S E A R C H ( wut r u lookng fr)

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Some Scattered Notes on Guattari's Machinic Unconscious (Music, Literature, Schizoanalysis)

No "seperation of the literary field and the scientific field." Rather, "a work like this [Proust] constitutes a scientific exploration in the same category as the work of Freud or Newton" (pg. 231).

As written in Anti-Oedipus, a particle smashes into a letter; speech that induces affect, as opposed to impotently representing - i.e., diagrammatics

That is, rather than literature - fiction for example - representing a real "outside" (lower case o, as opposed to Outside); rather than language symbolizing or imagining material, Proust's work - or any literary work for D and G -  is an "index" of "hyper-deterrioalized menal objects" (pg. 231) close to a "theory of incorporeals" (pg. 232).

An index of forces. A cargo manifest.  Diagram of forces, vectors, flows. An image of thought - "an asignifying machinic index" (pg. 240).

Language only roughly grasps these fleeting thoughts (and remember, schizos 'suffer' from 'flight of ideas'...); "fuzzy" "sensations" of "unclassifiable realities" (pg. 233) experienced not unlike  how one suffers from "synesthesia" (pg. 231) or the overlapping of senses. 

As it is written in A Thousand Plateaus 

"Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly…Where psychoanalysis says, ‘Stop, find your self again,’ we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet.' " (pg. 150-151).

Proust's work is not linguistic, but harmonic, rhythmic. Music, not logic - or a logic of music, of affect.

Proust's work is a physical act of "acceleration" (pg. 232) not unlike music itself. Acceleration is a matter of time and space, and time is just motion, or change in space. "Musical motifs as actual ideas...the closeness of the intervals between the five notes...and the constant repetition of two of them..." (pg. 233).  Likewise, music is a matter of time and space - meter and tempo. Dynamic force.

A note itself is the difference between pitches, or physical vibrations and how they resonate with the morphology of the body. The lesser the difference, the more the notes conflict, a conflict which creates a psychoacoustic phenomenon in the ear that then creates the illusion of the note moving, pulsing. 

Space, time, difference, force. 

Complex, impersonal, inhuman reality "aestheticizes" (pg. 237) itself, "cyrstalizes" (pg. 336) itself into a passage, a motif, that can be grappled, played with by the senses. 

"The analysis of the unconscious must follow - at its own risk - all the lines of the rhizome constituting an assemblage..." (pg. 238). All must emphasized. Even - no especially - the inhuman ones. Ones that "shake up the ego" (pg. 239). 

To schizoanalyze Proust, one must look at all the forces that come together and produce an event with emergent qualities.  

To schizoanalyze anything, one must index all the forces, inhuman and otherwise.