That fucking Frenchman, anyway.
Are you typing this as you are driving?
In a figurative sense, yes.
I tend to live and embrace D&G’s mandate to the nomad:
Always keep moving, even while standing still.
In Deleuze’s Negotiations, he makes a distinction between 2 ways of approaching a book. The first one involves approaching it like a box that holds a meaning in it, a meaning that one must merely open the box to get to. The second involves approaching it like a machine or system (I believe the 2 terms in this case are interchangeable (interacting with a universe of other machines interacting with and encompassing and folding into other machines: systems interacting with other systems either in isolation from each other as two distinct intensities or sub or supra systems. We see as much in the point made in The Anti-Oedipus:
That book does not mirror the world as much as form a rhizome with it.
And this is clearly the approach that Deleuze prefers for his writings and the reason his process gravitated towards free indirect discourse, or what Barthes referred to as writerly text: that which is created for the pure purpose of creating an event from which the reader can extract their own meaning –like a dream or a work of abstract art. And it is the primary argument against those who would dismiss postmodern thought as esoteric and elitist obscurantism.
And think about how it applies to what we do here: the d63 machine, through the language sub-machine, interacting with the Stuart and Obe machines under the supra-machine of our common ground equally interacting with the Ucci machine, and always under the watchful eye of the moderator machine which interacts with the protocol sub-machine that, in turn, interacts with the theoretical proper discourse sub-machine, all of it working under the supra-machine of the message board that, in turn, works under the supra-machine of the general discourse that, in turn, is sub-machine to the reality machine.
And given this Brownian universe of ontological and epistemological swirl, how seriously can we take our attempts at territorializing it into concepts that we can use like tools to fix it? It’s just too big and too far beyond us. Nor does it, in its indifference, do anything to justify the paranoid/fascist position of exerting and wasting our will to power on controlling it. If anything, it directs our will to power to what our mind machine is best equipped to do: interact. And interaction, in a sense, implies Play. It, of course, can imply control. But given our situation, that seems like a doomed project. So why not turn to Play? The history of atrocities has been that of those who didn’t know how, who failed to see themselves as one kind of machine interacting with a universe of other machines and who could not settle for the play of interacting with it but chose, rather, to secure it within the territorialization of the fascist machine that turned to paranoia when anything threatened it.
Unfortunately, desire is desire (the desiring machine) and goes where it goes: in far too many directions. Is it any wonder that the fascist/paranoid seeks to contain it?
But, at the same time, doesn’t this make it seem like the only real place that philosophy can truly happen is in the Sandbox?
Once again: I refuse to be taken seriously.
Pandora’s box?
Honestly, Heland, if the full measure of your intellectual process is heckling me, knock yourself out, brother.
The more I say it, the more pride I take in doing so:
I refuse to be taken seriously.
All I do, or care to, is let the words of a book (or any text in the postmodern sense) flow through me, see what sticks, and,if for nothing else, see what words flow out in return. And I could easily spend and justify the rest of my life doing so. I accept my place as a mind machine interacting (directly or indirectly) with all other machines that constitute my universe.
There are those, of course, who will penalize me for turning philosophy into some kind of joke. But, first of all, I refuse to think of myself as a philosopher. I haven’t time for the reading list. I’m more of a writer who happens to enjoy what philosophy offers. If anything, I have turned intellectual and creative curiosity into a joke. But isn’t that exactly what it all is (intellect, creativity, writing, and philosophy): a joke? Little more than a pastime with some perhaps serious consequences? A language game in terms of the general discourse machine? Perhaps the indignant should turn to truly serious (in other words: functional) pursuits such as science, engineering, business, or medicine –or even computers. There would be a far greater material reward in it. Even a dedicated janitor does better in that sense.
And who hasn’t laughed at a good joke?
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Forgive me, the temptation to parody Deleuze’s writing style is just too overwhelming.
