Perfect. Fucking perfect! I was unaware of Colebrook’s stuff. Thank you, I will definitely check her out. She seems to be Australian which makes sense - they do some mindblowing XXI cent stuff. Must be the Southern hemisphere. Yeah, this is the whole idea of the machinic in A Thousand Plateau
Technically, Deleuze was around for the invention of the meme. The idea is originally from Richard Dawkins (When he was an actual scientist, as opposed to being a Paladin of No-Theism). He brings it forth in 1976 at the end of “The Selfish Gene” - which I highly recommend reading or rereading, just to see the intellectual pedigree of the idea that behavior is traceable to genes. He says that A blind cultural/mental replicator may exist. If it does it would be called a meme. But you’re right, it really doesn’t get going until the mid to late 90’s. I’m 34 and got into philosophy through early AOL/Netscape articles on memetics when I was in high school.
There is an idea I’ve been working through which I’ve been calling Mental Ecologies - this is pretty much swiped in whole gulp from Greg Bateson and it’s not so much the notion of how memes are passed from mind to mind, but the notion of how the actual language you here every day truly affects how you think. This sounds really banal at the moment, but gimme a few weeks to work it out and it’ll be all sexy and filled with things like “Literacy/Orality, mentalitie, embodied cogition, and the evolutionary biology of language”. And then I’ll have network philosopher props of '45 caliber
You’re exactly correct in your description of the BwO. But what is a BwO when instantiated? What would an example of the Body without Organs be in the world?
you’re thinking about it wrong. Sorry, I’m blunt. People deal with BwO quite effectively all the time. I surmise you’re thinking about the BwO as some sort of society wide Marxist totality Paradise jesus sort of thing. Don’t think so globally. Think smaller systems. BwO is just fancy french bullshit for any system with interacting variables which “learns” from experience before that system has been run through any iteration. Think about an extended game of Paper, Rock, Scissors. If you decide to play a hundred games in a row, before you start to play, the set of you, your opponent, and the shared rules of the game in your heads is a BwO. As soon as you start to play, the system starts recording and the agents start plotting their moves in this iteration, the next, and possibly the next.
I actually think that Sokal is a hundred percent wrong about Deleuze and that his math is probably intuitively decent. It’s just French. I don’t mean that as a joke. I mean that it’s situated in a Mathematical tradition starting with Poincare, and encompassing the Bourbaki group, Benoit Mandelbrot, Rene Thom and others. I know for a fact that the influence of mathematics on the French humanities in the 50s and 60s was incredibly strong. As evidence, I present the entirety of Oulipo, the last year in Marienbad, and the Situationists amongst hundreds of others. It’s just that Anglophones have no clue about most of this, dismissing it as cheese-eater onanism
How against triangles? His methodology was psychoanalytical and dealt with surfaces pieced together. The closest analogy, was cubist. Is cubism a reaction against triangular forms? How does triangularity best desribe the movement before him, which he came to revolt against? And the Noveau Roman is in what way different, irrespective of topical formalisms?
Okay…. first of all, guys, I’m back to work tomorrow and have a limited window. So I’m going to start with something that feels like “breaking the surface” to me. Beyond that, I’ll get to as many points as I can.
But you’ve given me a lot to work with. So if I happen to neglect something, it has nothing to do with the quality of the point.
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As I have said before, what seems to be at work in D&R is a subtle description of how we interact with reality. And an important aspect of that, as I get it from Hughes’ reader’s guide, is the three syntheses:
1.Apprehension: our initial encounter with an object.
2.Reproduction: primarily the product of memory.
and 3. Recognition: which hardly needs explained.
Now imagine approaching a tree. You, at first, encounter it at an intuitive, pre-linguistic, level. It’s just this thing that you come up against. (As is also pointed out, contrary to Aristotle, we don’t work from the qualities of the thing to the thing itself; we work from the thing itself to its qualities.) Then it moves to the process of reproduction in that it is an object you have encountered many times before in different forms –that is before you have even started to put it into words. I mean how would cavemen have recognized as a tree if that wasn’t the case? Then it moves into the process of recognizing it as a tree.
We can see a parallel in this that involves the process from sensibility, to imagination (that which connects input), to memory to thought.
The thing is that it seems as if the recognition of the “tree” is immediate. Still, if we reason through it, we recognize that it does involve a process.
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First of all, it is a pleasure jamming with you again, brother!
