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In Massumi’s user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia , he writes:

First of all, it wouldn’t take much to recognize the connection between this and Sartre’s existentialism. It is, even if Deleuze doesn’t recognize it, testimony to the freeing power of the underlying nothing and the nihilistic perspective that spontaneously emerges from it. It recognizes, as Sartre did, that the nothingness between ourselves at any given moment, the self we could be 5 minutes down the line, opens us to any number of possibilities. The primary difference is that Deleuze seems to have blind spot for the angst and vertigo of possibility that can result from that condition.

But more important, this plays into and was stated in the context of Deleuze’s notion of the virtual: that which refers to the experienced now, which is not really experienced since we’re always tilted toward future possibilities or leaning back to the past. In other words: there is no now, only an assumed one. (Kind of accommodates Dennett’s spacio-temporal smear, doesn’t it?) This state serves as a foundation for all our potentials and possibilities.

And, in this sense, I get Deleuze’s embrace of the virtual for same reason I embrace the nihilistic perspective. They’re both equivalent as far as I’m concerned. At the same time, as I have said before: the nihilistic perspective is a nice place to visit; but only a sociopath or psychotic would want to live there. And this lies at the heart of my issue with Deleuze.

The sociopathic pitfall of the nihilistic perspective and the virtual is defined by those who, having no real criteria to regulate their behavior, turn to the one criterion that has a kind of praxis to it: power. Their basic argument is circler in nature:

I have power because I am right. Therefore, I am right because I have power.

This, of course, is the tautology of the serial killer, cut-throat capitalists, and players.

The psychotic, on the other hand, is a strategy of retreat. What they do is immerse themselves in their own little semiotic bubble with its own system of signs and rules of usage to the extent of becoming useless to the general symbolic order. This, at its most ideal, is the crazy-person walking down the street engaging in their own dialogue with an imagined listener. But in more watered down forms, it is the domain of drug and alcohol addicts, as well as, unfortunately, the avant garde and, to a great extent, Deleuze.

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?:

How could a writer not love the continental…

At the same time,

You have to respect Searle’s clear way of just building up an argument.

I kid the analytics.

But it’s all fuel for the fire to me.

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Generally, the expansion of the discontinuity, as speeding up the process of virtualization (from a faux realism qua another virtual suspension)-is the outcome of the role technology plays in accelerating it. And Capitalism as the mode of production is responsible for aiding and abetting this process.

I get the singular joy of being nihilized in this process, with pushing the limits into further possibilities -even at the cost. Of pushing the neurotic into a psychotic apprehension of this unreal world, but if this has some amalgam or extension from sartre’s freedom , then, Sartre’s failure to from a social base in Marxism/communism,solves nothing.

Deleuze’ embrace of the virtual world and the nihilistic perspective, in your opinion being similar, is this a postscription for slipping and sliding from a neurotic point of view into one where the absolute singular world that the psychotic inhabits, as a function of what Capitalism does? (A foregone conclusion?)

I agree, and the only possible way out of this quagmire is increased use of psycho chemicals generally, &/or systematic big brother scenario.(Not as far fetched as it sounds, an incredible lot of how we feel about ourselves comes from subliminal messages–which ironically reinforce the internal , virtual dialogue we are using in determining ourselves.

 This process has only a few alternatives available.  The reason why the military is so highly valued, and why it is also becoming more and more a virtual entity, is because it regiments the few remaining ideal structures left.  It fights for a purpose, an ideal, of overcoming, the overcoming of a prosthisized , projected ideal, of an enemy, a need for an enemy without, to project out the internal division for general consumption, so that internal fissures will not cause a total continental type of social de construction.

We need am enemy, a buffer zone, so we will not go absolutely bunkers over the problems of an over supplied, overproduced virtual consumerism. The enemy as the last frontier, and we need them, in order to legitimize the only remaining classic institution: the military industrial complex. The whole world economy feeds into the notion that we need a protector, a big brother to un wire our sense of fear. The military industrial complex is the holy grail, to get the individual body of production out of it’s singular apprehension of it’s self, out of the most awful fear of inadequacy, boredom, ennui. War, as the last frontier, even a virtual one, leaves people gasping for a hope for a new revival.

