Delueze Study:

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The Doctrine of the Faculties:

At this point, you are encountering this post as an object in space. You haven’t assessed it. It’s just there.

This is the sensibility part.

But you have to figure out what it means. Therefore, you turn to the imagination to consider all the possibilities.

You then turn to the memory part, comparing it to every previous experience you may have had, in order to derive meaning from it. This is a superficial form of repetition.

Then it all comes together in thought.

Unfortunately, thought being a product of language (that which cannot represent( it must fail…

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Something came across today while fishing Joe Hughes’ book:

It might help, at a more superficial level, to recognize, in the process by which a sensible object becomes recognizable to consciousness, the distinction between the self which is passive and the "I’ which is active. The two correlate to the process which starts in the passive synthesis, which involves the passive self, then evolves through the process of the sensible, imagination, memory, then thought to the active synthesis of the active “I”.

Hughes interprets this as the development of the active “I” that results from the, as I see it, perceiving thing turning from the object in consideration to consciousness itself. And it is further described as being inherently narcissistic.

(And I have to wonder if there isn’t a connection between this and the inherent narcissism involved in Lacan’s mirror phase.(

It may well be that this end, in the process, is what leads to the crime of representation. This, in turn, is what could lead to later Deleuzian sins such as Territorialization and The Order Word.

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Another concept that came up was the distinction between “good sense” and “common sense”. Now these can be taken, for the sake of a superficiality that is more accessible to us, in a socio-political sense. “Good Sense”, as Hughes’ interprets it, can be taken as what Deleuze later calls “territorialization”. And this can be easily associated with everyday understanding of what “good sense” might mean. I mean it is right there: if something makes “good sense”, it does naturally territorialize in that it takes some aspect of of the flux of experience and reality and organizes it into something that is predictable and controllable.

“Common Sense”, if we think about it in terms we’re familiar with, does seem despotic in that despotic ideologies are always passed off as being common sense. Think: Fox News. It always feels to me like the dark side of Ockam’s Razor. Or think of the statement:

All I need is good old common horse-sense. And anyone that needs anything more is just plain stupid.

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 As far as the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage goes, it is an interpretation of Freud's I'd.  Hughes' description of this is akin to Deleuze's notion of teritorialization, as a sensual taking in of the other, I get this.  But why is it a sin? As long is it doesent descend to "common sense"?

If paranoiac knowledge is gained through the lacanian illusion of mirror images, how does that process defeat Descartes notion of the cogito?

These and many other aspects of deleuze are puzzling, can you go into it with more detail?

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Thoughts on Deleuze:

Once thought starts to emerge from the intuitive contact with the object, the active “I” emerges from the passive self. And it would seem reasonable to say that this emergence of the “I” would ultimately lead to a consideration of its own existence. The passive self sees a tree. It finds itself confronted with a flux of individual aspects of that tree, all of which must come in a very rabid, but serial, process until the imagination throws it all together. Then memory would step in and refer it to similar past experience. It wouldn’t be long before thought steps in and says it is a tree. At this point, the “I” begins to emerge and starts the the transition to an active encounter with the object. At this point, it becomes a unifying process, that which turns the chaotic flux of reality into a controllable order that starts with the mental statement:

This is a tree.

Then the active “I” flatters itself by making all kinds of I-like statements about the tree:

It reminds ME of an old woman.

Eventually, this leads to attempts by the active “I” to control the world of others through things like Order Words like “family values” or “job creators”. The emergence of the active “I” always holds the potential for a fascism rooted in its natural narcissism.

The failure to stop this process, as I see it now (that is with the information I have) comes from a failure to recognize one’s own mind and thoughts as just machines among a world of machines. This, I think, is the point of both Transcendental Empiricism and The Univocity of Being which allows our thoughts to have the same ontological status as the rock that stubs our toe.

At the same time, I would revise the earlier Deleuze (that is as I understand him) in the context of the Deleuze that probably wrote the opening lines of The Anti-Oedipus. I would argue it to be the mind as system, with the subsystems of its thoughts, interacting with the infinite realm of interacting systems that constitute reality.

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Sorry Obe! The above started out as response to your points then, in the back and forth between this and Facebook, got turned into something else.

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It’s ok. Wired got crossed

 Yes the above is clear as to the notion of the emergence of the I is concerned.

But the foundation of that emergence as the Laconian mirror stage, is strictly phenomenological, the point being, the absolute Descartian knowledge of the cogito has been displaced by an illusion. So knowledge becomes illusionary, paranoiac.


 How does your analysis in with this phenomenological foundation lead to the notion of the sinfullness of a common sense interpretation of Delauze's territoriality? Is the implication here, that common sense can not appreciate Deluzian territoriality beyond a certain boundary?
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Anyway, I’m starting out on Levi Bryant’s Difference and Giveness. We’ll just have to see what happens on this run-through.

