One should never read a single book at a time. In the act of reading multiple texts, aleatory encounters between texts are produced like sparks arcing across two separated wires. There is no method here. Where and when such a spark will leap is not subject to calculation or prediction. Rather, such sparks are purely a product of chance. And, of course, it is necessary to add the caveat that it is impossible to read a single book at a time. As Freud famously observed in his allegory of the Roman city, and Bergson in his cone of memory, the past co-exists with the present, such that any act of reading is necessarily saturated with all the previous texts one has encountered. Yet even here the points at which texts touch one another, the point at which virtual texts and actual text touch in singularities, is entirely aleatory and without calculation. It is always an event. Perhaps there must be an Idea, Problem, or Multiplicity at work– in Deleuze’s sense of the word: a problematic field –that presides over the genesis of such relations. The principles of auto-synthesis are murky.
Of late my bedtime reading has consisted of Francois Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. This is a dreary, vaguely reactionary, depressing book that chronicles the way in which American appropriations of French thought ended up in a sort of identity politics, where questions of how to form a unified politics (in many respect Badiou’s question) fell apart. and political action came to be conceived in terms of cultural decoding (cultural criticism), all the while ignoring material and economic infrastructures underlying these semiotic formations. Here, for example, the act of revealing the ideological subtext of a film or the act of dressing like a punk becomes a subversive act in and of itself, despite the fact that economic structures nonetheless remain the same.
And indeed, if we look at cultural theory today, we seem to witness one of two alternatives: Either we have those forms of engagement devoted to the art of subversive cultural decoding (some moments of Adorno, early Zizek, Laclau, Butler, Foucault, Althusser, etc), or, more recently, we have discourses devoted to questions of how it might be possible to produce a unifying master-signifier that would allow for concerted and targeted political engagement without falling back into the horror and totalitarian aporias of earlier master discourse (as exemplified by the work of later Zizek, Badiou). Both of these approaches share the common emphasis on the cultural, the semiotic, the symbolic. Badiou, for example, somewhere remarks that economic Marxism is dead, focusing instead on that signifier that would name the event and function as a universal. Zizek argues that there is a parallax between the economic and the political, such that we can only ever see one or the other but never both at the same time. While thankfully both Badiou and Zizek argues for a Real outside the symbolic (and Foucault articulates a disjunction between the visible and the legible), nonetheless it seems that any outside to the symbolic disappears. As Zizek likes to put it, “the real is a function of the symbolic, a twist in the symbolic”. In my view, these positions arise from encountering language under the conditions of a paradoxically “open closure”, where there can be no outside to the manner in which one signifier refers to another signifier, such that we are led to seek out a void or empty place within social structure.
This evening, in Ian Buchanan’s highly original, sometimes idiosyncratic, yet often illuminating Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, I read that,
The fact is, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject psychoanalysis. This is a common misperception they themselves are largely responsible for. Contrary to popular myth, they explicitly state that they ‘refuse to play “take it or leave it” games with psychoanalysis and accept the edict that ‘one cannot challenge the process of the “cure” except by starting from elements drawn from this cure.’ (AO, 128/140). In practice they actually retain a number of psychoanalytic concepts (such as primary and secondary repression, the ego, the drives, as well as the concept of the unconscious itself as a distinct system within a system that also includes a preconscious and a conscious) and use them with only minimal retooling. Their stated aim is to engender what they term an ‘internal reversal’ in psychoanalysis and transform its ‘analytic machine into an indispensable part of the revolutionary machinery’ (AO, 90/97). The surprisingly Maoist implication of this aim is that social change can only be achieved via a ‘cultural revolution’, that is to say a revolution in the way people think rather than a revolution in arms. (Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, 65)
I fully agree with Buchanan’s appraisal of the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari and psychoanalysis. A sensitive reading of Anti-Oedipus reveals that Deleuze and Guattari have a great deal of sympathy for Lacan, while also rejecting certain elements of his project. Moreover, familiarity with Lacan’s teaching from seminar 9 onwards reveals that Lacan is immune to a number of the critiques schizoanalysis levels against psychoanalysis. Indeed, in light of Lacan’s critique of the ego, his rejection of the Oedipus (he disdainfully refers to it as “Freud’s myth” in Seminar XVII and it is never a touchstone throughout his teaching), his rejection of a unified body, his account of partial objects (which Deleuze and Guattari themselves compare favorably to desiring-machines), and in his critique of all totalities (“there is no Other of the Other”, “there is no metalanguage”, “the Other does not exist”, “the Woman does not exist”), there’s already a way in which Lacan’s teaching can be described as “schizoanalytic.” This is a connection that enthusiasts of Deleuze and Guattari have yet to adequately exploit in rejoinders to Zizek, Badiou, Hallward, and the rest. This judgment is only intensified if one factors in Lacan’s use of ethnography in the early Family Complexes.
