I'm not sure I've been terribly successful in picking apart Deleuze and Guattari this week, the combination of a head cold and 1000 plateaus creating a particularly cluttered and stuffy environment in my brain. But I couldn't help but read D&G through the other texts we've discussed, particularly through Plant. They seem primarily concerned with structural un-doing, and their rhizomatic text struck me as a theory-remix, an attempt to disrupt out categories and mental frameworks, particularly in the way we consider capitalism.
They combine flow, production, and pattern in the "desiring machine," which is the catalyst for production. Desiring machines struck me as appealing to Plant because they seem to create it as feminine. Schizophrenic and repressed, the flows are connective tissue between partial objects, and are even described as menstrual fluid.
In contrast, the body without organs is a nonproductive force (and very anti-Freudian in this reading, as the non-female, or male, is the non-productive). What puzzles me is its connection to entropy, or anti-pattern, as it "sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid."(9) In capitalism the body without organs is capital itself, "appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process."(10)
This comparison really strikes me from the IR, political science perspective as a criticism of capitalism in the vein of Polanyi. Deleuze and Guattari say capitalism perverts the world because capital takes on an artificial importance "since all of labour's social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour itself."(11) According to Polanyi's criticism of the capitalist system, capital is not a productive force in itself. More importantly, the foundations of capitalism rely on an essential fiction, that land, money, and labor are all commodities. The commodification of labor is similar to the body without organs in capitalism as being in conflict with the direct productive force, the desiring machine.
Despite these connections, I'm not sure how to define the body without organs in a manner that relates to its title (Why is it called a body? Why is it without organs?), and I can't make much sense of their use of schizophrenia something I'd like to unpack in class.
Monday, November 10, 2008
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.
"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.
What
I find Deleuze and Guattari's writing style to be very interesting and at the same time a little bit off-putting. That being said, there self-affirmed anti-polemical or maybe post-polemical style makes engaging with them very difficult. It's not that they aren't open to asking and engaging in questions. The difficulty is that they don't always answer the questions that I want them to answer. Oftentimes their process engages in a mutation of engagements to a degree to which I don't even know if the questions I'm asking make sense.
So, I guess the first question for me is what is the status of the rhizome? Is it primarily a description, a rectification of the arborescent illusion? What I mean is, have we always been always-already capable of being and becoming rhizomatic? Or, is the rhizome a prescription, a call to action for anti-arborescent thought. I feel that for Deleuze the answer is doesn't really matter. But, I feel that those questions become important for situating Deleuze in a history of intellectual thought. That is of course unless intellectual thought is rhizomatic in the first place (should be?) and Deleuze fits in everywhere and nowhere.
The status of ideology is also murky between these two works. Deleuze states explicitly that there is no and never was ideology. If that is the case, why does it make sense for him to talk about an ideology of capitalism. More, to the point if rhizomes have no exteriority, how does a process like capitalism even fit into Deleuze's conception of micropolitics. I think the answer for him is that it wouldn't or it doesn't. There are no first principles, everything starts from the middle, lines of flight and all the rest. Not desiring machines in capital but rather desiring machines and capital. This line of thought is somewhat troubling for me. I don't quite understand how Deleuze and Guattari can break apart Oedipus without starting from the first principal of Oedipus or account for capitalism or the lack-thereof without starting from the first principle of Capital. I guess, a rhizome and some grass sounds like a great idea until we remember that behind abstractions there are real people living real lives and those real lives exist in a context that are situated within a variety of factors (paraphrasing Zizek).
So in that sense I suppose that only one sense of rhizome works for me. It has to be descriptive, a correction of fallacies in thought, in other words an ontology in order to work for me.
At least comparing a sock to a vagina is alright.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
It's always the middle
For some reason, after reading the chapter on the rhizome I couldn't help but consider how politics is necessarily rhizomatic. That is, you have your arborescence existent in the democratic and republican parties but when it's time to campaign, you have to sell yourself as the rhizomatic candidate. The one that is connected to every demographic, every person, every industry, every dot, and is, neverthless, not better; a first among equals; one of you. The rest of the time, a party can have its extreme positions but the tree must masquerade as grass or it will be chopped down. The nagging question for voters, which one is more multiple. Of course, due to the impossibility of holding every view possible, the rhizome ends up false and incomplete. This rhizome exists within the binary logic of this or that candidate and this or that position. The campaigns are forced to create a false rhizome out of the binary logic that's been handed to them; and once elected are expected to continue in that rhizomatic middle while existing in a new hierarchical system of binary decision-making.
I am not tired of trees.
I, for one, would like to make it clear that the "we" Deleuze & Guattari use when they state that "we're tired of trees" is not inclusive of myself, though perhaps I should not be as self-protective in this instance since it seems that the "we" is the biunivocal Deleuze/Guattari (hereafter D/G). I was reminded of my affection for trees yesterday, when I was climbing one. I had to climb one with stout, lower branches that I and a young girl I was babysitting could reach and then hoist and lever ourselves up to higher, more numerous yet more perilous branches above. Hanging upside down in one tree, while we pretended to be more primal apes, I was unfortunately reminded of D/G. D/G claim that thought is not essentially arborescent, with which I tend to agree, but in the tree I began to think of brachiation, or arboreal locomotion (though we eventually decided against the monkey bars), and the problem of essentialist arguments.D/G write of the "wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else" (p. 11). The rhizome to D/G is a system of relations, with their preferred metaphor being rhizome-as-map, versus the genealogical tracings required by tree systems. Yet I find that the map, as a 2D plane of representation is troubling in regards to D/G's imperative that we "always follow the rhizome by rupture... make it vary until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions." I find the discursive "breaking away" of these "lines of flight" to be difficult to spatially imagine. D/G ask us to "extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency." Do I then view these lines covering over, a layering or highlighting effect on the map? Do I imagine planes bisecting each other, breaking out of the 2 dimensions inscribed by the map, and constantly overlapping to create a shape in 3 dimensions? The rhizome/grid system I know from experience to be a useful tool for analysis, particularly in relation to projects I have done involving Actor-Network Theory, yet I find these projects problematized by D/G. What objects I choose to privelege as actors, what relationships I imagine and choose to include and how I represent their variables make me wonder: am I a tracer or cartographer?
Networks of texts, with the root-book at its core, makes me think of a tree I might climb as being the D/G root-tree, considering how many texts I have read in this class and others that reference them. This brings me back to monkeys and brachiation. I find it much easier to imagine myself simian, and perhaps here I hang from the D/G tree and not so far off I see the Foucault and the Freud and the Derrida trees, their multiple, incountable branches each representing a book that involves them. And I can swing from this tree to the next, making a rhizome at each point of contact. I find this vision more representative of how I think, not arborescent but inter-arboreal, as I try to draw connections, make a map of what I have read, what I remember, and what makes sense to me. My thoughts may not be essentially arboreal, in their production or relations in the black box that is my neural system, but the thought pattern I perform seems to be. It is this performative aspect, like in Hayles' discussion of the title of her book, that most interests me.
Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass.
"The Desiring-Machines" is an extraordinarily difficult text. That said, I found it helpful to use other theorists as points of reference for the various arguments Deleuze and Guattari make. Not to sound like a wine connoisseur, but: I detected definite notes of Derrida and Burroughs in the piece. For Derrida, there was a redolence of the "supplement," however much D and G resisted the notion of an originary lack. Discussing Marxist economics (which I do not profess to understand), there was the idea of moving around surplus, of residues (capital) turning around and preempting foundational principles (labor); of "anti-production [operating] retroactively" to "appropriate productive forms"(31); finally, of the "body without organs" appearing to "allow us to return to nothingness" though it is decisively "not an original primordial entity" and is "not the proof of an original nothingness"(8, 33). At the center, then, is the desiring-machine, the interminable chain of interrupting productions and productions of productions. The subject becomes a residue of production, a mutating waste product (a bricolage). And if a "whole" ever exists, it is simply another term in the fragmentation, unable to "totalize." The main difference between these ideas and that of the supplement is that, I think, Derrida more firmly believes in the paradox, the originality of the supplement, whereas D and G mark the retroactive residuum as more of a counter-pressure.
Burroughs helps in thinking about ideas of coding, recording, and the schizophrenic. The surface of the body without organs is an "enchanted surface," divine, miraculous. Within inscription lies the power of creation, a machine whose interruptions form the residue of a "writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real"(39). Think of Burroughs' claim that the virus has a tendency to make itself real, that hieroglyphic writing itself demonstrates and eventually realizes (produces?) a natural state (beyond or before the The, the IS, the EITHER/OR); the virus, for him, is literal. For D and G, the act of recording creates a "genuine consummation," something "autoerotic" and "automatic," perhaps autopoetic. The hallucinations and delusions of the schizophrenic are real in that they create felt realities, in that "delirium is in fact characteristic of the recording that is made of the process of production of the desiring-machines"(22). There is no "lack" of reality: desire produces its own object. Playback, tape recorder 3, the productive cut-up of mechanical processes, creates a residue within its setting that is very real.
The schizophrenic is he who "scrambles all the codes" and who "never [records] the same event in the same way"(15). He "deterritorializes" the event and thus holds influence over it. To look at the subject: taking his image out of context, scrambling it, the subject becomes a frenetic and fractured thing. Subjectivity in Burroughs' writing is at the mercy of recordings, inscriptions, cut-ups--the subject cannot fall back on the essentialism of bodies, of organs and organic processes; inside is, perhaps, a machine contiguous with the machines all around him. There is no inside or outside. Similarly, the scrambling and deterritorializing work of the schizophrenic provides a vital bridge between the machines of the body and the machines of society: "schizophrenia is desiring-production as the limit of social production." Moreover, "the neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society"(35). Thus, the crisis of subjectivity and identity is moved out of the insular realm of the family, out of the realm of biological determinism and the individual psyche. Disorders of the mind become social disorders, irreducibly connected to capitalistic/social production. In the same way, for Burroughs, identity (through the machine of recording, inscription, imagery) opens up to society. The body becomes bodies, the animal animals. The virus machine connects the subject to the tape machine, the projection-screen machine, the media production machine.
Burroughs helps in thinking about ideas of coding, recording, and the schizophrenic. The surface of the body without organs is an "enchanted surface," divine, miraculous. Within inscription lies the power of creation, a machine whose interruptions form the residue of a "writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real"(39). Think of Burroughs' claim that the virus has a tendency to make itself real, that hieroglyphic writing itself demonstrates and eventually realizes (produces?) a natural state (beyond or before the The, the IS, the EITHER/OR); the virus, for him, is literal. For D and G, the act of recording creates a "genuine consummation," something "autoerotic" and "automatic," perhaps autopoetic. The hallucinations and delusions of the schizophrenic are real in that they create felt realities, in that "delirium is in fact characteristic of the recording that is made of the process of production of the desiring-machines"(22). There is no "lack" of reality: desire produces its own object. Playback, tape recorder 3, the productive cut-up of mechanical processes, creates a residue within its setting that is very real.
The schizophrenic is he who "scrambles all the codes" and who "never [records] the same event in the same way"(15). He "deterritorializes" the event and thus holds influence over it. To look at the subject: taking his image out of context, scrambling it, the subject becomes a frenetic and fractured thing. Subjectivity in Burroughs' writing is at the mercy of recordings, inscriptions, cut-ups--the subject cannot fall back on the essentialism of bodies, of organs and organic processes; inside is, perhaps, a machine contiguous with the machines all around him. There is no inside or outside. Similarly, the scrambling and deterritorializing work of the schizophrenic provides a vital bridge between the machines of the body and the machines of society: "schizophrenia is desiring-production as the limit of social production." Moreover, "the neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society"(35). Thus, the crisis of subjectivity and identity is moved out of the insular realm of the family, out of the realm of biological determinism and the individual psyche. Disorders of the mind become social disorders, irreducibly connected to capitalistic/social production. In the same way, for Burroughs, identity (through the machine of recording, inscription, imagery) opens up to society. The body becomes bodies, the animal animals. The virus machine connects the subject to the tape machine, the projection-screen machine, the media production machine.
Art and Desiring-Machines
I was intrigued by Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of artists in “The Desiring-Machines.” Desiring-machines work through the process of breaking down and art takes up this necessity for dysfunction for the purpose of creating group fantasies. Thus, art works out the broken down quality in a way that pleases or evokes pleasure from a group of viewers. Literally converting the dysfunction into the realm of desiring-machines. Desire within art, as a real productive force, is then a machine of antiproduction.
“Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because it has few needs.” (27)
Desire is an “abject fear of lacking something” (27), but that need comes from the objective being, man, who then desires to produce in the real. Artists take the fact that man, as organized in relation to the masses, deprives him or her of its objective being. Thus, art is the process of producing the objective. This simple process has intense repercussions and explosive qualities because it is something deprived to man. How can the artist use this practice of production politically? Does art provoke pleasure in a group of viewers or are Deleuze and Guattari speaking about a specific bourgeoisie group? Is there a difference between revolutionaries, artist, and seers or can their practices all be seen in the same light?
Reduced to Production?
I'm still trying to grapple with many of the specifics of each D&G essay, but it seems that "production" plays a large role in their approach. I found "The Desiring Machines" especially relevant in this instance, as their polemic centers on refuting psychoanalytic theories of desire as expression or lack in favor of a fundamentally productive concept of the unconscious:
In a word, when the theoretician reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, he is content to exploit to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, rather than a process of production, of 'industrial' production. (A-O, 26)And while their theories provide a much-needed corrective to theories of the liberal subject in which a man's needs and wants arise spontaneously, I wonder if their emphasis on production isn't also leading them into a more fundamental complicity with capitalism. My suspicion, which is based on Baudrillard's essay "The Mirror of Production," is that liberal political economy, Marxism, and, if my theory holds up, Deleuze & Guattari overdetermine man as a producing subject.
Does pointing to the "industrial" production of desire naturalize capitalism & its organization of labor? It's hard to ask questions like these of Deleuze & Guattari's text, for the distinction between natural and social is thrown into question by their theoretical framework. And it would seem that they take serious issue with the way that desire is repressed, constrained, channeled into and coupled with capitalist economy. Yet lines such as "everything is production" (which occurs twice on page 2) still make me uneasy. Am I failing to embrace the plane of consistency, the continuity of desire and the real? Or are Deleuze and Guattari relying too heavily on "production" as some sort of totalizing explanatory principle?
I can't say that I have any answers. I found the reading very difficult this week, but I hope that as we discuss it in class I'll get a better handle on it. Yet I also wonder if the sort of understanding that I want isn't exactly the kind of totalizing, abstract thought that Deleuze & Guattari reject.
Any way but up
The only thing that seemed obvious to me from the reading this week, maybe only because I've read some Galloway, too, is how the Internet fits into a rhizomorphic structure as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Point-to-point systems, like snail mail and auto transportation, integrate none of the “principles of connectivity and heterogeneity” of a rhizome. With mail and auto travel, there is a beginning, an end, and a middle piece--transport--that never seems fast enough. The Internet, as a rhizomatic conglomeration of interlinked pages, seems to have "neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills," (ATP, 23).
D&G's elaboration of the rhizome as being made of "lines" with no points, infinite offshoots (21). They pose the rhizome in contrast to hegemonic, arboreal structure (that lies beneath linguistics, psychoanalysis, and politics itself) which, it is to be presumed, grows upward, not laterally, bears fruit, and provides shade. My question, I guess, is one of dimensionality. Does a rhizome ever "grow up"? When a rhizomatic structure has hierarchical effects, what does this say about the rhizome itself?
A rhizome, as defined by D&G,
What is at stake in positing a politics based on a "natural" rhizomatic root structure?
D&G's elaboration of the rhizome as being made of "lines" with no points, infinite offshoots (21). They pose the rhizome in contrast to hegemonic, arboreal structure (that lies beneath linguistics, psychoanalysis, and politics itself) which, it is to be presumed, grows upward, not laterally, bears fruit, and provides shade. My question, I guess, is one of dimensionality. Does a rhizome ever "grow up"? When a rhizomatic structure has hierarchical effects, what does this say about the rhizome itself?
A rhizome, as defined by D&G,
- connects any point to any other point
- has traits that are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature
- combines different regimes of signs, even nonsigns
- is reducible neither to the one or the multiple
- is composed not of units but dimensions, directions in motion
- has no beginning, no end, always middle
- constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions, having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out in a plane of consistency and from which one is always subtracted
- is in constant metamorphosis
- is made of lines--but not like those in arborescent structures
- is not the object of reproduction
- is antigenealogical
- is short-term or antimemory
- functions by variation, expansion, capture, conquest, and offshoots
What is at stake in positing a politics based on a "natural" rhizomatic root structure?
Production and Anti-production
G+D equate identity within the desiring-machine to production, and the inability of separating that machine's only purpose of production from the essence of that machine: "Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow connective synthesis also has another form: product/producing. Producing is always something "grafted onto" the production.... We cannot accept the idealist category of 'expression'" (AO 6). This lack of expression seems almost like a question of agency or will. There are no actions (or as G+D point out, no difference between inside/outside), but instead this constant direction and interruption of connected energy. We are left with these connections or patterns as identity itself, or identity, more specifically, is this constantly cycling state within these intertwined machines. What I take away from this is a machine only exists because it produces, for that is how we identify the machine.
What I am not sure of is how nonproductive or anti production fits into the picture (I assume G+D use this terminology from Marx). "The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs" (AO 8). The schizophrenic table is only described as being a table because it contains the remnants of a table, or a shell, and acts as an assemblage of different furniture parts. Would nonproductive here refer to the table's lack of flat surface to hold things (i.e., the schizophrenic table does a poor job of what we desire a table to do)? I assume this means the avatar of a table automatically assumes productive properties by "going about with its business" but does not assume the functionality or comforts we assume of a table. Thus, is that the anti productive aspect of the table? This ability to assume an identity through the shell of production, and not in fact live up to that identity, but instead continue on as something completely different?
I then took this anti production into account with the socius (the socius being the record of production) within this body without organs (BWO) so that anti productive process allowed for the appropriation of these productive forces. "The forms of social production, like those of desiring production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of anti-production coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius.... It falls back on [il se rabat sur] all production... thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause" (AO 10).
Initially, I viewed this socius, in collaboration with the anti-productive forces, as a negative/hostile device within the BWO. However, am I on the right track in thinking that this is exactly what allows the schizo subject to reject rigidly imposed subject determination? "The full BWO is produced as antiproduction to keep itself from having any sort of triangulation imposed on it" (AO 13). G+D give the schizo this "recording code" that allows the BWO to get outside of the "social code." And this is how we arrive at the anti-Oedipal table? The table without a mother, a father; the table that has been everything (the bricolage of spare parts). I get this last point, but I am not sure how we arrive at the "either,... or, ... or, ... or" through this nonproduction, other than it's ability to allow the subject to appropriate his/her/it's own memory via the socius.
As is noted by D+G, identity here is the ability to be constantly born and reborn here (Klossowski commenting on Nietzsche) "As a result, an identity is essentially fortuitous, and a series of individualities must be undergone by each of these oscillations, so that as a consequence the fortuitousness of this particular individuality will render all of them necessary” (AO 21). Identity is this oscillation through "series of individualities," or a production, but is antiproduction here only to claim this socius for use within production? A socius in this case seems so internal, and identity acts as if it were an expression.
The Rhizome Datastructure
For some reason when I kept reading the rhizome I kept thinking of CS datastructures. I always thought of Saussure as an influential datatype creator: signifier/signified (Sign) vs. key/value (Hashtable). G+D come across to attack this Structuralist thinking, where we must now feal with "collective assemblages of enunciation function direct within machinic assemblages" (ATP 7). Enunciation comes arcross as essential here, we must not confine ourselves to these classic datatypes, but must break out of this one to one correlation we are used to. Could one create the Rhizome datatype? Is this even possible?
CS datastructures are exactly what G+D argue against. The Chomskian tree (the ever revered binary tree), the pivot (the top node), the n+1 (the addition to the ONE node). Hashtables, dictionaries, trees, stacks- they are all the same in this case.
The rhizome must accommodate (ATP 21):
"Signs and nonsign states"- is that just allowing different object types (like a Java Vector), or the ability to allow non-objects?
"anti-genealogy"- No child nodes allowed, no hierarchy traversal
"n-1 dimensions"- I might need a better working definition of this, but it looks like recursion as we typically know it isn't allowed here.
"Not points and positions, but lines"- seems to count out vectors, and digital representation on the whole.
"Not a representation"- This seems possible.
Interesting:
http://capitalismandschizophrenia.org
What I am not sure of is how nonproductive or anti production fits into the picture (I assume G+D use this terminology from Marx). "The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs" (AO 8). The schizophrenic table is only described as being a table because it contains the remnants of a table, or a shell, and acts as an assemblage of different furniture parts. Would nonproductive here refer to the table's lack of flat surface to hold things (i.e., the schizophrenic table does a poor job of what we desire a table to do)? I assume this means the avatar of a table automatically assumes productive properties by "going about with its business" but does not assume the functionality or comforts we assume of a table. Thus, is that the anti productive aspect of the table? This ability to assume an identity through the shell of production, and not in fact live up to that identity, but instead continue on as something completely different?
I then took this anti production into account with the socius (the socius being the record of production) within this body without organs (BWO) so that anti productive process allowed for the appropriation of these productive forces. "The forms of social production, like those of desiring production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of anti-production coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius.... It falls back on [il se rabat sur] all production... thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause" (AO 10).
Initially, I viewed this socius, in collaboration with the anti-productive forces, as a negative/hostile device within the BWO. However, am I on the right track in thinking that this is exactly what allows the schizo subject to reject rigidly imposed subject determination? "The full BWO is produced as antiproduction to keep itself from having any sort of triangulation imposed on it" (AO 13). G+D give the schizo this "recording code" that allows the BWO to get outside of the "social code." And this is how we arrive at the anti-Oedipal table? The table without a mother, a father; the table that has been everything (the bricolage of spare parts). I get this last point, but I am not sure how we arrive at the "either,... or, ... or, ... or" through this nonproduction, other than it's ability to allow the subject to appropriate his/her/it's own memory via the socius.
As is noted by D+G, identity here is the ability to be constantly born and reborn here (Klossowski commenting on Nietzsche) "As a result, an identity is essentially fortuitous, and a series of individualities must be undergone by each of these oscillations, so that as a consequence the fortuitousness of this particular individuality will render all of them necessary” (AO 21). Identity is this oscillation through "series of individualities," or a production, but is antiproduction here only to claim this socius for use within production? A socius in this case seems so internal, and identity acts as if it were an expression.
The Rhizome Datastructure
For some reason when I kept reading the rhizome I kept thinking of CS datastructures. I always thought of Saussure as an influential datatype creator: signifier/signified (Sign) vs. key/value (Hashtable). G+D come across to attack this Structuralist thinking, where we must now feal with "collective assemblages of enunciation function direct within machinic assemblages" (ATP 7). Enunciation comes arcross as essential here, we must not confine ourselves to these classic datatypes, but must break out of this one to one correlation we are used to. Could one create the Rhizome datatype? Is this even possible?
CS datastructures are exactly what G+D argue against. The Chomskian tree (the ever revered binary tree), the pivot (the top node), the n+1 (the addition to the ONE node). Hashtables, dictionaries, trees, stacks- they are all the same in this case.
The rhizome must accommodate (ATP 21):
"Signs and nonsign states"- is that just allowing different object types (like a Java Vector), or the ability to allow non-objects?
"anti-genealogy"- No child nodes allowed, no hierarchy traversal
"n-1 dimensions"- I might need a better working definition of this, but it looks like recursion as we typically know it isn't allowed here.
"Not points and positions, but lines"- seems to count out vectors, and digital representation on the whole.
"Not a representation"- This seems possible.
Interesting:
http://capitalismandschizophrenia.org
remove time from the equation...
Just to recap briefly my understanding of Guattari's and Deleuze's "Anti-oedipus": They seem to be rejecting that capitalist modes of thought train us to believe that we are constantly lacking something. This perpetual lack is then transformed as perpetual desire- more specifically, a desire to consume that desire. As such lack = desire. However, for Guattari and Deleuze, desire isn't a negative force that stems from/is lack; instead, it is an active production- a concrete force that is ubiquitous and omnipresent.
This reduction of seemingly everything into pure production machinery is a new and unique way of thinking of cybernetics and networks that also takes into account a skewed perception of temporality. Our other writers have also been interested in this non-western view of time: with feedback loops and the circular discussions of dichotomies, we have moved on from the linear A-->B mode of perception of time. However, for Guattari and Deleuze, even the circle seems to have collapsed on itself; they write: "Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced."
I wonder what is at stake when temporality between these once-loops is removed from the equation. Like a magician pulling out the tablecloth from underneath a set table, Guattari and Deleuze effortlessly, and a bit carelessly, seem to remove sequence and order from a highly organized and classified system. This reduction has huge implications: it even seems to imply that everything is the same; not that everything is nothing but that everything is everything and nothing is nothing. Distinction and demarcations are now gone: all we have left is desire.