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I think one of the main things that draws me to French thought is its tendency to look at philosophy more like an abstract form of literature. It’s as much about the writing as it is getting a point across. You tend to see this most when you compare it to American philosophy which focuses more on clear and logical exposition. And you have to wonder if this isn’t a result of a hierarchical tendency in American philosophy closely connected to its unquestioning embrace of Capitalism. As compared to the writerly approach of French philosophy, American philosophy tends towards the readerly approach of imposing meaning on the reader.
Still, I find myself as drawn to the American form of exposition as I do French concepts. I even miss it throughout my present study. It just seems more user friendly and less alienating in its tendency to offer up more you can use because it seems more relevant.
And it is this conflict of interest, and impulse (or “crisis” as Deleuze ascribes to Foucault), that may define my process and get me beyond the next creative hymen. Perhaps it is a matter of finding the right hybrid that satisfies the American propensity towards clarity of exposition while staying loyal to the French propensity towards depth, intensity, and lightness of touch –that is without dominating the discourse.
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John Lithgow, in an interview, once brought up a concept attached to ballet that translated as literally lifting one’s self into thin air. It was a French word that one can easily associate with pirouettes and has a subtle application to all other intellectual and creative endeavors.
I mean doesn’t the pirouette seem to be a matter of building up an energy and momentum that can take one, seemingly, beyond physical law? And can’t we see as much in witchcraft?
And given that, how can we see creativity as anything less than a form of witchcraft: that which takes natural elements and creates a whole that is more than the sum of its parts?
All you have to do is make reality a little more beautiful than it would be without you.
Eh what? 
“How does a human interpret itself and the world it perceives? Relative to its drives.
How many different drives does a person bear?
How compatible with one another are a person’s drives?
What are the relative strengths of a person’s drives?
How thoroughly have a person’s drives been synthesized with one another?”
I may or may not be staying on topic here. But I’ll give it a shot anyway:
First of all, we have to look at drives as expressions of the Will to Power which is not just attributed to human will, but all aspects of the universe. The law of thermodynamics, for instance, states that a concentration of energy in one area (Ex. heat units or BTUs), if unobstructed, will tend to flow to areas of lesser concentration until equilibrium is achieved. It is this very dynamic that makes electricity work since it is always working its way to ground. In that sense, we can pretty much think of all electronic components as little more than a very complex form of waterwheels.
And we see as much in human desire which is a molar effect of the molecular multiplicity of drives that underlie it. In this sense, we could see the self, as we experience it, as a non-linear feedback loop between the physical brain and its environment which is the result of drives which, being the attributes of the physical brain, are expressions of the Will to Power that, in turn, are subject to the law of thermodynamics. In other words, the relationship between our individual multiplicity of drives and our environment is what creates us as experiencing and conscious individuals.
Consequently, our relationship with our environment, via our drives (or individual expressions of the Will to Power) gets some shine from a distinction made by Gilles Deleuze in his book on Spinoza. First of all, we need to recognize that all encounters between our drives and the objects of their environment (which includes the objects of the individual’s mind) are ultimately power relationships that can come in one of two forms: the sadness of not having the power to affect or the joy of having that power. Now remember, the individual is always a multiplicity of drives interacting with the objects of their given environment. Hence: the complexity of our experiences as molar selves.
This kind of plays into Lacan’s point concerning Jouissance –which is a French term for sexual ecstasy or what Zizek refers to as the unbearable. According to Lacan, what we experience during sex is pleasure at a conscious level, while at a subconscious one, we experience discomfort. His argument is that if you cut a man off right at climax, he experiences extreme discomfort. We call it “blue-balls” in America. But it goes deeper than that. If you think about it, sex is a process of working your way to a thresh-hold that will take you out of a room that you’re really enjoying at the time. You’re pulling in 2 directions. And this experience may well be a result of the molecular multiplicity of drives in all these individual power relationships with the objects of their environments. I mean have you ever heard a song that gave you so much pleasure it made you want to fold into yourself? And wouldn’t this be the result of a complex interaction between the multiplicity of sad and joyful affects (the varied power relationships) that constitute the molar self?
To give you a full sense of how Jouissance works:
There was scene in one of the Hell-raiser series in which an individual was walking through Hell. In one chamber, there was a couple that were condemned to fucking with no hope of sexual release.