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One of things that did strike me starts with a common syllogism:

All humans are mortal.
We are human.
Therefore, we are all mortal.

This, as Bryant points out, warrants three levels of consideration:

  1. the syntactic in that it depends on a certain order of justification.
  2. the semantic in that it depends on a relationship between the meaning of the words involved.
    And 3. the existential in that it eventually has to have some kind of relationship to reality.
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One of the things I’m starting to get from Bryant’s book is that Bryant is a little more prudish in his approach to Deleuze. At one point, he chastises more Dionysian approaches that tend to think of Deleuze as ending up in chaos and a world in which meaning cannot be clearly extracted thus leaving us to work from our creative instincts. As he puts it:

“The Dionysians take Deleuze to be the champion of never-ending becoming without being able to qualify anything in particular. As a result, their discourse becomes empty and monotonous in that it is unable to qualify anything singular or specific.”

Now, on one hand, one has to give this some merit in that Deleuze, while encouraging the free play of thought, puts a great deal of effort into establishing authentic justifications for doing so. Coleridge tells us:

“It’s alright to build castles in the sky. The point is to build foundations under them.”

And I would agree with Bryant that it is Deleuze’s exceptional efforts at establishing a metaphysical/epistemological foundation and justification for the free play of thought that warrants his claim to genius. And I would further agree that there does seem to be an ordering process at work in the series that moves from initial contact to representation. But then Bryant sees the association of “the crime of representation” and Deleuze as a “tired cliche”. And note the smug dismissal of “empty and monotonous” in the the above quotation. Bryant explicitly says at the beginning of the book that his goal was to completely separate the independent Deleuze and the Deleuze of Deleuze and Guattarri. But while separating the two is one thing, completely forgetting or denying that that particular Deleuze, the one that described a dynamic system with systems upon systems interacting within and with other systems, did exist is quite another.

Earlier in the book, Bryant seems to push a perspective in which Deleuze started out like some blank slate who started from an ontological/phenomenological system then worked towards the socio/political understandings that Deleuze is most popular for.Once again, the process that works from initial encounter to representation is an ordering process. But Bryant seems to act as if that is Deleuze’s endgame when Deleuze was, in fact, critical of that. Furthermore, he seems to entertain the analytic fantasy that anyone or any intellectual process can start from neutral ground then work from reasoned metaphysical and phenomenological understandings to a socio-political one. We always start from a socio-political understanding of the world and work our way back -our prejudices following. Yet, Bryant’s interpretation seems to insinuate that he, himself, has somehow managed to achieve the reverse -a miracle if you will- when, in fact, it’s starting to feel like Bryant has approached Deleuze with his own a priori agendas. This, in turn, can only turn away those who have resonated with Deleuze’s more Dionysian aspects.

It just feels as if Bryant wants to steal the sense of play in Deleuze and turn him into something more sterile, something more esoteric, something more analytic. It’s like he wants to take the fun out of Deleuze. And from what I know about the man, I’m not sure he would appreciate that.

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"One of things that did strike me starts with a common syllogism:

All humans are mortal.
We are human.
Therefore, we are all mortal.

This, as Bryant points out, warrants three levels of consideration:

  1. the syntactic in that it depends on a certain order of justification.
  2. the semantic in that it depends on a relationship between the meaning of the words involved.
    And 3. the existential in that it eventually has to have some kind of relationship to reality."

An interesting results of this, almost revelation-like, is seeing in it the mechanism by which paradoxes (most notably those of Zeno) can seem to work. If you look, for instance, at Zeno’s archer paradox, that the arrow can never reach its target because it must always reach an infinite regression of half-points, you recognize that it can only work by focusing on the syntactic and semantic approaches while completely neglecting the existential. As I have said for some time: while the the reasoning behind the archer’s paradox seems sound, I’m not about to go prancing around in between an archer and his target based on it.

But doesn’t this bring us to an issue more immediate to our situation on these boards? I mean for all this unconditional faith in reason that you tend to encounter in those who flash it around like a badge of authority, doesn’t the validity of the paradox undermine the supposed superiority of reason over everyday experience? I mean I’m not out to invalidate reason as a useful tool. But there is a difference between approaching it as a tool and entertaining the bad faith of acting as if it is the only tool that will lead us to a right understanding of our reality. And doesn’t this put the analytic project in its proper place? That as one kind of valid approach among many other valid ones?

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While I am miles away from anything more than a rough sketch, I have come across a few things in Bryant’s book that seem to be bring me a little closer to understanding. We would first start with a point concerning internal difference from Bryant’s book:

“For instance, we can imagine two identical twins that are alike in all respects down to their most intimate thoughts, which differ only in being located in different spaces at the same time. The difference between these two would be an external difference pertaining to the medium of space and time conceived as containers, not an internal difference defining the being of their being or what it means to be specifically ‘that’ being.”