This reduction of seemingly everything into pure production machinery is a new and unique way of thinking of cybernetics and networks that also takes into account a skewed perception of temporality. Our other writers have also been interested in this non-western view of time: with feedback loops and the circular discussions of dichotomies, we have moved on from the linear A-->B mode of perception of time. However, for Guattari and Deleuze, even the circle seems to have collapsed on itself; they write: "Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced."
I wonder what is at stake when temporality between these once-loops is removed from the equation. Like a magician pulling out the tablecloth from underneath a set table, Guattari and Deleuze effortlessly, and a bit carelessly, seem to remove sequence and order from a highly organized and classified system. This reduction has huge implications: it even seems to imply that everything is the same; not that everything is nothing but that everything is everything and nothing is nothing. Distinction and demarcations are now gone: all we have left is desire.
A Crowd of Authors, A Cacophony of Meaning
It seems taboo to engage with the beginning of a reading in a critical blog post. It makes it seem like you didn't get to reading the whole of assignment, so you dug into the most forward and superficial element of the equation: the beginning. But I have two reasons for doing just this. The first reason is that the beginning paragraph of "A Thousand Plateaus" is simply to interesting to be left alone. The second reason, is that in my subsequent reading through of Deleuze & Guattari, I was exposed to the concept of the rhizome, and as the text of "A Thousand Plateaus" is most certainly constructed as a rhizome, then the beginning of the introduction is neither a beginning nor an introduction.
From the literacy so embedded in Western Civilization, I began reading "A Thousand Plateaus" on page 3, under the section heading "1. Introduction: Rhizome." Immediately the seeming straight-forwardness of my approach was complicated by an enigmatic illustration included just above the first paragraph of the text. It looked like a piece of music, because it was structured like a piece of music. Because it was titled as a "piano piece" and included a number of clefs and registers to signify certain musical ranges within which a composition might be denoted. By the piece of music was not a piece of music. It was a piece of abstract art, packaged as music. It didn't seem to have any of the order, or compositional elements of music. Though I did not know what the term meant yet, this music was a rhizhome, an object that refuted traditional literacy because it would not parse from right to left, from here to there, along a (genealogical) progression. Instead, this music, swirled into itself, looped back and forth across time, and diverted across ranges and registers. It could not be read as a readable text, it require a new, yet unconcieved literacy. Perhaps a rhizomatic literacy, if something like that could ever be devised (my hunch is no).
The beginning paragraph text of "A Thousand Plateaus" is like the illegible music. It is bounded, boxed and formatted as a reader might expect it, written from left to right, under a section heading that not only articulated it's numerical position within other textual bodies "1." but also included the term "Introduction" as an almost redundant articulation of its primacy. An introduction is an entry-way, but what kind of initiation to a thesis could this be?
"The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd" (3). So far, so good. It seems that the authors are talking a bit about themselves, explaining their approaches and previous history together. But then, in the second sentence, the whole thing begins to burst open, "each of us was several" suddenly makes the single-line rational of authorship burst apart. Like the illustration above the text, the idea of a plurality of authors begins to hint at a cacophony of meaning. "Quite a crowd" makes the reader feel uneasy. Traditional literary conventions have always held that a single-voiced author speaks to a single reader, it is one-to-one, from here to there, from me to you. But in "quite a crowd" the whole illusion of the unity of the text, contigenty on the singularity of the voice of the author and the cohesiveness of the argument ruptures, and the singularity of the reader himself becomes under attack.
"We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied" (3). This is still the authors writing (is it?), about themselves (no longer a certain number, an expanding cohort) but already it is also true of the reader(s). When the text fragments along with the concept of a crowd of authors, there is also a rupture in the reader, a multiplication, as intimated by the illustration above the paragraph. Since there is no easy way to read the illustration, one is forced to create new strategies: look here then there, look forwards then backwards, trace a single line. But each of these is unsatisfactory. So the reader begins to imagine a new way to understand the picture, as a cohesive-pluralistic whole, which can only be read by following multiple (all) of the lines simultaneously. And that's how Deleuze & Guattari begin writing, forcing likewise a shift in the reader towards new readings. And there's no certain way to read it yet, because there is no one way to write it.
There's no end, and this wasn't a beginning. It was cloaked like a way in, but it was already the entire argument.
From the literacy so embedded in Western Civilization, I began reading "A Thousand Plateaus" on page 3, under the section heading "1. Introduction: Rhizome." Immediately the seeming straight-forwardness of my approach was complicated by an enigmatic illustration included just above the first paragraph of the text. It looked like a piece of music, because it was structured like a piece of music. Because it was titled as a "piano piece" and included a number of clefs and registers to signify certain musical ranges within which a composition might be denoted. By the piece of music was not a piece of music. It was a piece of abstract art, packaged as music. It didn't seem to have any of the order, or compositional elements of music. Though I did not know what the term meant yet, this music was a rhizhome, an object that refuted traditional literacy because it would not parse from right to left, from here to there, along a (genealogical) progression. Instead, this music, swirled into itself, looped back and forth across time, and diverted across ranges and registers. It could not be read as a readable text, it require a new, yet unconcieved literacy. Perhaps a rhizomatic literacy, if something like that could ever be devised (my hunch is no).
The beginning paragraph text of "A Thousand Plateaus" is like the illegible music. It is bounded, boxed and formatted as a reader might expect it, written from left to right, under a section heading that not only articulated it's numerical position within other textual bodies "1." but also included the term "Introduction" as an almost redundant articulation of its primacy. An introduction is an entry-way, but what kind of initiation to a thesis could this be?
"The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd" (3). So far, so good. It seems that the authors are talking a bit about themselves, explaining their approaches and previous history together. But then, in the second sentence, the whole thing begins to burst open, "each of us was several" suddenly makes the single-line rational of authorship burst apart. Like the illustration above the text, the idea of a plurality of authors begins to hint at a cacophony of meaning. "Quite a crowd" makes the reader feel uneasy. Traditional literary conventions have always held that a single-voiced author speaks to a single reader, it is one-to-one, from here to there, from me to you. But in "quite a crowd" the whole illusion of the unity of the text, contigenty on the singularity of the voice of the author and the cohesiveness of the argument ruptures, and the singularity of the reader himself becomes under attack.
"We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied" (3). This is still the authors writing (is it?), about themselves (no longer a certain number, an expanding cohort) but already it is also true of the reader(s). When the text fragments along with the concept of a crowd of authors, there is also a rupture in the reader, a multiplication, as intimated by the illustration above the paragraph. Since there is no easy way to read the illustration, one is forced to create new strategies: look here then there, look forwards then backwards, trace a single line. But each of these is unsatisfactory. So the reader begins to imagine a new way to understand the picture, as a cohesive-pluralistic whole, which can only be read by following multiple (all) of the lines simultaneously. And that's how Deleuze & Guattari begin writing, forcing likewise a shift in the reader towards new readings. And there's no certain way to read it yet, because there is no one way to write it.
There's no end, and this wasn't a beginning. It was cloaked like a way in, but it was already the entire argument.
"You are trying to tell me, my ass isn't a wolf?"
Starting with one of my favorite quotes here, I am honestly not quite sure where this is taking me, yet. I guess what interests me most in Deleuze and Guattari is their turn towards a theory of liberation which focuses on desire and incorporates a very sensual concept of embodiment of the subject as a desiring-machine. Why the desiring-machine should desire to turn into a body without organs, is one of the questions which I keep returning to. If the body without organs is essentially the non broken flow of desire, a permanent state of fluxus then where does the consciousness go? do we need one? Or do they desire to forget to dissolve themselves into bodies without organs through which everything flows? Pink mist?
The other question I keep returning to is the question of how multiplicity is produced/comes into being. If desire is an expression of capitalism in the way that it comes into being and is confined within the same parameters then what kind of multiplicity is this? Where does it come from? And what potential of liberation does it hold? Other than turning 'Schizo' and with drawing ourselves from the world? There must be more options.
binary be damned!
D + G position the rhizome as an antidote to the dichotomous binary logic that has for so long plagued theories of organization, information, biology, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, &c. A biological entity, a part of a whole, a network in itself, the rhizome serves as a metaphoric tool through which to visualize and represent the possibilities of multiplicity, diffuse connections, and non-totality. As a natural body of incredible complexity, characterized by flowing lines and interconnectivity, the rhizome highlights the hegemonic nature of linguistic and biological classification systems based on dualistic divisions, the singular vs. the multiple, and 1-2-4-8-16-32 patterns of binary division.
Authorship, Writing:
D + G understand their own work as fundamentally rhizomatic, reflexively situating “1000 Plateaus” as an interconnective, interdiscursive machine continuously transmitting “intensities” and trading multiplicities with other machines (literary and otherwise). (plateaus 5) Constructed through the assemblage of plateaus, “multiplicit[ies] connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome,” 1000 plateaus is organized along lines of interconnected thoughts, patterns, and observations the organization of which cannot be accomplished in a linear, totalizing structure. (plateaus 22)
Occident/Orient:
On page 18, D+G evaluate cultures of the west and east, “occident and orient,” in terms of their embodiment of rhizomatic traits. The West, characterized by the forest, the tree, seed-bearing plants, domestication of animals, is far less rhizomatic that the East, where plants are propagated by asexual cuttings through the fragmentation of individual tubers. Where the West has been entranced by the “specifically European disease” of Transcendence and its recourse to an empirical beyond, the East has tended towards imminence, which I understand as a sort of
“withinness,” an inclusive folding of the subject into larger discursive and conceptual networks. This “Occident/Orient” comparison strikes me as interesting for two reasons: it seems very dualistic amidst a project so self-consciously aimed toward exposing the artifice underlying binary logic, and it implies a clean separation of East and West that ignores the increasingly nuanced global connections enabled by new media and the very interconnectivity and interdiscursivity with which D + G are concerned.
Finally, I turn to a wonderful print depiction of a rhizome, courtesy of google image search, that helps ground the rhizomatic theory defining the approach and form of 1000 plateaus. The picture depicts a few dimensions of connective lines within the rhizome. There are many large interconnected tubes in the darker central section of the rhizome, which seems like a sort of hub in which different vertical connections (represented by the thinner dangling roots) are brought into contact with one another and with other lines from different parts of the structure. Each of these large tubes, in turn, is connected outwards towards other structures and vertical roots that the “chopping” of the rhizome in this picture prevents us from visualizing. I very much like thinking about the form of the book in terms of this diagram, understanding the dynamic, shifting qualities of the narrative (if it is, indeed, a narrative as we typically understand them) not as some sort of defect in logical reasoning but as a critique of the very notions of “logic” and “reason” that have facilitated the continued hegemony of dualistic binary divisions.
* image @ http://www.sevensixfive.net/informatix/index.html
Multiplicity & Critique of Psychoanalysis
Having also had a difficult time with this week's reading, most of this response is made up of questions.
In the second chapter of ATP, the critique of Freud stems from the reductive character of the psychoanalytic theories he put forth: "Freud himself recognizes the multiplicity of libidinal 'currents' that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That makes it all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the unconscious the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the little scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him" (31).
Plant's Zeros and Ones intersects frequently with A Thousand Plateaus, especially where both texts engage in respective critiques of Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis. I won't pretend to grasp the implications or reasons for Deleuze and Guattari's interest in schizophrenia (or maybe the effects or behaviors characteristic of schizophrenia?), but I'm interested in how Plant, having clearly read this text ("Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration") chose to defend dissociative identity disorder or multiple identity disorder instead of schizophrenia. The "disorder" Plant appears to be out to vindicate, that of having multiple identities in one body (or the "feminine" characteristic of not identifying as easily with a single metier for one's entire life), is similar to but not totally compatible with Deleuze and Guattari's interest in schizophrenia, the experience of hearing multiple voices. Are these choices even important? Is this a mass/pack distinction? Are there distinctions in Deleuze and Guattari's text that can be delineated?
Both D&G and Plant explore how the possibilities of and already established presence of multiplicities are reified by inherited philosophical conventions that privilege unity and totality. I keep coming back to Plant's inclusion in Zeros and Ones of a certain critique of women: that they couldn't add, that they would see one and one and one and one. This notion of inability to or aversion to synthezing is interesting where it applies to Deleuze and Guattari, especially where there is a clear interest in Bergson's philosophy. If the intensive is only rendered extensive, distinct, as a succession of units by an act of the mind, what are the implications for multiplicity as they conceive of it?
Can there be a proper name that remains faithful to this multiplicity? Is psychoanalysis what prevents this, or is there something else?
In the second chapter of ATP, the critique of Freud stems from the reductive character of the psychoanalytic theories he put forth: "Freud himself recognizes the multiplicity of libidinal 'currents' that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That makes it all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the unconscious the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the little scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him" (31).
