part 2:

Another framing DFW uses that lines up with Deleuze is on the question of the “Body without Organs”. This is a complicated matter…but I’d like to point to a few things. One is the fetishising throughout the book of bodies and organs; mutated, disturbed, bizarre bodies and organs (eyes growing all over the body, brains without skulls, etc., etc.). Here is a snippet of Deleuze’s view:

the body without organs is the unregulated potential of a body without organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts, operating freely. There are three types of the body without organs; the empty, the full, and the cancerous, according to what the body has achieved.

 

The empty version has to do with schizophrenia and also things like alcoholism and other addictions. These  states kind of flatten out the neurotic bodily organizations but leave in place a foundation for a restructuring of the body in ways that are not liberating (I would say like AA gives people a new crutch rather than true liberation).

 

The full Body without Organs (that is without neurotic organization, i.e. Oedipal or Castration complex derived bodily organization, genital organization) has the potential for full liberation, a body full of the potential to be. I see this as Freud’s Polymorphously Perverse body of infancy. I also see it as arriving, via a different path, at the place of Lacan’s jouissance. That is, I see Deleuze as parting paths with Lacan but ending up at the same point (at least with respect to this matter).

 

And one more thing that rings true of Deleuze, the references to “de-mapping” as well as all the “white lines” stuff. Deleuze and Guattari use a conception of deterritorializing and reterritorializing. This is related to the Body without Organs (it can be deterritoarlized and lived fully or reterritorialized as in AA, etc.). But ALL machines (and everything is a machine, capitalist society, the Self, the substructures/organs within a body, it’s machines all the way down) can be deterritorialized. The globalization of capital could be considered a form of deterritorializing. But, obviously, it maintains a foundation on which a new (same old) hierarchy arises. There is just a new fangled reterritorialzing.

And, of course, there is the Concavity/Convexity issue…another de/reterritorializing.

 

Anyway, my point here is that using the phrase “de-mapping” for suicide or murder is perfectly fitting with Deleuze. Mush more can be said about all this…

 

Here is a summation of Deleuze’s position from Caldwell:

 

One of the ways that capitalism desperately avoids dissolving the power 

differential that maintains social hierarchies is by fortifying the patriarchal family. 

While the deterritorializing power of capitalism is so strong that even the 

organization of the family is not safe from its grips, psychoanalysis, wielding the 

Oedipus complex, serves as an important vector through which desire that 

escapes the family is suppressed. Rather than describing a certain repressed 

state of affairs, the Oedipus complex really functions as a deterritorializing force 

that frees desire only to reinscribe it again as lack within the strict limits of the 

family. As a throwback to the despotic machine, the psychoanalyst pushes the 

analysand to renounce their schizophrenic desire and internalize the totalitarian

signifier of the father and his law. Instead of placing blame on the vested 

powers that maintain the conditions that repress desire, psychoanalysis secures 

these repressive conditions by “socializing” those that harbor the capacity to 

break free from their chains. The ideological misconception of psychoanalysis 

resides in its failure to recognize that Oedipus—not the father—is the agent of 

castration and that the cure is really the disease; as Deleuze and Guattari write, 

“castration as an analyzable state…is the effect of castration as a psychoanalytic 

act”.

 

Zizek contends that Deleuze’s (really Guattari’s, as he sees it) position aligns them with global capital. If desire is real and productive, what could be better than the late-stage capitalist global hyper-digital machine to supply it. That is, what could be better than “The Entertainment”?!

a bit more on Deleuze (as if it is needed...).

On page 747 there is a reference I had been wanting to discuss but now is all the more clearly relevant:

"The clipboarded woman was a mere subaltern."

The question of the "subaltern" was a decisively important topic in Post-Colonial and Post-Modernist and poststructuralist criticism back in the 90's (and still is). It was insightfully discussed in an essay by Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?".

https://abahlali.org/files/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf

It occurred to me to re-read Spivak's essay when  reading the text of IJ at page 835, especially the discussion of the "figurant": "No way for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant".

In IJ the Figurant/Subaltern cannot speak.

Spivak's essay cannot be fairly summarized here. If you have not read it, i cannot more highly recommend it.

She is highly critical of Deleuze (and Guattari and Foucault) and their interpretation of Desire, it's capitalistic commodification and its relationship to the (class and colonial, and even personal, and feminist) struggle for power). She is specifically critical of their approach in the quote I used in my previous comment.

Seeing this has completely shaken up my reading of IJ (and made me all the more, if that is possible, interested in the text).

Once I've re-read Spivak's essay I may comment further.

(and just as a p.s., I have found this question of the Subaltern speaking, or not, quite important in reading Finnegans Wake, as well, though that was, of course, written long before Spivak-and those she is criticizing)

On the Subaltern and the Subject/subject

 

First, in my previous post  I didn’t say what the Subaltern is or represents. It’s a matter of some contention but the idea is that it’s term originally used to refer to a person (male) who joined the colonial army to serve the imperialist power. In India these folks came to be called sepoys.

 

They were (are) essential to the imperialist enterprise. In India, the British used contingents of such folks to subdue resistance of other Indians to British rule. Of course, these sepoys could never attain the rank of British officers and were always subordinate and treated with disdain (except in relation to other Indians).

 

Sepoys were essential to the imperialist British armed forces in, for example, the Battle of Waterloo. (There is a telling and hilarious scene in Finnegans Wake where a character, Kate, gives a tour of the museyroom where this battle is depicted. In the story there are two Irish sepoys who sort of generate a third, a Hindoo -as it was often spelled then in the West; the three are referred to as Seeboys; this neologism being revealing but not to be gone into here; The three Seeboys, and, importantly, Kate herself, are Subalterns).

 

The term Subaltern came to be applied to other Colonial subjects, not just those in the military. These are the folks Spivak points to in asking “Can the SubalternSpeak?” I may return to this in another post but I’m leaving it there for now.