/lit/ - Literature

>>10567775
Their project works on several different levels. Basically, they were materialists who criticized Freud and Lacan for not being truly materialist (Lacan probably never cared much about it, but Freud constantly considered that he was after some kind of scientific objective truth). The reason for their idealism was that they gave too much credit to images and language and none to matter, treating matter as inert rather than as having singular points (which are its forms, so that the matter-form duality no longer stands) which allow for complex interactions. Jung is included in these criticisms even though D&G are closer to him than to Freud (Deleuze being the only French citizen to think that Jung is more profound than Freud, as Derrida joked).

Their linguistic theory is related to their criticism of psychoanalysis even though it has its own targets and logic (Hjelmslev against Saussure, Labov against Chomsky, etc.), their aim being to show that when language is self-contained in a system it is starting from a set point and treating it as the rule rather than the enforced exception. Language is creative and we must stutter in our own language, which amounts to finding the right assemblages for us, the key point being that an assemblage connects things from very different domains (the orchid and the wasp interact despite being materially different and evolving separately initially, as Proust says): it connects words or phrases to affects (not just feelings, but every type of capacity to affect and be affected) to environments to times to spaces to gestures to images to anything else you can think of. Thus language as such cannot be thought isolated except by discarding the things that give it sense to begin with. Like DeLanda says: if someone says that their life has no meaning and that they're depressed about it there's no point in showing them the dictionary definition.

>>10451360
>>10450667
First off you have to understand that D&G are Spinozists, it's all about connections being maintained, strengthened or broken. When an internal relation becomes / acts like an external one you get a breakdown like in the case of cancer or autoimmune disease.

> Wtf does he mean by machines

For D&G machines are different from the mechanical in a deterministic sense. Think Spinoza or Leibniz's efforts to introduce the infinite into the finite of representation, but with difference rather than identity (which is fundamental to representation). If machines didn't function by breaking down and interrupting each other (as >>10451360 points out), you'd have an unbearable experience of the infinite (constantly hungry or horny or scared, etc.). They function through difference and repetition, differentiating from one another and reinforcing themselves through repetition.

The desiring machines of Anti-Oedipus produce all of experience through Kantian synthesis: they connect things, often things that don't go together by nature of their substance (weird dream content, delirium, or, in nature, the orchid and the wasp). D&G changed the term to assemblages to better reflect how contingent the connections can initially be. Haecceities (this-ness of a thing) become part of assemblages: 5 o'clock in the morning is nothing special, but if you wake up daily at that hour and suddenly find yourself unable to do otherwise that's because a new assemblage has been formed.

> Wtf does he mean by BwO and its relation with de desaring machines

Think connections directly to matter, such as when animals act on instinct in strange ways based on apparently external imperceptible forces (pressure, magnetism, etc.) and change their migration patterns like is often observed with sea lions or how animals sense earthquakes before they happen. Now associate these connections to experiences that affect your entire body: falling in love (activation of erogenous zones and shift in connections between perceived object and feelings, etc.), masochism (the contingent connection between pleasure and pain where pain is transformed without ceasing to be pain) and obviously drug fueled experiences.

> Wtf is his notion of schizophrenic

For Deleuze especially, following Nietzsche, there is a pluralism of material unconscious forces and series that dictates life. If your daily subjective connections differ based on various cycles (if you're tired you're not in the mood to do something else despite having a job to do, if you're hungry you start thinking about food a lot, etc.) then you get a very mild version of the imperceptible changes that make a schizo go from normalish (between certain thresholds) to full on paranoiac without realizing it until it's too late for example. The problem is that many internalize the discourse about them, becoming psychoanalytic or psychiatric stereotypes even if their condition wasn't that severe to begin with.