Larry Rickels, Day 3

Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

Let's return to these films and begin to examine the place of the failure of interpretation of the "psycho" moment

• Therapy and theory are coterminus in Winnicott, unlike in Freud where there is a distance between the transference moment and the theory of psychology
• Winnicott seeks to make the therapeutic session both the place of therapy and theory

Where Freud comes to be used for mass communication and technologization - we can see it in Benjamin's Themes and Motifs of Baudelaire and perhaps also in these films

• The masking of Michael Myers is a doubling; Leatherface is slightly different in that his is perhaps a melancholic collecting
• Freddie, Jason, Michael Myers - they become a cartoon, really, an expression of superegoic parenting that scolds against teenage sexuality
• They've become transcendentalized as evil and demonic and thus are encoded as part of the symbolic order

What's with vampire movies these days?

• The shift from zombies to vampires should be seen as a sign of hope: the eight years of the Bush Administration was to zombies as vampires is to the Obama Administration
• Saw should be understood, like Se7en, as a morality play for educational purposes, wherein the victim participates in the murder and they seek to find the CSI-styled DNA-certainty of why they are locked in that room.

Back to Benjamin
The essay on Baudelaire folds out a contrast of experience and memory from Freud and psychoanalysis as well as the German language itself

• Gedächtnis - memory that protects and preserves, commemoration, and it is linked to rote memory
• Erinnerung - remembering that is all about forgetting, remembering that over-records and thus erases; it protects against stimuli
• Consciousness defends against overstimulation and both Freud and Benjamin talk of these as shocks: the more often one is shocked the less affecting it becomes

But, traumatic shocks will occur, these breach our readiness and modes of preparedness and deeply affect us

• The traumatic event is revisited in the flashback and is linked with the serial dreaming of war neurotics
• The trauma victim sought to master the traumatic stimulus from the point when the traumatic event occurred
• This repetition might not be unlike Kierkegaard's idea of repetition, call it seriality, a return to remembering to forget

As Winnicott became more interested in regression therapy, he felt we had an in-born capacity to defend ourselves from impinging by cataloging which occurs in linear recording

• This categorizing and recording occurs so that they can be dealt with later (and forgotten)
• Remembering as defense and then remembering to forget

Illusion occupies different places for the transitional object:

• the loss of the original omnipotence is bridged or staggered through the use of illusion in the transitional object
• the transitional object gives the child a temporary rest stop in the constant onslaught of living
• The transitional object is always to be seen as an agreement that the question, "Did you conceive of this?" will not be asked - but isn't this an invitation to approach it?
• It shows how easily the social contract can be broken
• the purpose of the transitional object is for differentiation

Freud and Benjamin again

• The memory of "the shower scene" is constitutively disposable, the traumatic memory has been made disposable
• the more shocks we experience the more guarded our minds become

2 forms of experience in Benjamin:

1. Erlebnis - committed to a time line of working on it so it may be crossed-off the list
2. Erfahrung - open less under voluntary control

The shock is where we are most alive with our time, this is unfortunate as we are actively working against being shocked

• the hope of this work is that we might not become dead to our sensorium
• Canetti says of the crowd-feeling (which is destructive), that the dosed shock must be within a closed crowd
• Benjamin allows for an ingroup, a comfort zone that is provided by gadget-love; a connection with a control panel - massification becomes more intimate in the control panel
• He argues that the match marked the onset of the countless developments of technological innovation which would transform the human world where we are able to experience the shock
• "The camera gave the moment of posthumous shock," his understanding of how every gadget-lover can administer the shock in an intimate, ingroup setting

Prosthesis (Ernst Kapp) was shared or recycled by McLuhan when he read Freud or Buckminster Fuller. Kapp, while living in Texas said the axe in Texas was so much closer to the hand than the axes in Germany.

The film actor is fragmented, transported, and reassembled through film and the audience is fabricated in the sensorium.

• "The film image is separable and transportable" Benjamin wrote this at the time when Lacan was writing about the Mirror Stage
• The image is pitched first to the camera and the scene is only created upon editing

What underlies belief in surveillance?