Now this is something that defines this as yet another “rough sketch” in that while I cannot pinpoint the exact connection between this and what is to follow, I’m certain the two are connected.

Anyway, Bryant, later in the book, goes on to describe the nature of Time and what we experience as the Present:

The main thing to note is that the present is always in passing to a past that, in its self, cannot pass and can be described as a past, given the nature of the present that was never present. The important thing to note here is that this notion of time and of that present is what defines the nature of Being. In other words, Being is always in a process of passing into the past while moving forward, while becoming. Still, what sustains the illusion of the static object or being is one repetition bleeding into another while every repetition is always different than the previous occurrence. What we see here is the perpetual repetition of the new. Or, as Claire Colebrook puts it:

“The only real repetition is the repetition of difference.”

Of course, most of us would recognize this as the foundation of Deleuze’s emphasis on becoming over static being. But Bryant, being the raincloud and snob he reveals himself to be, breaks into what I see as intellectual arrogance:

“Initially, we may believe that Deleuze seeks a genetic account [the doctrine of the faculties –my addition] because he has some sort aesthetic preference for becoming over stasis, genesis over conditioning. Yet this is an entirely BANAL [emphasis mine] and UNCONVINCING [once again: mine] for adopting such a position. Such “reasons” [the scare quotes are his] only persuade those who are already convinced… which is to say those who are ‘not interested in philosophy’ [scare quotes mine].”

First of all: thank you Mr. Capote. We can be sure that it must be a big payoff for all the work he has done getting where he is to be able to act like he is the only one to have gotten the true interpretation of Deleuze (that is out of all the other well trained people struggling with him –most of which recognize Deleuze’s emphasis on becoming). I mean thanks for treating me like an idiot when unlike 99.999999999+ of other people in the world, I have committed a lot of effort to trying to understand Deleuze and philosophy.

What Bryant fails to understand here is that my engagement with philosophy is my process –no one else’s –not even Deleluze. Therefore, if I adopt a Deleuzian emphasis on becoming over being, it would only be because it makes perfect sense to me much as it has most other interpreters of Deleuze –regardless of who has the “right” interpretation.

Only a smug prick (who really doesn’t understand the spirit of intellectual inquiry –who sees it more in terms of a power relationship) would presume to know who and who is not “interested in philosophy”.

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But then, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised given that Bryant is from Texas. I mean he’s not a redneck or conservative. But he still comes off as a classicist which is kind of the unrecognized cousin of conservatism.

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Well guys, it appears I was getting it wrong: that process I was describing that went from the initial raw encounter with the object to representation, that which went from passive to active synthesis was not Deleuze’s main point, but rather the target of his critique. As he sees it, according to Bryant, the passive synthesis is not so passive in that even the the sensible stage is productive. And while I can’t, at this point, describe the basis of this, I think I can offer a possible connection:

Once again, we have to return to his notion of the mind as machine, or one machine interacting with an infinity (both directly and indirectly) of other machines. Or as he describes it beautifully at the beginning of The Anti-Oedipus: systems interacting with systems upon systems within systems -a kind of hyper-Brownian universe if you will.

And while I have to deal with Deleuze’s almost quasi-materialist position (me being a dedicated anti-materialist when it comes to issues of a self), I have to admire the possibility he presents in arguing that all thought and creativity can only be Being acting through our being and that it is through Being’s process of becoming that we emerge as selves.

I mean, despite the materialistic aspects of it, I’m kind of blown away by the implications it holds for the jam and what we do on the Board.

It supports what I have been pimping lately in making the creative thought process a matter of the communal as compared to pretentious notions of being some kind of lone genius waiting for the world to get them.

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One interesting point that emerged in the book concerning the nature of self was Bryant’s own: that the self naturally emerged from Being itself, which reads like the anthropic principal to me. As he put it:

“In what follows, I contend that this opposition [that between subject and object] that characterizes so much of our thought is not a simple accident of history, but is rather a sort of inevitable illusion produced from within being itself.”

Once again, I find myself taken aback by the materialist implications. Still, I have to admire it. And it’s not like he, anymore than Deleuze, just offhandedly dismisses the experience of self like a eliminative materialist would. Neither of them seem to be what Dennett would call “barefoot behaviorists”. They still allow for the dignity of human existence.

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One of the issues that comes up with Deleuze is The Dogmatic Image of thought, which involves 3 questionable presuppositions that I think have a lot of relevance to what we sometimes encounter on these boards:

  1. That thought has a natural affinity to the true.

  2. That it has any specific form of objectivity.

And 3. That it bases itself on a model of recognition.

