constant escape

winter withered, warm
Admittedly, I've just jumped all over the place. I read the intro a couple of times then just looked up Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs etc in the index and jumped to any point at which they were mentioned.
I mean you could make a solid argument that that would be the way to penetrate the book. It would be the farthest removed from a linear reading.
 

version

Well-known member
My approach to this is to read what you want to read, and just frequently play lectures/podcasts about the other stuff in the background as you do other things, until whenever you get to studying them directly.

After hearing however many talks about the central points of so-and-so, or how so-and-sos project fits into the meta-narrative as such - you get to have a running start when you actually read them.
Yeah, eventually I just decided to read whatever I want and see what I can get out of it. You could spend a lifetime preparing to read some stuff.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I still believe that a ton of it consists of different attempts at articulating more or less the same things, or different angles at the same things.

And if you can spend x hours digging down on your own terms to understand this stuff, I'd say it would be worth 2x, 3x, maybe 4x hours trying to understand what is behind someone else's articulation. That would be the way to make a ton of progress in a relatively short time.
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah, I've mentioned before that I already understood the rhizome from reading Burroughs and Pynchon and dropping acid. They're different licks of paint on more or less the same chassis.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
@Linebaugh

Did you ever finish AO?
no, but I picked it up again recently and I think I'm going to try and read it through. It gets considerably easier after the first chapter.
Im a 140 pages in. Deleuze is at the very least an entertaining writer, regardless of how one takes/comprehends his ideas- one of the ways he riffs on Nietzsche.

Its also a tad abrasive for the same reasons you were talking about Capitalist Realism, i.e. mental illness is entirely societies fault. That's not exactly what Deleuze is saying, and you can tell that he goes to pains to dance around outright saying that, but sometimes it feels only good faith is keeping me from interpreting it that way. Helps to keep in mind the understanding of the unconscious the continental philosophy guys are working with.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i'm taking vimothy's advice and gonna read delanda as a way in to the big dloozy. i did read the first chapter of '1000 years of non linear history' ages ago but then had to give the book back. Gonna get started on it again soon.
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't think he meant literally starting his books in the middle. Just the point you just made about "always being in the middle", although apparently once you've read the intro to ATP you can read everything but the conclusion in any order you like.

This is also ideological. You get it with the Wake too. It's a move against the search for pure origins. The root of the white race.
 

luka

Well-known member
This relates to the etymology thread too where again you have a search for pure origins the untainted source of the white race.
 

catalog

Well-known member
This relates to the etymology thread too where again you have a search for pure origins the untainted source of the white race.
there was a movement in victorian reaction america where they tried to do away with all the stupid english-isms that made no sense eg changed colour to color and put 'z's in where 's's were. didn't catch on properly. back to basics protestant approach to things.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
This is also ideological. You get it with the Wake too. It's a move against the search for pure origins. The root of the white race.
By opposing the presupposition of a beginning, you arguably necessarily oppose the presupposition of an end.

So you're left with this constant, eternal movement, the extremity of which I suppose would be totally nomadic and non-dialectical, but I think you can find a middle ground.

That is, an eternal dialectic of sorts. But it wouldn't be that the cosmos do or do not operate dialectically, but rather perhaps a pragmatic question of what we stand to gain by treating dialectically or not.
 

version

Well-known member
That Deleuze quote about a musician being someone who appropriates something from a continuous acoustic flow is something I think about a fair bit.

»One can conceive of a continuous acoustic flow that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow: notes? Aggregates of notes? No? What will we call the new sound from a musician?«

Like catching and surfing a wave, the turtles in Finding Nemo riding the East Australian Current.