• There is something comforting about it, right?
• None of our suffering will go unnoticed, as Nietzsche said
• But it's not a comfort that is available to us, something has been satisfied, though we might not enjoy it immediately
• Derrida pointed out that live media requires the belief that this live transmission from Baghdad is really from there and is live

Benjamin says Painter : Magician :: Surgeon : Cameraman

• What is skipped in the surgical approach is the interpersonal meditation. It is in that sense that the cut of editing is what guides us to this place of affirmation - that through technology we appreciate Nature
• The Delay of the Machine Age (Hanns Sachs) what separates Antiquity from the Industrial Age? There has been a shift from primary to secondary narcissism - the latter is shareable and always has to deal with managing ego
• The primary narcissism is like the zombie where the body is always decomposing and we walk around dead
• Every schizophrenic shows us the emergency exit through the uncanny use of technology (Judge Schreber)
• "The delusion is the act of recovery," Freud

Note to self: Canetti's "the living's sense of superiority to the dead," is not Confucian at all - what is the relationship between the dead and death in psychoanalysis and philosophy?

Looking at William Wilson (E.A.Poe, 1839)

• before the essay on "The Uncanny" Poe sees the uncanny doubling of the war veteran whose uncanny double is the Warrior
• In Beyond the Pleasure Principle he says the double can be reclaimed

We begin with an enormous sense of alienation

(WW, 3) Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! [...] hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven? [...] I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.

• The psycho here is not a failure of interpretation but a want for successful interpretation
• What is it he sees? It is nothing. He reinstates the familiar story of sarcastic imitation. Is this the relic of parental identification (we draw sarcastic pictures of the Teacher, our parents, etc.), but this parental container is simply not enough and he leaves the academy
  

  (WW, 11) I looked; - and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable terror. [...] Not thus he appeared.... Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?
  

  
  
• His immediate school fellows had never noticed this constant imitation
  

  (WW, 9) But, in truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself,) this similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed at all by our school fellows. That he observed it in all its bearings, and as fixedly as I, was apparent [the parent?]; but that he could discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance, can only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary penetration.
  

  
  

[END OF CLASS]

Larry Rickels, Day 2

NOTE TO FACEBOOK VIEWERS: to view any of the clips you'll need to visit the actual blog. Scroll to the bottom and click "View Original Post"

Larry Rickels taught a course entitled SCHAUER SCENES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM. This course explored the genealogy of the "psycho" (and Psycho effect) in mediatic-analytic sessions.

We began class with a discussion of Ulmer's evening lecture.

Back to Psycho

Norman as TV: he switches between stations (personalities), he's not able to cross over except on the audio track.

A genealogical digression: the train as conveyor belt of neurosis

• the first case of male hysteria was at the time of the use of trains and this symbolizes something
• the term "psycho" became slang after WWI; Freud, et al. called it war neurosis or shell shock - wherein the soldier endures an uncanny doubling of the ego
• psychoanalysis became famous because it was the only treatment at that time that could get the soldiers back out on the frontlines
• Freud was first included into the U.S. military after they saw that the Nazis were also employing psychoanalytic ideas
• now we call it Post-Traumatic Disorder

The "slasher" genre develops the "splatter" phase which is more oral and features cannibalism, etc.

Night of the Living Dead 1968, Romero:

• A reference to "The Shower Scene" is made in this film
• there is this need to show what ghouls eat in this film (when the daughter eats the father in the basement, 83 minutes in)
• this is a critical moment in the development of the horror genre as it is the removal of the invisibility of violence in the genre

Interesting to note the role of the TV in this film: they refuse to go into the basement because they believe their relationship to media will keep them alive

The zombie attack is called an epidemic of mass murder, their told not to pay their respects to the dead

It must be remembered that this film is released in the wake of the murder of MLK, and perhaps this film suggests to us today that everyone is implicated in his murder as society functioning as itself had created these conditions

• we are those posses, wandering around taking pleasure in the wanton killing

Romero introduces the terror of survival - those that die in the film do so because they are not worthy of the future.

The Psycho effect: the murderer and the victim redefine life as surviving, the status of surviving is altered in various films

"The survivor is mankind's worst character," Canetti stated in his Crowds and Power.