The main thing to understand here is that these dogmas are the product of years of cultural conditioning (since the ancient Greece at the very least) and their embeddedness in our collective consciousness is what allows some people to throw them loosely about while acting like they are undeniable axioms. But allow me to go through them in a loose improvisational way in the hope of establishing the problem with them while hopefully describing the ways in which they manifest:

  1. Thought has a natural affinity to the true.

Really? First of all, if this were really the case, then no one would make a wrong assertion. But let’s go with the dogma and look at it as an issue of thought having a natural affinity towards the true while some miscreants will violate that natural affinity. Doesn’t this only offer us over to the power mongers who will define those who variate from “the true” or a “true” that THEY have determined the criteria for? And never mind the naturalistic fallacy of acting as if, simply because thought might have some natural affinity to the true, that we’re naturally obligated to it. I mean given that Plato was one of the first recorded practitioners of this dogma, is it any wonder he wanted to ban poets from his republic? And shouldn’t we take pause in noting that Plato’s republic is considered by many to be the framework for such authoritarian systems as Nazi Germany -among others?

  1. Thought has a specific form of the objective.

And what would that specific form be? Is it what is external to us? Like the rock that stubs our toe? But what about the pain the experience creates within us? And what about the the very real pain we FEEL at the loss of a loved one? And given that anything we can experience must register in the brain, the best we can talk about, as Zizek tells us, is the objectively subjective and the subjectively objective.

But a deeper problem emerges (one we’re all too familiar with on these boards) when we consider the relationship between philosophy and science –given that the scientific method is implied in the notion of the objective. As the tradition of philosophy has shown, the only role that has distinguished philosophy from that of science has been that of playing in the gaps that science has left because it has no quasi-objective means of exploring it. Think, for instance, of the meaning of life or the experience of self. Nor does it help to do as the analytics and simply discard an issue because it can’t be approached through a scientific method. That is just moving the target closer in order to hit the mark.

And 3. Thought bases itself on a model of recognition.

Recognition of what? The rock that stubs my toe? The pain I feel because of it? The resentment I feel towards the rock?

You and I agree to meet in a bar for the first time. While waiting in the bar, I think a lot about our first meeting. I imagine what you look like based on past experiences. I wonder what you will actually be like. The thing is, none of this kind of thought would be possible if it were simply a matter of recognition. It is not just a matter of an encounter with an object and realizing (or recognizing) what it is. If you think about it, if this were the case, there would be no way we could recognize the new. We would be in a reality in which we were always condemned to what we could already recognize. And that, in turn, would condemn us to nothingness.

Neither philosophers or poets would exist because they wouldn’t have the jump-start of something besides recognition.

The problem is that recognition requires a past recognition to recognize it. But that can only lead to a problem of infinite regress in that there would always have to be a previous recognition.

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Had a bit of an epiphany last night that may or may not have something to do with finally working my way to the end of Difference and Repetition (through osmosis):

Say we’re looking at a stone lying on the ground. Now that stone seems to have a stable existence for us. However, given the nature of Time, it is always a different stone since we are always observing it at a different point in time: the stone we saw just split seconds ago is not the same stone we are seeing in the always passing present in that it always exists in a different point in space and time. It is always in a state of becoming . Deleuze even goes to a deeper level in pointing out that this stone has gone through changes due to the wear and tear of time (wind, water, etc.). In other words, changes are always occurring to it in the infinite picture even if they don’t seem to be occurring in the more local and finite realm of our observation.

The thing is that since this stone can only exist as a past to our present point in the repetition of our observation of it, it could not actually exist since its past manifestation is always the result of a past present that was never really present. In this sense, it is as if the assurance that the stone will still exist, exactly as it is, at all future points in our observation of it is the foundation of empiricism. In other words, it is the future (the sense that the stone will remain the same), which we can never truly know, that gives the present the stability we experience reality as having.
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One of the points in the book that struck me was Deleuze pointing out that (non)-being was an epiphenomenon. And you have to give him credit here in that the only way we could even think about nothingness is through the inference of Being. Since things are, we have to assume that they could not be.
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The movie Inception would seem to be the ultimate rhizomatic movie given its focus on dreams which are rhizomatic by nature. But it’s not. It didn’t just skip from point to point. Rather it had the starting point of a given reality that worked, layer by layer, to another given point. It was more a genealogy. And in that sense, it was more arborescent.
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Deleuze might deny it, but, for me, he always leads to the nihilistic perspective: that which is tapped into the underlying nothingness of things, the fact that no matter where you are, or what you’re asserting, you’re never on as solid ground as you think you are.
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It was him that made me take the nomadic flight of realizing that it is silly to argue about politics since the game is already over: democracy is no longer democracy and the corporations won. Republican. Democrat. It really doesn’t matter anymore. All that is left is for us to draw back the curtain and see who is actually pulling the levers.

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Now all there is is to look the beast in the teeth and figure out what we’re going to do.

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Economists are certainly not the answer.

They assume that everyone will play fair.

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Philosophy is not even considered unless it plays lip-service to Capitalism.