).


 * the first paralogism: extrapolation (Oedipus' formal cause)
 * global and specific use of the connective syntheses
 * use has two aspects: parental and conjugal
 * Lack: deprivation (theological appearance: insufficiency of being)


 * the second paralogism: the double bind (Oedipus' method)
 * exclusive and restrictive use of the disjunctive syntheses
 * use has two poles: Imaginary and Symbolic
 * Law: commandment (theological appearance: guilt)


 * the third paralogism: application (Oedipus' precondition)
 * segragative and biunivocal use of the conjunctive syntheses
 * use has two moments: aggregate of departure (racist, nationalistic, religious, etc.) and aggregate of destination (familial)
 * Signfier: meaning (theological appearance: signification)


 * the fourth paralogism: displacement