• The command is a suspended death sentence
  
• commands are older than speech and originate in flight
  
• the herd in fleeing a predator is the first crowd formation
  
• and it is the origin of the sacrifice
• Judge Schreber is the ultimate survivor because he has absorbed all the energy of those that have died

Cannibal Killers
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974, Hooper
"The film you are about to see is true," as the trailer informs us, was a direct response to the Watergate as well as Vietnam War lies of the contemporary moment. Hooper was in many ways responding to the brutality of his times:

Some college kids - loosely liberal, returning to the sticks, from which they came

Taxidermy (a nod to Psycho?) gone wild.

The "Shower Scene" is alluded to here with the extreme close-up of the eye, she seems to be literally vivisected by the camera

Follow this link to view the ending

She is rescued by a truck, named Black Maria, which is the same name as Thomas Edison (the father of film)'s theater and lab.

What we are exposed to here is the economy of the recording of destruction.

The inspiration for Psycho was the true story of Ed Gein, he was also the inspiration for Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, as well as the inspiration for the Leatherface character in this film.
We were fully inside Ed Gein's home with this film.

This machine of destruction and recording (the whirring of the chainsaw as an allusion to the camera recording) is finally interrupted.

Her survival begs the question, this was alluded to in the trailer: Must we be chained to what we have seen?
What kind of work must we do to shake-off that impact?

The problem of the slaughterhouse is the problem of food and death.

[END OF CLASS]

Michael Hardt, Day 2 (1/2)

Hardt taught a class entitled "POLITICAL ACTIVISM: MULTIPLICITY & EMPIRE" where we read through three texts: Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus (both written by Deleuze & Guattari), and Empire (written by Hardt and Antonio Negri).

A great way to supplement my notes is to use the notes he has posted on his site at Duke University.

Today's class we read through A Thousand Plateaus.

If Anti-Oedipus was written with an enthusiasm of May, '68 ATP shows a certain sense of defeat.

Why is there a date corresponding to each date? Maybe an antilinear (antiprogress) order.

Caution: AO had an unrestrained quality (lines of flight are revolutionary!); ATP is more of a "yes, but..." cautionary approach. See Claire Parent's interview with Deleuze L'Abecedaire (Charles J. Stivale, trans.), particularly the section "D as in Desire" where he discusses the sense of guilt that D&G carried for some time after 1968. (See also ATP, 165)

Rhizome

• these are defined by connection and heterogeneity
  

  (ATP, 21) [U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. ...It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. ...Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, or off-shoots.
  

  
  
• the rhizome is the multiplicity that is defined not by addition but subtraction: the arboreal is n+1 (this is overcoding), the rhizomatic is n-1 (it is destabilizing in connecting)
  

  (ATP, 21) The rhizome is reducible neither to the One or the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n+1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. ...It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n-1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis.
  

  
  

What are plateaux?
Any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by way of superficials that extends a rhizome.

(ATP, 22) What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus [vs. chapters, me] that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a "plateau" any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus.

Dualism
In AO and especially in ATP Deleuze &Guattari invoke dualisms to challenge all models. They bring up these contrasts in order to abandon them. This invoking of dualisms invites an examination not so much that a dialectic synthesis is achieved but so that in the intense oscillation between the two poles we come to realize how unstable these dualisms are (see Day 1 notes).

(ATP, 20) The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism.

Earlier in this section, after discussing tracings and maps (below), they announce that their strategy in using these dualisms:

(ATP, 13) Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? ...Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them? ...Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual divergence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map. This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical.

They oppose tracings (tree) and maps (rhizome):

• a tracing is a reproduction
  

  (ATP, 12) All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as well as psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain a balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start. ...It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree. (emphases added)
  

  whereas
  
• cartography is a performance of superficial multiplicity
  

  (ATP, 12) The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. ...What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs.... The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification....the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways....as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same." (emphases added)
  

  
  
• Deleuze & Guattari state that the mode of apprehending the world that they call tracing is dangerous:
  

  (ATP, 13) [I]t is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. ...The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it. ...That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the unconcious, and the latter of language.
  

  
  

We should note that in the above statement they say that the rhizome does contain tendencies toward structuration, what the arboreal does is to exploit those facets of the rhizomatic toward its own needs for fixity. We might think of Shephard Fairey's "Obey" as a quintessential example of this tendency in the contemporary moment. The man was co-opted to sell Barack Obama (of course this has been the tendency within graffiti culture for a minute now).

(ATP, 14) Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.