 The production body, in-it-self is redeemed by an ever continuous war, between a pharmacologically sustained sanity (growing, as the neurotic shift blends into a totally absorbing Virtuality) and this war transvalues the ideal into the real like a machina perpetuum, the forces, whose power derives from the unconscious daily interactions of the commercial theater, is guaranteed an objective basis to overcome the fear (of not being able to keep up with the Joneses) by duplicating this theater into the more real theater of war.  Survival itself, becomes the new tactical structure, and its guaranteed anomaly, the guarantor of the police state, the arbiter of the idol of the marketplace, of conspicuous consumption.

In spite of the fact that this type of transvaluative projection can be implied from Deleuze, it is only a contingency in time of a structural dive in the crisis of Capital. As a contingency, it feeds itself, through the body of production, and it’s most delicious treat, is the singularity of a determined austere apprehension of itself, which it knows , is the only thing that’s capable of self justification. There is no exit, and the truly free, are the invisible ones, the one which have no visible identity, because they are uniform, the ones without labels, inside and out.

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First of all, excellent post, Obe. You’ve given me enough to work with here to insure I have enough to post about right up to the end of this study. But more importantly, you’re working in the area that draws me most to Deleuze: that of socio-political criticism. But keep in mind here that I try to limit my posts to about 500 words (minus quotes) so that have time to go through what I’ve written and tinker, tweak, and tighten. And any one of your points could set off any number of words. So if I don’t get to all of your points in this sitting, they certainly warrant getting to down the line.

Once again, we return to James Burke’s point that technology seems to expand in a way similar to Galileo’s Law of Falling Bodies: at a constant rate of acceleration. The problem, as he points out, is that it invokes in us a taste for novelty. This, in turn, gravitates towards a taste for the different at the expense of quality. You see this in tastes that are taken on simply because they are different while lacking the classic qualities that induce us to enjoy a thing. This is why we are compelled to update to the latest and greatest even though the differences made may not hold any practical value. Take, for instance, some of the weird apps you tend to find on smartphones and Ipads. I’ve seen it in musical tastes as well, especially in some the avante garde punk stuff that you find young people in record shops getting into –or use to back I had to go to record shops. You also have to wonder if this phenomenon isn’t behind reality TV as well. I mean it seems as if the primary formula lies in finding something different to film: Amish mafia or Redneck Millionaires. One could easily see these kind of things coming out of corporate brainstorming sessions.

At the same time, it seems like this effort has turned on itself to the extent that finding the different has become so impossible that we have to seek it in variations of the same. As Baudrillard argues: there is nothing new left to be done; all we can do is play with the fragments of history. A station I tend to listen to is Groove Salad: techno ambient jazz. The thing is that most of what it plays is of an enjoyable quality. The problem is that nothing stands out. In other words, our addiction to the different has become such that we are willing to settle for slight variations of the same. It’s as if we’ve grown too tired to break through the next creative hymen.

And let’s be clear on the role Capitalism has played in this. And nothing could make this clearer than the role Greenspan has played in this. Greenspan, being an inflation hawk, was known for raising interest rates so as to slow down the economy thereby keeping the exchange value of consumer goods low due to a compromised consumer base. But then, because he knew that a vital economy depended on consumers, he turned to the solution of credit: virtual income. And this emphasis on credit has been at the heart of every economic strategy since then as corporations seek to trickle down less while sustaining the consumption that sustains them. It is this aspect that has accelerated the virtuality of today’s economy and our media driven world. For instance, one of these virtual strategies consists of keeping things in constant state of change through constant updating. This, in turn, forces us to consume in order to maintain the standard of living we are use to even if we don’t actually have the resources to do so –that is outside of credit. And note the way that Capitalism has hijacked our holidays in order to turn them into imperatives to consume. It’s no wonder that no matter what point we are in a year, we’re always just a pay period or two away from the next obligation to spend money we may or may not have.

And we should note here what any psych 101 class will teach you: that change is synonymous with stress. Is it any wonder that the neurosis you refer to is so dominate and could gravitate to schizophrenia?

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Deleuze argues that the role of philosophy is the creation of concepts. And I would tend to agree with this. However, I would argue that an equally important role is the development of conceptual play.

Yes, the willingness to abandon oneself to creative chaos, as Nietzsche encourages us, in order to give birth to a dancing star. We’re drawn to it: that glory of breaking through the next creative hymen. Yet, we hesitate. Part of us wants to be normal, to be accepted. Should it be any kind of surprise: our propensity towards neurosis? Perhaps even the schizophrenic?

