Entering the Deleuze and Guattari labyrinth
It’s time now to plunge into the Deleuze/Guattari labyrinth, following the trail without knowing either where this trail leads or whether I’ll be able to find my way back to the Queen’s Journey and the line of thinking I began in the last post.
Yesterday I wrote about the first two synthesis, the connective synthesis of production and the disjunctive synthesis of recording. (See, I’m trying to keep the way out of the labyrinth in mind, but it’s about to disappear.) These are the first two of the three processes which are D&G’s equivalent of ‘the-thing-in-itself’, or (perhaps more accurately) the way ‘the-thing-in-itself’ manifests itself in the world, operates, functions. The first (the connective synthesis of production – Freud’s instinctual drives) leads part objects to connect and create and/direct flows of energy. The second (the disjunctive synthesis of recording) doesn’t just record/register/create some representation of the connections and creations and directions (as I suggested yesterday); it disconnects, redirects, prevents, blocks flows of desire.
This morning I’ve been re-reading parts of Anti Oedipus and the commentary about this second synthesis, the disjunctive synthesis of recording, and this is the trail I want to follow this morning. I’m not sure yet whether the trail is my own thought process, set off by reading this morning, or whether I’m actually following a trail made by D & G. We’ll see … perhaps.
D&G have this concept of a body-without-organs, with which these part-objects somehow interact, and which seems to have the function of buggering things up while at the same time claiming to be the source of all the activity.
They describe it as being, or as having, a slippery surface on which the desiring machine’s productions are recorded (in signs, language, memory?). In this act of recording production on the surface of the body-without-organs, flows are interrupted, purloined, blocked, claimed.
They talk about this as anti-production. It’s a kind of messing with all the production so that it somehow dissolves, is thrown back on itself, and then needs to be repeated (the energy is irrepressible) but in a changed or different form.
The thrust here (or at least a possible meaning which makes sense to me) is that D & G are trying to explain difference, they’re trying to explain the inadequacy of the Freudian implication that we’re stuck with our neurosis/psychosis/Oedipal triangles, stuck in endless cycles of repetition.
They’re explaining, perhaps, creativity, new possibilities, freedom from a process determined entirely by instinctual drives.
One of the examples used (was it in Anti-Oedipus or in the commentary) is of the baby’s mouth (a part object) instinctively attached to the mother’s breast (another part object). This is the connective synthesis of production. But the baby isn’t in the grip of this instinctual connecting and sucking forever, just as none of us are in the grip of our instinctual drives the whole time. There are moments of disjunction, or perhaps more accurately an eternal process (to do with signs, representations, memory) which disengages the production machine, where meaning or direction or instinct is repulsed by the body-without-organs, and a new form of production is therefore made possible.
I’m stumbling along the path here, and there’s not a lot of clarity. But I can see, I think, enough to know that D & G are trying to make room, in their metaphysics, for difference, change, creativity.
My Ariadne’s thread here is the Queen’s Journey story. There is difference, change, creativity in the story. I’m thinking that this is part of the DNA that D & G are trying to explain.