/lit/ - Literature

drop that french pseud gibberish and read jordan peterson

>>11370899
great post thanks

in all seriousness i wonder what jp would think of deleuze

>>11370888
Desiring-repression isn’t brought about from Capitalism in Deleuze’s work. Rather, we desire repression because of the Oedipal Structure of society ~ Daddy keeps you away from mommy and that’s how you become a well functioning member of society according to Freud. Deleuze and a bunch of other European thinkers attributed Fascism to the Oedipal structure, JP also gets on this in a way when he talks about how Hitler was, in a sense, the paternal sovereign archetype - orders you must obey to keep you safe and what not.

Capitalism, in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is just Anti-Oedipus. So like the schizophrenic in his work isn’t oedipadized properly so they slip through society and the desire flows some strange ways because they don’t have the Oedipal repression and then they’re the body without organs redirecting desire into new assemblages and they’re really the only ones who can create novel things and desiring-machine arrangements because they short-circuit whatever desiring-machine they’re a part of, and there’s actually the freedom you would expect to have under capitalism for once.

>>11370899
they're not mutually exclusive. you can read deleuze and still clean your room and pet cats.

>>11370888
capital isn't necessarily the immanent or immediate freeing of all flows of desire. capital is the limit of what can be freed, as well as the freeing process of deterritorialization, but it's not like everybody can immediately do this or would necessarily even necessarily want to. there are repressed people in a schizoid world as much as there are schizoid people in a repressed world.

your second sentence seems pretty much correct as i understand it. representation is the thing D&G want to get over, because they think Oedipus is bunk. but people still repress - fetishism feels good. they may not want to but they do it anyways. and on top of that, fetishization can become normative or lucrative. it's perverse, but you still do it (and ultimately, everything is probably only shades of perversion anyhow).

so repression isn't necessarily brought about by capitalism, it's brought about by people who make up a capitalist world. capital is an underdeveloped form of schizophrenia in that sense, the place where the rubber meets the road, and out of this comes the socius. and circulation always happens regardless of what kind of society you are in. so in a sense capitalism doesn't bring about repression, and repression doesn't really bring about capitalism. capitalism is the term we can use to talk about what happens between the poles of some form of despotism and schizophrenia as the flux of immanent deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

i'm not an expert on this so feel free to shit on this interpretation if it seems way off.

>>11370951
Your description of capital is good. That’s why I like Deleuze though. He psychologises what the guy at the bank is doing just as much as the guy in the psychiatric hospital. And I mean it makes sense because it’s still just instinctual drives constrained by the superego.

>>11370949
Deleuze seems to me to be attributing a more metaphysical stance on desiring-repression, tho. He critiques reich early on for focusing exclusively on the familial structure, and he says that Oedipus is just a societal representation of all desiring-repression. I'm not too sure tho, but the explanation that it's purely the oedipal structure causing desiring-repression isn't satisfying to me. Thanks for helping, tho. It's very interesting stuff

>>11370979
You’re probably right regarding what Deleuze says, but that’s kind of where he loses me too because I don’t really see what desire has to do with metaphysics.

>>11370975
But yeah - you consider you go to like a bank and he talks to you about a ‘mortgage’ and it makes sense semantically, but then you consider that he presses a button moves cash around which is anchored to goods that are territorialized to certain instinctual drives (and everything usually works out), and suddenly the whole situation seems kind of precarious and a notion of re-territorialization in a capitalist economy doesn’t seem strange at all.

>>11370975
me too. at first the concepts D&G use seem pretty wild, and then eventually you find yourself wondering how you could have ever seen it any other way. it really does seem like a pretty accurate description of reality, rather than some kind of agitprop or literary fantasy, no matter how face-melting some of the concepts seem on first glance. by the end of it it's hard to see anything other than one big squishy and pulsional world all tangled up in itself. the last chapter of ATP is a mic-drop for the ages:

>We can no longer place the assemblages on a quantitative scale measuring how close or far they are from the plane of consistency. There are different types of abstract machines that overlap in their operations and qualify the assemblages: abstract machines of consistency, singular and mutant, with multiplied connections; abstract machines of stratification that surround the plane of consistency with another plane; and axiomatic or overcoding and abstract machines that perform totalizations, homogenizations, conjunctions of closure. Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic — perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic — but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.