Plant's Zeros and Ones intersects frequently with A Thousand Plateaus, especially where both texts engage in respective critiques of Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis. I won't pretend to grasp the implications or reasons for Deleuze and Guattari's interest in schizophrenia (or maybe the effects or behaviors characteristic of schizophrenia?), but I'm interested in how Plant, having clearly read this text ("Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration") chose to defend dissociative identity disorder or multiple identity disorder instead of schizophrenia. The "disorder" Plant appears to be out to vindicate, that of having multiple identities in one body (or the "feminine" characteristic of not identifying as easily with a single metier for one's entire life), is similar to but not totally compatible with Deleuze and Guattari's interest in schizophrenia, the experience of hearing multiple voices. Are these choices even important? Is this a mass/pack distinction? Are there distinctions in Deleuze and Guattari's text that can be delineated?
Both D&G and Plant explore how the possibilities of and already established presence of multiplicities are reified by inherited philosophical conventions that privilege unity and totality. I keep coming back to Plant's inclusion in Zeros and Ones of a certain critique of women: that they couldn't add, that they would see one and one and one and one. This notion of inability to or aversion to synthezing is interesting where it applies to Deleuze and Guattari, especially where there is a clear interest in Bergson's philosophy. If the intensive is only rendered extensive, distinct, as a succession of units by an act of the mind, what are the implications for multiplicity as they conceive of it?
Can there be a proper name that remains faithful to this multiplicity? Is psychoanalysis what prevents this, or is there something else?
- "He knew that this new and true proper name would be disfigured and misspelled, retranscribed as a patronymic." (26-27)
- "Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs" (ATP, 35)
-"There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take ‘collective agents’ to mean not peoples or societies but multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity." (ATP, 37)
The proper name is a social designation that reinforces the notion that the self is self-identical, singular, unified. The "true and proper" name of the Wolf-Man was a recognition of multiplicity-- my question is, is this multiplicity embodied/ contained by the body? I kept returning to passages about pores and orifices (both in this text and in The Desiring-Machines) to see if I could better understand how pores relate to a body without organs. It is hard to grasp what the body without organs entails, especially with regard to interiority/exteriority, boundaries, limitations, interpenetration. What is the relationship between the body without organs and the idea of a surface? I assume that positing the body without organs is meant to reinforce multiplicity, but at the moment I can't really separate this idea from notions of stability, delineated borders.
What is important about indiscernibility?
The Synchronic (and other musings)
What is useful about the rhizome model to Deleuze and Guattari is that a rhizome, composed of undifferentiated tissue, can engender at any node a differentiated plant shoot, which is in some sense independent of (and can survive the death of) other shoots along the rhizome, although it is inextricably physically connected with them.
D + G's philosophy is also markedly synchronic; at its most explicit: "A rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model" (Plateaus 12). A lot hinges on this, and in thinking it through I've decided I think this works properly with the now-physical/now-conceptual rhizomes: a rhizome may grow in time, but time has nothing fundamental to do with it (other than to form another rhizome, perhaps (Plateaus 11)). At least it provides an easy exit away from mimicry, because mimicry requires an original (ie: an original in time) and a later reproduction. In a synchronic view of the world, even the most "obvious" reproduction cannot be discerned from the original. Technological production complicates this slightly in the same way that writing always did-- for an artwork made in photoshop, is the file the original? a printout? some abstract concept?--- but that aside, it could be, after all, that the Mad Peck "Providence" poster hanging in my room is the original; I made a ton of reproductions because I knew they would sell well; and Mad Peck, Doc Daniels, and the lot liked it so much (but found the posters a bit overpriced) that they hand-drew their own copy.
So looking at it this way, of course "the crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings" (Plateaus 11). But wait. You never find the surroundings shifting to mimic the chameleon. I think we're not supposed to think of them as so distinctly separate, by rhizome logic: "There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming [...] and operating in the same assemblage" (Plateaus 34). But as much as I buy most of D + G's arguments and examples, there seems to be something else at work here as well. I will note that their distaste for evolutionary trees at first invoked in me similar suspicion. But all animals just points, yes; yes, evolution is in some ways only a matter of thought. The difference between a new organism and a simple mutation even for biologists came down to a question of reproduction. But as yet I still think I would propose that you can call the relationship between the chameleon and the tree rhizomatic while also accepting that the chameleon is changing its colours to mimic those of the tree, perhaps even to mimic the tree. Why this works I have to think through further; my initial impulse was that the chameleon is not only his act of changing colours, but of course insofar as that is his action at the moment, I think D + G might suggest (and I would believe) that it is. I'll continue thinking about it, but I'm just wondering if D + G's view really needs to abolish mimicry outright or whether it is largely an artefact of synchronic logic.
Additional Speculations
"The break of interruption conditions this continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity" (Anti-Oedipus 36). D + G are careful through their emphasis on production and becoming to not let this become an originary homogeneity then dispersed; it is a continuity constantly regenerated in time (which again makes irrelevant any real notion of time). The model at work: THIS break, NOW, is cutting this. Cutting what? Indescribable a moment ago, because it simply was, now that it is cut, you see. You can only after the fact say that it was (used to be) continuous. Over and over again.
Last year I became fascinated by something that although indebted in part to Althusserian ideology, I think falls into this logic. I found the notebook I thought it was in but it wasn't there, so I'm going to try to find it for tomorrow. But as much as I can remember, it had to do with belief and the way in which, like D + G's cut continuity, one can only consider something a belief rather than just "knowing" it to be true as soon as something to the contrary is pointed out. But I think there was some point of excess that I cannot at present recall.
One final point, now that we are getting into a few texts written originally in languages not our own I would like to mention the question of translation. Reading the translator's notes at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus was pretty enlightening as to the limits of translation (trait?), but even before that, reading Anti-Oedipus, I had been thinking about something similar. The essay necessarily deals with "lack," the French "manque." In Italian the word for "to lack" or "to miss" is "mancare," obviously of the same root as the French, and although I don't know for certain if this holds true in French, there is some difference in its use compared to English. It works indirectly, so to say "I miss you" is "Mi manchi..." which if you were to translate word-for-word seems like "You miss me." Not sure if we have to take this to extreme depths of analysis, but it made me wonder about the ways differences like that might make a difference in the world logic and possibly more locally in the arguments and support of these kinds of essays, when the subject of the verb is always determined by the missed object (so perhaps the notion of complete absence is in some ways absurd).
D + G's philosophy is also markedly synchronic; at its most explicit: "A rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model" (Plateaus 12). A lot hinges on this, and in thinking it through I've decided I think this works properly with the now-physical/now-conceptual rhizomes: a rhizome may grow in time, but time has nothing fundamental to do with it (other than to form another rhizome, perhaps (Plateaus 11)). At least it provides an easy exit away from mimicry, because mimicry requires an original (ie: an original in time) and a later reproduction. In a synchronic view of the world, even the most "obvious" reproduction cannot be discerned from the original. Technological production complicates this slightly in the same way that writing always did-- for an artwork made in photoshop, is the file the original? a printout? some abstract concept?--- but that aside, it could be, after all, that the Mad Peck "Providence" poster hanging in my room is the original; I made a ton of reproductions because I knew they would sell well; and Mad Peck, Doc Daniels, and the lot liked it so much (but found the posters a bit overpriced) that they hand-drew their own copy.
So looking at it this way, of course "the crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings" (Plateaus 11). But wait. You never find the surroundings shifting to mimic the chameleon. I think we're not supposed to think of them as so distinctly separate, by rhizome logic: "There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming [...] and operating in the same assemblage" (Plateaus 34). But as much as I buy most of D + G's arguments and examples, there seems to be something else at work here as well. I will note that their distaste for evolutionary trees at first invoked in me similar suspicion. But all animals just points, yes; yes, evolution is in some ways only a matter of thought. The difference between a new organism and a simple mutation even for biologists came down to a question of reproduction. But as yet I still think I would propose that you can call the relationship between the chameleon and the tree rhizomatic while also accepting that the chameleon is changing its colours to mimic those of the tree, perhaps even to mimic the tree. Why this works I have to think through further; my initial impulse was that the chameleon is not only his act of changing colours, but of course insofar as that is his action at the moment, I think D + G might suggest (and I would believe) that it is. I'll continue thinking about it, but I'm just wondering if D + G's view really needs to abolish mimicry outright or whether it is largely an artefact of synchronic logic.
Additional Speculations
"The break of interruption conditions this continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity" (Anti-Oedipus 36). D + G are careful through their emphasis on production and becoming to not let this become an originary homogeneity then dispersed; it is a continuity constantly regenerated in time (which again makes irrelevant any real notion of time). The model at work: THIS break, NOW, is cutting this. Cutting what? Indescribable a moment ago, because it simply was, now that it is cut, you see. You can only after the fact say that it was (used to be) continuous. Over and over again.
Last year I became fascinated by something that although indebted in part to Althusserian ideology, I think falls into this logic. I found the notebook I thought it was in but it wasn't there, so I'm going to try to find it for tomorrow. But as much as I can remember, it had to do with belief and the way in which, like D + G's cut continuity, one can only consider something a belief rather than just "knowing" it to be true as soon as something to the contrary is pointed out. But I think there was some point of excess that I cannot at present recall.
One final point, now that we are getting into a few texts written originally in languages not our own I would like to mention the question of translation. Reading the translator's notes at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus was pretty enlightening as to the limits of translation (trait?), but even before that, reading Anti-Oedipus, I had been thinking about something similar. The essay necessarily deals with "lack," the French "manque." In Italian the word for "to lack" or "to miss" is "mancare," obviously of the same root as the French, and although I don't know for certain if this holds true in French, there is some difference in its use compared to English. It works indirectly, so to say "I miss you" is "Mi manchi..." which if you were to translate word-for-word seems like "You miss me." Not sure if we have to take this to extreme depths of analysis, but it made me wonder about the ways differences like that might make a difference in the world logic and possibly more locally in the arguments and support of these kinds of essays, when the subject of the verb is always determined by the missed object (so perhaps the notion of complete absence is in some ways absurd).
Saturday, November 8, 2008
digital-philia
I am interested in the moves that Deleuze and Guattari make concerning desire and process. I believe that this relates to our ‘feelings’ for digital media. From the Anti-Oedipus they establish three meaning of process. The first being production “is immediately consumption and a recording process.” Then he mentions the enregistrement and uses it as way to think about how this process might function. According to the translator it has a variety of meanings one of with is the “process of making a recording to be played back by a mechanical device (e.g. phonograph), the recording so made by (e.g. a phonograph record or a magnetic tape).” What immediately struck me was that he is referencing analog technology and techniques. With most of the analog technology, of our not so distant past, the ‘process’ shifts and in a way so does our perspective. This in part is due to the concept of ‘destructive editing’. You record on the magnetic tape or film but when you edit you destroy your original in the process. With digital technologies this editing concept has changed to ‘nondestructive editing.’ Your original file (movie, music, pictures, ect.) are preserved as information. This gives one the ability to indulge in any combination or multiplicity in the process. You can have your cake and eat it too. And what do you know? You ate it but still have it*. Perhaps this changes the nature of our desire? Has it become more of a fatel attraction? Or maybe it is just another schizophrenic hiccup in the ‘process’.
*Common contemporary artist joke.
At a cocktail party a sculptor leans over to a video artist and whispers into their ear:
S-What does a prostitute have in common with a digital photographer?
V-What?
S-You got it, you sell it . . . whoa, what do you know . . . you still got it
*Common contemporary artist joke.
At a cocktail party a sculptor leans over to a video artist and whispers into their ear:
S-What does a prostitute have in common with a digital photographer?
V-What?
S-You got it, you sell it . . . whoa, what do you know . . . you still got it
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Stuff
I quite enjoyed the Burroughs reading. What seems to be left unsaid is that if the word is a virus, then we are that virus. I don't believe he's really calling for revolution--he's not exactly a scientist, and most of what he says is metaphorical. It seems to me his goal was rather to make people aware of the power that they can have once they understand that events occur within them, not in the world--sort of bridging the gap produced by Lacan's mirror stage, or rather relocating the self in the abstraction where it actually resides, rather than in an interplay between the body and the environment. The opposite of Electronic Revolutions might well be Marxist theory, which attempts to circumscribe the actual relations between the self and the other. Burroughs tries to make us aware that there is only one, or perhaps two, most strongly in the long prose poem near the end of the text--in which he displays the ability of his words to intercut our memories and our ideas of emotion into a sort of collage, which we are meant to understand exists not on paper but in our heads. His discussion of playback, of course, has very little to do with actual tape--movies are language as much as audio tapes, newspapers, and spoken words; telling someone about it is enough to constitute playing back an event. It's interesting that he mentions Scientology (sarcastically, I think), considering that hundreds if not thousands of people around the world are currently engaged in a "war" on Hubbard's Church, which consists entirely of playing back events that the CoS has tried to conceal--displaying their more eccentric beliefs, and communicating the various scandals they have unsuccessfully attempted to cover up. The internet facilitates all this, and I imagine Burroughs would have had a laugh out of it.
