Originally Posted by davobrosia

When I said discourse, I didn't mean this conversation. I used it in the structuralist sense insofar as I believe that the Subject, Other, ethics, truth, knowledge, and everything else all find their origin in discursive formations--ideas, attitudes, actions, beliefs, culture, and Ideology, as well as the intersubjective network of relations of the aforementioned--that construct us and the worlds of which we speak. More important to me is examining the power relations that influence and exist by virtue of these discourses.

this is off topic, but i hope you'll help me synthesize. if we think of the human organism, the organization of their body, as 'a' machine desiring to connect with others in a world of other machinic bodies, is Discourse in that sense the totality of ways in which bodies do or don't connect up with other bodies (dependent on the habitus in that 'field' of discourse)? and would power relations within a discourse then be the intersubjective limitations (ideological / sociocultural laws, etc; not, e.g., like the laws keeping certain bodies of chemical compounds from combining) that influence those possibilities for connection, making some possibilities acceptable and others not?

as a quick example: since money is influential in our intersubjective ethicopolitical dictations, and since big tobacco has a lot of money, cigarettes are (as a body) possible and acceptable for a human body to connect with (well, depending on the owner of some establishment's law, now). so this allows for the combination of those two bodies, thus allowing for the possibility of a 'smoker' and by opposition a 'nonsmoker'. is this another way of thinking about foucault's placed importance on discourse in [everything], or am i missing the point?

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Yeah, that more or less makes sense. Think less in terms of homogeneous bodies and more in terms of assemblages and multiplicities and you'll be on the right track to being a proper Deleuzean.

re deleuze and guattari's relationship to (anti-)lacanianism:
it seems to me that lacan is positing 'the body as a machine', a concept he talks about in so many other words, in the sense that energy as a concept is essentially tied up with the invention of the steam-engine, as masters never had to do any energy calculations with actual slaves, only with machines. freud does his thinking at a time when energy was being scientifically probed, and he essentially maps out the flows of energy in a body-driven-towards-homeostasis, in a homogeneous body thought of machinically, or what is the same thing, economically.
couldn't we say that freud actively explores and maps out the different paths, the different actualized paths, that desire flows through and within a 'victorian assemblage', and questions those things which restrict those flows of what he calls narcissistic libidinal energy--sublimations--for that general, and also particular, assemblage? when lacan speaks of the image and the symbol, in part, he does so to reinforce the relation the subject who speaks, the I of the symbolic, has to the imagined me, the me-for-the-other, the moi constructed through egomorphic mirages (the ego as a succession of mirror identities) and actual, real affects of that speech with the other on the person (paranoia, etc). so for freud and lacan, we limit our possibilities for actualizing other possible assemblages, other multiplicities of flows of desire, or in other words, other shots at becoming-other.. only, when lacan speaks of this, he speaks of an imagined lack, which is, to be crass, the loss or the lack of possibilites and of previously actualized other-hoods for the self, of a traumatic 'dissemblablance' with the other-self, e.g., as a Mother-breast-baby machine.. i understand i've only read a portion of lacan's work (that mirror stage piece, some random things here and there, and most of his 'seminar: book ii [1954-5]', which i'm currently reading), and even less of deleuze and guattari (and deleuze) (all of whom i will be reading at some later time, after i read through freud's other works..), but it seems like all of this is fairly comprehensible under the machinic-assemblage, is it not?

so, the machine-desiring-production is, i.e., the machinic subject (or the subject as it exists in its relation to lacan's symbolic order, like a machine playing with symbols for a place in the closed-circuit or field of culture) desiring recognition and placement, somewhere, in the closed circuits of symbolically registered identities, of connecting with one or the other of some binary category (smoker, non-smoker; straight/gay) that the bodies-assembled never quite live up to (reformed-smoker, once-had-a-cigarette, etc.; reformed-gay, once-had-a-dicking, etc.), and can't, bc they desire becoming-otherness, they desire production.

for deleuze and guattari, then, we can't say that desire is based in lack because we are giving up the idea of a narcissistic psyche driven by lack (in its relationship with itself-in-the-other, as it only exists through the other), and taking up the idea of a multiplicity of bodies producing an assemblage through connecting up with or not connecting up with other bodies and assemblages of bodies.. even though the production implies some sort of a lack, e.g., in the break between expectation and in reality, or a disappointment of some other sort, that lack itself only exists through the productive power of the symbolic, which we produce in because we desire our placement in the social, we desire our identity (i am a smoker, i am hetero, i was once-a-democrat, etc.), in some sense, that we want one or another of some masochistic, fascist categories, a symbol under which to pinpoint one's self, or in other words, to sediment their connections by reinforcing, through symbols and ritualized usages of those symbols, their own identity (though nothing is ever truly sedimentary except in death; freud says as much in beyond the pleasure principle), reinforcing an imaginary image of the self as a united subject when in reality it is acephalic, or polycephalic, which is the same thing, disunified, decentered, the image being preserved while in actuality it is always dissipating and dissolving as the machine desires other connections; the pleasure principle?

i may go over this later to see if i typed coherently. in any case, it's a string of thoughts

fancy logic


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Bjorn made the connection of Nv1 to Hitler before he even coded the site, well done .

Lacan's later trajectory coincides with most of what D&G are saying. They aren't really anti-Lacan at all. The breaking point most people see is the desire/lack distinction, but even then...

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/...ri-avec-lacan/
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/...romean-clinic/

thanks for the articles.

edit: yeah, this makes a lot of sense. i suppose i'd read that guattari was anti-lacanian somewhere (...) and became confused as to why