I’ve often found myself returning to these lines from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus with wonder and admiration:
…we always make love with worlds. And our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover, to either close himself off or open up to more spacious worlds, to masses and large aggregates. And isn’t it in this way that we must understand the famous formula of Marx?– the relationship between man and woman is “the direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person.” That is, the relationship between the two sexes (man and woman) is only the measure of the relationship of sexuality in general, insofar as it invests large aggregates (man and man)? (AO, 294)
To fall in love is to fall in love with the world of another person. In earlier writings I have distinguished between World and Earth. World is the particular manner in which an object is open to its environment. It is that which the transcendental idealists and phenomenologists are analyzing when they speak of “reality”. Earth is the field of that which exists, regardless of whether it is available for any being’s world. Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion of “disjunctive synthesis”. A disjunctive synthesis is a “relation of non-relation”. In Deleuze’s technical vocabulary, a disjunctive synthesis is a synthesis of divergent series that do not converge yet somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark. Consider the relationship between me and my cat. My cat and I share entirely different worlds even though we inhabit one and the same earth or heteroverse. There is no point where our worlds converge, yet nonetheless certain differential events flash across our distinct and divergent worlds, creating a relation in this non-relation. Somehow our worlds come to be imbricated and entangled with one another, even though they don’t converge on any sort of sameness.
Perhaps there are two types of love. On the one hand, there is perhaps the sort of love that Aristophenes describes in Plato’s Symposium, where love is premised on the same. Here love is a conjunctive synthesis, where the two lovers converge on identity, as they strive for the same. It seems to me that this love is always doomed to death. It is a machine that can’t work or function precisely because, as a result of a sterile repetition, it lacks the differential energy to perpetuate itself or continue itself. It ceases to have anything to talk about, much less any reason to make love. On the other hand, there is disjunctive love. Disjunctive love is a love that somehow occurs in divergent worlds that nonetheless occupy the same earth.
read on!
Here, to fall in love is to fall in love with a world that one cannot assimilate, consume, or domesticate. This is queer love. In disjunctive love the lovers are withdrawn from one another as worlds, yet still somehow in relation. The spark that passes between their divergent series creates the sort of perpetual motion machine I described in my recent interview at New APPS precisely by opening the lovers on to that which is in-consumable by the lovers. This element of the “spirit is a bone” becomes perpetual stimulus for the invention of the respective worlds of the lovers without any termination point in identity. Here we encounter the ontic principle, in the form of a difference that continues to make a difference. This disjunctive synthesis becomes a perpetual stimulus for invention, negotiation, and creation between the two. It is this, no doubt, that Lacan has in mind when he says that “the sexual relationship is impossible, but it does not cease to be written“. Disjunctive love becomes a space of perpetual writing in the Derridean sense of “arche-writing”. We now know that the Milky Way and another galaxy are in a process of collision. This collision will generate an entirely new galaxy. Disjunctive love is like this. It is a collision with a non-consumable, “non-autopoieticizable” difference that generates the condition for endless creation.
In The Imperative Lingis writes,
We recognize our friends at great distances, before we can see the contours of their faces and the color of their complexions and hair, by the posture and gait. We recognize someone not by the outlines\, by running our eyes around the contours of his or her head and trunk, but by the inner lines of posture. To recognize a person is to recognize a typical way of addressing tasks, of envisioning landscapes, of advancing hesitantly and cautiously or ironically, of plunging exuberantly down the paths to us. Someone we know is someone we relate to posturally, someone we walk in step with, someone who maintains a certain style of positioning himself or herself and gesticulating in conversation with whom we take up a corresponding positions as we talk. (52 – 53)
For Lingis things are a particular style of being. To recognize our friends is to recognize that singular style. There is something familiar and recognizable in it, but something that is perpetually aleatory and open-ended. This is what it is like with disjunctive love. To love is to fall in love with a style, with a world, where an earth is shared yet the two of you diverge. That style and divergence becomes a perpetual stimulus for renewal and creation… An evolutionary spark across divergent series.
May 19, 2011 at 2:10 am
Very nice!
May 19, 2011 at 7:25 am
Wish it went on…
May 20, 2011 at 1:58 am
To be honest I get kind of lost with most of this Object-Oriented Ontology stuff. It speaks a different language than the Plato-Aristotle-Descartes-Spinoza-Leibniz-Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel-Heidegger philosophy that I’m used to. While it seems to draw some inspiration from Karl Marx, it seems not to be too interested in the critical tradition of Lukacs-Bloch-Benjamin-Kracauer-Horkheimer-Adorno-Lefebvre-Harvey-Postone developments of Marxian thought, or of the great political thinkers of Marxism, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotskii, etc.
Can someone briefly break down the lines of influence for OOO in general, differentiate it from SR and delineate its major influences?
I mean, it’s clearly not very interested in phenomenology, from what I can tell. And it’s largely inspired by Deleuze, who I have read. While he’s somewhat interesting, he and Guattari have a very odd understanding of capitalism.
And I don’t get its obsession with Lovecraft and other sci-fi/horror writers. I mean, I’ve read almost everything Lovecraft ever wrote but I’ll be the first to admit that he was a second-rate Poe.
May 20, 2011 at 1:35 pm
[…] HERE, with a nice citation from Lingis’s The Imperative, which Levi has been enjoying lately. It’s my favorite Lingis book, with The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common a close second. […]
May 20, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Ross, you must be a blast at parties.