However, I must respectfully disagree with you in that, to the postmodernist, understanding is everything. It’s the “Truth” with a capital “T” that it is opposed to. As Layotard points out, it is the failure of Grand Narratives more than anything –including the failure of the Grand Narrative of Science.
What Sokal got pissed about was the way that postmodernism played with the knowledge that science offered when he felt that science should control all understanding of the world. He was little more than a tyrant that wanted to tell everyone what their reality was based on science.
And, Humean, you know this as well I do: the arrogance he displayed in doing so is the very foundation of the TLBs (troll-like behaviors) we encounter all the time on these boards.
And postmodernists do not just pull things out of their ass. If they did, how would it have gotten as important as it did? It has to seduce, which requires that it resonates with the experience of other individuals. Postmodernism is not just something that the cultural elite just forced on everyone else.
I mean it got important among the intellectually curious. It’s not like it was some con pulled on common sheep.
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Sorry guys, ran out my window.
Thanks d63, the inference was an obvious answer to my quiery too. As Beckett, the post structuraist said : as it is. (Inference being a play with an objective uncerainty).
The poststructuralists and postmodernists have nothing to apologize for.
The state philosophy of the analytic, neuro-maniacs, and those who suffer from Darwinitis
(those who claim to have found a short-cut to the “Truth” through objectivity, reason, and the scientific method…
Just know that it always feels like you’re jamming at the same level I am -if not a little above it.
It is just a pleasure jamming with you.
?:when did Beckett come out. He’s usually considered a modernist. But those categories are so vague.
I really need to read “Waiting for Godot” again.
I actually wrote a story based on it about a couple of bikers that met a couple of chicks on their part-time job, which they were doing to keep up their Harleys honestly, who invited them to a bar where they found themselves waiting.
Even squandering capital for the sake of an impoverished aesthetic is worth while at times.
As far as aesthetic is concerned it is as only real as an absolute, and by absolute I mean all inclusive, excluding none but it’s self. It is arrogance, and undefined in it’s own grime. Saintly in it’s own sin.
St. Genet I read anecdotally, broken metaphisically rather then topically. So in a sense he is modern. He is obvious, yet fragmented in essence, psychoanalysis couldn’t touch him, he has no topicality. Can this mean that topicality is a cover-up of inner fragmentation? Now I mean this in the positive, as in modernity having exhausted itself in futility. The phenomenological reduction leading to a meeting with reality, producing mostly bad faith, loosing its political ground, de structured the Das ein, and machine produced a topical simulacrum.
Yeah, the cool thing about Colebrook’s interpretation of Deleuze is that she wets your appetite rather than scare you away.
My favorite passage on the machinic is the beginning of The Anti-Oedipus: the part about the mouth machine on breast machine, etc., etc…
Actually, I’ve listened to the audiobook. I also like his points concerning game theory and how mixed strategies of cooperate and compete tend to fair best.
But having you point to the actual publication date, which I’m almost certain is accurate, kind of tweaks my mind since I don’t think I was even aware of Dawkins until the last several years. And philosophy has been a part of my life since the second half of the 80’s when I bought Durrant’s The Story of Philosophy . The idea, at the time, was to see how Aristotle’s categorical imperative would affect my music (I was mainly a musician at the time) –which just goes to show how much I knew about philosophy at the time.
To me, it’s almost like he didn’t really get going until the 2000’s. But I’m sure he was bouncing around academia back then before he trickled down into popular culture. The strange thing, to me, is why it took so long when the effect of Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape was almost immediate. The guy got a series on The Learning Channel. I mean it’s not like Dawkins was obscure or anything. It’s as if people in general were simply not ready to accept a genetic account of human behavior. At the same time, psycho-biology was getting a lot of props. There were articles about it in Time Magazine. However, in the early 90’s, it got almost fascistic in the way it described the drug or alcohol user as incapable of thinking beyond their biology –in other words, beyond their addiction. It was as if they were some kind of malfunctioning machine that required the “expert” to fix them.
Perhaps it was Dawkin’s point, at the end of the book, referring to that game theorist (I can’t remember his name) that managed to put, much as Nash did, Capitalism into question.
I think the issue of how language affects how you think came up somewhere between Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Postmodernism. In fact, if I am interpreting it right, it is what led to the PC movement that gave the Right-wingers ammo against guys like us –the hypocrisy and irony being that they eventually turned to such politically correct terms (or platitudes) such as “soak the rich”, “welfare queen”, “job creators”, “tax and spend”, and the term “socialism” as if we should hear psycho shrieks every time we hear it.
