offshoots

Like almost everyone else who has posted below, I'll mention that I found the reading this week very challenging. But I'll also note that not only is the "Rhizome" chapter a performance of its concepts, "The Desiring-Machine" performs as a sort of desiring-machine itself.

"Desiring-machines ... continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly: the product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run" (A-O 31).

Our readings of this text are both the production process and the product. One of the tendencies that D&G are combating here is the "so it's..." of interpretation. There is no "Oh, so it's the anti-Oedipus because the Oedipus presents itself as too primary or something like that." There is no correct interpretation that we can turn to, nor even is it as feasible in this text to just work through sentence by sentence like we did with Derrida. It defies that kind of linearity by its very structure, by beginning in the middle and by moving to different offshoots rather than carrying through to some kind of end.

The text, then, is an exemplification of desire in the reader. Throughout my reading of "The Desiring-Machines" I had a feeling that I was lacking something, that I was simply not reading closely enough to figure out what D&G were really saying. But that is precisely the move the text enacts. "Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object ... Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine" (26). Within the "real" of the text, any reading is possible, and in fact the desire to make a reading of the text (both the production and the product) is in fact the aim of the text.