>>11370979
But it just occurred to me too, if you apply it to like a Platonic metaphysics then desiring-production is what reaches into the world of forms and brings concepts and connections into material capitalist reality, and then desiring-represession just limits the potentially infinite becomings. But I know his metaphysics were heavily influenced by Spinoza and I’m not entirely sure it’s what he meant, but it makes sense to me.

>>11371030
To me, the idea of freeing the flows of desire only leads to more total subordination. The desiring-repression is necessarily what happens when desire is represented as signification in the form of money in the socius. Desire folds in on itself- when you desire something, the only way to acquire it is to express your desire in a necessarily capitalist mode, as capitalism integrates everything. Therefore, you're desire is subordinated necessarily to that of the system. No idea of this is right, but it's what I think is going on. I haven't finished anti-oedipus yet, and I would really appreciate if someone could clarify if my interpretation is the common one or a retarded fanfic i came up with because of illiteracy,

>>11371052
Makes sense, as I understand it, for everyone in the society except Deleuze’s schizophrenic who short-circuits money completely in the process of reterritorialization.

>>11371052
>>11371108
And I mean that also doesn’t sound like ‘freeing’ the desire flows but just the way desire operates in the at large Oedipal sense.

>>11370888
>How is desiring-repression brought about by capitalism if capitalism is the freeing of all the flows of desire
you're answering your own question here

>>11370906
Peterson, probably without knowing it, describes his own work in a proustian manner that Deleuze took for himself, namely as a kind of engineering of the psyche (and beyond), like a mechanic fixing and tuning his machines. Also, the cognitive stuff (embodied cognition in terms of environment and bodily mapping, cognitive patterns becoming entrenched and blocking or continuing one another) work well with D&G's assemblages. D&G said explicitly that the way the brain is described as working influenced their rhizomatic approach the most. Also, remember Derrida's joke that Deleuze was not only the only French intellectual, but the only French citizen, to think that Jung was more profound than Freud. Still, D&G criticized archetypes as being post hoc simplifications and territorializations as they prefered the daemonic model (the daemons were messangers between territorialized Gods in Ancient Greece) of in-betweens, unlikely connections between things that normally don't go together (disjunctive syntheses).

>>11370888
Desiring-repression is a bad term since it can mean both desire of repression and repression of desire. It is possible that Zizek was, at least in part, right about the Oedipal familial organization as an axiom of capitalism as being an outdated model. Remember that Marx and Engels criticized the family as a part of the framework of capitalism (the woman as the unpaid caretaker of the working man, family as a means of maintaining wealth and power at the cost of inauthentic relationships, etc.). So I'd rather agree with the points made itt about representation as blocking desire. It's almost like choosing porn over sex, something gets lost even as desire is fulfilled.

>>11371013
> You’re probably right regarding what Deleuze says, but that’s kind of where he loses me too because I don’t really see what desire has to do with metaphysics.

Depends on what you mean by metaphysics. But think about it this way: desire is at the core of all experience (if you do not desire anything at a given moment, you desire for that moment to continue as it is for example). Every phenomenon can be interpreted in many ways: artistic, scientific, erotic etc. and every interpretation and evaluation has an assemblage attached to it. Assemblages have many components, part of them material (biological) and part of them relational (some assemblages can share material components). Matter is not just one uniform thing, but a series of self-differentiating intensities (they constantly differentiate from themselves and from each other in their becoming) that have thresholds and limits. At some level assemblages, no matter how fluid, have thus something to do with metaphysics within the Deleuzian framework. The thing is that this doesn't always come out in an obvious manner in his work with Guattari even though it's the same framework (they explicitly use intensities as a concept).

>>11370949
First time this french hack makes sense to me

>>11370949
>the schizophrenic in his work isn’t oedipadized properly so they slip through society and the desire flows some strange ways because they don’t have the Oedipal repression and then they’re the body without organs redirecting desire into new assemblages and they’re really the only ones who can create novel things and desiring-machine arrangements because they short-circuit whatever desiring-machine they’re a part of, and there’s actually the freedom you would expect to have under capitalism for once.

tl;dr "Be a yuppie artist!" Did Deleuze know he was shilling the ideology of late capitalism or was he that much of a dumb boomer?

>>11371052
Read Clouscard. He utterly destroyed Deleuze and proved that Anti-Oedipus is little more than a bastardization of both Freud and Marx in order to advertise for capitalism which now requires new markets and demographics.

