[...]er's phallus: that which endows her with power and authority

fetish --> a way of both preserving his belief in the missing maternal phallus and at the same time accepting her castration and the possibility of his own

disavowal =/= repression (--> neurosis) =/= negation (denial) =/= repudiation (foreclosure --> psychosis)

negation: a provisional lifting of repression (not through acceptance, the repressed contents are verbally and affectively negated) --> affirmation: the process of registering or fixing a drive to an ideational content (signifying the former by the latter), both the condition of signification and of repression

...................................

Grosz on Deleuze and Guattari

problem with “becoming woman”
the process of becoming-X [marginal, woman, non-western, etc.] means nothing as a strategy if one is already X =/= question of difference, specificity

*desire
*machinic functions
*assemblages
*rhizomatics
*cartography
*intensities
*speed
*planes

appropriation (recuperation) of the positions and struggles of X ==risks==> depoliticizing aestheticizing struggles and political challenges crucial to the survival and self-definition of X

problem with becoming
(Deleuze and Guattari are invested in a) romantic elevation of models of psychosis, schizophrenia, and madness ==>
•ignore the very real pain and torment of individuals
•raise pathology to an unlivable, unviable ideal for others


our reservations and suspicions (in apass when we face each other)

Deleuzian rhizomatics & feminist theory --> reversal of Platonism: “ideal =/= real” (opposition integral to Western thought)


rhizomatics, cartography, schizoanalysis (deconstruction, grammatology) ==> clear the ground of metaphysical concepts ==> (others) may be able to devise their own knowledges

four “illusions” of representation:
•identity
•opposition
•analogy
•resemblance
}--✕--> becoming (beyond the logic and confines of being)
}--✕--> multiplicity [defined by the outside] (beyond doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects)


Deleuzian-Foucauldian understanding of politics theorizes in a clearer and more direct form than *rival (alternative) political philosophies* (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and anarchism), the kinds of theoretical and political struggles in which feminists are involved

[*]body: a discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and events, intensities, and durations --link--> organs + biological processes + material objects + social practices

[Spinoza's rare affirmative understanding of] body: (is analyzed and assessed more) in terms of *what it can do*, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, the machinic connections it forms with other bodies (=/= a locus for a conscious subject, as an organically determined object, by their genus and species, by their organs and functions)

from Plato to Lacan --> desire: negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (an effect of frustration) [desire is frustrated by the real]
=/= Spinoza Nietzsche Deleuze --> desire: immanent, positive and productive, ***desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction*** [desire is productive of reality] --> aleatory, bricolage

Spinoza's ethics: capacity for action and passion, increase or decrease one's capacities and strengths <-- good & bad
=/= Levinasian ethics (modeled on a subject-to-subject, self-to-other relation)

(psychoanalysis) *partial objects: organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject*

...................................

(Archer > Saint Lauren:) “fashion fades, style is eternal" = 'notions of style <--> notions of history’ ={"to have style" = to have the means of inserting oneself into history / “to lack style" = to risk oblivion}

Archer --> how critical considerations of style can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against one another

erotic stylization of deadly force --(Archer asks)--> why is it stylish for one to be attracted to the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?

...................................

Chen on animacy

animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways

[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns

change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)

animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character

animating principle [--> rigging]

...................................

Ihde: playing a musical instrument (= a technological mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)

Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology

...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)

Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***

*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication



“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts

(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)



matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle

(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability


Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities that are both cultural & natural (for example material technologies are both “real” & “constructed”)


Ihde --> technologies are in *mediating positions*

interrelational relativistic ontologies : there is interaction and mutual “non-neutral” and “noninnocent” productive and emergent shaping between humans + technologies + animals --> knowledge is “situated” and particular, not “transcendentally” true ==> putative symmetry between the human & nonhuman


bestiality (interrelational, sin?) is embedded in what has to appear to us today as an antiquated or surpassed stability

•(Merleau-Ponty + Ihde) embodiment is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated + embodied]
•(Pickering) cybernetic (self-organizing set) is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated]


---> go to Galison's Einstein


(the old notion that) ***phenomenology is primarily descriptive =/= prescriptive

[ethicalization of knowledge, in Iran, in artists reading choices based on gender, etc. turning research into applied ethics]
•contemporary ethics of a cosmopolitan pluricultural tolerant sort
•absolutisms of politically incarnated groups had to transform absolute beliefs into “private” ones (taken off the streets and battlegrounds) <--now-- returning!


****technologies are multistable: having unpredictable side-effects and embeddable in different ways in different cultures****

[technology + embodied -->] abstract philosophical reflects + mundane work practices[...]