Likewise, should the reactions of those who have succumb to state philosophies, who want, more than anything, to be players in an in crowd, who seek dominance at the expense of Jasper’s “loving communication”, really surprise us?

Deleuze poses the plane of immanence (that empirical realm in which thoughts engage like events among other events, producing machines among other producing machines –machines that produced our thoughts) against the plane of transcendence (the realm of the ideal that seeks to channel the play of immanence to its own ends: to enslave it). Among the expressions of Transcendence Deleuze describes are Truth, Reason, God, human nature, or just plain nature. But given our experience on this board with those who embrace Transcendence, I would add another as equally insidious as any of them: the trend: that criterion by which one is given admission to “the in crowd”: that criterion that one must perfect to become the player priest: that criterion by which it is clearly known what discourses must be shut down thereby shutting down the flow of energy: the creative chaos of the plane of immanence.

We laugh at the psychotic walking down the street engaged in a conversation with themselves. But we must distrust all hierarchies. We should listen for the poetry in that discourse. Once again: Nietzsche:

One must have inner chaos to give birth to a dancing star.

Capitalism is the cheer squad of the trend as well as other expressions of the plane of transcendence.

The dying gasps of classicism, perhaps? But this would equally be the dying gasp of the classical order entangled in Roman hubris.

(How much KTS and Satyr would hate that: a whole culture (their culture) becoming woman.)

So would it be any wonder that we have classicists among us? Those who rail for notions such as objectivity and all other expressions of the plane of transcendence? Those who embrace the phallic? It would seem they fear the creative chaos.

And what does that say about roman hubris?

D & G also wrote, in the Anti-Oedipus, that a book is not a mirror of the world; it forms a rhizome with it.

In this sense, we see a connection between Deleuze and the pragmatism of Rorty. Ultimately, it comes down to a rejection of all forms of higher powers and higher principles, a rejection that allows us to get on with the business of making a better life for ourselves, if in no other manner, to justify it through Play.

Leibniz asks: why all this rather than nothing?

And what better response could there be than “Play”?

Given that we believe in things like afterlives, higher powers, and higher principles (at heart they’re all the same) and that point A to point B is pretty much a given, what imperative could be more pressing than the idea of playing with mind and consciousness? Of seeing what it can do?

We should be so privileged as to experience the pure ecstasy of the madman without self consciousness.

(Yet, I edit myself… all the time.)

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 So, the plane of immenance de constructs all built up structures of ideas, things, events, to multiple singularities, each one a value in it self as a play, this is great, but also sad. Because the plane of immenance needs the transcendental ideal as a pre-requisite, without it, it couldn't contrast itself, and if it wasn't for this contrast, this schizophrenia of dualism, the evolutionary motive itself would remain on the level of pure plane, pure chance.  Like a dice game, Einstein says God Himself doesn't play.  Why?

Naïve realism couldn’t be represented except through the charm of a formal, albeit decaying aesthetic. The french symbolism is what I have in mind, it is as if the imminent like the foam on the crest of a wave just about to break, riding on tons of azure water, of the tons of classic beauty, and if it were not for that, immenance would not be realized. Both are needed schizophrenically, the ideal and the real together, bridged by a wisp of restrained chaos , delightfully balanced by the slightest whim as angels, dancing on the head of a pin.

This is what defeats the imminent second, before the wave breaks, that micro second, where the brilliant white of the foam sizzles it’s ancient song of mariners long past, the siren song of salty dogs, the romance of illusion in between. This is perhaps the motivation, a throwback into Kierkegaard’s fascination with the aesthetic ideal surpassing God himself. It’'s a vision he aspires to. But as in the void, the frame is always there even apart from the content, and the need to fill it. The poverty of the beautiful chaos is framed. God framed us, for His pleasure.

I totally agree of the co"incidence of all psychic events, pictures, memories, even the idea of immenance itself, as just another play.

