technical images and linear text

I was writing what I intended to be a brief note on a Deleuze quote I planned to use in a paper, and it kind of spiralled out of control into a rough statement of where I want to take my investigations of Deleuze, Derrida and lingustic différance / vs ontological differenc/tiation (I had to throw that in, just to emphasize that Deleuze’s more stark prose is certainly not bereft of some fun typographical quirks). Anyway, since it seems this blog has at least one or two hypothetical Readers, I thought I’d start throwing some of these fragments up for some less hypothetical comments. You readers, hypothetical as you are, are floating around on some sort of virtual plane of immanence, at least from my frame of reference. So why not actualize yourselves a bit?

In ‘The interpretation of utterances’ (a text whose entire authorship is a bit uncertain, but doesn’t specifically indicate anybody but Deleuze, so I am assuming this is D. himself), Deleuze says that “Freud continually misunderstands infantile sexuality. He interprets, and therefore misunderstands. He clearly sees that the child is completely indifferent to the difference between the sexes; but he interprets it as if the child were reacting to castration anxiety by maintaining its belief in the existence of a small penis on the girl. This is not true: the child has no castration anxiety before being reduced to a single sex. The child lives as having n sexes that correspond to all the possible arrangements into which the materials common to girls and boys enter but also those common to animals, things…” (Two regimes, 94-95)

SO, Deleuze critiques Freud and psychoanalysis for roughly the same reasons as — but fleshes out his critique more thoroughly than — either Lacan or Derrida. Perhaps he is only more positive than Derrida, whose borrowings from negative theology make him pretty clearly a thinker of the absent, of the negative, etc. The first of two things: It’s not that unconscious is structured like a language in a literal sense, but in the literal sense of that sentence – a simile of language (but think about how the next sentence might lead to a relationship beyond the simile, perhaps pointing to the notion of a ’simulacrum’). So the unconscious undergoes a process of structuration, through the formalization of differential relations in terms of degrees of opposition and difference. What a thoroughly linguistic critique of Freud (as in the case of Lacan and perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent Derrida) misses is that although the place of différance is not an actual place, that doesn’t imply it is not. In other words, the being of différance is negative in relation to language, but that does not imply that it ‘is’ altogether lacking in real existence. The differential relations which are structured by language are not created by language. Instead language delimits and regulates a play of différance which preexists language and takes place on a virtual level – the unconscious, the place of the archē-writing – and the free play of difference on this virtual plane is always trying to escape its linguistic binding. Différance is therefore the plane of immanence properly belonging to language. While this certainly has a real existence somewhere in the biological, electrical, and chemical processes of our body (unless we really do want our ontology to lead to some sort of ontotheology), its virtual nature implies that this plane will in no way resemble the linguistic structure. Indeed, language is a principal source of the logic of representation, and so if we were to draw our connections between the structure of language and the as-yet undetermined structure of the mind according to this logic of representation, we would be drawn into a truly vicious circularity. There was a second thing, but I either forgot it, or it wove itself into what became a very drawn-out first thing.

But when I cut and pasted that from my first virtual writing of this on google documents, (a handy tool for the nomadic and multicomputered pseudointellectual if there ever was one) I remembered the second thing. I finally grasped last night the fundamental Idea of Deleuze’s project in a way that allowed me to make it my own – allowing for a bit of enculage, one might say. It’s not all about the unrestricted play of differential elements on a plane of immanence (nor is it about solidifying this play into a process of making-sense ala deLanda), but rather it’s about the movements of actualization, the points at which the planes intersect, when we see the virtual and the intensive revealed in the midst of the actual and the extensive. In these moments, the structural logic of a thing’s genesis (which operates on a virtual plane of ideas) is revealed within the actualized, extended matter which covers over and exceeds any totalizing structural description. The question of language is an essential one that, barring LoS, seems to get sidestepped a bit. Language gets a playful treatment in the vein of Carroll, but is never subjected to the sort of serious analysis that Deleuze applies to other phenomena. But none of this was the second thing – instead the second thing was that gender and sexuality, as shown in the above passage, are essentially free plays of difference which are shackled in place by the logic of representation. What’s interesting to me — and this is somewhat immanetnt in the ‘first thing’ above as well as all many encounters between psychoanalysis and deconstruction — is to what extent this work is performed by the representational logic within language (ie ‘gender discourse’), and to what extent this is performed by language itself (ie. a strong version of Lacan’s thesis on language & unconscious). Inverted, this problem is equally important: to what extent is language an independent, conceptual medium of expression, and to what extent does it remain an actualization/structuration of unconscious sex/death drives? What can we say about the respective positions of langue and parole in this regard? That was more or less the ’second thing,’ an Idea whose problematic form really started to become apparent towards the end.

This discussion led to an almost unrelated (but of course deeply connected) third thing – I mentioned virtual writing above in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, but now I am thinking about it more seriously. If language expresses a free play of virtual differences, made manifest and shackled by its actualization in representation, then what can we say (ha!) about ‘virtual writing?’ Above I tied archē-writing to the virtual plane of language – and so is there anything to say about the connection between digital publishing and arche-writing? How have word processors have really taken almost all of the ‘actualization’ element out of the process of writing (or at least shifted it from mechanical actualization – graphe - into electronic actualization ; but how ‘actual’ is a digital representation of language in an electronic circuit?). Our writing is no longer anything like speech. When we type on a computer (as opposed to writing with a stylus of any kind, or typing on a machine which fixes text immediately) only language itself – a ‘pure’ writing of sorts, at least the most pure so far – constrains the free play of différance, while all of the difficulties implied by mechanical (in the physical sense) actualization are borne by mechanisms (in the engineering sense). This is liberating – but of course, its liberation is a Janus-faced one, like all of the liberations wrought by capital. The free play of desire is less restrained and more fervently productive, but perhaps this is a road which leads only to schizophrenia.