Now imagine the Hell it would be to do that for eternity.
In my recent study of Deleuze, I find myself, despite my opposition to hardcore materialism, comfortable with his notion of the hecceity which can be translated, at a nominal level, as an event which can be applied to the self or mind as well as most other phenomena in the universe. In this sense, the mind can be looked at as one kind of event (or system) interacting with all the other events (or systems) in the universe.
However, I have to qualify this in that I only court the materialism of it to the extent that it is a useful model in terms of Deleuze’s manifesto to approach philosophy as a creative engagement with the world rather than the science that analytics and American intellectuals would like to reduce it to.
Been reading Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers. And much to my surprise, I’m finding the obscurity of their collaborations are not so much the influence of Deleuze as they are Guattarri. I mean what I’m getting, having gotten halfway through the book, is that I’m basically facing what feels like a 400+ page prose poem that utilizes a sci-fi/technical/stream of consciousness/abstract language. I would have expected it to be the other way around, Guattari being the psychoanalyst. But then he was trained by Lacan. And all I have to do is pick a random page in the book to give you a sample of what I’m up against here:
“No ‘code treasury’. Codes aren’t hoarded, they aren’t organized. There is no “A”. What a mess. It’s very nice to try to straighten this all up, but it’s useless! The sign assigns itself singular chains, singular territories.”
At other points, he goes into something similar to my own poetic flights:
“The image of the body,
Oedipus,
shit,
binarized phonic flow,
total milk.”
And while I can understand that he is going for style that compliments the schizo-analysis they emphasize in the Anti-Oedipus, I have to wonder how this worked in the context of the correspondence between him and Deleuze the book came from. Does there come a point at which one can become so comfortable with such a language that they are perfectly able to communicate in it? Or is it simply a matter of play in which the parties involved just talk past each other while taking pleasure out of their ability to interact in an engagement that is ultimately meaningless? And this is an important question because I have seen people do as much on the boards.
This, of course, comes down to the free indirect discourse attributed to Deleuze which actually makes a little more sense with Guattari in that his stream of consciousness style feels a little more poetic. And what Deleuze encourages us to do, to treat philosophy like a collection of songs on an album, makes more sense with The Anti-Oedipus Papers in that one, at times, can take enough pleasure in the way things are being said to overlook the fact that they cannot understand a goddamn thing that is being imparted. Still, it reminds me of a line of a poem by Donald Finkle called “Hands”:
“Lay back and let the hands do their work on you.
There will come a time when poem and reader are equally beautiful.”
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Still, I’m getting burnt out on my fixation with Deleuze and his collaboration with Guattarri. Given the large volumes of books I’ve recently bought and read in order to extract what I can use in Deleuze, it’s all beginning to feel like a carrot on a stick. I mean having now bought and read 7 different books in my desire to approach the point of Difference and Repetition, I have to wonder if I haven’t reached a point where I have as much understanding as I need for the time being, and if I shouldn’t get back to my own day and age with writers who are working and speaking from the same context I am familiar with –such as Zizek or Rorty or a contemporary writer such as Galen Strawson.
It just feels like I’m reaching the point of diminishing returns.
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At the same time, I would note the avant garde nature of what Guattarri seems to be doing and how typical it would seem of the late 60’s/early 70’s in which it was written. In a sense, it reads like the schizophrenic monologue of someone in control of a highly technical language. But it courts the psychotic pitfall of the nihilistic perspective in that, having abandoned the criteria of the symbolic order, it recedes into its own little semiotic bubble with its own terms (parole) and underlying grammatical rules (Langue).
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Still, I wonder if I haven’t taken it as far as I need to for now and if I should move on to something else.