Still, there is some credibility to it since we do tend to think with language among other semiotic systems. And it has to be a reflection, in terms of brain plasticity, of how we’re interacting with the world –think Pinker: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. And note Deleuze’s concept of “the order word”, that which is drilled into children in order to control the way they think. That one I know for sure came up in A Thousand Plateaus .
Anyway, I’ve heard of Bateson. I’ll have to check him out. But I look forward to your points on “Mental Ecologies”. A large part of this process is developing the language we use to describe it.
Humean, I need to elaborate a little on our discourse but just used up my window. I hope you will stick around so we can go a little deeper into the issue with a little more grace and subtlety than I was capable of the other day. It’s far more complex than I was able to express at the time.
That's ironic, game theory being used to approbate Capitalism, where his utility came in as reference to national defense and global policy. I guess we are all prisoners of one sort or another.
D63 you said a few weeks ago you seemed to be slow in this undertaking, things are picking up, it seems. Hope to see more.
I think, Humean, that Post-Structuralism’s and Postmodernism’s most glaring weakness lies in its detractors rather than its practitioners in that it is a big mistake to take it too literally. For instance, those who admire Baudrillard generally accept the description of him, with affection, as a sci-fi writer who happens to be writing philosophy. I mean we’re not schizo-paranoid. We know perfectly well that this Simulacrum as a general metaphysical state or entity (a kind of beastly thing) does not exist -at least not in the sense that The Matrix makes it seem. One could easily accept Baudrillard without having to accept some kind of conspiracy theory.
Still, he does give you a perspective that can give you a lot of understanding that you would not otherwise get -for instance, the possibility that our economy no longer has any basis in reality, that is since 40% of it is based on finance which produces no tangible product, which may lie at the foundation of the experience of The Simulacrum. Compare that to Adam Smith’s vision which was based on shopkeepers, artisans, craftsmen, and family farms -and old country doctors. That was a time when the differential between what was produced and what it was exchanged for was far closer.
(In this sense, Baudrillard gives us a different perspective on Marx’s main point: that we cannot have a differential between real and exchange value without creating very real problems.)
And I think the same stands for Deleuze.
Sokal, to me, is more of a party pooper than anything. The guy clearly had no sense of the import of Play and how Play can lead, through the increase of energy, to real discoveries in more “serious” forms of intellectual pursuit.
It’s not going to happen through some fixed method. And it will take all kinds of people doing all kinds of different things. Shutting them down can only stop the exchanges of energy between us: the systems (the machines) interacting with other systems: other machines.
First of all, I apologize if my exposition style reveals a bit of rustiness as I have recently been a little too engaged in practical matters to practice this kind of thing as I should. But in the following, I want to relay some more intuitive gropings at an understanding of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and its, as Joe Hughes’ puts it: critique of representation.
First of all, we know, up front, that one of Deleuze’s primary emphases is on becoming rather than just being. And this, I think, is intimately tied in with his conception of Time and The Virtual: or that which is always a transition from the past to the future. The present, if such a thing can be said to exist, is merely the past at its most condensed or compressed -if you will. Now given the virtual nature of the present, and the lack of foundation we might derive from any object in space and time (that is since it can never stand still in Time), how can we expect to establish a stable representation of it as subjects –subjects, mind you, who are in a continual process of becoming?
Of course, what I need to get at (or anyone who can help me) is the underlying notion of repetition as compared to the more common one of generality –that is since the underlying repetition is what creates the more common notion of repetition as generality. I mean what is this underlying repetition that lies at the level of our first encounter with an object.
Perhaps it’s that we have to repeat the object or singularity in subjectivity before we can turn it into something recognizable.
Second and lastly, I would point out the process that an observation goes through that starts with the sensible (the senses), then moves through imagination, then memory, and ends up in thought. Once again, given the process (the way the sensible must go through transformations as it works its way to thought), we have to question the underlying foundation of any representation that thought can produce. I mean it seems a kind of Baudrillardian Simulacrum: a copy of a copy of a copy and so forth and so forth… The irony of it lies in the similarity between Deleuze’s process and Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of how the brain produces the experiences of mind. And Dennett, himself, in Consciousness Explained, describes the spatio-temporal smear that can result from his model. But even more ironic is how Dennett can make the claim to perfect representation (that is through the scientific method) when his own theory may well, if put in the perspective of Deleuze, undermine representation altogether.
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It’s as if I’m naturally drawn to concepts that draw me deeper into the nihilistic perspective –hence, my attraction to French concepts. What makes it dangerous is my equal attraction to the American approach to exposition. I want to give people a clear manual for the death instinct.