>>11371897
Like you'd know anything about deterritorialization given that you post the exact same thing every time like a paranoiac stuck in his own very narrow assemblage.

>>11371904
> a bastardization of both Freud and Marx

That's the point, it was not just a creative take on the two, but also an attempt to go beyond them where they failed.

> to advertise for capitalism

This is as silly as it sounds. Capitalism doesn't require D&G to advertise it in order to succeed. The Maoist critiques of Social Democracy (in which they place D&G just as much), in which Clouscard seems to fit as well, miss the point of their abstractions entirely. Desire is just as much of a problem within capitalism as it is in any other possible organization, unless we transform humanity into something non-human entirely of course and even then it is the result of desire.

>>11371960
>Desire is just as much of a problem within capitalism as it is in any other possible organization, unless we transform humanity into something non-human entirely of course and even then it is the result of desire.

Isn’t that in some ways the point of D&G? That the total deterritorialisation by capital and it’s attempted reterritoroalisation will ultimately be resisted due to the schizophrenic nature that has essentially brought humanity almost beyond desire, or rather will bring about a desire for the Real over the symbolic. I haven’t read them so I might be way off point here, fascinating ideas though.

>>11371960
>>11371944
Deleuze towards the end of his life admitted that he ended up helping capitalism more than anything.

>>11371960
>Capitalism doesn't require D&G to advertise it in order to succeed

Funny comment. I've actually thought about this exact same thing in relation to Ayn Rand.

>>11372086
(citation needed)

>>11372086
Don't know about that (although I'd love a source for it), but he did say that he and Guattari can't be responsible for every misunderstanding concerning their work.

>>11372078
That may be part of it, but it doesn't have to be capitalistic in the end. It's like what D&G said about drugs, there's no benefit to completely destroying yourself through the deterritorialization that they provide.

>>11372078
D&G seem to be less about imagining a new world order than about understanding how dystopias are formed and the necessity of seceding from them. it seems to me that the life of the nomad war-machine is kind of like this: almost like the uncanny doppelganger of the urstaat but knowing it.

it might be the case that there *is* no ideal sociopolitical configuration for Humanity as such, no Best Possible political configuration of capital and desire. it doesn't seem that we can 'get beyond' desire, the best we can do is to just pay attention to it and follow where it leads rather than into the places we 'want' it to lead, given that all of these forms of wanting may only come after the fact in that sense, wish-fulfillment fantasies that inevitably disappoint (however perversely pleasureable it may be to fail, sending us back to our analysts and so on).

>A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments. - deleuze

the appeal of schizophrenia seems to be that it represents an outer limit for thought, that it is itself a way of connecting to the plane of immanence from which governments and other things are *derived* but can never be perfectly emblematic of, since in order to do that they would have to become BwO's themselves. that's what gives them, i think, their 'revolutionary' character. it wouldn't be a New Revolution to take the place of the old one, this is just more of the same, more repetition. the New thing is radically different and not intended, perhaps, for repetition or central planning. and that makes sense, too, given that we can see that leftist or socialist governments can be just as destructive as the 'capitalist' systems we have now that we blame all the ills of society on.

it's people who do this, in the end. the despots, the will-to-despotism, is/are in us long before they come to appear in the world.

>>11370888
I haven't really studied Deleuze in any depth but I know a lot of ideas are coming from Wilhelm Reich... googleing in "Anti-Oedipus" on page 129:
>Reich was the first to raise the problem of the relationship between desire and the social field (and went further than Marcuse, who treats the problem lightly).
A lot of these Eurotard theorists liked the ideas of the younger political Reich (although there's still "issues" they seem to sidestep in his work e.g. homosexuality being a dangerous social neurosis) but didn't want to deal seriously with anything of his after he moved to America (voted for Eisenhower) and started writing about "red fascism" and can be seen as just joining in the very American tradition of clever entrepreneurial scam artists (inventors of perpetual motion machines, time machines, cancer cures, etc, etc) who can best be relegated to the field of crackpotology. [i.e. see http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/reich.htm typical stuff that avoids the serious later empirical experimentation in favour of theories].
I know Engels didn't believe in the second law of thermodynamics which is clear from his Dialectics of Nature and even more so as seen in his polemics with Podolinsky [Marx died just before he could seriously engage him]. I don't think that can just be ignored as a weird quirk as the politically correct ecologists are trying to do by greenwashing Marx. Be it Marxs notion of "surplus value" or Reichs notion of "orgone" energy the central consequence of human activity here has been expanded reproduction understood as a source of real significant cosmological negentropy.
Of course these notions are much to weird for establishment science to take seriously... mathematics itself has been so "successful" in physics but weak in social science because of the refusal to take the paradoxs of set theory seriously and the set of all sets is the dialectical movement at the very heart of set theory... "dialectical" applies to any process modellable by a reflexive sentence here i.e. nonlinear processes. You got to go back and read Gödel 'n shit, science is totally retarded today, no real cures for illnesses, moore's law is coming to an end, etc, etc
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/godel.htm