 

sus

Well-known member
Deleuze is where you go to piss or shit or do other degenerate things, e.g. if yr shroomed-n-sped-out before a Slayer set. "Heya wankers, where's deleuze?" "Right to the lefta the stage ya cunt kencha see em"
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
From a passage on colonialism:

'If it is true that thought can be evaluated in terms of the degree of oedipalization, then yes, whites think to much'
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
What does oedipalization mean to you? I still haven't gotten a footing there.

edit: I suspect this line of inquiry is rife with irony.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
What does oedipalization mean to you? I still haven't gotten a footing there.

edit: I suspect this line of inquiry is rife with irony.
They use it as social repression that subsists automatically in the unconscious. The book is called a guide to the 'anti fascist life' so you could call oedipolization internalized fascism (a phrase I think they even use themselves). Have you suppressed your desire and love your daddy?

I best understand how they use Oedipus as a 'signifier.' They talk about the the unconscious as 'productive' and Oedipus as 'expressive.' The Oedipus complex takes the indifferent, meaningless machinations of the unconscious and makes them expressive of the oedipal arrangement: mummy-daddy-me. So Oedipalization introduces a transcendent object (the signifier, the phallus) into the world that codes it accordingly. Asking 'what does it means?' equates to: what 'true' authority is this expressing? and the question 'what does it do?' is better suited in unlocking the processes of the unconscious.

I believe they also refer to Oedipus as the history of desire. So oedipolization also refers to the set of material conditions that have developed to usher in Oedipus- this expressive, unproductive mode of being. (Which is the chapter I'm currently on, so bear with me) They call primitive society territorialized, which, from my estimations, means the social bodies directly corresponded to the unified territorial body of the earth. No Oedipus yet. Just as primitive man works directly on the body of the Earth and thus understands its many parts in terms of use (what can I eat, build with and etc.), social formations follow the same way: social positions in primitive society are dependent on their use. Did you see suspended reasons David Gaeber post on debt? Because that is exactly what they are referring to. We've found that primitive society functioned on a system of debt, i.e. the family was coextensive with the social body in that every member of the family is woven in this web of social debt (literally demonstrated by the primitive practice of exchanging women/wives). So incest is a taboo not because of Oedipus, but because what constitutes the mother, father, son, daughter is dependent on what those positions mean in this web of social debt. I.e. what does the father/mother/son/daughter do in the primitive social system. Incest would make these positions unproductive as it would close them out of the social sphere

Oedipus develops through a historical process of deterritorialization, starting with the separation of the social and familial bodies, which begin as coextensive in primitive territorial relations. The first step in detterritorialization is the despot who establishes himself as a kind of signifier, suddenly the debts and alliances of primitive society have 'meaning' in relation to the despot, or the State. Social formation is no longer entirley dependent on use, but is now coded by the signifier that is the state, the despot This is where I am in the book, so I cant speak much further, but you can see how the development of capitalsim later on only deterritorializes further through the seperation of labour and the means of production.

So to take us back to the classic Oedipal question, the Oedipus complex isn't the incest taboo, its when the incest taboo exclusively subsists in the unconscious. Once incest would have destroyed the entire structure of primitive society as it would take people out of the social system of debt, but incest now is a kind of arbitrary taboo. Really, if we all decided to enter incestuous relationships tomorrow, our mode of production would remain unaffected as the famlial unit and social body are entirely separate and enclosed units. So Oedipus is what detaches, encloses, makes arbitrary and unproductive.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah @suspendedreasons Graeber post was really helpful, as is yours here. I haven't been able to piece together an understanding until now.

So oedipalization, as it seems to be laid out here, can be figured as a repressive process, with ever more layered/nuanced coding being piled upon some kind of id/impulsive core? More and more elaborate and circuitous pathways for the magma to reach the surface?

Kinda seems like a form of energy harnessing, optimizing the application of vital energy, which, if left unrepressed, would not have amounted to nearly as much, in terms of complexity. Now, to satisfy some of those urges, we need to be, or appear to be, at the front end of the pack, the more optimal mate, the byproduct of which arrangement is a sort of general advancement of whatever the group endeavor is?
 
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