[-empyre-] Re: love, crunch, and the internal debt

[simon]

Dear empyre/lovers,

Sergio writes: "don't Deleuze & Guatari speak of "desiring machines"?"

Harun writes of Barthes's concept of the punctum and the prickings of 
love which he suggests might be one result of the pincer movement to 
which I'd earlier referred.

The reference was an allusion to Deleuze & Guattari's /God is a 
lobster,/ the double articulation they read signs of throughout a 
thousand plateaux of creation.

Many of David Byrne's songs have 'machines of love' in them and a 
'master plan.' It seems like this idea is a construction like that of 
the desiring machine. Different because the master plan is not ours: 
involuntary gestures are made, dumb signals sent, smells smelt. Things 
go according to plan but the plan is not ours, impersonal. And yet 
interested in the inmost minutiae of our secret lives.

Do you ever get the feeling you're being used? We ask, exasperated.

'The facts of life' Byrne sings about are supposed to be sensible but 
not intelligible. On the other hand, desiring machines don't open up 
some panoply of freedoms from which we've so far been excluded. There's 
no Reichian orgasm of release or Marcusian polymorphic field of dreams 
and desires into which we ride our machines of love.

Deleuze and Guattari are critical of both the facts of life as they are 
given and the artificial paradise into which our desires taken as 
guiltless givens are expected to deliver us.

For the former, the sensible conditions of aesthesis are opened to the 
guiltless disinterest of noesis.

For the latter, a desiring machine suffers a primordial constraint. It 
is a constructivism constrained once by a necessity exclusive of 
subjective or objective relativism and twice by itself being opened up 
to chance.

The only choice remaining lies in affirming the univocity of being but a 
being of becoming which is not a diversity of options or possibilities 
but an active principle of variation.

Deleuze addresses himself rather to the conditions of love than to its 
conditionality: the love of love, or its internal and genetic conditions 
of possibility.

The punctum of Barthes's /camera lucida/ has an extra dimension as well: 
the studium, which is not properly noetic as I understand it but 
epistemological. With the punctum Barthes seems to be thinking in terms 
of a transcendental. Not his. Not general. And not particular. Not just Mum.

He seems to be looking at a condition of possibility: the being of being 
in the photo, its internal difference.

Anne Carson's /Economy of the Unlost/ I read alongside Deleuze's Bergson 
whose negativity and impossibility may be retroactivated to include 
(without explaining) its possibility, like a double negative. 

And Aldo Busi's /Sodomies /where an absolute /No/ opens for the writer 
the condition for a writing within writing, like the empty space, a 
uterus outside of the phallologocentricities upon which such depend, the 
semen-like splash of Bacon's paint: a love of/in love.

A final and faulted note on desire in Deleuze and Guattari: it is not 
desire. If desire is the body, it is the genome. (Consistency here cums 
courtesy of Levi Bryant, antinomianism wilde-mine.)

love,

Simon Taylor

www.squarewhiteworld.com
www.brazilcoffee.co.nz

p.s. I seek work.