Beyond the freedom of Rollo May, he wisely places responsibility at this point. The minute we realize that we are totally free, our responsibility to at least ourself to try to understand that the bridge between this singularly attained immenance (conscious) and the naïve realism that Rosseau considers a natural state, .where lays the necessity to re integrate into the transcendental, to encompass the transcendental field. Leibnitz realized this and this is a new level of disconnect, and yet it has the function to raise it’s monadic structure to a higher level,
It’s a re integration of any modicum of chaos, or unreal, within the folds of reality, is in merleau-Ponty foreshadowing Polanyi’s “tacit understanding” of stratified intentional entities.

Without giving you to opportunity to estimate my use of these ideas, it seems as if I feel, I am on the right track.

The crisis of today is unrealized by most. We are standing on the edge of a precipice, and only the “social authority” you mention above, can we, naïve realist’s find the courage to dispose of the guilt we build up over our gambling, gambling with how we can in good consciounce rid of ourselves of our losses.

If we could just stand by Rosseau, and not feel the guilt as he had(he was tried before the Academy as was socrates), then we could assume the function and role you describe with impunity. We have lost faith, and we don’t see that it’s always been there, but now we just think it’s lost. Nietzche never intended to overcome Kant’s categorical imperative, since he couldn’t with a huge cartesian doubt to overcome. He just may have assumed the role of describing what needs to be done, so that a re’affirmation can be brought about. And it is unfolding. Chaos again bows before the light.

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The ethereal of the self conscious naively real, today it’s the formerly used colonized third world, confusedly trying to re-integrate with quantum speed of impersonal hindsight, and micro managed by social/political forces of quick/fixed seeming appearant solutions, this is the macro problem of an immenance in stark contrast to the disillusioned de constructed ideals playing as yet shadow games of nercroleptic illusions of fleaur-de-mal, and this machine as a body so cleverly crucified between an old and a post modern world. His crucifixion the total symbol for deleuze: one which I am not familiar that he took into account.

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I think we have to navigate our way through the rhizomatic network in a way that is respectful of Deleuze, but beyond him: a tamed by reality response to his youthful enthusiasm and delusory readiness for the very world he wants to create. One sees the creativity in it. One could not presume to make art without it, to add creative machines to the complex of interaction with other machines: the plane of immanence. Still, creativity must be territorialized into a public statement. Spoken in tongues, it’s no good to the general symbolic order –even if it is impressive in its intensity.

(William Carlos Williams: a poem is a machine: by which he meant a poem is a construction of words that derives its effect through the resonance between the poem machine and mind machine.)

The creative act is one thing; art is quite another. The creative act is a child taking crayon to a piece of paper; art is the praise that child gets from their parents as they hang it on the fridge.

Picasso once said that taste is the enemy of art. But art is a visual thing and Picasso was probably not one to define his terms.

(?: do you realize how easily this string could end up like a psych ward full of patients meandering around and engaging in their own little monologues. No wonder nobody else wants to play here.

(But art is a matter of taste: it is a social agreement about what constitutes Beauty.

Therefore, had Picasso been a philosopher, he would have said that art is the enemy of the creative act. Had he of read Deleuze, he would have recognized art as a form of territorialization.

One has to admit that the postmodern approach is one of submission to consumption: if nothing else, the consumption of knowledge. At the same time, that immersion in consumption can lead us to forget those who are being hurt by it.

Capitalism supplies us with the tools to arrive at the postmodern nihilistic perspective to make us more compliant consumers. It directs us to the sociopathic pitfall. It thinks it can keep such wildness in check. But can it?

Capitalism fills us with desire. But what happens when that desire turns on it through the proletariat.

We could approach Difference and Repetition by considering our own instinctive responses to the 2 terms.

On that basis we could see the two as yen and yang, chaos and order. But, as I understand it, Deleuze opposes such dichotomies. Yet, difference and repetition are the underlying aspects of how we manage language. We all have a vocabulary that consists of thousands of words. And given the powers of recall it must take, it’s actually amazing we can manage to put a string of words together to form a coherent sentence, much less one that might actually impress someone.

I mean how do we actually make someone laugh?

Yet we pull it off. And underlying that ability has got to be difference and repetition:

The ability to repeat certain things (that which appeals to the latest structure in brain plasticity) while being able to create important variations among them (that which drives brain plasticity: difference).

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Perhaps the ward is full and it’s time to let others in? Or, take a break. Before the break, let me in on a secret not all that well known: salvadore Dali would have gone overboard had he not found his alter ego.
Or had his narcissim not metamorphed into the flower narcissus. Art for its own sake. The flower for the sake of springfield.

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But seriously aside d63, let’s get to the crux of the situation. Schizophrenia is not just a loaded word, as misused, and politicized, as it seems to implies anything from divisiveness in political affairs, to extreme. Mental disturbance from seemingly complex biochemical, behavioral and cognitive aberrations. There are theories of genetic traits as having built in genetic tendencies toward an affinity for it, and other emergent theories.

Now, the fact is, Deleuze’s theory seems appealing on one front, in the sense of offering a simplistic reductive etiology, however upon closer examination a number of objections could be raised.

As far as causation is concerned, can the illness used in a metaphor as for instance similarly, tuberculosis or “consumption” was used in illness as a metaphor?
If this is the purpose of Deleuze, to simply point to a quantified probability curve tending to approximate a kind of "schizophrenic preponderance in a given time frame, as did freud in his time of analysis corresponded the victorian taboos with the incidence of hysteria. If this is the case, the metaphors will imply a type of sociAl/psychological correspondence. To be fair, is there a similar kind of thing goin on with capitalism and schizophrenia?
That the incidence is growing is certain as we have agreed earlier on, but could this increase be due to other causal factors, such as mass population migration to large metropolitan populations, by heretofore agronomical population? Or even carcinogenic involvement? In sweden a study came out correlating moral laxity with an increase of psychosis. This can too, be a credible starting point.

It seems likely that capital as marx drew it, had dynamics of production, diminishing returns, that impacted psychological ideas such as dehumanization, etc. But what really is the level of causation here?

The harbingers of existential psychoanalysis point to the patient’s situation, and inauthenticity, estrangement and so on. Are these ideas, as a consequence of the capitalistic mode of social approbation, enough causally to cause an ontological shift from a neurotic to a psychotic state?
These are questions which may be asked to bring into focus the ontology of the insanity of the age, the age characterized by production machines of bodies without sense, bodies as machines, territorilized ideas, etc?

 Is this a systemic process,or illnesses locally grown in infested heavily industrialized urban centers. 

 In all fairness, these objections are brought up, and critics would say,that it is convenient to project causation to political expediency, as the shift away from looking at genetic traits have been given up for brighter, and changing diagnostics, and less guarded outcomes.?http://ilovephilosophy.com/ucp.php?mode=login
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B63 : I have written the above critique in the same mode as expressing that as one of any number of ideas as existential situations, equally held, non judgemntally. How does this situation related to Deleuzek4 holding? (I suppose non judgementally)? Within the complex realm of existentialism, how can an anti-possibility,arise?, as anti Oedipus?
The multiplicity of the situations disqualified Deleuze’s schizophrenic “outlook” (for a choice of a better word) from any seriously quantifiable study, since it remains on the level an anti-casual study, it has been reduced, to a pre-qualification, on basis of a function of metaphors. It remains suspended as Suzan Sontag speaks of illness as a metaphor. But has it successfully been reified to qualify as a metaphor, as in consumption did two hundred years ago?
And lastly, I introduce this alternative way of looking at it, as a response to Your suggestion, as to an observation you made, that our discussion of this subject may appear odd, to outside observers, and we ourselves may be suffering from some kind of a hebrephrenic correspondence.

 There is much to be said for the this illness and the ravaging effects it has on the lives of countless sufferers, and any serious discussion needs to take into consideration all the objections which may be raised against a hypothetical causality, as convincing as Deleuze seems to be.

Lastly, how is anti psychiatry stand up in today's very pragmatic world in relation to a non continental approach as taken by R.D. Laing.

 I know that this is a lot, but hoping, if you wish, to explore these and perhaps other possibilities which may come up?


If Guattari's argument is based on purely Marxian critiques of Capital, then can we contain the foundations of his ontology strictly in line with Dialectical Materialism?  And if so, can the synthetic effects of value/devalue be extended metaphorically from social economics to socilal psychology?

The angst of materialism vis a vis personal value as self image tends to coincide with the sustained view of the One Dimensional Man, however this book too, is the product of the 60’s, and the new left has had its heyday and decline, within a period of a mere five to ten years max, and the ideals have never measured up to their effects, by any means.

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Bela Gruenberger charged that extreme left wing Stalinist’s were in a bunch of infantile, in rebellion against their father. Is at the crux of the argument. Lacan, disavowed this extreme view.

