“The connective synthesis concerns instincts and drives, and the ways they endow objects with value or erotic charge; roughly speaking, it translates Freud’s notion of libidinal investment or cathexis and the functions he assigns to Eros or the life instinct. The disjunctive synthesis involves the functioning of pleasure, memory, and signs in the psyche, along with what Freud called the death instinct, or Thanatos. The conjunctive synthesis, finally, is about the formation of subjectivity.” -Holland, Eugene W… Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (p. 25). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
Today I want to take a more personal approach to the model described above (D&G’s syntheses of the unconscious: connection, disjunction, and connection (through an old and trusted riff of my own. And I am doing so in preparation for an article I would like to write for a UK magazine I’ve allied (or rather affiliated (myself with: Philosophy Now. So any input (whether it succeeds or fails (would be appreciated. Consider the sentence:
At what point are you in this sentence right now?
Now think about your experience of reading that sentence. First there was the connective synthesis of connecting one word to the other –all of them partial objects that somehow related to the object that followed and somehow connected. But it wasn’t long before the disjunction kicked in of not having the full meaning of the sentence until you reached the end. On top of that, there was the disjunction of discovering a question which you couldn’t answer while it was being asked which, technically, means you never really answered the question. As Deleuze put it in Difference and Repetition: you were dealing with a past present that was never really there.
But, finally, you reached the end of the sentence and experienced the conjunction (this kind of collapsing on itself (of getting the meaning of the sentence. The problem, however, is that you were never really there to answer the question as it was asked.
Now we can translate this to the point Holland (via D&G (was trying make as concerns the subject (that which occurs after the fact): that it is always the aftereffect of the syntheses of the subconscious but is always naturally prone to claim all processes (all syntheses that led to conjunction (were the results of its own efforts. And it’s easy to see the problems this could lead to.