Brico-Brack - Sudhu

As a founding member of the Societe Bricoleur, I took special interest in Delueze and Guatarri’s invocation of  “the early industrial-era phenomenon of bricolage: a tinker’s assembly of amorphous collections of metal and junk, oblivious to the materials’ original purpose in industrial machinery. Bricolage thus involves the re-appropriating of familiar material, into a chaotic assemblage that deviates from those materials’ expected purposes… Deleuze and Guattari point to bricolage as a response to capitalist excess, and in particular, the broadly schizoid tendencies of desire in a state of excess,” (Carson, Social Production and the Subject [Deleuze and Guatarri])

I’m interested to know if there are possibilities beyond capitalism (We touched on this in class last week: some way of re-arranging spilled apples from the cart we keep upsetting). If it’s all we know how do we conceive of something beyond our conception? Is this where artistic and philosophical work comes in handy? Can we cast frames like nets into the sea of chaos and retrieve framed portions of chaos that present ideas and realities previously un-conceived (inconceivable)?

And, is it really a response to capitalist excess? All our life is excess, according to  extrapolations in class from Haraway and Grosz. If we didn’t have excess we’d be dead. Don’t we all have some form of bleeding off excess that might be likened to “the satisfaction the handyman experiences when he plugs something into an electric socket or diverts a stream of water”? And can the satisfaction only be achieved “be explained in terms of “playing mommy and daddy,” or by the pleasure of violating a taboo? (Delueze and Guatarri, 7)

Is it possible that “everything functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures…distances and fragmentations, within a sum that never succeeds in bringing its various parts together so as to form a whole.”? And thusly we can conclude that the whole never actually exists, except as a sum of its parts, which cannot be summed?

“Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines” (Delueze and Guatarri, 3)

“Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another.” (Delueze and Guatarri, 5)

“Every “object” presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object. Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux… the eye interprets everything…in terms of seeing. But a connection with another machine is always established…”

Here we are back at Haraway’s idea of interconnectedness, companion species as desiring machines, producer and consumer, consumer and producer, both at once in relation to one another, intra-referential on a plane of intensity drawn between the two. This cross-sectioning of the universe may be useful in some cases, perhaps to help us humans feel like we have some form of understanding of the chaos that surrounds us. Here I’ll diverge momentarily to take up Grosz and her frames of chaos, as her use of “chaos” remains slightly suspect (A chaotic system is one which has seemingly-random behaviors, at least in certain parts of its “life”. When examined more closely, with the right “frame”, the seemingly-random turns out to have some predictable “order”. It may not be (and probably IS not) precisely predictable, but there are regularities which can be approximated. A random system (if there really be such) doesn’t have any of those regularities and is only predictable in aggregate with some kind of statistic, like the “normal” or”gaussian” distribution of test scores. So, with the correct frame one can “divine” order from chaos or at least, appear to have some understanding of the interrelations of some of the constituent bits that make up chaos and our universe. It seems to me the use of all this philosophizing is to frame the world, which we don’t understand, in ways that help us to feel that we have some understanding of some of the constituent bits and their relationships with other constituent bits that make up chaos and our universe. We make controlled, or uncontrolled, empirical observations of certain specific phenomena and from our observation or measurements construct subsets, Venn diagrams, planes of intensity, and other such reductive but useful, for our little minds, visual or linguistic representations of datasets, subsets of the all encompassing (non-narrative) database that makes up our universe, the all-encompassing chaos, the inter and intra related web of data, networks and information processing units.



desiring process and product

Let’s first start with a disclaimer: I think there are some useful ideas in desiring machines pertaining to what I’m interested in, however I’m not sure if I agree with, or even understand, the full meaning of what the authors are driving at here especially when connecting Marxist ideas to Freudian ideas.  

This little excerpt I would like to discuss: (p.3-4)

“What do we mean here by process? It is probable that a certain level of nature and industry are two separate and distinct things: from one point of view, industry is the opposite of nature: from another, industry extracts its raw materials from nature; from yet another, it returns its refuse to nature; and so on.  Even within society; this characteristic man-nature, industry-nature, society-nature relationship, is responsible for the distinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called production, distribution and consumption.  But in general this entire level of distinctions examined from the point of view of its formal developed structures, presupposes not only the existence of capital and the division of labor, but also a false consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily acquires, both of itself and of the supposedly fixed elements within an over-all process.  For the real truth of the matter - the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium - is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determines the production, though they do so within the productions process itself.  Hence everything is production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties and of pain. Everything is production since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced.  This is the first meaning of process as we use the term: incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them the productions of one and the same process.”