However, this is not what I wish to draw attention to. Here I can only throw up a sort of place holder for future thought and discussion as I’m very tired at the moment, but I wonder if, in fact, it is the case that social revolution is only attained through cultural revolution as Buchanan suggests. Here is the productive spark between Cusset’s dark and pessimistic account of the American appropriation of French theory and Buchanan’s assertion. On the one hand, there is the uninteresting observation that Buchanan is mistaken on textual grounds with respect to Deleuze and Guattari. While we might readily agree that for Deleuze and Guattari, social revolution can only take place through a revolution in desire, it’s also important to note that for Deleuze and Guattari the various syntheses of desire aren’t restricted to the domain of the cultural. Rather, in Anti-Oedipus desire is a sort of metaphysical principle that extends well beyond social bodies to include rocks, biological processes, stars, etc., etc. Wherever there is a connective synthesis, desire is at work. Desire is a synthesis of production. As such, desiring-production would include material economic processes, and not simply cultural formations.
Yet this textual criticism is not, in and of itself, of great interest but is the work of the pedant. The real question is whether cultural transformation is sufficient for social transformation. I suppose here we would have to determine what is meant by social transformation. Here my thoughts are underdeveloped, however the question I wish to mark is that of why we seem to witness cultural transformation after cultural transformation without accompanying social transformation. There are no shortage of radical critics out there, yet there seems to be very little in the way of a broad-scale, extra-academic audience for these critics. Often these critics speak in very impatient terms, suggesting that we need simply engage in the Act or affirm the Event to produce change, yet somehow these declarations ring hollow and fail to produce the effect they promise. Despite his affirmative stance, there’s a way of reading Badiou’s renewal of the concept of fidelity or faith in the political sphere, for example, is an exceedingly depressing symptom of our contemporary malaise; for, to put on my Nietzschean hat for a moment, this affirmation has the stench of the politically exhausted who feel the need of resorting to a messianic discourse to sustain the will to remain engaged where the hope of change looks all but impossible. Where work is possible, where work is immediate, there is no need of fidelity. Here I am not suggesting that the cultural is unimportant. Clearly there is a multi-directional process at work in these phenomena, such that the mythical base-superstructure model is mistaken. Material transformations beget cultural transformations and cultural transformations beget material transformations. The relation is not univocal in character.
However, it seems to me that in much of this political thought, questions of receptivity are missing. In a vulgar simplification of information theory, we are told that information requires a sender, a message, a channel across which the message is sent, and a receiver. Theory, in a variety of ways, has examined messages and either sought to formulate new messages (later Zizek, Badiou with Acts and truth-procedures), or to “deconstruct” various message frameworks (ideology: early Zizek, some moments of Adorno, Butler with her critique of gender, Spivak with her ever diligent analysis of blindspots in various academic discourses, Laclau and the splitting of hegemonic signifiers, Foucault and his analyses of power and its naturalizing tendencies, etc); yet has theory devoted enduring attention to the question of the conditions under which messages can be received?
At what point do certain statements, certain declarations, certain assertions, take on the capacity to resonate and produce effects in a receiver? What are the conditions for the possibility of being heard? Posing the question on the scale of readers, why is it that for me my eyes used to glaze over when reading Marx, yet now I find Marx of the greatest importance and interest? Some sort of change must have taken place. A new receptivity, a new aesthetic, must have installed itself. I became capable of receiving a message where before I was not. But how and under what conditions? Likewise, under what conditions do certain political positions and declarations begin to resonate within the social field? This question is at the very heart of social change and is not secondary or ancillary to questions of critique. For without adequately answering these questions, adequate strategies of producing change cannot be formulated. However, a glance at the history of political transformations also seems to indicate that while these shifts are cultural in character, they also seem to involve material transformations that problematize the cultural sphere, calling for new institutions, new group formations, new ways of feeling, new subjectivities, and new ways of living.
Larval Subjects . 
July 24, 2008 at 5:04 pm
“I became capable of receiving a message where before I was not. But how and under what conditions?”
