How does Plato take desire in his Republic?
Plato in his Republic takes desire as the opposite of reason, something to be controlled
How does Deleuze conceive desire in contrast to Plato?
- Deleuze, by contrast, holds desire as a positive force; not a lack as usually understood but productive in nature
- Like labour, desire is actualised in the course of practice (Gao, 2013)
How is desire defined by Deleuze?
Desire is defined simply by Deleuze as the production of reality: “desire produces, [and] its product is real” (AO: 26)
What is the function of social representation?
- To separate desire from reality
- Inject so-called “needs” and scarcity and lack into a desire-reality relation (Holland, 2014)
What is the result of the injection of so-called “needs, scarcity and lack into a desire-reality relation?
- Result of this is that individuals or groups come to believe consciously that they lack or need something
- Produced by desire itself but subsequently gets taken from them by social order
What does Bataille argue The Accused Share (1988) about needs?
That needs, and utility get introduced into an economy that is itself characterised by super-abundance
What do D&G explain about desire in AO in relation to Marx?
D&G explain in AO (p. 27):
“Marx notes [that] what exists in fact is not lack but passion. Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counter products within the real that desire produces”
What does desiring-machine pay attention to?
- Attention to the micropolitics that involves subterranean movements of individual and collective sensibility, affect and allegiance (Gao, 2013)
- Rather than macropolitics of social classes and institutions of political government
How does desiring-machine change from AO to ATP?
Desiring-machine in AO changes to the more neutral ‘assemblage’ in ATP due to the persistent subjectivist misunderstanding of the former concept
(Massumi, 1992)
D&G introduce a conceptual distinction between desiring-production and social-production?
- In order to take historical variability into account
- The terms are two sides of the same coin
- “Social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions” (AO: 29)
Why is psychoanalysis a strictly capitalist instiution?
- Because capital privatises reproduction in the private sphere at the same time that it privatises ownership of the means of production in the economic sphere
- They are separate spheres
- Privatisation and segregation of production and reproduction into these distinct spheres
How does Hollands (2014) compare Marx transformation of the bourgeois political economy to D&G’s psychoanalysis?
Similar to how Marx transformed bourgeois political economy into a revolutionary materialism by refusing the subordination of labour to determination by capital
D&G transform bourgeois psychoanalysis into revolutionary materialism by refusing the subordination of libido to determination by the nuclear family and the Oedipus complex
What is schizophrenia?
The name D&G assign to desiring-production its absolutely indeterminate, free state
How is desiring-production indeterminate?
Desiring-production by nature is indeterminate, but at the same time, subject to determination by social institutions and representations, which impose order, objects and aims on it
How does capitalism foster schizophrenia?
Capitalism fosters schizophrenia as the free form of desire not only by segregating production and reproduction from society at large, but also by subjecting social life itself to the abstract quantification of the market, thereby freeing desiring-production from social coding
(Hollands, 2014)
What does the BwO stage?
- Stages struggles of desire to escape determination and thus designates the human potential for freedom
- Simultaneously the locus of coding and decoding
How does capitalism relate to the BwO?
- Capitalism unlike previous social forms tends to unleash free-form desire on the BwO and thus fosters widespread schizophrenia
- Hence the subtitle of AO
How does BwO in its potential freedom appears only with capitalism towards the end of universal history?
- Opening the prospect of a post-capitalist market that finally subordinates social production to desiring-production (Hollands, 2014)
What does desiring-production provide the immanent critera for?
“Desiring-production provides immanent criteria by which to judge the (in)adequacy of various historical forms of social production”
(Hollands, 2014: 58)
What do D&G insisit in the name of desire?
That the unconscious operates according to constitutive synthesis in order to process experience in such a way to guarantee the free play of desire
How does desiring-production serve as a revolutionary fulcrum?
- Serves as a revolutionary fulcrum for social critique as well as the critique and transformation of psychoanalysis into schizoanalysis (Hollands, 2014)
- Society itself must conform to the “logic” of the syntheses of the unconscious or else to be condemned to repression
What does the schizoprehic desiring-production determine?
- The schizophrenic desiring-production will determine the conditions of social production instead of being determined by them
- Legitimate uses of the unconscious synthesis will prevail over illegitimate uses on the BwO
How in ATP, does the BwO form the plane of consistency?
- Desire can over-proliferate like cancer; it can break loose and plunge into the void
- Utmost care is required for desire to occupy the BwO freely, without over-coagulating and becoming fixed, on one hand, and without becoming wildly chaotic, on the other
How does the play of desire on the BwO operate as a different engine?
- The play of desire on the BwO operates as a difference engine, continually forming, deforming and reforming modes of passionate attachment to reality
- A dialectic of differentiation and capture exists
- Desire on the BwO favours the moment of differentiation over the moment of contraction
