this series of youtube lectures is pretty interesting. It gave me a basis for understanding some of Deleuze https://youtu.be/GS35vUMhww4
I have no idea what to expect and no idea what this is but im going in
I'm taking that guy's advice and am going to take a break/maybe never reexamine this again.
thanks for this, when he says;
"the elements of language must have been given all together, all at once, since they do not exist independently of their possible differential relations"
what are the elements of language, and what does he mean by given all together all at once?
(fwiw I've only read bits and pieces of Capitalism & Schizophrenia and have no business acting like i understand it well. got here from /all, never taken a philosophy class or anything ,just have a passing interest in this)
For me the concepts start to click a bit more if treated less like a text to be literally understood, and more like a work of surrealist art (to be kind of emotionally understood, felt, yknow). Foucault says something like this in his preface to Anti-Oedipus, that it's best approached as "an art."
one thing I do get from D&G (at least Anti Oedipus, as that's what I've read the most of) is an examination of the hierarchies that infect every aspect of our lives, constrict our ways of thinking, cripple the imagination, and reduce our boundless potential in the service of Capital.
For example: Think of your typical Freudian psychoanalysis, where someone's whole mental situation is often reduced to "He wants to fuck mommy" or "She has penis envy." Awfully reductive, wouldn't you say? The patient's situation could potentially be very complex, and there might not be anything even wrong with them, we could even learn from them! But the whole factory line functions way better if we all just accept a canned explanation that the system decides is healthy. The way we think about our own brains, how we think about thinking itself, is constructed in service of the market.
I guess that's where the Schizophrenia comes in, with the metaphorical Schizophrenic being a figure who, unable to perceive a lot of things in the socially acceptable, capital-approved way, can't "Play by Their Rules." By virtue of not knowing these structures, he's able to subvert them, and if we can erase these rigid lines that our society draws in our brains to corral our thoughts, and we become more like the proverbial Schizophrenic, we'll end up better off for it.
That's my dollar store understanding, at least.