They follow the above statement with, "That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsymmetrical, operation. Plug the tracings back onto the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome." I suspect we can understand what they mean by this plugging-back-in that is nonsymmetrical by understanding what they said earlier about the subtractive nature of the rhizome (ATP, 6) "[A]lways n-1 (the only way one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted) Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted...." In other words, we are of a mass (or crowd, or people, or public, or category), but we are individuated by our efforts to be unique within this throng, we are literally subtracting ourselves from the crowd when we express our uniqueness.

Wasp & Orchid
The wasp and the orchid are brought up briefly in Anti-Oedipus (AO. 5th pr., 285) when they are discussing Samuel Butler's "The Book of the Machines" and they expanded upon the wasp and the orchid in A Thousand Plateaus. Recently the letters between D&G were published and we learn that Guattari wrote to Deleuze about a certain kind of wasp that reproduces through orchids.

• The orchid gives-off a pheromone that leads wasps to leave their reproductive materials on the orchid and thus the flower is now able to impregnate other wasps - the wasps are of course also able to reproduce on behalf of the orchid because in the process of "mating" with what it thought was another wasp (but "was" an orchid) it has picked-up and now transmits the orchid's reproductive materials.
• The wasp and the orchid are in a process of becoming in this way and their relationship is a rhizomorphous, heterogeneous one - they don't cease to be wasps and orchids but they become both in their doing. This is an interesting moment of deformation, I wonder what Ranciere has to say about this?
  
• A fine example of what they are striving toward in discussing nonhuman sex (see Day 1)
  

  (ATP, 10) How could the movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.) But this is true only on the level of the strata....
  

  
  
• This begins some discussion in the class room about mimicry. During the discussion several people (Annemarie Oliver, Amir Mogharabi, and Tom Zummer) mention Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia by Roger Callois.
  
• It's decided that metaphor is perhaps the enemy of D&G and this talk about rhizomes is metonymy not metaphor. If we continue with the text we get:
  

  (ATP, 10) At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. ...There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying.
  

  
  

Pack vs. Mass

• Mass: equality of members, one-way transmission, large
• Pack: small, inequalities as remainders
  
• They reference Elias Canetti:
  

  (ATP, 33) Doubtless, there is no more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is component part of it, and to these which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign. Canettis notes that in a pack each member is alone even in the company of others (for example, wolves on the hunt); each takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band.
  

  
  
• They see Canetti's pack subject as a schizo position in opposition to the paranoid position of the mass subject; but they don't want to only introduce a simple dualism: "There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses in packs." (ATP, 34)

What is an machinic assemblage?
In the beginning of Anti-Oedipus D&G mention the bricoleur - someone that is perhaps most like McGuyver in working with all materials at-hand. They begin the discussion of the bricoleur by stating that, "The schizophrenic is the universal producer." This is someone that possesses, "an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved." Assemblage may be understood in similar terms to bricolage:

The rule of continually producing production, of grafting production onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary production: the production of production. (AO, 7)

In A Thousand Plateaus they ask (34) "What do you not have to do to produce a new sound?"

• Assemblage is something like a concatenation, a plane of consistency such that there are constant relations of becomings:
  

  Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-inhuman, each involves a molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or prepares the way for them. In Kafka, it is impossible to separate the erection of a great paranoid bureaucratic machine form the installation of little schizo machines of becoming-dog or becoming-beetle.
  

  
  

(Aside: sometimes I walk my dog and I yell out my favorite line from The Trial, "Like a dog!")

There are not two multiplicities or two machines; one and the same machinic assemblage produces and distributes the whole, in other words, the set of statements corresponding to the "complex." What does psychoanalysis have to say about all of this? Oedipus, nothing but Oedipus, because it hears nothing and listens to nobody. It flattens everything, masses and packs, molecular and molar machines, multiplicities of every variety. (ATP, 34-5)

(Foucault's "deployment of sexuality" from The History of Sexuality is brought up here)

What is love?
If we consider this question we begin to see the utility of the assemblage.

(ATP, 35) What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates...; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. 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 something can be named...acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. (bold added)

This is not about dissolution into unity or opposites or wholes but the multiplicities in us.

This is my own contribution to these notes: We might want to liken this talk of apprehending the loved one in a crowd to William James' What Makes a Life Significant?