This reminds me of a dilemma Dogen Zenji faced earlier in his life. On the one hand, per the Zen tradition and ultimately his own teachings, all sentient beings are Enlightened. On the other hand, per the Zen tradition and ultimately his own teachings, practice (zazen, holding the precepts, etc.) is indispensable. Dogen’s resolution of this dilemma is that practice does not create Enlightenment, implying a fundamental opposition between practice and “its goal,” but that they are coeval with one another.
Doesn’t Lacan offer a similar lesson regarding the formation of the subject in its “choosing” to hear the Name-of-the-Father: hearing is neither before nor after the heard Name nor the subject it inaugurates? In other words, either it’s going to happen or it’s not, and if it’s going to happen there’s nothing “in the Real” that forms a “pre-condition” of it happening that isn’t already Symbolized.
Getting back to your post though, in what way isn’t “the cultural sphere” already problematized (by its material conditions)? Doesn’t that presuppose the myth of wholeness that I think you are otherwise against.
July 24, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Thanks for the comment, Joe. I think it’s important to be careful with what you’re proposing about master-signifiers and the name-of-the-father vis a vis the question of hearing. One the one hand, if this is true, then it would be incredibly disempowering at the political level as there could be nothing in the way of strategic action, only risk that occasionally works and more often than not fails. Of course, things might indeed be this way. On the other hand, it’s worthwhile to look at the analytic act or interpretation itself in the clinical setting. There it is not an issue of a situation where the analysand is either going to hear the interpretation or isn’t going to hear the interpretation, rather there is a long and arduous process in which the analysand is, as it were, prepared for interpretations. Analysts do not simply offer interpretations as they occur to them– though sometimes they do this as well –but rather there is a process of delay, strategization, etc., that can go on for days, months, and years before the interpretation is enunciated or made. Here the question is that of the conditions under which interpretation is able to hit the real. These conditions involve shifts that take place in the unconscious of the analysand through other analytic interventions, the analysands work of free association, and so in. In other words, there’s all sorts of preparatory work that takes place in the clinical setting so that a space might emerge where a constellation of words might resonate. The question then would be what analogue to this would there be at the level of political praxis. Additionally, we can’t talk of something “already being symbolized” prior to the name-of-the-father as the name-of-the-father is a condition for symbolization in Lacan. I should add that while there is much I retain of Lacan I have also become deeply critical of his thought, believing analysis has efficacy for very different reasons than those suggested by the Lacanians.
You write:
I am not advocating the position that the cultural forms a whole or totality, but instead suggesting that this view is implicit in many of the theoretical orientations I mention in the post. Like Kant’s categories of the understanding functioning as a condition for the possibility of the phenomena of experience, language is treated, by these theorists as the transcendental condition for all our relations to the world. That is, language is treated as the conditions by which the given is given as given. Because language is self-referential (i.e., one signifier always refers to another signifier), the theorist then falls into a situation where there is no outside to language because, as you put it, the real is always-already symbolized or mediated by language. This leads to a theoretical perspective where questions of change are posed primarily in terms of cultural and linguistic interventions (i.e., the work of decoding or ideology critique and the introduction of new master-signifiers). As a result of this, other modes of analysis tend to fall away and become obscured, such as the analysis of economics, environment, or technology. This, for example, is why the Lacanian analyst can contentedly say that all analysis can unfold within the field of speech, ignoring institutional structures of the hospital, material conditions in which the analysand is living, etc. Likewise, the Zizekian might look at strife in regions of Africa, interpreting all that is taking place in terms of signifiers surrounding tribal names, looking for that interpretation that would “shift the very frame of the conflict”, ignoring things like the disappearance of major lakes due to global warming upon which agricultural infrastructure is dependent, the diamond trade, etc. Now, I must emphasize, I am not suggesting that language is unimportant or that it should be ignored. Clearly major discoveries were made in the theory of the last century. However, what we need, I think, is something closer to what Latour is up to where semiotic, deconstructive, and technological elements are woven together in a sort of monster without one having hegemony over the others and in which objects themselves are actors.