I read something like this and I think about what it means to be an artist.  I am inseparable from the natural world, I desire nature,  I desire to produce, I produce nature-content productions to be consumed and stand as record of my desires.  All of this is complexly intertwined.  I want to examine with commercial (industrial) - natural divide, I do this by using commercial/industrial products (which were derived from nature through raw materials) to then reproduce a natural phenomenon and framing it within the seductive structure of the commercial. 

pg. 4 “…we make no distinction between man and nature…”

Where I get lost is in the schizophrenic, the id, the oedipus complex, aren’t these things that are perhaps separate from nature?  By identifying these characteristics in terms of humans, man and nature begin to become separate, unless it is argued that nature (organisms, organs, tissue, cells) also are subject to schizophrenia, the id, ego and superego, oedipal complexes and the like.  Which obviously they are not, it is not possible that every organism in nature is governed by the structure of mother and father- as we looked at the variety of sexual reproduction in the Roughgarden article it is easy to dispel Freud’s model.  

Confused! 

Desiring Machine Reading Response-- Duncan Bowsman

My hand-machines desire to produce the production of text from their coupling with my motor-brain-machine that triggers movement of the hand-machine’s finger-machines across the keyboard-typing-machine in its coupling with my computational-database-visualizer-processing-machine’s processes of production production.  Id est, I wanna type somethin’.  I have added here the constraint that I am no longer thinking of I as an ego or one abstract system, but as interconnected machines with their desirings, couplings, and processes.  My brain-machine, in its feeble idea-producing capacities, sees an opportunity for synthesis in becoming-reading-response as not only a stylistic flourish, but as a process of producing somewhere in my understanding-machine process the completion of a process begun in one of its many connections with my eye-machines, which have seen (as they desire, as they incessantly seek out as they only know how to do even my lids are closed in the processes of becoming a dream-producing machine) the text of this reading on desiring machines.  But eyes don’t create a becoming-understood alone, that’s not their function, understanding is only in coupling becoming-seminarian processes (when they are activated) of the saying-and-hearing, social seminar-producing machine.  Semantic satiation, hopefully, may produce a backdoor-opening process for a becoming-intuitive of the information presented rather than a grasping-without-certainty produced by the coupling of competing brain-machine parts: the word-understanding machine, the doubting machine, the information synthesizing machine, the friend-thinking machine, the music-listening machine, distraction machines, the droning on-and-on machine, the desiring machine coupling processing machines desiring coupling machines coupling desiring machines, machine processes of desiring producing desires, desiring producing machine processes to produce desiring, coupling coupling machines, desiring process processing processes desiring production… etc., etc., etc.

In thinking of the umwelt of desiring machines and their interconnections, couplings, and systems as an art practice, perhaps we might remember our old pal Arthur Ganson, his literal machines and their desires: Machine with Oil (a luxurious oil desiring machine), Machine with Grease (the constant orgasm-desiring machine), Machine with an Artichoke Petal, and the others in the museum machine and how they couple with tourist viewing machines and so on?

Week 10 Reading Response - Jesse

I’m not sure if everyone is aware of this, but I actually have a BA in psychology. Granted, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I had learned (and let’s be honest, if you’re not pursuing psychology in academia or as a therapist, then it’s tough to retain the details) but I do remember that I’ve never been a fan of Freud. Not to say he wasn’t influential (he was), but that doesn’t mean he “right.” I feel like he’s led the world astray, and the fact that people still base their understanding of human behavior on the theories of Freud and his “disciples,” is troublesome for me.

With regards to the Caruth/Freud’s analysis of the father dreaming of his son burning – why is nobody taking into account the fact that time does not progress at the same rate in the “dream world” as it does in the real world? Is the fact that the father is dreaming about this event really delaying his reaction to the event? How do we know that the whole sequence of events in the dream took more than one second to play out? And who’s to say that it wasn’t the candle which actually woke the father up? Perhaps the whole dream occurred in the time between the sound of the candle crashing reaching the father’s ears, and the time when he became physically aware of himself being awake. I’m not suggesting that the analysis has no validity. In traumatic situations, the repetition of the trauma within a dream can be viewed as a coping mechanism, or help the conscious explore some of the unexplored regions of the subconscious. Yea, I can buy into that, but there’s got to be more there.

Very quickly, with regards to Deleuze, I was trying to read Anti-Oedipus’ discussion of the schizophrenic and their relationship to self/body, as a metaphor for capital and production. I think that’s what was trying to be done, but I just couldn’t make the connection. The worst part about this situation is that I still have no idea how the “Solar Anus” relates Marxism, and I feel like that could be a great conversation killer (or starter?) at fancy cocktail parties and social events.

After the Deleuze

Deleuze, in spite of his long sentences, offers a much more appealing model for schizophrenia, one which more closely maps to my experience.  When I was an undergrad, during the first peak of the psychedelic era, my composition professor and his wife, who was my piano professor, both very well known and extremely accomplished artists, suffered the dismay of their beautiful teenage daughter having her first episode of schizophrenia.  At this point the daughter and I somewhat befriended each other; she shared with me her artwork journal (that recalls the schizophrenic artwork described by Deleuze) and described how it documented her progression into her various “episodes”.  She was so lucid about all of this that I was having great difficulty with the kind of treatment she was receiving, being shunted off into facilities and things; my experience of her was that she wasn’t doing anything that was therapeutically different than what everyone else was doing by self-medicating with LSD; it was a line of flight from the unbearabe absurdity of capitalist existence…but society didn’t get it…