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anæsthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it— so importantly—is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and 'that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies.

Major & Minor
Back to speaking of Kafka - Can we propose criteria for political action in using major and minor languages?
Proust said, "Every great author writes in a foreign (minoritarian) language.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between several modes of language: major, minor, and becoming-minor (ATP, 106)

• major languages seek unity and uniformity
• minor languages seek reductions in constants, and a proliferation of concepts
• becoming-minor:
  

  Continuous variation constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the majoritarian Fact of Nobody. Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming.
  

  
  
• Again they reference Canetti, this time to discuss the order-word which they say has two tones:
  

  (ATP, 107) Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere. ...The verdict. But the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected: it is like a warning cry or a message to flee. It would be oversimplifying to say that flight is a reaction against the order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its other face in a complex assemblage, its other component.
  

  
  
• The task at-hand, then, is to transform the order-word to a line of flight, rendered positive and creative:
  

  (ATP, 110) For the question was not how to elude the order-word but how to elude the death sentence it envelops, how to develop its power of escape, how to prevent escape from veering into the imaginary or falling into a black hole, how to maintain or draw out the revolutionary potentiality of the order-word.
  

  
  
• Hardt makes reference to the Soledad Brothers play, paraphrasing, "Yeah, Ima fly, but Ima grab a gun"
• The issue isn't simply major or minor, but of nuance that suggests a social organization that is not of a constituted order, the constituent assembly as becoming:
  

  (ATP, 110) One should bring forth the order-word of the order-word. In the order-word, life must answer the answer of death, not by fleeing, but by making flight act and create. There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the other - to transform the compositions of order into components of passage.
  

  
  
• Becoming-woman: "There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming." (ATP, 106). So, all becoming is minoritarian. There's something difficult in the word order here because it's not that there is a woman to which we tend toward. Shouldn't it be woman-becoming or black-becoming?

What abstract machines are:

• They are not infrastructure, they are not transcendental order
• They have a piloting role, these construct a real-to-come, they are always prior to history.
• Abstract machines are much more than language:
  

  (ATP, 141) A true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency, which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and reterritorializations. The abstract machine itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction between within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form.
  

  They make the distinction between matter and substance, function and form:
  

  Substances are of expression "or" of content. But functions are no yet "semiotically" formed, and matters are not yet "physically" formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function - a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute. (ATP, 141)
  

  
  
• A diagram is an abstract machine that operates on matters; it allows us to see what we see, it doesn't represent the real but constructs a real for us to see.
  

  (ATP, 142) Defined diagrammatically in this way, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside of history but is instead always "prior to" history. Everything escapes, everything creates - never alone, but through an abstract machine that produces continuums of intensity, effects conjunctions of deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and contents. This Real-Abstract is totally different from fictitious abstraction of a supposedly pure machine of expression.
  

  
  
• We can think of the Turing machine, this is certainly to what they are referring, as Foucault's Panopticon - in this way a piloting: the panopticon produces the subjects to observe as well as the power of watching over them.

How to make yourself into a BwO
The body without organs is the field where intensities can grow; the masochist is all about being affected - they use pain to bring forth a body without organs:

(ATP, 155) [I]t is claimed that the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can only get it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to allay or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochist's suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire. ...In short, the masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire.

• Positive desire, referenced above, means that desire is not a lack of something:
  

  (AO, 27) Desire...becomes this abject fear of lacking something. But it should be noted that this is not a phrase uttered by the poor or the dispossessed. On the contrary, such people know that desire "needs" very few things - not those leftovers that chance to come their way, but the very things that are continually taken from them - and what is missing is not things a subject feels the lack of somewhere deep down in himself, but rather the objectivity of man, the objective being of man, for whom to desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of the real.
  

  Further:
  

  (ATP, 229) There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be.
  

  So, to understand the masochist as engaged in the the delay of pleasure is to miss the point; their activity is not about pleasure vs. pain, but about engaging in world creation. Pleasure gets in the way of experiencing positive desire for the masochist.
  

  (ATP, 165) The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. ...There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation or another.
  

  
  

That the BwO is desire and desire is positive does not mean that we necessarily have a positive outcome. The BwO can go bad.