I think it’s more the creation and complication of concepts. At least that’s the sense he and Guattari want to give to philosophical production in What is Philosophy? Philosophy doesn’t study; it creates; it imagines, it assembles, fabricates, hallucinates, proliferates. I’m having fun here: one can’t say of any great philosopher that he didn’t imbue at least one concept with his name, and that’s the key to the Deleuzoguattarian conception of philosophy, a conception that is itself (of course) a creation. This is, of course, a simplification. Every creation is at the same time a complication, precisely because one does not create as if from nowhere: nihilo ex nihilo. To create is to take up what D&G call the material of a plane of consistency, to reassemble it and to inflect it anew, venturing a creative response to a problematic field. Descartes looks from his window onto the hats and coats of a social body. Inhabiting a certain realm of intelligibility, he ventures the cogito as a solution to the human problematic, the question: what is it that defines the human? His is a plane shot through with religiosity and human exceptionalism, a plane from which it makes perfect sense to claim for human thought an immaterial status, simultaneously setting it apart from the animal and suturing it to the divine. Descartes creates this concept, for different thinkers of the same conceptual plane may venture different responses to similar problems. Creation is creative. It’s complicated, because Descartes has to start from somewhere. He has to take up a problem, a constellation of concepts, and form within them his own dualism. Dualism complicates these other concepts (i.e., extension as the essence of the physical, the inertness of matter, the self-directed freedom of thought, and so on).
Philosophy isn’t reflection, precisely because the artist has no need of philosophy in order to reflect on her work, just as we have no need of the conceptual resources of the philosophical tradition in order to make sense of our pasts, ruminate on our choices, and so on. When, in response to those reflections and ruminations, we create something new (even if only by complicating what’s already given), we do philosophy. So, reflection might be something like a condition for the possibility of philosophy, but it isn’t philosophy itself. The same goes for analysis, for argumentation, and so on.
What do you think, d63?
But look at what is out there.
we dive:
into our lives…
I think we can, and, in fact, must, do this together. For, while it is true that every concept is signed, as it were, with the name of a single (and singular) thinker, that creation is at the same time, as I’ve said, a complication. Thinking is bricolage. In order to think, to create, we enter into dialogue with other thinkers, we assemble what we have available around us, inflecting it in new ways. This is an emphatically intersubjective affair; it is only solipsistic inasmuch as the “lone thinker” still engages with a history of thought, still dialogues with others, even if those others exist for him only as modalities of his own thought. It might be worth quoting, even if only for the fun of it, a favourite passage of mine from Jarmusch:
[size=85]Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.[/size]
I think this sums up nicely the fact that philosophy is as complicated as it is creative. To create, you have to complicate or “steal,” in Jarmusch’s vernacular. You take from other thinkers, you take from experience, from art, from sensation, from your own life, from the lives of others, and out of this bricolage of other tools, you build your own edifice, your own concept. This concept is singular, though it always refers back to the larger conceptual plane out of which it emerges, just as the most original film maker still refers back to a tradition from which he takes, even if only to ultimately depart from it.
We do this together, even if we only ever do it alone—if you know what I mean.
Sorry d63 been away but some jeneral observations here re: repetition diffefamce. Basically the ontolilogical turnaround from reductive paradigms occurred as a consequence of the political foundation with Sartre
.
The macro difference.was replaced end by micro differrance where participation became a mistoque as Levi Strauss pointed out
So community itself is presented on a given rather then reduced from arrived at representations.
Sorry d63 been away but some general observations here re: repetition differance. Basically the ontollogical turnaround from reductive paradigms occurred as a consequence of the loss of socio- political foundation with Sartre
.
The macro difference.was replaced by micro differrance where participation became a mistique as Levi Strauss pointed out
So community itself is presented on a given rather then reduced from arrived at representations.
Note: the above is in referance to "can this be arrived on a singular or communal context?’ , as presented above.
In any case, I feel DeLueze's intentiona was one
Correlating the two. My communication with You started on the level of finding nexus between the two, and I think You (and I and the OP are at a point, where, the two are corelevantly involved, yet to what degree? I guess it reamains to be seen.
The shift is subtle, almost unnoticable, but present nevertheless. Is it seeking ground, or becoming more and more an excercise into the area of 'what if'? , a hypothetical option, steered toward a possible outcome into unknown territory(ality) And if it is so, is it a matter of a shift toward the middle, a cry for more direction and authority, or, a further wait and see attitude, where the limits have to be set, almost indiscriminately by statistical awareness of those limits ?