Monday, October 27, 2008
In The Electronic Revolution, Burroughs’ describes the hands-free orgasm he achieved at age thirty-seven. Aided by an orgone accumulator, an insulated box that focuses magnetic energy, Burroughs claims to have climaxed in a localized, anti-entropic environment. The orgone accumulator, as I understand it (not very well), is one of those Wienerian islands of decreasing entropy, a seemingly opposite construct to Burroughs’ cut-up audio projects. Without the intrusion or imposition of a virus—that is, with a “ray gun” in a vacuum—it is possible to make “a direct connection with what is known as LIFE,” (13). However, Burroughs also points out that we know no life separate from the virus(es) infecting us, as we live in “a state of stable symbiosis” (6), unsuspicious and almost unconscious of the written word. Maybe orgasm is the only thing possible in a completely disillusioned state. Burroughs goes on to describe the “revolutionary” power of illusion, capable of making people hear, believe, and react to, behaviorally and biologically, more than what’s said. I’m interested in how Burroughs distinguishes one “life” from the other—say, LIFE A being aviral, blissful, sexual, anti-entropic, and LIFE B being constantly injected with and influenced by viruses, to LIFE B’s benefit or detriment (death?). I wonder whether the apparent randomness of topics in his essay, as well as the “noise” introduced by his spelling mistakes and typographical errors, are fragments of his own attempt to splice together a viral text. How much of his writing is meant as just social disruption?
Sunday, October 26, 2008
The technological default of race
On page 24 of The Electronic Revolution, Burrough's notes that "when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did." This type of coding of the subject (taken as the subject of a scientific experiment, taken as a subject, i.e., one who possesses subjectivity) is relevant in the virus metaphor particularly in light of the advent of the retrovirus, a viral agent that carries its genetic material in the form of RNA which can then utilize reverse transcriptase (retro-) to augment the chromosomal DNA of the host. These viruses propogate themselves by hijakcing the DNA replication mechanisms of the host cell to produce more of the retrovirus, which then gets its DNA integrated in the neighboring cells, and the pattern repeats itself. AIDS is the most popularly known retrovirus, a disease which has had the power to define populations, affecting their phenotype: the American gay man as vector, a label which has since transferred popularly to people of African descent, American and otherwise. Fanon writes in the opening pages of The Negro and Language that "the black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype eundergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation" (p. 19).
This coding practice of language, explored by both authors assigned for this week, is applied differently by both. I will focus on Burrough's use, since it pertains to use of technology as traditionally understood--a mechanical and/or electrical apparatus. There is a given availability to technology in Burrough's populist text: "No, 'They' [the users of this technology] are not God or super technicians from outer space. Just technicians operating with well-known equipment and using techniques that can be duplicated by anyone else who can buy and operate the equipment." (p. 25) He argues for an availability of technology to the masses, but this is the only true mention of any class consideration in the text itself (with the major exception of those in power as a class versus the subjugated people). To be able to afford and use the technology is given, and the appeal to the readership of the text to try out these experiments which "any numer can play" further enforces this point.
However, throughout the rest of the text the class argument is made through the assumption of ideas about race. On page 9 the appeal is to the "white race" as the target audience of language-as-virus. The mythology of the Garden of Eden "was a white myth." Growing off of this, Burroughs states that "this leads us to the supposition that the word virus assumed a specifically malignant and lethal form in the white race... the virus stirs uneasily in all your white throats." "Whiteness," defined by Burroughs, is given to be the technological default of race and race relations. This stems from a post-colonial theory and history. It is the white man who is the creator and subject of technology, and is the one constantly represented by this technology (white faces on TV, in positions of power, talking about their expertise, broadcasting it to "white" audiences). This is implicit in the history of the photography of racial types, where the images of a certain individual came to be representative of an entire race, and were used to establish hierarchies of race (race and its aesthetics, assembled in a linear devolution from the Caucasian to the African to the ape). This history cannot be escaped or theorized away, contributable to the power of the written language, which Burroughs points out. Scrambling as a revolutionary technique also has the dangerous consequence of eradicating difference: "Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just settle down in a nice even brown colour. Scrambles is the democratic way, the way of full cellular representation. Scrambles is the American way" (p. 36).
What happens when the subaltern appropriates "white" technology? Do they scramble their "difference" (non-whiteness) with the technological default? Is there a (Third) World Wide Web? Is there a revolutionary potential to technology that applies equally to all "races," or is there an inherent danger to non-white "races" that does not exist for the "white man?"
This coding practice of language, explored by both authors assigned for this week, is applied differently by both. I will focus on Burrough's use, since it pertains to use of technology as traditionally understood--a mechanical and/or electrical apparatus. There is a given availability to technology in Burrough's populist text: "No, 'They' [the users of this technology] are not God or super technicians from outer space. Just technicians operating with well-known equipment and using techniques that can be duplicated by anyone else who can buy and operate the equipment." (p. 25) He argues for an availability of technology to the masses, but this is the only true mention of any class consideration in the text itself (with the major exception of those in power as a class versus the subjugated people). To be able to afford and use the technology is given, and the appeal to the readership of the text to try out these experiments which "any numer can play" further enforces this point.
However, throughout the rest of the text the class argument is made through the assumption of ideas about race. On page 9 the appeal is to the "white race" as the target audience of language-as-virus. The mythology of the Garden of Eden "was a white myth." Growing off of this, Burroughs states that "this leads us to the supposition that the word virus assumed a specifically malignant and lethal form in the white race... the virus stirs uneasily in all your white throats." "Whiteness," defined by Burroughs, is given to be the technological default of race and race relations. This stems from a post-colonial theory and history. It is the white man who is the creator and subject of technology, and is the one constantly represented by this technology (white faces on TV, in positions of power, talking about their expertise, broadcasting it to "white" audiences). This is implicit in the history of the photography of racial types, where the images of a certain individual came to be representative of an entire race, and were used to establish hierarchies of race (race and its aesthetics, assembled in a linear devolution from the Caucasian to the African to the ape). This history cannot be escaped or theorized away, contributable to the power of the written language, which Burroughs points out. Scrambling as a revolutionary technique also has the dangerous consequence of eradicating difference: "Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just settle down in a nice even brown colour. Scrambles is the democratic way, the way of full cellular representation. Scrambles is the American way" (p. 36).
What happens when the subaltern appropriates "white" technology? Do they scramble their "difference" (non-whiteness) with the technological default? Is there a (Third) World Wide Web? Is there a revolutionary potential to technology that applies equally to all "races," or is there an inherent danger to non-white "races" that does not exist for the "white man?"
scrambling, entropy, and exploding systems of control
Burrough’s theory of language as virus describes language as a system of control, and therefore oppression, with revolutionary potential through repetition. “Playback is the essential ingredient” in the revolutionary weapon of language. Playback for Burroughs is God, taperecorder 3, it kicks Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden; in other words it lets all hell break lose. As Derrida would agree, the written word’s ability to be repeated allows for its manipulation and reappropriation.
In response to Meg’s passage about infected identities, that is, language as identity infected by power systems, I considered how Burroughs would respond to Fanon’s problem with language, that of submitting to the language of the oppressor, and that the power of language denies space for other identities. Burroughs suggests scrambling language in order to rail against and explode the power system. I’m not sure how well this idea applies to Fanon’s problem, because the use of creole does not lessen the French language’s power status, although it does allow for the emergence of other identities.
What I find interesting in language-scrambling is the loss of self; a loss of the distinction between sender and receiver into a big scrambled mess: “Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just settle down a nice even brown color.”(36) He calls this “the way of full cellular representation.” ‘Scrambling in together’ thus destroys the system of repression because it singularizes while at the same time destroys the self/other binary, because ‘the other’ is the same as ‘the self’ in its one-ness. It degenerates into entropy, the devolution towards a chaos rendering everything indistinguishable from anything else.
I was confused by scrambling, however, because while it questions the agency of a receiver in deciphering the message (thus the system of control that can then be coopted by revolutionaries), does it assert the authority and power of the sender or does it suggest that the system of control lies in an external actor, context, that scrambles the message between sender and receiver?
The receiver gets a scrambled message, and has to descramble it, depending on his ability. But is the message scrambled by the sender, or is it only scrambled in transmission? In which case, is this scrambling a tool of the sender or an external force (context)? In other words, where does the power of language reside?
His proposed scrambling tests remind me of the Turing test’s effort to determine the ability of the players to establish the correct source of a message. Turing wanted to point out that people cannot fully descramble a message, or they would be able to tell which was computer and which was human (or male or female). Is it the cleverness of the other players that confuse the message, or the context, that of physical separation?
In response to Meg’s passage about infected identities, that is, language as identity infected by power systems, I considered how Burroughs would respond to Fanon’s problem with language, that of submitting to the language of the oppressor, and that the power of language denies space for other identities. Burroughs suggests scrambling language in order to rail against and explode the power system. I’m not sure how well this idea applies to Fanon’s problem, because the use of creole does not lessen the French language’s power status, although it does allow for the emergence of other identities.
What I find interesting in language-scrambling is the loss of self; a loss of the distinction between sender and receiver into a big scrambled mess: “Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just settle down a nice even brown color.”(36) He calls this “the way of full cellular representation.” ‘Scrambling in together’ thus destroys the system of repression because it singularizes while at the same time destroys the self/other binary, because ‘the other’ is the same as ‘the self’ in its one-ness. It degenerates into entropy, the devolution towards a chaos rendering everything indistinguishable from anything else.
I was confused by scrambling, however, because while it questions the agency of a receiver in deciphering the message (thus the system of control that can then be coopted by revolutionaries), does it assert the authority and power of the sender or does it suggest that the system of control lies in an external actor, context, that scrambles the message between sender and receiver?
The receiver gets a scrambled message, and has to descramble it, depending on his ability. But is the message scrambled by the sender, or is it only scrambled in transmission? In which case, is this scrambling a tool of the sender or an external force (context)? In other words, where does the power of language reside?
His proposed scrambling tests remind me of the Turing test’s effort to determine the ability of the players to establish the correct source of a message. Turing wanted to point out that people cannot fully descramble a message, or they would be able to tell which was computer and which was human (or male or female). Is it the cleverness of the other players that confuse the message, or the context, that of physical separation?
A Mask on a Man, a Man in a Mask
Burroughs and Fanon turned out to present interest contrasts to Derrida's ideas of language. Most notably, those penetrating alterities that liberated language from strict context in "Signature Event Context" proved to be weapons of outright warfare in Burroughs' text, usable by both the oppressor and the oppressed. What Derrida didn't want to call the "viral" and "corrupting" moments of language become precisely that; it is really remarkable how Burroughs keeps denying any "positive" effects of the virus. In other words, the alterity inside of us/our language is no longer liberating but confining, quarantining as in biological warfare.
Fanon also sees the more violent side of fragmenting language. Both he and Burroughs speak of the body being penetrated, violated by some oppressing force. But this is a dual attack: for Fanon, the black man is also covered up with a mask even as his body is invaded, dismantled, "scientified;" for Burroughs, the virus has its external component (the screen, the collage) as well as its internal one (the virus already incorporated into us, sometimes latent). For both writers, there is an ambiguity, a slippage between inside and outside in which everything seems to turn inside out, or at least reveals a dual layer: the "Negro" in Europe becomes the European in the Antilles.
There's an odd sense in which putting on the mask of whiteness is the same process, from an inverted perspective, as the other penetrating the same; he is inside the mask and thus gains the power of subversion in the same stroke that he is oppressed. Derrida approaches the language problem from inside of, dare I say it, the dominant discourse. Thus, his solution is a kind of exposure, an opening up of an insular context to a third, external term. Fanon, who approaches from the margins, perhaps even feels thinkers like Derrida co-opting his space, using his alterity to pierce the social membrane or to expose an otherness already within the mask.
The doctor who speaks to the black man in pidgin (the language of the other) traps the other as the other within society. Similarly, "well-meaning" whites, like Sartre, seem to have the same effect when they speak of using the language of the other to liberate all of society. When the other is "brought in" as an external, internalizing force, he is "overdetermined from the outside." What of his own inside, then? The black man needs space, breath, a reprieve from being forced into the political arena.
Fanon also sees the more violent side of fragmenting language. Both he and Burroughs speak of the body being penetrated, violated by some oppressing force. But this is a dual attack: for Fanon, the black man is also covered up with a mask even as his body is invaded, dismantled, "scientified;" for Burroughs, the virus has its external component (the screen, the collage) as well as its internal one (the virus already incorporated into us, sometimes latent). For both writers, there is an ambiguity, a slippage between inside and outside in which everything seems to turn inside out, or at least reveals a dual layer: the "Negro" in Europe becomes the European in the Antilles.