July 24, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I should add that the point here seems to be that social change seems to take place at certain boiling points related to economic and technological transformation, not through the agency of the letter. The agency of the letter, by contrast, seems to do something like advance work, recoding various signifying relations, opening the possibility of change going in one way or another. For instance, were the economy in the States to collapse right now I would be terrified, not simply because of the prospects of trying to make due, but because very reactionary elements have coded the social sphere for the last few decades rendering it likely that the response to this bifurcation point would be fascist and persecutory in character. Within the broader social sphere outside the walls of the academy, there is very little in the way of emancipatory discourses, so the cultural field is largely without the resources or a pre-prepared public to experience such an economic collapse in terms pertaining to corporate exploitation, fascist exploitation, etc., and very likely to encounter such a collapse in terms of the fault of various minority and leftist groups. This is one reason why the act of recoding– as I described in my article “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures” –is of such importance.
July 25, 2008 at 3:24 pm
“In other words, there’s all sorts of preparatory work that takes place in the clinical setting so that a space might emerge where a constellation of words might resonate. The question then would be what analogue to this would there be at the level of political praxis.”
I had this on the back of my mind, too, when I wrote that comment. I’m short on time, and won’t be back for a few days, but I’ll just say I think that this kind of preparatory work is at least part of Zizek’s project. That’s why I’ve made the comment about him working on “the people” as much as anything we’re looking at as the state. I agree with you, too, that there are certain discourses—surrounding the economy, environment and technology—that need to be woven into this, which is part of why I see making such a big deal about electoral systems, which I view as a material condition of our political process.
July 25, 2008 at 11:19 pm
You said somewhere in your post that “while… thankfully Zizek argues for a Real outside the symbolic (and Foucault articulates a disjunction between the visible and the legible), nonetheless it seems that any outside to the symbolic disappears. As Zizek likes to put it, “the real is a function of the symbolic, a twist in the symbolic”.
This seemed to me to be saying that Zizek asserts a Real outside the symbolic, but that he also doesn’t assert such a Real. So, I was wondering, as a much poorer reader of Zizek, how is it that he argues for a conception of the Real outside of the symbolic, and why is that something we can feel “thankful” for?
July 25, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Nick, I think that was infelicitous expression on my part. I should have written “while… thankfully Zizek argues for a real that cannot be reduced to the symbolic… nonetheless it seems that any outside to the symbolic disappears as the real becomes merely a function of the symbolic.” As for why this is something to be thankful about, I would say that it allows us to escape linguistic or semiological idealism where everything is merely competing texts and relations of power, allowing for a real of situations that might be a site of action and critique.
July 29, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I still haven”t got very clear how I”ve just arrived to your blog… but it”s a really nice surprise.
Unfortunately sometimes (well, most of the times in my country) the transmission of lacanian theory seem to be such a dark, dogmatic and hermetic thing that texts as accesible like yours are really welcome.
Nice work.
August 13, 2008 at 2:44 am
“At what point do certain statements, certain declarations, certain assertions, take on the capacity to resonate and produce effects in a receiver? What are the conditions for the possibility of being heard? . . . why is it that for me my eyes used to glaze over when reading Marx, yet now I find Marx of the greatest importance and interest? ”
This sparked a connection with something I read last night in Wayne Booth’s _The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction_. He was talking about how a work that had captivated him as an 18 year old is unreadable as a 67 year old–somewhat the way I respond to Ayn Rand’s work now. There seems to be (This is me, not Booth) doors or windows (possibilities for reactions/responses) that didn’t exist at the time of the previous reading. Those doors (or whatever metaphor you choose) have to be created by others/others’ texts. The interesting thing is that the door is a form of constraint rather than freedom, or it’s a possibility of freedom by way of constraint. You have do go thru the door; you can’t go thru the wall around the door. There’s a negation there. Some doors are also forever closed. I cannot go back and love _Atlas Shrugged_ like I once did. I am constrained in this sense. I am not permitted to love that book anymore. The bridge back has been burned. Maybe, for you, a new door now exists and Marx will help you pass through it. That door wasn’t there before, so Marx held no fascination. . . . I don’t know. Just rambling.
August 14, 2008 at 3:28 am
Unrelated question: have you seen any of the Cormac Gallagher bootleg translations of Lacan’s Seminar? he’s done a really extensive set, but it’s all unofficial. are they well-regarded or not?
September 5, 2008 at 9:48 pm
This is a delayed response, but I just wanted to say that I completely agree with your (and Buchanan’s) assessment of Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to psychoanalysis (esp. to Lacan). Even more insightful, however, is your point that Buchanan’s reading of Deleuzo-Guattarian desire fails to see it in its totality as he constrains it to the cultural. That is one crucial part of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory that I expected Buchanan not to miss. When you say something about changes in receptivity, I think you’re on to something. I myself was initially resistant to Marx, but now I can hardly do an analysis of the socioecopolitical without somehow drawing from him.