>>11372086
That's the process of reterritorialisation though appropriating his work. It's an irony he would is clearly aware of. It doesn't mean that his thinking wasn't revolutionary.
Deleuze is so staunchly anti-capitalist and so frequently makes this clear in all of his works that it's abundantly clear people who get the idea he was some sort of neoliberal (same thing with Foucault) clearly haven't read any of his work.

>>11372317
Ah, I get the reference
You used that philosophy report auto generator

>>11372349
>it's abundantly clear people who get the idea he was some sort of neoliberal (same thing with Foucault) clearly haven't read any of his work.

Neither one of them makes it easy on their readers though because they both continuously conflate the descriptive and the normative, so sometimes they can be read as defending current society in general, and sometimes they seem vehemently opposed.

It's similar to people's readings of Nietzsche in that way.

>>11372360
I highly doubt though enough people have read Deleuze to misread him - he is hardly entry level, unlike Neetchur. I suspect it is caused by a mixture of the "Epic Accelerationism" Nick Land stuff and probably how critiques of critical theory generally operate.

>>11372317
Why would they have to engage with Reich's entire body of work? D&G weren't shy of quoting literal psychotics, it's just that they only took from them what they wanted as being orthodox wasn't productive.

As for the science stuff, Deleuze questioned the second law of thermodynamics as well or rather how far it was taken as a metaphysical principle even at the price of dogmatism. There is no shortage of controversy between Deleuze's influences (Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza, Simondon etc.) and science.

why couldn't deleuze just chill out and enjoy things

>>11372419
It's also a matter of the left constantly being at odds with itself. Guattari frequently got into fist fights with Stalinists when he was a Trotskyst in his youth. Alain Badiou pulled all kind of shit on Deleuze when they were colleagues at Vincennes and so on. It's no surprise everyone, trying to be more leftist than the next guy, was denouncing everyone else as capitalist sympathizers.

>>11372671
looks pretty chill to me

>>11372671
Well he lacked a lung for most of his life. I have a hard time seeing how much fun I would able to have with just 1 lung.

>>11372360
> conflate the descriptive and the normative

Both for Nietzsche and for Deleuze the distinction is mostly pragmatic rather than ontological. When dealing with evaluations and interpretations, the tendencies towards one value or another tend to have a material component (even if it is more complicated than that, hence assemblages and rhizomes and all the rest). Even though is-ought and similar dualisms can be reintroduced, they are nonetheless not part of their systems of difference.

>>11371904
based clouscard poster

d&g is the buffy the vampire slayer of philosophy, self-referential nerdy universe-building that hits edgy academy pseuds in their erogenous zones. deliberately opaque and further divorced from praxis than even derrida. He deserves credit only for Difference and Repetition, which at least situatates itself in the realm of intelligibility (sorry, i mean its haeccity with conventional linguistic multiplicities places it in the same assemblage. somethingsomething plan d'immanence)

>>11372267
ooh wow what a deep fucking insight, the ussr did repressive shit JUST LIKE THE WEST oh fuck and I only had to slap my dick between the pages of a thousand plateaus 305 times

start a fucking trade union instead of masturbating your neurons

>>11372360
sorry nigga, nietzsche was a proto-fascist, foucault was a neoliberal and deleuze/guattari ivory tower word-salad tossers.

>>11371904
so mad that i can't seem to find clouscard in english anywhere.

>>11372747
Start with Nietzsche and Philosophy to get rid of some of that ressentiment.

>>11372747
don't put your genitals in books anon

it's not good

>>11371904
>>11372747
Clouscard was parody.