Militant Incidences

[sodapopinski51]

"The ultimate meaning of structuralism is binary alteration. The ultimate meaning of machinic filiation is a sort of surrealism, residues, detritus, witness to the impossibility of 'reducing' desiring machines coded flows (singular infinitives)" Anti-Oedipus Papers, an essay by Guattari called Militant Incidences

Comments

[anfalicious]

I do read these posts, just don't have much to say in response. Keep it up! :)

[z3ro666]

Ditto.

- Adam

[sodapopinski51]

yes I think you are correct. But the allusion here, at least this is what I think... I may be incorrect, is that society at large functions as a machine (ala Marx's Fragment on Machines in Grundrisse) and that the individual on some level has lost their autonomy, their subjectivity. That capitalism, or whatever social order you inhabit on a macro-level, moves and distributes bodies, wealth, etc. in a way that disenfranchises a majority of people. So to salvage this Foucault and Guattari say that "agency" (although they never actually come out and use this word) is to be exerted on a micro-political level. At the grassroots, in the family, at the level of an individual body. I think this is what Foucault had in mind with his concept of "technology of the self" in History of Sexuality.

[sodapopinski51]

Let me clarify... the "impossibility of 'reducing' desiring machines coded flows (singular infinitives)" This is the same problem that troubled Heidegger in Letter on Humanism, and elsewhere. The idea that no thought can be expressed without language, and in the process of expressing a thought you confine and domesticate that thought, "code" it if you will, into something that can carry a relative meaning. That is, if you aren't making sense then you are schizophrenic, or psychotic or something, but you might have something profound to say, the thought might exceed the logical conventions of standard language. Hence the impasse most philosophers who are worth their salt run into... they have no word that can best characterize their thought! So D&G attempted to broach this problem by literally making up words as they went along, thought was never to take a secondary position to language, but visa versa, language was the instrument of thought. The techne is to be destroyed, in the sense that thought does not always positively result