Lit Crit 2007

[Glenn Scheper]

> Is any of this Deleuze/Guattari you mention available online?
> I'm willing to give it a try.

My surf of D&G cuts flows turned up nothing actually by them.
However, I have Anti-Oedipus under my arm again, as I thought
a close reading of cuts & flows might be helpful in decoding
Revelation as tantric conjunctions. Let me opine two words:

It's real slogging through, as every paragraph drags in yet
another famous psychologist or author or jargon unexplained.

As I type these paragraphs in, I realize they do not limit
themselves to the classic trifecta of examples, but like a
maniac, stuff every list with everything that came to mind.

Hey, that just might appeal to P-trained readers!

Page 1 opens:
1. Desiring-Production
  It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times,
at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats,
it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever
said the id. Everywhere it is machines--real ones, not
figurative ones....

Before me, page 84:
5. The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption-Consummation
  In the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of
consumption, we have seen how the body without organs was
in fact an egg, crisscrossed with axes, banded with zones,
localized with areas and fields, measured off by gradients,
traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds. In this
sense, we believe in a biochemistry of schizophrenia (in
conjunction with the biochemistry of drugs), that will be
progressively more capable of determining the nature of
this egg and the distribution of field-gradient-threshold.
It is a matter of relationships of intensities through
which the subject passes on the body without organs, a
process that engages him in beginnings, rises and falls,
migrations and displacements.

Book ends:
...in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines
and the repression of desire. Completing the process and not
arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not
assigning it a goal. For the new earth ("In truth, the earth
will one day become a place of healing") is not to be found
in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest
the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead,
it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-
production, this process that is always and already complete
as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore
remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously,
these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed.

        ====

What I distill so far is a true insight into my own psychosis.

They describe: repulsion and the paranoiac machine; attraction
and the miraculating machine; and when both exist together, a
celebration of pure intensities: the celibate machine, the Body
without Organs, found in Judge Shreber, Kakfa characters... ME!

They demonize Freud and his neurotic depressive positions, also
the Oedipal oppression of capitalism and its production of lack,
(or desire?) suggesting that schizophrenia is a healthy response.
--That would be P's anarchism.

Lack is not real, only desire, and desire is polymodal, exceeding
the okay Oedipal triangle. They would turn philosophy on its head
by abandoning categorically based ontologies for pure differences,
wherein every difference is different from every other difference.

The rest I haven't got to yet, forgot, or didn't understand.

What I do find wrong for me, is that they make of their machines
a theory of everything, and ignore, or rather, specifically deny
any transcendent God or Law that informs the whole system.

        ----

Similarly, mention here of _Metaphors we live by_ got me to the
bookstore, but I only found Lakoff and Johnson's _Philosophy in
the Flesh_. I glanced around and settled in on Ch 27, Morality.

They too, as cognitive scientists, build up their TOE, theory of
everything, as the epiphenomenon of metaphorical thinking, and
they also totally ignore, deflate, any transcendent God or Law.


        ====


What thinking's hot? 400 papers. Lots of code, map, metaphor...
http://www.slsa07.com/proposals.html

Here's a sound-byte to quote in my Revelation hermeneutics:
'Though metaphors are analytically productive-they highlight aspects
which remain otherwise unnoticed-they are also seductive and reductive:
they downplay other aspects. Notably, their seductive productivity might
lead to reification: displacing the phenomenon with the metaphor, and
treating it as a thing in itself.'


I read Tasmanian, and thought of "Tashmeen". Perhaps her cryptonym?


Heard:
...Something(?) that Lucifer came to loose. That one is a real use.

BTW, I sure admire the expertise, the battery of lit crit principles
that Paul applies to factor P's text. Makes me feel like a dolt here.


Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.