notebookeleven

Marc Ngui | Drawing – Art

Larvalsubjects has an interesting post on Marx in the academy over here which has generated a lively discussion in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of agency has risen to the fore again.  This is still something I find disturbing, something I’m not really able to get a grip on fully, since I tend to understand the problem of agency as responding to something like a desire to answer the question ‘what difference can I make?’.  "Where’s the agency", someone might ask, "in these economic analyses of desire (D&G) or capital (Marx)?  Isn’t it all just a huge machine in which I am nothing?  And if it is a big machine, how did this machine produce it’s own auto-critique?  Isn’t it really the break, the rupture (of the subject), that we need to theorise?  Isn’t consciousness really the most important fact in reality since it is inexplicable by reality?   Me, I’m important, surely – doesn’t my analysis do anything, offer anything – don’t I have the answers, or at least the right to produce answers or the possibility of finding them?"  I’m inclined to dismiss these questions out of hand as the whining desire of a resentiment-filled petit-bourgeois who thinks they’re ‘in charge of their life’ in the first place  but have to recognise that at least some of the charge invested in this response is disproportionate and perhaps related to the other peculiar investments I find myself bound to (revolution, majik, sex).

One of the things that I thin I agree with larval about is that the emphasis of thinkers such as Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere and Zizek seems to be inverse to that of Marx – "Don’t these positions [Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere, Zizek] postulate that change proceeds via consciousness, rather than consciousness, thought, emerging from modes of production?" larval asks. 

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One of the re-occurring problems that Deleuze & Guattari address within Anti-Oedipus (AO) is that of the apparently self harming act.  This is perhaps most clearly indicated in the way in which they return to the ‘desire for fascism’ within the masses that Wilhelm Reich attempted to address in his book The mass psychology of fascism.  Reich, whom D&G declare  "the true founder of a materialist psychiatry" (AO: 129), was unsatisfied with any theoretical explanation of the rise of fascism that failed to account for its popular support.  They phrase this in terms of desire – "Desire can never be deceived.  Interests can be deceived, unrecognised, or betrayed, but not desire.  Whence Reich’s cry: no, the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism, and that is what has to be explained" (AO: 279).  The argument is a attempt to allow reality to speak, to let the facts back in, in particular the unpalatable fact that there was this support for fascism (this desire).  Such a fact, the argument presumably goes, means that we are faced with the options of (i) either those who voted and marched and applauded the fascists were somehow duped or else (ii) they willingly and knowingly wanted this state of things (which is taken to be a kind of contradictory situation since it is ‘against their own interests’ for the masses to desire fascism).  Unlike a simple despotism in which the autocrat installs themselves through violence, perhaps aided in some sense by passivity, the fascist regime came to power through a popular passion, through the desire of the masses.  This poses the problem of why people desire that which is against their own interests, why people desire that which oppresses them?

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The snoring man on the train, just behind and to our left, revolts us. Their noise is more penetrating – more cutting – even though it is lower in decibel than the irritating child a few seats in front with their high pitched and hyperactive voice testing the patience of the father figure accompanying them. The snoring man is filthy in his activity, that rasping breath, that grasping for life calling out to be silenced – and with its silence comes death. The sound of the breath is a broken tool that reveals its function, its equipmentality as Heidegger would call it, precisely by being heard. That filthy, contaminating breath, no gentle rythmn of life but a crushed, rushing in-out-in-out intimacy that brings the Other too close, too far within the experience of living together that repulses us within our modernity, repulses us because of its forced confinement amongst each other.
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There’s an interesting online psych project over here at Project Implicit…an interesting thing mentioned on Thought Capital’s blog post about the use of ’empirical data’ in ’evidenced-based meta-analyses’. I presume these EBMA’s are some sort of peculiar category of philosophical activity, perhaps connected to the idea of ’experimental philosophy’ which, whilst fascinating, seems to sometimes miss the point. Can evidence ever establish particular principles of thought? If not, then is it for a philosophy a question of giving up principles or of giving up evidence? Is there a dichotomy here that cannot (in principle or in fact) be resolved?

This difficulty, of what we might call the distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris is critical to any attempt to understand transcendental philosophy. There is an argument being made (James Williams, Dan Smith etc) that it is in fact principles that are crucial for Deleuze, that the quid juris has in some sense a priority derivable from an affinity of Deleuze’s method with that expressed by Leibniz ’Principle of Sufficient Reason’. Everything has to have a reason for existing, a ratio existendi, rather than simply a reason for being, ratio essendi. In fact, Smith argue, Leibniz in fact added other epistemological and metaphysical conditions in the PSR with the notions of ratio cognoscendi (a reason for how we can know the thing, the principle of indiscernibles) and a ratio fiendi (reason for becoming out of that which already is or law of continuity preventing arbitrary MacGuffin like inventions during the course of an account). The PSR aims to fulfill all that we would ask for in either of the quid moves, such that a question of fact or principle is capable of being responded to by understanding the sufficient reason for a thing.

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There is a background to every text, a life, a thought, an obsession, a spilt cup of coffee on papers badly placed on a temporary desk. Good sex, drunken rants, flirtatious concepts, all of these form part of that which will never be said within the text, only ever sensed, occasionally and differently, by the readers and writers who follow the words along the page. This, maybe, is why people want to read biography, interviews, trivial detritus from the lifetimes of another, the writer, the author, the proper name appended to the title. When the text is one within philosophy there’s this sense that somehow knowing about the brandishing of a poker or the peculiar arrangement of garters, socks and toilet habits, somehow knowing this will help know the concepts. This betrays a latent humanism, most often, where we want to know what the author thinks, we want to discern accurately, so we think, the moments that occurred in someone elses’ mind and re-occur them in our own. There seems no reason to assume this humanistic notion of a transport of ideas from one mind to another as the central task of reading and interpreting a text. There seem many reasons to assume that a text is in fact nothing to do with an author to the extent that the act of reading occurs without any author and if the text works it works without an author other than the reader. Would it matter, say, that the images and ideas drawn from a book that had been read under one name suddenly found themselves shifted to another name? It might matter in terms of understanding the author but surely the point of reading is to understand the ideas and images not the author? Otherwise I would always be in a better position to understand an author by talking directly to them and not reading their work? The author really does seem somehow redundant, theoretically, since it is the ideas and images that we are interested by and in.

Despite this, those texts that occur on the margins of ‘real’ texts, authorised works, always seem to have a strange, uncanny necessity to them. This is no less the case than in ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ by Felix Guattari, a collection of strange and varied notes and jottings produced in the course of writing, jointly with Deleuze, the work ‘Anti-Oedipus’, the first volume of ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. When I first acquired this text a few months ago I read through it quickly and briefly, finding it strange and impenetrable, dismissing it as a rather weak and perhaps idiotic collection put together more as part of an attempt at hagiographical recuperation than intelligent concept creation. Guattari is increasingly viewed as an aberrant force on Deleuze, the ‘wild’ infecting the ‘pure’, lunacy implicating itself into rigour. Zizek is no doubt the main location of such a view (in his ‘Organs without Bodies’) but it’s not isolated to him alone and the increasing interest in the central and more ‘classically philosophical’ work such as ‘Difference and Repetition’ also appears at times, justifiably or not, as the result of an attempt to subtly, perhaps even subconsciously, purge Deleuze of Guattari. In this context ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ (henceforth AOP) might be thought as an attempt to regain the crucial duality or pluralistic-monism of the name ‘Deleuze-Guattari’. All this, however, would be to miss the point or purpose of the AOP. There is no hagiography here, nor any attempt to somehow provide evidence for the absolute necessity of the double name. Instead there is a kind of compassion.

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