September 9, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Like Ryan/Aless,I’m coming to the party late, but I could not help but think that there is an entire field of thought that you are not mentioning especially as you talk about material and cultural revolutions; in addition, this field would be closely aligned with popular receptivity in the way that it addresses issues the relationship between science and the humanities. I’m talking about andrei leroi gourhan, bernard stiegler, fred kittler, and many followers; i.e. the history and development of technics.
You mention information theory but as you know Lacan had a deep interest in cybernetics. Do you see that interest as a link that might help develop the questions between cultural and material transformations, an inbetween space already occupied by technology for better and worse?
September 11, 2008 at 6:25 pm
“On the other hand, it’s worthwhile to look at the analytic act or interpretation itself in the clinical setting. There it is not an issue of a situation where the analysand is either going to hear the interpretation or isn’t going to hear the interpretation, rather there is a long and arduous process in which the analysand is, as it were, prepared for interpretations. Analysts do not simply offer interpretations as they occur to them– though sometimes they do this as well –but rather there is a process of delay, strategization, etc., that can go on for days, months, and years before the interpretation is enunciated or made.”
I’m often struck by the way you make the analyst-analysand relationship paradigmatic. My opinion is this tends to obscure the problems you are trying to discuss rather than illuminate them.
I am in agreement with you when you say Deleuze and Guattari do not outright reject either psychoanalysis or Lacan, but it is precisely to this paradigmatic use of the analyst-analysand relationship they direct some very pointed criticism.
It is in the power relationship between the analyst and analysand that a problem arises. I don’t want to caricature this power relationship or lapse into my own habitual hyperbole over it–as far as dominating and exploiting power relations go, this is a mild one. And I personally believe the analyst, through an extraordinary cultivation of sensitivities and sensibilities, is often able (somehow) to overcome it–to transcend it, if you will. However, how that is happening when it is happening isn’t theorized by psychoanalysis. In that theory, in one way or another, the analyst is ultimately the one who knows.
When you use the analyst-analysand paradigmatically and over a large number of very different phenomena, it always seems to me you do this as if it could be simply understood or assumed you have the role of the analyst, or at least the role aligned with the analyst. Then, with that position assumed, you are concerning yourself with how to get the “analysands” to open up, to change, etc. To get cured. But what if you don’t have the proper set of coordinates any more than anyone else? What if the others just happen to be just as open, or more so, than you? What if from their perspective the problem is that YOU aren’t open enough?
It just seems to me you are asking about opening in a way which partially precludes any real answer from coming. There’s no BwO in psycho-analysis or in Lacan.(Well, about Lacan I admit I could be very surprised, and will be happy to be enlightened if there is a BwO in Lacan.)
September 14, 2008 at 12:19 am
Hey larval, love your site and have been following it for quite some time now.
I’ve been re-reading anti-oedipus now that i’ve finished volume 1 of capital and am almost finished with limits of capital by harvey. The parallels, regardless of whether or not DandG are ‘coquetting’ are truly exciting, especially where they align their project here in similar terms to the Kantian critique.
My question is that being somewhat familiar with the sort of history of Lacan and different conceptions of the Real, what would you compare the Body Without Organs to in the realm of Marx, Kant, and Lacan? I’m having trouble understanding it fully in a philosophical/theoretico/technical sense although it makes a good deal of sense metaphorically and intuitively.
Also, Zizek’s claim that Deleuze is a Hegelian Lacanaian (lol), although somewhat funny in that Zizek seems to like to find the hegel.lacan in everything, it is also theoretically interesting.
I haven’t read much Hegel but early in the phenomenology, I remember being struck by the idea that spirit is in everything. So when you wrote that for DandG desire is amongst the planets as well as individuals, it struck me. Aside from the two ‘languages’ used, one a (i know this isn’t correct but hopefully you’ll get the jist of it) affirmative ‘vitalism’ and the other that of negation.
I tend to think that the difference is superficial, and if so, that leads to a lot of interesting little sparks that might be woven between DandG and otherwise unthinkable ‘enemies’ like Kant, Lacan and Hegel.
September 14, 2008 at 3:26 am
Here are my broad and somewhat unrelated (to this post) thoughts: