What is representation?

Ben's point about restricting ourselves to the syllabus is well taken and I can definitely agree to only posting about the texts assigned from now on. The stretching of this argument is needless and should be stopped.

However, I must point to the chronology and specifics of the argument itself and suggest that the manifestation of my position's disruption of the study is not one sided. My impetus for arguing my specific point was not created in a vacuum; and if we refer to what I conceive of as a clear chain of causality, we can extract two separate contributing attitudes. Reviewing the happenings in general terms, there have been four connected incidents: (1) the third meeting, where our conversation about drugs spawned a heated debate on the nature of philosophical responsibility and the purpose of philosophy, (2) the continuation of the discussion on the blog, to which I replied, (3) the comparison of my qualm with Trinity's Lacanian objection, to which I was told it was not an apt comparison, where the argument escalated, and (4) a continuation on the blog directly responding to my previous complaints, to which I again replied.

The nature of my issues following the original interaction were spawned not only by the text itself, but the way the text was being defended and the reaction that became increasingly more personalized than the claims I made necessitated; all the while appearing only after the choice was made to continue the argument.

The second consideration that needs to be taken into account is that my later arguments were aimed directly at the structure of the text itself--the way in which Deleuze and Guatarri asked for a particular subjection, the way they considered representation as a lamentable activity all the while ignoring the essential representative feature of using words, or the way it posited a 'different mode' of reading (something that conditions one's opinion of its propositions in advance).

My general point has been that whether it argues in a different style and for different modes of thought in general, it still is making claims about how we view the world and how we should view the world, something that we should never just experience. That entry within is the very feature that defines subjection. The preinscribed suggestion of relinquishment of a critical mode until one "fully understands," as if we were reading a single sentence pouring from an omniscient mind, defines subjection. We cannot be called by a text, that is the very interpellation of ideology that the writers wish to separate their descriptions from.

Whether these phenomena are written into the work itself or simply conditions of it; there is a blatant and obvious parallel between the nature of the system the text intends to critique and disrupt, and the text itself. How can we suggest that the parts of the text should not be read as a whole and then call for the consideration of more of the text? How do we consider an author's text different from a history of identifications and dualisms when it repeatedly establishes them--molecular-molar, becoming-being, virtual-actual? These are not returns to the Dualisms it wishes to dispel? Can their saying the movement between these spheres is irreducible to defined categorizations actually deny that it still refers to substances-modes-systems which are at any moment in opposition with each other?

Even if Deleuze and Guatarri wish to represent something entirely unique and new and succeed, they still cannot leave the representative condition of the use of language. Reporting isn't thinking or experiencing--writing "ow!, saying "that hurt" to a person after feeling a pain, saying it to oneself and feeling the pain are four absolutely different phenomena. Description does not subsume all action--it is only the action of description. The very attempt to normalize innumerable phenomena to the aforementioned words--molecular-molar, etc.--is no different than a reductionist cognitive scientist describing conscious states as "neurons firing" and describing a causal process within a brain. Both of these reports describe something valuable, but neither can claim supremacy over the other; they can only be used to their maximum potentials or limited in their overdesignation and reduction.

I can continue to read the book and find in it positive and negative conditions, leaving my criticism of the nature of accessible language behind, for now; but I will not allow my differentiating view to be relinquished nor will I confuse the imagining of a representation of representations--a writing written about writings, representational art, and histories--with anything but.

This argument can be ended, we can agree to disagree; but there shouldn't be a way conditional to understanding a text. We do not require the preconcieved mode of some philosopher to imagine the monstrous potentials of the world, we read books describing the world once we have already contended with these monstrous potentials.

Words communicate. Words represent. We cannot express something extrinsic to representation, while sitting in its home.