The Routledge Research Companion to Media Geography by Paul C. Adams Jim Craine

Author:Paul C. Adams, Jim Craine [Paul C. Adams, Jim Craine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781317042822
Google: agLPCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-23T04:12:31+00:00

Thinking Inwardly

A media chapter entitled “places of interiority” may be of concern to those who remember the rise of psychogeography in the 1980s, and some overreaching battles between Freudian, Lacanian, and feminist theory. Freud’s focus on the development of self through the Oedipal-stage was challenged by Lacan’s mirror-stage and a linguistic turn in how we understood the development of consciousness and the evolution of unconscious drives. Feminism challenged the patriarchal basis of the Oedipal- and mirror-stages as being too rigorously structured around a white, male European model of human development. By so doing, feminism obviously also challenged the patriarchal structure of society. Taking this further as part of their influential Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) famously connected the focus of psychoanalysis on pathologies and developmental normalization to the apparati of capitalism and the state. They take Freud beyond the family, seeing individuals as the heterogeneous aggregate of parts of social and natural machines. They reposition desire as positive, productive, and more than libidinal, and the unconscious as indifferent to personal and political identity. Deleuze and Guattari empty out the Oedipus, dissipating its power into a multiplicity of “desiring machines.” The subject eviscerates, turns inside out, and continuously reconstructs itself as a temporary “body without organs” along lines of desire. Deleuze and Guattari evoke the breast-mouth as a body without organs that comes together as a temporary assemblage, which may not be part of other wholes but a working body with its own purpose. Unlike Freudian and Lacanian theory, desire is positive. There is no lack or unconscious desire left unfulfilled.

Deleuze and Guattari position Marxian thought as a libidinal exercise, seeing the social and political as immediately invested with desire. The entire notion of a complete monadic “subject” with political and personal interests of its own becomes meaningless unless understood relationally, in terms of its recombinatorial power. For Deleuze and Guattari, analytic possibilities cannot reside in a space already occupied by objects precipitated out of the state’s binary machine, like man/woman or inside/outside (Kirby 1996: 115). The ideal state of a body without organs is most often relational and recombinatorial, temporary, lacking restraints, moving in excess of the boundaries between subjects and objects, insides and outsides.

From a Deleuzean perspective, it may be useful to think in terms of intensity as a movement toward the internal and extension as a movement toward the external. And, brilliantly, Delouse sidesteps the issue of ontological binaries because actual intensity has form and substance, or extension, which may be thought of as an exteriority. This not to say that virtual or pure intension is undifferentiated, only that it is an indeterminate part of our spatiality (Massumi 1992: 66).

Kathy Kirby (1996: 117) argues that a focus on Deleuze and Guattari – as well as other post-structural perspectives that reorder the space of the subject, “can lead subjects to disrespect the bounds of others, or to cede too much of the social territory and lose the capacity to maintain their own self-interests.” The danger here, she argues, is

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