There's an odd sense in which putting on the mask of whiteness is the same process, from an inverted perspective, as the other penetrating the same; he is inside the mask and thus gains the power of subversion in the same stroke that he is oppressed. Derrida approaches the language problem from inside of, dare I say it, the dominant discourse. Thus, his solution is a kind of exposure, an opening up of an insular context to a third, external term. Fanon, who approaches from the margins, perhaps even feels thinkers like Derrida co-opting his space, using his alterity to pierce the social membrane or to expose an otherness already within the mask.
The doctor who speaks to the black man in pidgin (the language of the other) traps the other as the other within society. Similarly, "well-meaning" whites, like Sartre, seem to have the same effect when they speak of using the language of the other to liberate all of society. When the other is "brought in" as an external, internalizing force, he is "overdetermined from the outside." What of his own inside, then? The black man needs space, breath, a reprieve from being forced into the political arena.
If I knew Chinese then I could consider better what Burroughs had to say about that...
Burroughs’s notion of language as a virus is an interesting one that appears to be expanding the idea of the virus more than framing the function of language. In fact, viral language appears as an approach, a possibility, something that can be done with language explicitly as is shown by his examples of how the recording effects change in reality. Of course, for Burroughs part of the essence of language is viral but this characteristic of it can be exploited for your own purposes which is what he demonstrates. Because language and writing in particular, must exist in time, must traverse it, and through this requires the binary play of absence/presence to function, its possibility for use virally and politically is made concrete. Its very nature as an acting present of a One that is no longer allows its use. The recording can incite because its playback is, for all intents and purposes, the same as reality. A person yells in a crowd and incites it to violence; the listener of this sound does not have to see the speaker or know where the speaker is. There is only the sound, having the same perceptual qualities as the original sound and thus indistinguishable from the original. The playback is the action itself and so the past acts on the present. As opposed to writing and speech, two distinct things, the present speaking and the playback are only readily distinguished by actually viewing the source when the sound quality is of a high enough fidelity and the term for both things is the same: sound.
This linguistic violence manifests itself in a different fashion in Fanon where the use of language is symbolic, powerful, overdeterminate, and negating. That is, the language of the colonized and the language of the colonizer must play and dance in the psychology of the colonized in a peculiar way. The two languages become classist determinants over top of race that must negate biology. What I mean is that in Fanon, Creole is marked, it is dirty. To move up in life means to learn French, the tongue of the colonist; but not just that, it means to become the colonist, to become French, to become European, to become white. In the dealings described by Fanon of the white man with the black man of the Arab, there is always a talking down. There is an assumption from the white man that this person must be uneducated, poor, and, in any case, not a good French speaker and when the response is in good French, the next thought must be that this person is in fact, not truly black; he has mastered our tongue, he is becoming white. The language of the colonizer, and its relation to the native tongue, is, therefore, always coloring the relations and dealings of people but especially of the black person because he is made conscious of it every moment for every utterance must prove and justify his honorary acceptance in the white club; an acceptance forever provisional and with the condition that it may be revoked at any time without notice. A slip of Creole here and you’re done for. The existence illustrated by Fanon (and that which he believes must be rectified) is one of an always already determined from without being constantly engaging with others through willful negation against this foisted upon determination. And this is all made and done through the use and the play of language(s).
If language is violent then it appears so is everything else. Burroughs describes the power relations and assumptions that are implicit in language and, in particular, in the to be verb which frame us and our worldview. In this sense, these ideas have a kinship with the ideas of anarcho-primitivism which views society, and especially technology, as something that is doomed to be oppressive and starts its critique with language and with the technological advancement of agriculture and domestication of livestock which involves the Othering of nature so as to subjugate it. This Othering which becomes ubiquitous and obsessive in control that later manifests itself through slavery and industrialization.
This linguistic violence manifests itself in a different fashion in Fanon where the use of language is symbolic, powerful, overdeterminate, and negating. That is, the language of the colonized and the language of the colonizer must play and dance in the psychology of the colonized in a peculiar way. The two languages become classist determinants over top of race that must negate biology. What I mean is that in Fanon, Creole is marked, it is dirty. To move up in life means to learn French, the tongue of the colonist; but not just that, it means to become the colonist, to become French, to become European, to become white. In the dealings described by Fanon of the white man with the black man of the Arab, there is always a talking down. There is an assumption from the white man that this person must be uneducated, poor, and, in any case, not a good French speaker and when the response is in good French, the next thought must be that this person is in fact, not truly black; he has mastered our tongue, he is becoming white. The language of the colonizer, and its relation to the native tongue, is, therefore, always coloring the relations and dealings of people but especially of the black person because he is made conscious of it every moment for every utterance must prove and justify his honorary acceptance in the white club; an acceptance forever provisional and with the condition that it may be revoked at any time without notice. A slip of Creole here and you’re done for. The existence illustrated by Fanon (and that which he believes must be rectified) is one of an always already determined from without being constantly engaging with others through willful negation against this foisted upon determination. And this is all made and done through the use and the play of language(s).
If language is violent then it appears so is everything else. Burroughs describes the power relations and assumptions that are implicit in language and, in particular, in the to be verb which frame us and our worldview. In this sense, these ideas have a kinship with the ideas of anarcho-primitivism which views society, and especially technology, as something that is doomed to be oppressive and starts its critique with language and with the technological advancement of agriculture and domestication of livestock which involves the Othering of nature so as to subjugate it. This Othering which becomes ubiquitous and obsessive in control that later manifests itself through slavery and industrialization.
"Other Opinions"
Reading it through twice and looking at specific passages more than that, I still don't feel I have a good handle on Burroughs's thesis, and honestly from first read through now, I think a large part of that is simply that he doesn't really treat his notion of word as virus in sufficient depth. In trying to distill out where the problem lies, I've come to conclude that it is in lack of information and in jumps of thought rather than in any kind of logical fallacy, which makes it difficult to argue against; it just makes it frustrating for me in trying to consider his argument critically. A lot obviously hinges for him on this scrambling technique and on playback, and those are interesting ideas in themselves. I love and believe the ideas of riot provocation, &c. But what precisely he's aiming to prove with the Moka Bar example escapes me. Or rather, I think I understand what he's aiming to prove, and it has to do with the definition of "produce" in his observation that "playing back recordings of an accident can produce another accident" (14). At first I thought he was talking about a circumstance in which the effect on listeners somehow engenders a situation in which an accident happens, as in the riot example. But to take the Moka Bar seriously, we have to read "produce" as literally "causing," giving these tapes a G-d-like power over circumstance. You might argue against my calling them "G-d-like," and I think that's fair-- I'm not attaching myself to this particular comparison-- but what I mean is that I don't think it aligns necessarily with the notion of virus. Yes, it is parasitic. Yes it in the playback he describes invades the host area. But his relations still feel associative: "Copy DNA/RNA"---"make image copies of a place". "Destroy/lyse cell (thereby enabling infection of others)"---"Damage/destroy place," possibly with the addition that "we thereby we can go and selectively do the same to other places," but of course this is quite a jump because the initial tape/virus itself has nothing to do with that.
Also, the tape scramblings and playbacks might be called art or experimentation, but they're not science. It doesn't even sound like other than a passing reference to the Law of Averages that Burroughs even looked at basic statistics when considering his field "research." All of that is fine; it can still be an interesting argument, but why he brings viruses into it at all still escapes and bothers me. Spiraling prose that seems like it should (but I do not find to actually) complement his argument, and leaps in causality and possible mathematical ignorance are enough to disgust me away from the text (which means I'm actually fairly happy that we will be discussing it in class because I don't like thinking that about really any text at all, and discussions have sometimes in the past led to a complete change in heart and mind. Already as I work through the text yet again I see passages specific about viruses that I'd like to look at more).
This is all strange for me to begin with, because in reading semiotics I tend to err very much on the side of little narratives, which my truth-value/scientific proof problems with Burroughs obviously do not reflect. But ultimately I just feel like Burroughs gains nothing and loses credibility by his poorly supported although trendy sounding virus thesis.
The comparison to G-d-like power that I mentioned earlier reminds me that I do like his hypothetical three tape-recorder arrangements, in particular the one in which G-d is the third recorder, so that G-d is basically reduced to or at least considered caused by one's feelings of shame and self-conscienceness. Indeed he says the third tape "is objective reality produced by the virus in the host" (10), so G-d is kind of a byproduct of innate ethics and their effects.
As to Fanon... well I'm less opinionated, at least. The structure he's examining as at work in the racial difference is I think very interesting, because it is not merely Otherness, not quite like Ideology, not simply Master-Slave.* One particular section I'd like to look at is on page 133, the paragraphs beginning "But that does not prevent" and "When I read that page." It seems to me here that what he's saying is that he wants racial difference to remain, just not racial hierarchy. Differance, multiplicity, perhaps? Except maybe not simply, because of the overdetermined from the inside and out nature of what he's talking about.
* - Marginally entertaining marginal comment... footnote #24 on page 138 mentions white man as "master," which is from where I took this structure. Interesting self-observation is that I can never think of "master-slave" without thinking of the RS flip-flop circuit in computer hardware. I have since learned that "master-slave" is a common moniker for the latch (although they never told us that in CS0310), but my first exposure to it was as the first page of our very own professor's "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge!" This I note here and call marginally entertaining (if not marginal) because this kind of random overlay of information enters in Burroughs's argument, and is something that I would consider useful in looking at what his view of information outright is.
Also, the tape scramblings and playbacks might be called art or experimentation, but they're not science. It doesn't even sound like other than a passing reference to the Law of Averages that Burroughs even looked at basic statistics when considering his field "research." All of that is fine; it can still be an interesting argument, but why he brings viruses into it at all still escapes and bothers me. Spiraling prose that seems like it should (but I do not find to actually) complement his argument, and leaps in causality and possible mathematical ignorance are enough to disgust me away from the text (which means I'm actually fairly happy that we will be discussing it in class because I don't like thinking that about really any text at all, and discussions have sometimes in the past led to a complete change in heart and mind. Already as I work through the text yet again I see passages specific about viruses that I'd like to look at more).
This is all strange for me to begin with, because in reading semiotics I tend to err very much on the side of little narratives, which my truth-value/scientific proof problems with Burroughs obviously do not reflect. But ultimately I just feel like Burroughs gains nothing and loses credibility by his poorly supported although trendy sounding virus thesis.
The comparison to G-d-like power that I mentioned earlier reminds me that I do like his hypothetical three tape-recorder arrangements, in particular the one in which G-d is the third recorder, so that G-d is basically reduced to or at least considered caused by one's feelings of shame and self-conscienceness. Indeed he says the third tape "is objective reality produced by the virus in the host" (10), so G-d is kind of a byproduct of innate ethics and their effects.
As to Fanon... well I'm less opinionated, at least. The structure he's examining as at work in the racial difference is I think very interesting, because it is not merely Otherness, not quite like Ideology, not simply Master-Slave.* One particular section I'd like to look at is on page 133, the paragraphs beginning "But that does not prevent" and "When I read that page." It seems to me here that what he's saying is that he wants racial difference to remain, just not racial hierarchy. Differance, multiplicity, perhaps? Except maybe not simply, because of the overdetermined from the inside and out nature of what he's talking about.
* - Marginally entertaining marginal comment... footnote #24 on page 138 mentions white man as "master," which is from where I took this structure. Interesting self-observation is that I can never think of "master-slave" without thinking of the RS flip-flop circuit in computer hardware. I have since learned that "master-slave" is a common moniker for the latch (although they never told us that in CS0310), but my first exposure to it was as the first page of our very own professor's "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge!" This I note here and call marginally entertaining (if not marginal) because this kind of random overlay of information enters in Burroughs's argument, and is something that I would consider useful in looking at what his view of information outright is.
Burroughs' methods
Burroughs was writing at a time when mass media was, without exception, inaccessible to the fringe without mainstream approval. The tactics by which he would intervene in reality, namely the recording and modified playback of audio from subjects whose operation he wanted to disrupt, seem both ridiculous and somehow spot on brilliant.
To unpack my perspective of his writing a little: I see his underlying method as modification of information about the past or the remote. This springs from the observation that we have a small sphere of perception as finite physically rooted organisms and that the expansion of that sphere requires technology. Burroughs knew that most people never saw presidential candidates speak, never saw another continent, never heard the news, without it being digested, transmitted, and excreted at a distance by a media monster. The channel of absorption in which he chose to intervene was that of audio and video, and he believed that by changing the networks of reference between subjects he could alter the way reality really Was.
