Re: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 5 Oct 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I haven't read Thousand Plateaus. I tried to read Anti-Oedipus, but I gave
> up after about 50 pages because I thought it was complete nonsense. Since I
> respect your opinions a lot, Harry, I'll give 1000Ps a shot.
>
> Doug
>
Doug: Thanks for the kind words and I think you just might like at least
some parts of Thousand Plateaus. Like any huge work its really uneven,
ranging from the easily comprehensible and thought provoking to the
irritatingly obscure. I don't think Anti-Oedipus was nonsense, but there's
no doubt it was written in a way that asumed complete familiarity not just
with Freudian and post-Freudian psychiatry but with many of the classic
cases as well --something very few people outside the field have. When I
hit the second page and sunbeams shining out of Schreber's ass, I thought
they were nuts. But the attempt to break the Feudian one-dimensional focus
on Oedipus is well taken and their discourse on desire, for all its
convolutedness, is helpful for thinking about what some of us call
self-valorization that takes off (in their terms) in varous "lines of
flight". I came to their work through that of Laing & Cooper's earlier
writings on schizophrenia and their critique of the failure of pyschiatry
to grasp the insanity within which many people are trapped and to which
only what appears to be an "insane" response is sane (e.g., double binds).
In the end I found Anti-Oedipus limited by, among other things, a taking
over of rather primitive Marxist analysis, a la Baran & Sweezy. They are
more interesting when striking out on their own to find new ways of
explaining the limits and possibilities of self-activity. Yet even here, I
don't like all their choices --such as the metaphor of the machine which
pervades their work and seems unable to escape the capitalist paradigm of
production and manufacturing. But their essay on rhizome is not only
useful for thinking about non-hierarchical "networks" but is an also an
inspiring demonstration of just how useful the exploration of metaphors
can be. Makes you want to go out and think through some others. And there
is much, much more that I find enriches my conceptual imagination.

I read Guattari's Molecular Revolution first, which was a better
introduction to his work than the joint book and found many parts of it
useful. Guattari was very involved politically in France, not just in
campaigns such as the one to support the Italian exiles (e.g., Negri with
whom he later wrote Communists Like Us) but also with efforts to expand
the range and availability of tools of all sorts for people to use in
elaborating their own collective directions autonomously from capital.
Except for the centrality of work (which probably came from Negri) ClikeUs
was a nice little book reasonably focused on the need for non-homogenizing
alliances among a diverse array of struggles.

Anyway, when you do get around to it, have fun and don't get hung up on
the opaque stuff, just keep reading. Read it a little as poetry perhaps,
the way I'm convinced many read Marx's discussion on value. Eventually you
can make sense out of most of it, but only if it tweaks your imagination
and it seems worth the effort.

Harry
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Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 478-8427
               (off) (512) 475-8535   Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cleaver homepage:
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Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
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