Delueze Study:

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
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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
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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 ?

Finally, found a book that, as Claire Colebrook did with Deleuze himself, gives me a meaningful steppingstone to Difference and Repetition: James William’s interpretation and guide. It being in e-book form, I turned to it when I found myself reading pages and pages of the Logic of Sense with no payback whatsoever. I just couldn’t take it anymore. But this one is working. And I think the main reason it is is because Williams is not afraid to offer a nominal understanding that, while not completely accurate, will give you a means, on your own terms, to work towards the subtleties and complexities of Deleuze’s concepts.

Consequently, I’ve come to conclusion that, as far as reading, I’m better off engaging in the dialogue of my own day and age (that which I can most easily relate to) and working my way back to the actual texts of the greats. Much as I did with music when I was a musician. Of course the purists and snobs will scoff. They’ll argue that you can never truly understand Deleuze until you read Deleuze. And that might work if I were, as relates to philosophy, out to be a scholar. But I’m not. Not even out to be a philosopher. I care more about writing about it and my experience of it. Beyond that, I prefer to be more of an audience to it. And I can’t be an audience if I’m not, in some minimal sense, entertained enough to want to go on.

And given Deleuze’s emphasis on encounters, the same kind we have with movies or music, I’m not sure he would be as opposed to my approach as the purists might be.
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One of the cool things I have gotten out of it is the realization that my initial instincts about the significance of difference and repetition were not as inaccurate as my lack of faith in myself would lead me to believe. As Williams’ book points out, it is about the relationship between difference and repetition that makes reality what it is for us: the underlying structure.

For instance: this post. Now, you know it is a post because you have seen posts a thousand times before. And yet you are able to recognize that, through a synthesis of all the posts you have seen before, even though it is different than any post you have seen before. Of course, this is a more obvious example.

But let’s say this was a rock. Of course, you would recognize it as a static object. But the thing, given your subjective experience of time, is that you are always experiencing it at different points in your subjective experience of time. In other words, it is always moving, even though it seems to be standing still.

And this is what gives us an illusion of an orderly world standing still even though it is always in a process of becoming. And it is this illusion that sucks us into the even more dangerous illusion of representation that allows us the delusion of believing that our minds can be like mirrors of reality, if we just tweak them just right.

“Cowardice, cruelty, baseness and stupidity are not simply corporeal capacities or traits of character or society; they are structures of thought as such”

Williams, James (2013-01-15). Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (p. 134). Edinburgh University Press. Kindle Edition: a quote from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

I have been particularly malicious, lately, with a very dear real world friend (Doug) and a respected message board friend (Vlad). But I’m not going to apologize to them for pretty much the same reasons I would consider any apology from them to be superfluous and unnecessary. It, as far as I’m concerned, was a language game that escalated into a little mutual roughhousing –and little more than that. And I can only hope that my respected peers will, despite our differences, consider this to be as close to an apology as this needs to get.

That said, I need to articulate on the position I’m coming from here. First of all, I tend to subscribe to a Deleuzian, Guattarian, and (to some extent) Zizekian agenda of seeking out all pockets of fascism (purposely with a small “f”) that tend to emerge everywhere –including, and most importantly, within ourselves. Secondly, and lastly, my process always works from the assumption that there is no form of human behavior (including those far worse than I have attributed to Doug and Vlad –neither one of them strike me as being worthy of being tagged as evil) that can’t be understood if we look deep enough into ourselves. If I found a fascistic tendency in either of them, it was only because the potential lies in us all.

In other words, in order to truly understand how oppressive social systems tend to emerge we have to look at tendencies that inhabit all of us. If we don’t, there can simply be no real basis for making assertions about “the other”. Without the basis of our common human nature, there would not be any proof for our assertions: they would simply be “the other” with a whole different foundation than the rest of us –kind of like alien life forms. And I find that assumption a little hard to buy in to.
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To cop off of and revise Russell, philosophy lies in that no-man’s land between science and poetry. Therefore, wouldn’t the main goal of philosophy seem to be to penetrate to our common humanity and take note of the pitfalls it can fall into?
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One of the main complaints among post –structuralists and –modernists concerning science is that it tends to work with isolated systems. The thing is that we all, when pursuing the life of the mind, tend to work in our own little mental labs. In other words, despite the engagement with reality that we find ourselves in, the armchair nature of what we do involves the isolated systems of our mental concepts. This is why we can be so malicious on boards when we would tend to act otherwise in real world encounters: the other, on the boards, is strictly a matter of their concepts and the language they use to express them as compared to the person as a whole that you tend to deal with in real world situations.
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However, given that important distinction between 2 ways of interacting, you have to wonder about the potential for fascism (once again, purposely with a small “f”) in digital interaction. You have to wonder if it couldn’t lead to a dangerous reductionism.

James Williams is good. Daniel Smith is even better. Check out his compendium of essays (called, I think, simply Essays on Deleuze).

hi d63. long time no hear-or see. I do not think you need to fear any consequential negative feedback from anyone who knows you even slightly. As far as fascism implicit in a disconnected venue is concerned, the checks are mostly built in as artifacts, mostly in the form of been there done that. it takes specially circumscribed personalities to become prone to these types of concerns, I remember Nixon on his way out publicly admitted of fears of a fascist emergence. periods of weakness tend to give rise to the signifier shift toward a more certain center, and for opportunists, this translates into advantages to be had. At any event to be sure, we must examine the order of our own house to see to it that we do not fall into such traps. There are ongoing forums going on on Deluze, have You taken a look at them ?

I’ll check it out, Onto. Thanks.

Yes, moments of turmoil do tend to compel people to seek order -even if it is a really bad one. It would be hard to deny the role that post WWI economic insecurity and hyper-inflation played in the emergence of NAZI Germany. Interestingly enough, in the midst of our recent economic uncertainty, I have actually found myself confronted with a few people (otherwise decent people) who are actually turning to the Jews as the source of our problems. It’s as if people are trying to deny the very real failures and injustices of Capitalism as America embraces it by diverting the issue to a matter of a specific type (or race) of rich people.

You’ll have to send me a link to those forums.

But then doesn’t simply pointing to “rich people” in general suggest a potential fascism? As Marx pointed out: even the Capitalists are subject to the forces at work in a free market approach to the economy. Or as Jonathon Wolfe, the writer of Why Read Marx Today, pointed out in an interview on Philosophy Talk: you simply cannot submit yourself to such forces without expecting results that are beyond your control.