Category Archives: Uncategorized

In the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) claim that it was a ‘mistake to have ever said the id’, because the unconscious is a productive force ‘at work everywhere’. The world is comprised of ‘machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines […] all the time, flows and interruptions. ThisContinue reading “rival dealer and desiring machines”

‘Insisting on fantasy to the end’ – Todd McGowan Lynch’s characters’ use of uncanny linguistic expression and their frequent juxtaposition with ‘larger-than-life’ pere jouissance figures is limitedly successful in providing access to the underlying Real because it only destabilises one of the two Lacanian orders that constitute perceptible reality: The Symbolic. By evoking and negatingContinue reading “lynch and language [4/4]”

‘Repeating, Like an Automaton’ – Slavoj Zizek Although Lynch devotes a significant amount of the language in his films to highlighting the totalising power of the Symbolic and the way it perpetuates its authority by reproducing fantastical desires that inevitably fail before the Real, he devotes a far greater proportion of his filmic work toContinue reading “lynch and language [3/4]”

‘An anthem of conformity’ – Grace Lee Much of the language in Lynch’s filmography is dedicated to identifying the paradox he sees at the heart of the Symbolic Order: although language is fundamentally incapable of representing the Reals that underlie conscious experience, it is granted an absolute power to shape individual thought and to determineContinue reading “lynch and language [2/4]”

‘The thing that language never is, never can be, but to which language is always moving.’ – Steve McCaffery, ‘Intraview’ Since the very beginning of his filmmaking career, David Lynch has exhibited a fundamental distrust of, and reluctance to engage with, language. As Dennis Lim detailed at length in his 2015 book David Lynch: TheContinue reading “lynch and language [1/4]”

‘Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling’ – Thomas Pynchon The end of the Cold War and subsequent spread of transnational capitalism – globalisation – massively disrupted the longstanding and relatively stable ideological balance that had entrenched itself across the globe during the 20th century; the Western Bloc was capitalist, theContinue reading “ruins of the future”

‘We sing amid our uncertainty.’ – W. B. Yeats Although many of Yeats’ poems, particularly those surrounding political and revolutionary topics, seem to be so ambivalent in their tone that they never wholly affirm any one view or idea, I believe this to be true only of their tone. Even in his poetic writing thatContinue reading “ambivalence”

‘There was until recently in Paris, on Rue Pavée in the Quatrième, a decrepit looking language school which displayed in its window, in English (on a dusty cloth banner, in fifties–style white on red lettering) this injunction: “don’t let the English language beat you—master it before it masters you”‘ – Denise Riley Although Michel FoucaultContinue reading “theory/language/power”

‘We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality’ – Irish Murdoch, Although J. G. Ballard’s novel The Atrocity Exhibition and Irvine Welsh’s collection of short stories The Acid House both suggest their authors would agree with Iris Murdoch’s suggestion that ‘we live in aContinue reading “postwar fantasies”