D63 the de-territorization of “schizophrenia” as simply directly attributable, was not deleuze’s objective, they upheld the clinical version. But they seemed to de-differentiate the distinction between. The secondary, social process as an object of the pleasure-production machine, rather than the familial, the primary.

 In addition, but not to beat a dead horse, is Deleuze's view that the Capitlal tends to encourage Freudanism, as a way to create the illusion of reality. This is the manipulation of the investment of pleasure in strictly Freudian terms,whereas what is really going on is the feitshized body's pleasure seeking has been posited into the commodit-es of pleasure--consumerism.  This again points to a de-differentiation of Oedipal content and fusing it with the secondary process differentiation, thereby alianating the familial, primary process differentiation.

 So it is really turning marxian ideology on it's head, and not a primary analytic original idea.  That is the weakness of Capital, it is a reaction to, rather than being a unique ontology.  It has to use the underlying ideologies to ground itself, and therfore it's always in a defensive mode. Absent enemies, it has to create them.

 Pls forgive for the exploratory way of approaching this, I am breaking into uncharted territory, and the above is not representative of any conviction, apart from placing this process in suspense, as a totality.

Just some thoughts

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First of all, Obe, I’ve been passing the time until my user guide for Difference and Repitition comes in from Amazon (I know: consumer of knowledge) reading online resources on Deleuze. If you want to put this on a track of us observing a common thing, you might check them out:

langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC1.html

plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/

And one I’ll read if I have time:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze

Excellent move! Turn Deleuze’s emphasis on Difference on him.

Yeah! I suppose you’re right.

But I would point out that Deleuze distinguishes between the “transcendental “and “transcendence”. In Deleuzian terminology, the latter, as the plane of transcendence, is opposed to the plane of immanence. This is why he refers to Transcendental Empiricism. I’m not fully sure what he means by “transcendental”, but I’m sure, given what I have gotten from secondary sources, that it has something to do with Kant.

Please understand that I do not explain this to you as a teacher or guru trying to correct a student, but rather as a peer imparting what he has to another peer. This is, above all, a jam, brother.

Yeah! But isn’t this the domain that philosophy should take pride in covering? Philosophy lies in that no-man’s land between science and art. Shouldn’t it take pride in that rather than cringe in the shadow of science? Shouldn’t it take pride in its ability to make the non-functional functional? That which can justify a point A to point B by pushing consciousness to places the weltanschauung does not offer in itself? Or is philosophy, the concepts we create, merely part of the weltanschauung? The plane of immanence?

The cool thing about Deleuze is that he encourages us to love philosophy and attempts to show us how. He teaches us that your process of playing with the nomenclature and my attempt to blue-collarize it are equally valid.

We have to be weary here: the worst thing we could do is downplay the seriousness of mental illness. You’re right: people are suffering.

But what we also have to do is make a distinction between clinical mental illness and the terms we apply to it being used in a metaphorical sense. We have to be careful of making the same mistake the critics of the continental make in taking it too seriously. Deleuze and Guattarri take great pains in distinguishing the schizophrenic process from schizophrenia.

And like Baudrillard and his “simulacrum”, we have to keep in mind that what we are dealing with are perspectives –not Truths. But they are perspectives that can lead us to truths (with a small “t”) and understanding.

BTW: thanks for showing up when no one else seems to have the balls to do so. We may talk past each other from time to time. But we’re still doing it (the jam) together.

(Hebephrenic: what a cool term to bring into the discourse. With this we could evolutionize the Deleuzian lexicon with the “Hebephrenic Discourse”. The thing is that such a discourse is not exclusive to what we’re doing here. It, due to the drive-by nature of what we do here, is actually ubiquitous throughout The Board. Don’t we all just scan through what the other has said looking for what we can respond to? The only difference with you and me is that we embrace the admission.)

But anyway: thanks again for showing up:

Love ya, man!

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In Joe Hughes’ reader’s guide, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition , we get a good explanation and response to the general criticism of Deleuze’s writing style, and much of postmodernism, that its obscurity masks a lack of meaningful or valid content. Now first of all, anyone who has any experience with poetry or art should recognize the emptiness of this complaint immediately. As Archibald MacLeish put it: a poem should not mean, but be. And this is the spirit in which Deleuze describes (not defines) philosophy: as a kind of nonfiction poetry or fiction.

