First of all, Anthony Garcia, I apologize for inferring that you might be a moron. It was a knee jerk reaction that the drive-by method of philosophizing we engage in on the boards allows too much for. And, too often, I end up regretting it to the point of using my daily 500 word window on redeeming myself –that is as compared to points I could have made on my present reading of Zizek.
That said, I have to take you at your word when you say:
“Argument to what? I don’t see it. What ‘desiring machine’ mean? I don’t see exactly what central point is. I didn’t mean it as a negative comment. Just a neutral, stating that the meaning of this is lost on me. The points seem to be all implied in some way. I want more clarity here. That is all.”
And:
“ In other words I get some of Rory’s idioms and points he has made, I never read Deleuze, so his idioms are lost on me sorry.”
Okay! Fair enough. And you have shown yourself to be a little more reasonable than:
“Discourse is like flirting?? I don’t see it really, and where they are similar in some way, doesn’t strike me as anything profound. What’s this mean to you? Why is this important?”
Setting aside the cheap tactic of badgering, the main problem I have with this (and what suggests a propensity towards heckling rather than honest intellectual inquiry (is that it reminds me of a satirical quote from Roland Barthes’ Mythologies:
“I do not understand. Therefore, you are ignorant.”
And let’s be clear on this: the only agenda I saw at work in your post was a desire to make me seem ignorant without doing any real work, of resorting to the laziness of general statements. As most creative writing classes will hammer into you: show, don’t tell. And it seems to me that you’re doing a lot of telling without showing me anything. Plus that, since you have yet to show me much else, I can’t help but feel that you’re basing your whole process on negativity without making an honest assessment of what it is you are negatively responding to. I’ve seen it a thousand times, not only on these boards, but on commentaries on other boards: the contrarian position (remember you were commenting on a point that had gotten likes (of acting as if negativity is somehow some kind of shortcut to intellectual superiority –when, in fact, all it really suggests is a lot of ego-stroking. And it’s not like this fits the “emperor has no clothes” mythology you might be working from. And while it was wrong of me to infer you might be a moron, what your approach does suggest is a sub-standard approach to intellectual inquiry.
I mean think about it, Anthony: you latched onto the one point you did understand (a point, BTW, that you took from a commenter on my post (then took the time out to make a snide comment about it. Now how does that not make you a heckler? It just seems to me that the solution to your problem (and it is explicitly your problem (is really pretty simple:
Should you see something with my name on it, don’t buy the fucking book!
Furthermore, don’t make yourself seem like a common redneck by commenting on things you admittedly know nothing about. It would be like me claiming that mathematics is complete nonsense because I don’t understand them. Stroking one’s ego and snarling “Bah Humbug!” is really an unflattering approach to creative and intellectual inquiry and discourse.
*
That said, you do present an issue concerning the relationship between flirtation and discourse in that heckling suggests that discourse may depart from its connection to seduction and resonance by being also about power relationships. Zizek gets at this in Did Someone Say Totalitarianism when he says:
“So, at this unique point, we pass from language as discourse, as social link, to language as pure instrument.” -Zizek, Slavoj (2014-04-08). Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: 5 Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (The Essential Zizek) (Kindle Locations 1710-1711). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
It seems to me that what the heckler is engaged in is discourse as pure instrument in that it is ultimately about a power relationship: that of debasing the other. And the instrumental function of language can be expressed in other ways such as a boss telling an employee what to do. And this does kind of exclude the role of resonance and seduction which, in turn, puts into question the notion of discourse as flirtation (a point I’m not sure I was trying to make in the first place (in that Jouissance seems like less of a factor. At the same time, you can’t help but feel that heckling is a kind of flirtation in that you can imagine the heckler imagining their selves as having some kind of entourage laughing at every clever thing they say. It’s like some fantasy built around the mythology of Truman Capote.
It’s something I will have to explore, with the help of those that CHOOSE to explore it w/ me, as I go along.