(ATP, 163) How can we fabricate a BwO for ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How can we tell the three Bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this problem.

These lines of flight can be suicidal:

(ATP, 165) Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. ...That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO form its doubles: empty vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification, and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consistency (keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for the suicidal and the demented).

Here I would like to point back to the Parnet interviews (above) and the section "D as in Desire" because we can see that D&G were quite serious in their lament after May of '68, "There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there also a possible use that would be in conformity with the plane of consistency?" (ATP, 165)

Faciality

• Levinas' notion of the face of the Other is expanded here, "The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels." (ATP, 167)
  

  (ATP, 167) Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in tows, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system.
  

  
  
• The colonialist constructs the dark Other and attributes to it racial quality and thin in negating this the colonialist forms its own identity.
  

  (ATP, 178) European racism as the white man's claim has never operated by exclusion, or by designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as an "other." Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face.... From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal. ...Racism never detects particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by its incompetence and naivete.
  

  
  
• What would be a non-dialectical racial theory? Faciality as the representation of the order of rule.
  

  (ATP, 180) Very specific assemblages of power impose signifiance and subjectification as their determinate form of expression... no signification without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects. ...A concerted effort is made to do away with the body and corporeal coordinates....Bodies are disciplined, coroporeality dismantled, becomings-animal hounded out.... A single substance of expression is produced. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject. You will be pinned to the white wall and stuffed into the black hole.
  

  
  
• Faciality is the production of what is considered normal, what is allowed to be seen (perhaps this is not dissimilar to Ranciere's discussion of the aesthetic regime?):
  

  (ATP, 181) This machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social production of the face, because it performs the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus.
  

  
  
• The political implications of faciality, "Dismantling faciality is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger...." (ATP, 188). First we must recognize our place in hierarchy, but in dismantling this we must ensure we don't lose our Face (lest we end up in a gas chamber)
  

  (ATP, 188) The organization of the face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds... a whole set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of signifiance and subjectification. ...If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity.
  

  
  

How is love conceived in faciality?
There is the dismantling sense and there is the constituent sense. There are these two moments:

1. a kind of line of flight - I become capable of loving by abandoning love and self:
   

   (ATP, 189) Only in the black hole of subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living love in which each party connects with the unknown tracts in the other without entering or conquering them, in which lines composed are broken lines. Only on your face and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to return to a primitive head, but to invent combinations by which those traits connect with lanscapity traits that have themselves been freed from the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also been freed from their respective codes.
   

   
   
   
2. to compose these lines together like broken ones without overwhelming them:
   

   (ATP, 199) I no longer have any secrets, having lost my face, form, and matter. I am now no more than a line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the void. Absolute deterritorialization.
   

   
   

There is no guarantee that in dismantling my face this will ensure compossibility with you; we must, in the project of love, find the lines with which we make compositions:

(ATP, 205) It is also necessary to look at the various combinations: it is quite possible that one group or individual's line of flight may not work to benefit that of another group or individual; it may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw it even deeper into rigid segmentarity. It can happen in love that one person's creative line is the other's imprisonment. The composition of the lines, of one line with another, is a problem, even of two lines of the same type. There is no assurance that two lines of flight will prove compatible, compossible. There is no assurance that the body without organs will be easy to compose. There is no assurance that a love, or a political approach, will withstand it.

Micropolitics and Segmentarity
Their idea of the State:

• an orthodox Marxist sees it as the executive officer of the bourgeoisie
• Althusser deemphasizes the unitary State and emphasizes the institutions that function as State apparatuses
• with Foucault we should talk about State-ification, power operates at different points
• D&G understand the State as the resonances among centers of segmentation; not unlike Foucault:
  

  (ATP, 211) The central State is constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity but by a concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among centers. There are already just as many power centers in primitive societies; or, if one prefers, there are still as many in State societies. The latter, however, behave as apparatuses of resonance; they organize resonance, whereas the former inhibit it.
  

  
  
• They are struggling with with the molecular nature of fascism and see a difference between fascism and totalitarianism. That fascism occurs in individuals, not only at institutional levels; there is the danger that lines of flight are not liberatory in themselves:
  

  (ATP, 229) This, precisely, is the fourth danger: the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition. Like Kleist's line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide, double suicide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death.
  

  
  

[End of Part One]