But the reveals a legitimate justification for this in Deleuze’s emphasis on free indirect discourse rooted in a distrust of direct discourse. As post-structuralism in general has recognized: there is something about reality that transcends the language we use to describe it. As Deleuze sees it, language has no right to claim that it is capable of representing reality. Like a book, it can only form a rhizome with it. It can only act in the world creating events in the plane of immanence.

(And I would argue that science is just such a language.)

As Deleuze would argue: language captures (not represent) thought and reality. Therefore, if we are honest about it, all we can do is is follow Nietzsche’s lead in his Dionysian dance of thought, to not try to represent thought or reality or, most importantly, becoming, but to invoke becoming in others.

And this ties in to what I think is one of the most despicable, petty, and TlB expressions of analytic arrogance, one brought up to me by Hughes’ book: the Sokal prank. Now I have always suspected that all the experiment (if that’s what you want to call it) proved was 2 things. First of all, it proved that Sokal was a petty and sanctimonious prick who thought that science was the only means by which anything could be understood. Secondly, it proved what everyone already knew: that philosophy, as philosophy with the focuses it has, is dependent on the authority of scientists when it comes to matters of science. Philosophers simply do not have the time to fact check everything that happens to be going on in science. What Sokal engaged in was a greedy reductionism. This was established in the book when it pointed out that much of Sokal’s criticism of Deleuze in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectual’s Abuse of Science was punctuated by the fact that they didn’t understand him. Or as Roland Barthes’ parodied in Mythologies:

I don’t understand. Therefore, you are ignorant.

Now what is relevant to us is that those among us who engage in the same analytic arrogance of Sokal will treat him as some kind of hero who actually proved something.

It was like the intellectual equivalent of Fox News: common goonism.
*
The problem with direct discourse is that implies that the one who is engaging in it is attempting to change our mind or bring us closer to their way of thinking. Hence Deleuze’s concept of the “order word” and the notion that language is, by nature, prescriptive, or that which tells what we should or ought to do.
*
Like Rorty, Deleuze seems to consider representation the crime of the century (Philosophy as Mirror of Nature). Like Deleuze, Rorty seems to consider philosophy little more than an activity in the world: something we do in order to change the world: to connect an interacting machine or component to it.

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Hey guy! Where are we going with this? As post modernism goes, I do get the sorry but at the same time excited bt the fact that we do have to start making connections, one way or another. Whither it goes who knows? But my feeling is, that the trust of that energy will evolve from the continental divide. I see nothing wrong with retro ideas, as a matter of fact, I think steps have to be retraced before they can again be re-aligned, so that we again can take the road less traveled. I am with you on that and I try not to relinquish a project.

The sad part of any undertaking in this mode is, that it sorely needs a unifying principle, a networking of ideas, so that the continental divide not be just another venture cut off from an anomalie, not nearly sufficiently described.

At any rate, I will start some reading into Rorty, I have Deleuze somewhere in the garage, gotta dig it up, however been busy with familial things so that the familiar I sort of let hang. But I don’t forget.

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The crime, brother, is the notion that language or the mind can just reflect reality when all it actually does is form a relationship with it: the plane of immanence as compared to the plane of transcendence: Truth, Logic, Rational Thought, Objectivity, God, etc…

This is why Deleuze gives as much import to art as he does science.

As he points out: philosophy, art, and science are just different ways of dealing with chaos.

And I think one could legitimately take the risk of throwing theology in there as well,
even if Deleuze wouldn’t do it himself.

That would be my blue collar interpretation.

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For those who know me on this board (perhaps better than I would like them to), I humbly offer this passage from D&G’s What is Philosophy in my defense:

Once again, Deleuze argues (as well as Rorty) that the greatest crime of the century was the birth of representation, the notion that language, or anything we can do with it (like thinking), can actually reflect reality, that all we have to do is correct the mirror by swearing allegiance to such transcendents as objectivity, facts, evidence, logic, rational thought, the scientific method, or God (it’s pretty much the same thing –or faith) to get the reflection “just right”. All language can do is form a relationship with it. And we have seen how the failure of this recognition expresses itself, all over this board, in TlBs.