Today we have the internet, which ought to have changed everything. No longer is our information mediated by corporations, but rather by our equals, our neighbors. Governments and corporations have, in fact, run into trouble because of emergent phenomena beyond their control growing on the internet. So why does Burroughs' message still ring true? Why, upon reading about his methods, does one still see a space -- a constructed reality in need of a revamp -- in which they could be deployed?
I believe that the internet has made the modification of reality through media intervention impossible. While things took a little re-equilibrating after the advent of the internet, the essential state of human perception-at-a-distance has not changed. For example: to know what was happening during the presidential debates I did not read liveblogged accounts of them posted by audience members; I watched CNN and read the New York Times analysis simultaneously. Tomorrow I will not read about the financial crisis on an individual's blog; at best I might read the Huffington Post. For poll results I will visit Intrade, 538, and RealClearPolitics. None of these are run by individuals, and each of these has a brand which could be recognizably parodied, imitated, or otherwise intervened in in the manner Burroughs suggests. But in order to see anything on the internet, you have to want to see it.
And the difficulty with people only seeing what they want to see is that it makes changing preexisting notions of reality even harder than it was for the ideological revolutionary, the advertiser, the dadaist, the missionary, the convicted innocent. Burroughs believed that simply exposing reality to an alternative narrative, however disconnected from it, would affect a change in it. But today, the internet acts as a resonator for the aggregate perception which constructs reality.
So the old media remains strong. Tomorrow thousands of thousands of thousands will read what writers for the New York Times believe to be true. Burroughs with his tape recorders will be lost in the noise of people yelling their beliefs back to themselves. And above it all, unchanged, billions will turn on their television sets and watch anchormen construct state-sanctioned credibility and liveness and the people will believe the commercials and take their new beliefs back to their computers, where they will confirm themselves, where the network of them will confirm them.
The internet made social change seem easy. But cutting through the noise still requires subversion, just of a new kind.
To unpack my perspective of his writing a little: I see his underlying method as modification of information about the past or the remote. This springs from the observation that we have a small sphere of perception as finite physically rooted organisms and that the expansion of that sphere requires technology. Burroughs knew that most people never saw presidential candidates speak, never saw another continent, never heard the news, without it being digested, transmitted, and excreted at a distance by a media monster. The channel of absorption in which he chose to intervene was that of audio and video, and he believed that by changing the networks of reference between subjects he could alter the way reality really Was.
Today we have the internet, which ought to have changed everything. No longer is our information mediated by corporations, but rather by our equals, our neighbors. Governments and corporations have, in fact, run into trouble because of emergent phenomena beyond their control growing on the internet. So why does Burroughs' message still ring true? Why, upon reading about his methods, does one still see a space -- a constructed reality in need of a revamp -- in which they could be deployed?
I believe that the internet has made the modification of reality through media intervention impossible. While things took a little re-equilibrating after the advent of the internet, the essential state of human perception-at-a-distance has not changed. For example: to know what was happening during the presidential debates I did not read liveblogged accounts of them posted by audience members; I watched CNN and read the New York Times analysis simultaneously. Tomorrow I will not read about the financial crisis on an individual's blog; at best I might read the Huffington Post. For poll results I will visit Intrade, 538, and RealClearPolitics. None of these are run by individuals, and each of these has a brand which could be recognizably parodied, imitated, or otherwise intervened in in the manner Burroughs suggests. But in order to see anything on the internet, you have to want to see it.
And the difficulty with people only seeing what they want to see is that it makes changing preexisting notions of reality even harder than it was for the ideological revolutionary, the advertiser, the dadaist, the missionary, the convicted innocent. Burroughs believed that simply exposing reality to an alternative narrative, however disconnected from it, would affect a change in it. But today, the internet acts as a resonator for the aggregate perception which constructs reality.
So the old media remains strong. Tomorrow thousands of thousands of thousands will read what writers for the New York Times believe to be true. Burroughs with his tape recorders will be lost in the noise of people yelling their beliefs back to themselves. And above it all, unchanged, billions will turn on their television sets and watch anchormen construct state-sanctioned credibility and liveness and the people will believe the commercials and take their new beliefs back to their computers, where they will confirm themselves, where the network of them will confirm them.
The internet made social change seem easy. But cutting through the noise still requires subversion, just of a new kind.
Determining the Body, Resisting Cultural Hegemony
In Electronic Revolution and The Fact of Blackness, Burroughs and Fanon discuss the ways in which language is inscribed onto human bodies, how words are mapped onto each person’s material, corporeal existence. A cut-up, “scrambled” narrative combining theories of virology and calls for subversive media production, Electronic Revolution defines the written word as a virus that predates—and makes possible—the spoken word. An inversion of Derrida’s articulation of Condillac’s theories of the origins of language, Burroughs’ notion that writing precedes speech calls into question the dominant schema that places writing as an outgrowth and evolutionary product of speech. Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness and The Negro and Language treat, respectively, the consequences of being black in a white-controlled discursive network and the issue of borrowed, assumed, or appropriated linguistic identities. While drastically different in form, content, and purpose, both pieces explore how language is mapped onto the bodily experience of humanness or, in Fanon’s case, the experience of being “marked” by one’s bodily or corporeal schema.
“To stay present…A boy masturbates in front of sex pictures…Cut to face of white man who is burning off black genitals with blow torch” (Burroughs 46)
“To stay absent…Sex phantasies of the boy…The black slumps dead with genitals burned off and intestines popping out.” (Burroughs 46)
Juxtaposing images of a young boy masturbating with images of a white man brutally lynching a black man, Burroughs’ evocative scrambling technique highlights the fetishization of the black body in media and popular culture. Burroughs’ frightening depiction of the bodily results from his splicing and scrambling of sexual imagery and racialized bodies into a cacophony of disgusting yet intriguing imagery. The meanings of the black body are fixed by rigid cultural norms governing race relations and the history of black bodies in relation to white aggressors. In Burroughs’ schema of the reactive mind (RM), seemingly harmless commands such as “to be animals” and “to be a body” become problematic, possessing what Borough’s calls “the most horrific consequences.” Inhabiting a black body, in this schema, may possess the most horrific of these “most horrific consequences,” for the black body is and has been so often reduced to an object of control or possession. While perhaps not an explicit discussion of the meanings of the black body and the embodiment of language within it, Burroughs’ cut-up narrative is full of traces of what Fanon terms the “crushing objecthood” imposed upon those marked by black skin.
Fanon, writing what is in its own way a “cut-up” or scrambled narrative (characterized by extensive citationality and external references), underscores the bodily nature of blackness and the “consciousness of the body” with which the black man is perpetually saddled. (“Fact” 110) The black man’s inability to define himself except in relation to whiteness feeds into the “crushing objecthood” by which “every ontology is made unattainable.” (“Fact” 109) Just as Burroughs’ depiction of a fetishized lyching of a black man shows the determination of blackness through white eyes, Fanon describes how black people, in contrast with jews (an interesting comparison worthy of more critical interrogation), are “overdetermined from without,” their meaning and existence “fixed” by the powerful white elite constituting society’s apparatus of control. (“Fact” 116)
Where Fanon and Burroughs seem to agree—or at least overlap—on the determination of blackness through white-dominated media culture and discursive relations, they differ in their choice of tactics by which to throw off this yoke of oppression. Fanon, whose “only weapon is reason,” becomes frustrated and neurotic by his continual contact with the “unreason” of racism and white oppression. (“Fact” 118). Burroughs, on the other hand, proposes a subversion of reason and order—the cutting up and splicing of language and reality—as the means of subverting the entrenched language systems which govern our experience of reality. Instead of using reason as a weapon, Burroughs effectively inverts reason, cause and effect, and rational speech patterns to create new forms of resistance to dominant cultural hegemony.
While at the time a fringe proposition, it seems that Burroughs’ attention towards processes of cutting, splicing, and reconstitution media such as sound and video has had huge impacts on the development of new media forms and the opening of new sites of resistance to hegemonic systems of power and oppression. Surely that is something that both Burroughs and Fanon could celebrate.
“To stay present…A boy masturbates in front of sex pictures…Cut to face of white man who is burning off black genitals with blow torch” (Burroughs 46)
“To stay absent…Sex phantasies of the boy…The black slumps dead with genitals burned off and intestines popping out.” (Burroughs 46)
Juxtaposing images of a young boy masturbating with images of a white man brutally lynching a black man, Burroughs’ evocative scrambling technique highlights the fetishization of the black body in media and popular culture. Burroughs’ frightening depiction of the bodily results from his splicing and scrambling of sexual imagery and racialized bodies into a cacophony of disgusting yet intriguing imagery. The meanings of the black body are fixed by rigid cultural norms governing race relations and the history of black bodies in relation to white aggressors. In Burroughs’ schema of the reactive mind (RM), seemingly harmless commands such as “to be animals” and “to be a body” become problematic, possessing what Borough’s calls “the most horrific consequences.” Inhabiting a black body, in this schema, may possess the most horrific of these “most horrific consequences,” for the black body is and has been so often reduced to an object of control or possession. While perhaps not an explicit discussion of the meanings of the black body and the embodiment of language within it, Burroughs’ cut-up narrative is full of traces of what Fanon terms the “crushing objecthood” imposed upon those marked by black skin.
Fanon, writing what is in its own way a “cut-up” or scrambled narrative (characterized by extensive citationality and external references), underscores the bodily nature of blackness and the “consciousness of the body” with which the black man is perpetually saddled. (“Fact” 110) The black man’s inability to define himself except in relation to whiteness feeds into the “crushing objecthood” by which “every ontology is made unattainable.” (“Fact” 109) Just as Burroughs’ depiction of a fetishized lyching of a black man shows the determination of blackness through white eyes, Fanon describes how black people, in contrast with jews (an interesting comparison worthy of more critical interrogation), are “overdetermined from without,” their meaning and existence “fixed” by the powerful white elite constituting society’s apparatus of control. (“Fact” 116)
Where Fanon and Burroughs seem to agree—or at least overlap—on the determination of blackness through white-dominated media culture and discursive relations, they differ in their choice of tactics by which to throw off this yoke of oppression. Fanon, whose “only weapon is reason,” becomes frustrated and neurotic by his continual contact with the “unreason” of racism and white oppression. (“Fact” 118). Burroughs, on the other hand, proposes a subversion of reason and order—the cutting up and splicing of language and reality—as the means of subverting the entrenched language systems which govern our experience of reality. Instead of using reason as a weapon, Burroughs effectively inverts reason, cause and effect, and rational speech patterns to create new forms of resistance to dominant cultural hegemony.
While at the time a fringe proposition, it seems that Burroughs’ attention towards processes of cutting, splicing, and reconstitution media such as sound and video has had huge impacts on the development of new media forms and the opening of new sites of resistance to hegemonic systems of power and oppression. Surely that is something that both Burroughs and Fanon could celebrate.
Fanon's Cut-Up
At the beginning of "The Fact of Blackness," Fanon quotes a white person on the street: "Look, a Negro!" This phrase is repeated throughout the text and draws out multiple levels of commentary. Quotations of poets from the Negritude movement, well-meaning whites, Jean-Paul Sartre, among many others, seem to position Fanon's text as relational in the same sense as his body is defined in relation to white bodies. The citationality of the cut-up is a means of achieving revolutionary ends for Burroughs; for Fanon, it is an important technique in drawing out how the fact of blackness is established, in academic and quotidian realms, among writers as well as drunks on the train, in language.
But while these texts point to a certain rupture inherent in borrowing language (the subject of Fanon's "The Negro and Language"), I would argue that Burroughs and Fanon differ on the value of the cut-up's ability to rupture ontology. For Burroughs, the cut-up is a strategy that can undermine "the IS of identity," that ontological rigidity which constrains subjects into automatic patterns of perception and behavior. Yet for Fanon, "every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society" ("Fact", 109), a circumstance that operates more as an agent of oppression than as a liberating destabilization. It seems that Burroughs social position, which does not force him into "crushing objecthood" (Fact, 109) allows him to embrace an anti-ontology that cannot be revolutionary for Fanon precisely because it has already imposed upon the black subject.
Keeping these considerations in mind, I wonder: does the move in poststructuralist theory towards a liberating destabilization of identity wrongfully assume the stability of different subjects under different conditions? Is there a tension between Fanon's mobilization of cut-up and his search for identity (and, furthermore, does this tension undercut or strengthen his argument)? Is there a way in which both Burroughs, who frequently refers to the "will" of the subject & the desire to "consciously control" the language-virus, and Fanon, who desires to "help the back man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been develped by the colonial environment" ("Language," 30), fail to account for the slipperiness of citationality? Might "Signature, Event, Context" help us to think through the cut-up in different terms?