The info about OOO is everywhere. If you don’t care about it, then just go back to your Marxist solipsism. I know I won’t mind.
May 20, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Ross,
You can read an outline of my version of object-oriented ontology in my contribution to The Speculative Turn which is available online for free in .pdf form. My own work is heavily influenced by Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Marx, Pickering, Jane Bennett, Roy Bhaskar, McLuhan, Kittler, Ong, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou, Lacan, Zizek, Niklas Luhmann, Bateson, Braudel, Locke, Deleuze, and a host of others. You can find a link to The Speculative Turn under the “Books” link in the righthand sidebar of this blog. Harman’s work is deeply influenced by phenomenology, especially Heidegger. Much of SR is an attempt to break with the sort of idealistic tradition you evoke, instead developing a realism and a materialism.
May 20, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Joseph,
I fail to see how any of the thinkers I mentioned ever argued for a “Marxist solipsism.” The problem of subjectivity doesn’t even arise for me, since the primary subject under capitalism in my analysis isn’t even human: it’s Capital (which is incidentally also the “object” presently). Humanity possesses some limited subjectivity, but is still largely restricted in terms of its free action by the objective dead labor that has accumulated from the past and continues to accumulate. Capital is the “automatic subject,” as Marx put it. Not humanity, and certainly not individuals.
May 20, 2011 at 8:24 pm
Levi,
I certainly understand the attempt to break with German Idealism, which, while useful to understand as context for later thinkers, was effectively sublated perfectly in Marxist inversion of Hegel’s absolute idealism.
Also, all of the Marxists that I mentioned were obviously materialists. It kind of comes with the territory of being a Marxist.
May 20, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Keep in mind Derrida’s supposition in Of Grammatology that cybernetics and social science are primarily involved in the re-appropriation of presence. In some sense science & technology are smitten. So called 6th generation computing anticipates interfacing disjunctively with the secret style of nature. Microtubules from the human brain are being manufactured in laboratories in Japan in hopes of ultimate computing. One team of scientists is even inventing the NanoBrain, a two-way communication device shaped like a complex molecule, intentionally designed to LOVE the molecular biology of life.
***
This post also informs theories of the behavioral ethology of adolescence. There is surely some friction in late adolescence as the core actants of a world (parents,friends,media) respond to the maturation of the adolescent’s perceived vital energy. The Lingis quote is tremendously placed.
Perhaps the term “falling in love” can be placed on a continuum with less dramatic adolescent experience, for example, “enfatuation”. Awareness of disjunction is the crucial factor in discovering how silly be the adolescent crush.
More mature experience of disjunction may produce convictions about unrequited love.
Ah the violence!…falling in love with style.
It also can inform feelings about aleatory globalization.
May 21, 2011 at 7:16 am
Ross:
You seemed to take my “Marxist solipsism” so literally — I wasn’t ascribing any such solipsism to Marx, but to your continual, kind of, to be frank, dismal rejection of everything that isn’t Marxist or of his lineage. I was saying your thought is enclosed in a kind of feedback loop where it can only see Marx and Marx’s critiques everywhere. Those have value, that goes without saying, but since you have started commenting here, they have inevitably been in the form of, “hey, this isn’t very Marxist, so why should I care?” I understand you are committed to Marx, but you words here make you out to be more of a Marx evangelist, absolutely certain of the truth of your ideas. That’s what I meant, not anything about your specific ideas of subjectivity. It’s more about the way your words and behavior here sound and appears.
I may be wrong and have completely missed the point and be misjudging your behavior here. But, again to be frank, so often you only seem interested in taking the wind out of people’s sails.
May 21, 2011 at 7:21 am
PS: Ross, by the way, I am not saying this as an enemy — I have read through several of your posts on your (very strikingly designed) blog, and find them very good, that is, when you aren’t rejecting and naysaying every other thing. When you are positively talking about, say Soviet architecture — a very fascinating topic and very thoroughly researched by you — that’s great, I’m a fan of that kind of stuff.
I am only writing this to make sure that my statements are aimed at your empirical behavior here only, not your own work, which, as I said, is certainly valuable and intensely researched (going by your blog, anyway).
May 21, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Levi, beautiful post here. I too wish it went on. I hope you retain this thread of discussion for future articles or books. It seems like a great way to discuss ‘objects’ as ‘actants’, as well as their withdrawn, yet ‘cross-participant’ ‘qualities’ (my paraphrase of ‘divergent synthesis’)– at least, a good example of the kinds of object-dynamics you seem committed to showing and/or unraveling.
The discussion between Ross and Joesph seems a bit petty, to be honest… not to mention totally unhelpful :/
May 22, 2011 at 1:59 am
[…] 22, 2011 Love Redux Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized Leave a Comment In a previous post I began developing an object-oriented account of love. Building on this, we can ask, what is the […]
May 24, 2011 at 12:57 am
(long time reader, first time poster)
Very happy with this post! For the past couple of months I’ve been thinking about relationships like the articulation of two ecological systems brought into relation. The relationship establishes channels of sharing or exchange that can’t be reduced to intentionality, design, essence, etc.
This was all sparked for me while reading about biodiversity in western Colombia — which is the result of a productive bottleneck of two continental systems at the isthmus.
June 10, 2011 at 6:57 pm
[…] in their own ‘world’ (in the sense elaborated in Levi’s quite beautiful posts here and here), each entangled in the mesh. The entanglement of these two objects is not merely an […]