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“The lovers of clarity and certainty can trace their lineage back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides (fl. 5th C. BCE), who pointed out the principle that everything that can be truly known must be reliable and ongoing, and therefore ultimate reality must be permanent and unchanging. By contrast, Heraclitus (c.535 –c.475 BCE) made the point that nothing in our experience is unchanging, illustrating it with his famous claim that you can’t step into the same river twice.” -Carol Nicholson, Philosophy and the Two Sided Brain, Philosophy Now, Issue 92 .
It seems to me that Deleuze tends more towards Heraclitus in recognizing you can never cross the same river twice. This, of course, seems obvious. But we still have to figure out how he sees repetition in that constantly becoming river.
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On a personal note, one of things that my focus on Deleuze has brought me to realize is that after a while with philosophy, you find yourself at a point where it’s either too little (such as the pod-casts I listen to which only allow me confirm thoughts I’ve already arrived at) or too much (such as Deleuze who eludes me to the point of frustration).
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But then it’s stupid to want comfort at the same time you want to get beyond yourself.
Deleuze, according to Joe Hughes, points to a violence in the act of perception. Now I should first point out that the act of perception starts in a process that starts with the sensible (the initial encounter with a thing in the world), then goes through imagination to memory then moves on to thought where it begins to be transformed into a representation. Now the violence comes from the disruption of these 4 faculties as they deal with the initial encounter. However, the four faculties don’t work in harmony. They all have their own agendas. This can only further the intensity of the violence.
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Think Dennett’s multiple draft model of consciousness.
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As I read more, it becomes clearer to me the extent to which Deleuze wants to undermine representation and why he wants to do so. It’s why he wants to undermine language’s claim to “represent” reality and why he had arrived at the notion of “the order word” by A Thousand Plateaus.
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In this lies the coolest thing about French philosophy which is rooted in their tradition: their unconditional commitment to freedom. The French would push right to the core of existence to protect it. And they’re too smart to succumb to distractions like Capitalism. This is why republicans hate them.
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While America, being in its adolescence, thinks through its dick, the french have managed to get to their heads.
First of all, Hermes, just letting you know that I now have the Levi Bryant book on order. It should arrive around the end of next week. Hopefully, we’ll have some common ground to work with.
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I THINK I’m starting to scratch a little deeper into the surface of Difference and Repetition. But keep the import of the qualifier “think” in mind as you read through my musings on the issue.
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I would first point out the 3 Kantian syntheses that Deleuze is working from and revising:
Apprehension in the intuition. This is the initial and intuitive encounter with the object.
Reproduction in the imagination. This is the internal event (noesis) that corresponds to an external event (noema).
Recognition in the concept. This would seem to be the point at which we begin to articulate what the object is.
But before we go on, I would offer a refresher on Deleuze’s doctrine of the faculties, the process by which the initial encounter with the object works its way to the understanding of the object (or concept): what I like to call SIMT: Sensibility, Imagination, Memory, and Thought. Deleuze’s 3 syntheses consist of:
Imagination: now this is a compression of the sensible and the imagination, and the only one I’m starting to get something of a grasp of. It has to do with Deleuze’s concept of the virtual and how, when it comes to time, we can never truly be in the present: we’re always in a transitional phase between the past and the future. For example, one of the standout phrases of the book is “the past that was never present”, a phrase derived from Heidegger. The point, as I see it, is that even though it seems static, the object is always subject to the process of time which keeps it in a constant change of context. It is always becoming, even while standing still. Therefore, the imagination is required to make it seem static.
Memory: this, as I understand it, is the point at which consciousness seeks similar experiences of objects in order to assess. This is the point at which consciousness reproduces the object (or repeats) in order to turn it in to something it can work with.
And 3. Thought: this is the point at which consciousness begins to turn the initial contact into a concept. And this, as I understand it, is the bridge between the initial and pure encounter and the crime of representation.
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Because of this aversion to representation, it might be reasonable to argue that one could arrive at a similar place through the less opaque writings of Rorty.
Still, there is something about Deleuze that pushes deeper into the foundation (therefore, justification) of such a perspective. With Deleuze, we are clearly pushing to a very deep phenomenology –maybe even metaphysic.
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In the context of Deleuze’s embrace of the univocity of Being, we could reasonably argue that Difference has being no less than that of the stone that stubs your toe. Many would argue that it is merely an abstraction and relationship between things. Still, it is a thing that exists in the world of Being.