The Fanon MixTape
From the start, Burroughs throws out controversial statements in his "Electronic Revolution." Written language came before spoken word? The only was to pass on information through time/space is via writing? Writing/language is an undetected virus?
The first day of my intro Linguistics class we learn to value the spoken word over the written word (there are languages with no written transcription), I've read about the Old Testament as passed down for years and years over a vast land area before a written transcription became available, and language does not need the vocal tract caused by the ancient virus Burroughs references (we have sign language, don't we?). Once I stopped taking Burroughs literally, and opened up to a broader interpretation of his writing, things began to click.
I will look at the three tape recorders he talks about.
We arrive at the initial example on page 10.
#1 is the object we wish to effect (Adam, errors of the senator, pristine Moka Bar)
#2 is access material from tape #1, or the material tape recorder #3 will use to effect tape recorder #1 (Eve, the senator's sexual activity, the surrounding Moka Bar)
#3 "is the objective reality produced by the virus in the host" thus God, the controller, or the operator of power.
Thus, we take the notion of tape recorder, and can apply that to any sort of language/sign/picture/word/audio sound/message we want. As an example of the race situation Fanon speaks of in "The Negro and Language," we could put Fanon in tape recorder 1, Fanon speaking pidgin and then eliete French in tape recorder 2, and the audio conversation from the racist drunk in the bar in tape recorder 3.
Playback or repetition from recorder 3 causes reality to come out from the "reality" on the tape recorder. The reality we have is of Fanon being the "host" for the virus of the French language, a reality which construes Fanon only as the Other within society.
But Burroughs uses the example of tape recorders becuase it allows one to fight back (tape recorders are a realtively inexpensive, democratized technology). He fights back against the Moka Bar, and he urges us to fight back against mass media and the police state by making our own wild mixes (by breaking up "lines of association" (21)).
I guess I have two questions from this scenario.
A. We always see utopian ideals when it comes to technological idealism (a la Enzensberger), but is Burroughs hitting at something beyond the mere technological aspect of the virus/the 3 tape recorders? I don't think YouTube was what he was looking for, so why didn't what he wanted to happen in all of his experiements actually happen?
2. How would it be best to change the Fanon + three tape recorders scenario layed out above? Which aspect of his essay fits each tape recorder?
Other questions:
1. How close is scrambling to noise or encryption (23)? It seems like he is emphasing syntax does not matter with the sign/word/photo/image, some sort of semantic meaning always gets across (in his discussion of subliminal messages). An example of this would be the theoretical alternative "cut-up" press on page 22.
2. Does the "re-interpretation" of scrambled messages hand over the agency of a message to the receiver (24)? How would this "self-ascribed" message play into Fanon's white mask (where a scrambled message "forces something on the subject against his will" (32))?
3. Do we have a new riff on cybernetics by equating language with a biological virus? Do words have control over bodies (e.g., the dicussion of Hubbard's pain producing engrams on 39)? Are we moving too fast when we say that language causes physical effects (such as when Fanon wishes to measure "the modifications of body fluids taht occur in Negros when they arrive in France (Fanon, 22)).
4. I see Burroughs's proposal for a new language as the elimination of identidy. Viruses/tapes control us by giving us an identidy and changing that identidy's reality; such as Fanon's identity giving Creol language or broken French. Fanon wishes to identify the virus and not try to "compete" in a lose-lose situation where the Other is always giving the losing hand identidy (Fanon 28,29). Am I right in thinking that these are the two articles modes of resistance, and if not, what am I missing here? The language virus strangled the ancient humans and labeld him a host, the white attacker tried to strangle Fanon and labeled him as a cultureless foreigner. But both persons must remember they are more than labels: "to the mechanical problem of respiration it must be unsound to gaft a psychological element, the impossibility of expansion" (Fanon, 28).
The first day of my intro Linguistics class we learn to value the spoken word over the written word (there are languages with no written transcription), I've read about the Old Testament as passed down for years and years over a vast land area before a written transcription became available, and language does not need the vocal tract caused by the ancient virus Burroughs references (we have sign language, don't we?). Once I stopped taking Burroughs literally, and opened up to a broader interpretation of his writing, things began to click.
I will look at the three tape recorders he talks about.
We arrive at the initial example on page 10.
#1 is the object we wish to effect (Adam, errors of the senator, pristine Moka Bar)
#2 is access material from tape #1, or the material tape recorder #3 will use to effect tape recorder #1 (Eve, the senator's sexual activity, the surrounding Moka Bar)
#3 "is the objective reality produced by the virus in the host" thus God, the controller, or the operator of power.
Thus, we take the notion of tape recorder, and can apply that to any sort of language/sign/picture/word/audio sound/message we want. As an example of the race situation Fanon speaks of in "The Negro and Language," we could put Fanon in tape recorder 1, Fanon speaking pidgin and then eliete French in tape recorder 2, and the audio conversation from the racist drunk in the bar in tape recorder 3.
Playback or repetition from recorder 3 causes reality to come out from the "reality" on the tape recorder. The reality we have is of Fanon being the "host" for the virus of the French language, a reality which construes Fanon only as the Other within society.
But Burroughs uses the example of tape recorders becuase it allows one to fight back (tape recorders are a realtively inexpensive, democratized technology). He fights back against the Moka Bar, and he urges us to fight back against mass media and the police state by making our own wild mixes (by breaking up "lines of association" (21)).
I guess I have two questions from this scenario.
A. We always see utopian ideals when it comes to technological idealism (a la Enzensberger), but is Burroughs hitting at something beyond the mere technological aspect of the virus/the 3 tape recorders? I don't think YouTube was what he was looking for, so why didn't what he wanted to happen in all of his experiements actually happen?
2. How would it be best to change the Fanon + three tape recorders scenario layed out above? Which aspect of his essay fits each tape recorder?
Other questions:
1. How close is scrambling to noise or encryption (23)? It seems like he is emphasing syntax does not matter with the sign/word/photo/image, some sort of semantic meaning always gets across (in his discussion of subliminal messages). An example of this would be the theoretical alternative "cut-up" press on page 22.
2. Does the "re-interpretation" of scrambled messages hand over the agency of a message to the receiver (24)? How would this "self-ascribed" message play into Fanon's white mask (where a scrambled message "forces something on the subject against his will" (32))?
3. Do we have a new riff on cybernetics by equating language with a biological virus? Do words have control over bodies (e.g., the dicussion of Hubbard's pain producing engrams on 39)? Are we moving too fast when we say that language causes physical effects (such as when Fanon wishes to measure "the modifications of body fluids taht occur in Negros when they arrive in France (Fanon, 22)).
4. I see Burroughs's proposal for a new language as the elimination of identidy. Viruses/tapes control us by giving us an identidy and changing that identidy's reality; such as Fanon's identity giving Creol language or broken French. Fanon wishes to identify the virus and not try to "compete" in a lose-lose situation where the Other is always giving the losing hand identidy (Fanon 28,29). Am I right in thinking that these are the two articles modes of resistance, and if not, what am I missing here? The language virus strangled the ancient humans and labeld him a host, the white attacker tried to strangle Fanon and labeled him as a cultureless foreigner. But both persons must remember they are more than labels: "to the mechanical problem of respiration it must be unsound to gaft a psychological element, the impossibility of expansion" (Fanon, 28).
Infected Identities?
The readings this week discussed how identity is constructed through language. Fanon writes “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of civilization” (17-18, The Negro and Language). Participation in language is participation with the dominant social group. His problematic in The Negro and Language is the specific case of the Negro of Antilles learning French in order to be part of the white world. “Mastery of language affords remarkable power” (18). This “power of language” (39) is problematic for Fanon because it denies a space for other (17) identities.
In relations to Burroughs text, the “power of language” is complicated by his argument that western language has virus-like structures and characteristics. This construction is produced through the falsifications of the syllabic western language: the use of THE, EITHER/OR, and TO BE. These falsifications create the virus which is our notions of identity, “the IS of Identity” (54). Identity is defined clearly by what one is not or by information on a passport.
However, it is “the other” within these texts who is called to use voice and speech as a weapon against a repressive system, to explode and erupt it. This erosive, breaking apart of the system is ending the war game, as Burroughs calls it. But what lies on the other side? If the written word acted as a virus to create the spoken word, then how does the virus go away? Do we lose language and identity, opening up new languages and identities? What marks or damage will the virus leave on a system?
the word made flesh
I was very interested in the way in which Fanon places questions of language and thought into embodied forms. In "The negroe and language" he connects the choice of speaking in either creole or french to a history of and an existence in face of the subjectification of colonization, analyzing how the choice of speaking either creole or french plays also into questions of identification and depending on the choices how the choice to speak french rather creole can actually be playing into the logic of 'white supremacy'.
"Black Skin White Masks", seems to be a very bodily text, for instance when "the vein has been mined out"(p.121) or after criticizing Satre for taking the power out of the words and resumes: "I began to weep" (p140) and there are many more instances, for instances the encounter between the black guy on the train who shivers because he is cold and the little boy who starts to shivers because he feels threatened. And with some of these moments he also seems to play into racial stereotypes or to parodize them, for instance, when he first talks about mother earth and then states "That is because the body is not something that is opposed to the mind"(p.127).
Still in contrast to the Burroughs text, who essentially proposes that meaning can be cut into little pieces to be reassimilated in which ever way you like, to you're own benefit, creating virus which can spread. It is really interesting how the issue of control on bodies, virus, language and are so much interwoven with questions of race. The colonized subject cannot escape his/her embodied meaning, while the white writer chooses to construct, bodies of text, virus and media collages to assert power.
It also really reminded of a text by Drew Leder which is called "the absent body" and in which he tries to explain why the body is so non-present in western societies. The funny thing is only that there is a scene in this text in which we have a woman, (who gets chatted up by some guys) and whose body suddenly becomes very present again, Leder then concludes in a supposedly pro-feminist way that this happens because her body is the "other" in this instant, still his main-argumentation is that the body in general is absent, actually 'othering' this woman in the first place through is own perogative. So I'm wondering in how far questions of embodiment are presently linked to questions of oppression.
Virus, Language, Race
While Burroughs' text establishes as its basis theory "that the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible," the experiments and research projects he then goes on to propose or describe having performed would suggest rather that recorded material when played back in the space of its recording transforms the situation which might otherwise have occurred in a different manner, where the distinction writing/speech would line up with the distinction recording/action. Because it is mostly the nature of a virus that is developed after Burroughs notes this, it's fairly unclear what Burroughs' said basis theory has to do with, for example, a Derridean deconstruction of the privileging of speech over writing by demonstrating that the category of writing is a precondition for the category of speech in the first place. In addition, Electronic Revolution problematizes presence and absence, which we discussed last week in reading "Signature Event Context," with reference to the idea of the Reactive Mind developed by L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, has his credibility rendered suspect before his concepts even enter the text ("the target moves" - a Scientology center where a playback operation was taken out). So why use these RM distinctions developed by Hubbard later in the text, in a quasi-poetic sequence intended, perhaps, to develop a series of associations which I later collude in evoking when instead of "To stay up... Erect phallus," I encounter simply "To stay up" (46, 47).
When discussing a pre-riot situation, Burroughs says, "Could you cool a riot by recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable demonstrator? Maybe! However, it's a lot easier to start trouble than to stop it" (20). Electronic Revolution is a sort of guide book for starting trouble (and being THE God) via playback. I wonder, like Patrick, how Burroughs' social position informed his interest in such destabilizing tactics. Fanon may be "overdetermined from outside," but Burroughs seems to posit that universal empowerment can be an effect of widespread tape recorder use and picture-taking.
According to Burroughs, a virus
- mutated the structure of the (male ape) host's throat, but is passed to his female mate in a sexual frenzy that results from the virus, and this throat continues to exist as part of the structure for posterity,
- (unproblematically) produced the "yellow races"
Whiteness appears (in my reading) to be implicitly aligned with unity and the absolute in Burroughs' text, yet never explicitly treated. In "The Negro and Language," Fanon describes speaking of French by black men as being essential to social status in a colonial structure. "To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation" (19). What might be the implications of such a mutation, or of mutation in general? How does this scientific analogy play into questions of pattern and transmission that we have discussed before?
According to Burroughs, a virus
- mutated the structure of the (male ape) host's throat, but is passed to his female mate in a sexual frenzy that results from the virus, and this throat continues to exist as part of the structure for posterity,
- (unproblematically) produced the "yellow races"
Whiteness appears (in my reading) to be implicitly aligned with unity and the absolute in Burroughs' text, yet never explicitly treated. In "The Negro and Language," Fanon describes speaking of French by black men as being essential to social status in a colonial structure. "To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation" (19). What might be the implications of such a mutation, or of mutation in general? How does this scientific analogy play into questions of pattern and transmission that we have discussed before?
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