What the TlBs fail to recognize is that while many of the highly intelligent people on these boards do not publically make an issue of the transcendent (once again: objectivity, facts, evidence, logic, rational thought, the scientific method, or God –or maybe not so much “God”) they do make use of them as they should be: tools. They don’t go around flashing them as badges of authority. They just use them and let the rest come out in the wash.
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On one hand, one could agree with D&G in that those who settle for merely interpreting previous philosophers “just right” are little more than philosophical functionaries. At the same time, you have to give some credibility to Walter Kuhn’s distinction between normal and abnormal science in that I think it would equally apply to philosophy and art. I mean you have to give some worth and love to those who dedicate their lives to merely filling in the gaps that the latest paradigm leaves.
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You see in Deleuze a struggle to articulate something that can be compared to the wave/particle relationship: the plane of immanence can be thought of as the wave aspect while the concept can be thought of as the particle aspect of it.
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But as D&G also points out: greatness comes from creating a new plane of immanence, which we do through creating new concepts. Through creating new concepts, we create a new way of thinking about thought: the plane of immanence.
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After this Obe, the next project is a book (a graphic guide) on eastern philosophy that will take me a couple of days. After that, I’m going to turn to a study of the latest issue of the Harvard Review of Philosophy. It’s only 10$ if you want to join me.

I hope you will.

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 I do, and will keep that in mind.  The relational aspect between the two planes is interesting , and, it seems as if transcendental relationships as against reflective ones between the two planes reduces the problem of defining the transcendental (versus the transcendental plane) as you mentioned.

To find out how Eastern Philosophy can be integrated within the transcendental, to establish this relationship, would be very interesting.

I will try to order the above publication so I can follow where this may be going.

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Yeah, Obe, reading the graphic guide, Eastern Philosophy for Beginners, proved to be a little instructive to our point here:

Reading it, I realized how much Indras’s Net is like Deleuze’s rhizomatic metaphysics:

At each crossing point of the network is a gem that reflects all the other gems, gem by gem, thereby reflecting itself reflecting in all the other gems, and so on and so on…

It’s already been pointed out with Derrida and deconstruction; but you have to suspect that eastern philosophy had a little influence on Deleuze as well.

That said, I should be starting on the latest issue of the Harvard Review by Monday or Tuesday. I’ve already went through it once (which always helps with a study). But I really hope you will join me. But if you can, focus on the most recent.

One of these days I want to do one or several on some of the free online journals. That way everyone can participate without money being involved.

Speaking of which, you should check this out:

world-newspapers.com/philosophy.html

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.d63

I have been always under the impression, that being unsure of one’s position, may be a sign of an inability to take a stand. Having literally and figuratively been strung out of understanding the disrepency between Being and the seeming logic of positivism, schizo-analysis for me, is not simply a figurative way to use it as an aphorism of sort, but literally, to work through the two, as if in a living project. If I could be brutally honest with you from this point on, the dialectic. Is not only an idea to justify a certain proclivity, but a logical need to connect the imminent and transcendent planes of understanding. I have pre philosophically struggled and am struggling to this day, of trying to connect the two, and do not see any harm of even using a style of apologia to connect the illness unto death’ kierkegaard speaks of, with the content of philosophical digression, between the one and the other.

Subtle distinctions aside, within this view, there is a real requirement to show that a relationship does exist between the psychological and the ontological, and such a relationships encompasses the large scope of the historical development of the idea of the transcendent all the way from the classical ideals, through the great doubter Descartes and through the modern world of the ideologue, then the anti ideologue, and then finally the great synthesizer Kant.
Without hegel and Kant, dialectical materialism would not have been possible, and without dialectical materialism, materialism would not have been able to define itself positively. There would not have been enough forces generated, and who knows, the world war itself could have not been interpreted as an ideological struggle.
In light of the above, I eagerly look forward to the application of Eastern thought. And how it fits into the equation.

I do hope no misunderstandings can develop on issues which may be tangential, and as a result, I would not depreciate in your eyes. I think philosophy is a search for truth and truth like a beacon shines through the levels of misunderstanding, which have minimally caused ad hominems at the very least, but have in fact resulted in blood shed and the loss of life.

Schizo analysis begs the violation of the mind extrapolated into the vastmess of the world, and the madness of mass delusion has shown it’s. Self as a literal testament to it’s own condition.