Dear Diary Moment 9/5/2021:
Reading Joe Hughes’ reader guide to Difference and Repetition, I’m starting to get clearer sense of a line of development that started in D & R and reached a deeper and more evolved expression in Anti-Oedipus. But first we have to backtrack through Husserl’s understanding of Kant’s Doctrine of the Faculties: that which describes the synthetic process by which we move from immediate experience to understanding. Using the terminology I lifted from it all:
It starts with the sensible which is the data input that comes through the senses.
We then move on to what Kant called Reproduction through which imagination and memory process the incoming data in order that the mind might achieve:
Understanding which is the active domain of thought as compared to the passive nature of the previous two.
And this is a two way street. While there is a synthetic process that works from the sensible to understanding and the conceptual, there is a “double adventure” in which the conceptual is imposed back on the sensible: the schematism. In Kant this was the modes that allowed the mind to organize the chaotic input of reality. And much of Deleuze’s D & R is about his attempt to revamp the model in the context of Kant’s later book: Critique of Judgement. Furthermore, it helps to recognize that Deleuze, unlike Kant, saw this process as failed and therefore aleatory in nature: a roll of the dice.
And jumping to Anti-Oedipus, we start to see a lot of overlaps w/ the D & R model and D & G’s 3 syntheses of the unconscious (a clear result of Guatarri’s psychiatric background and influence:
The connective in which the mind takes in data and forms connections.
The disjunctive in which conflicts and dichotomies emerge.
And the conjunctive in which an uneasy and volatile (therefore tentative (understanding is reached that is destined for collapse.
And I use the term “understanding” as a purposeful reference to the previous synthetic process. This is because this, as D & G describe it, is the point at which an active self emerges (an I (then collapses back into the passive process: the barbarian hordes of the unconscious. And in this process, we see how the concept of schematism emerges in new form in the overcoding D & G attribute to Freud’s Oedipus complex.
PS: could go on; but this shit is straining my brain.