Winslow:
> It's not true that "financial speculations" are "disconnected from the
> sphere of material production". Booms and busts in stock markets, for
> instance, have very significant effects on material production.
>
Thinkers in the post-Lacan, post-Althusser line insist on the disconnect. Guattari sure did, something that came home to me as I was sitting in the tatami room this morning reading 'Molecular Revolution'.
Perhaps we can see evidence of the disconnect in the economic 'forecasting' on Lou Dobbs and CNN in another thread--such forecasting is like someone using cattle guts to tell everyone to start buying stocks to anticipate the upturn, regardless of what the human side of the economy is actually saying.
BTW, it's interesting that you should cite Lacan on the 'real'. He tried to get at the reality of the 'self' by using a line of reasoning somewhat like Frege (the platonist-realist) defining number as an immaterial object that subsists in Plato's third realm--perhaps by way of Meinong (the objective idealist who made some improvements on the Kantian tradition) with a lot of structuralist abstraction thrown in.
Guattari takes the Lacanian approach even further until it self-destructs into a monism, and the results are , in short, more like the movie, The Matrix. Still, a warning, it's hard to understand Guattari unless you've read a lot of him and have read a lot of what he has read as well. And such cross-disciplinary flights of fancy are hard to keep up with.
Charles Jannuzi