Delueze Study:

“Beliefs or non-beliefs don’t exist in an vacuum. They exist within and are connected to an extensive web of beliefs-- our worldview or ‘story’. So the likelihood of a belief being true is not simply a matter of evidence but of its coherence with lots of other beliefs we have come to rely on in living our world. Now we are committed to some beliefs much more than others–what Rorty calls our ‘deep vocabulary’. Ideas which challenge our deeply-held notions of how things are will be be strongly resisted because they threaten the foundation or structure of our story/worldview as a whole.”

First of all, Steven, Amen, brother!!! and Hallelujah!! You kind of get at the essence of the pragmatic approach here.

That said, bricolage being my primary mode of operation these days, I’m going to try to connect this with a point I wanted to make about Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and hopefully cap it off by connecting it with your point, maybe even highlight the connection I see between Rorty’s pragmatism and the process of Deleuze. Anyway:

“Alice and Through the Looking-Glass involve a category of very special things: events, pure events. When I say “Alice becomes larger,” I mean that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa. Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time. “ –Gilles Deleuze: Logic of Sense

One of the cool things about philosophy (as I’m sure you well know (is that everything can be right in front of your nose without your actually having fully articulated or, more importantly, assimilated it to the point of becoming a part of your natural being. You’re just going along collecting a lot of different things from a lot of different sources until one moment of reading brings it all together into what can be said to be an epiphany. And sometimes that epiphany can involve actually realizing that a lot of what is being said is actually included in the title. I had that experience with Sartre’s Being and Nothing when I realized the book was basically about the interaction between Being and Nothingness as well as Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition which is based on the metaphysical/analytic recognition that even a pure repetition must consist of different instances of the same thing.

This is where I’m at with the above. I now realize (or am actually feeling it (that what Deleuze is talking about is the Logic of Sense (how we initially encounter the world: our reality (which he describes as the passive synthesis in Difference and Repetition. And in that passive synthesis, nothing is fixed. We cannot even find a fixed point in time which we can truthfully call the present: perhaps the “deep vocabulary” that Rorty refers to. It isn’t until we move to the active synthesis that we get the point of capture: the illusion of real presence.

There is every reason to believe that it is the Logic of Sense (the paradox (becoming (that underwrites how we understand the world. But in our desire to control (our desire to fix (our understanding of the world has become a kind of overcoding. Perhaps even those epistemological systems believed to underwrite anything me might say about the world comes out of the conflict between the passive and active syntheses.

I could ask the question, do you know the truth for real? If so, then I doubt you’re into overcoding. Rather, I bet you like to keep things completely simple. :-"

we all would like to keep things as simple as we would like, but getting cluttered is oft a by-product.

Yes: that which overflows our overcodings: our territorializations.

In light of the internet, one can better appreciate the prophetic nature of Deleuze and Guattarri’s rhizomatic model (one I think fuses into Layotard’s (described in The Postmodern Condition (model: the matrix of communicative displacement (especially as concerns the relationships we tend to form on the boards. It’s like an endless forward flight of relationships formed and soon moved beyond. We connect and, with a kind of ease, move beyond the connection. Connect and forget as Deleuze implores us to do. And after a while of this kind of training, it becomes (perhaps frighteningly so (even easier. And this is because no matter who moves on themselves or what board we get rejected by, there is always somewhere else to go (someone else to interact with (another step forward in our individual process. And I know this sounds cold. But it is this coldness (almost psychopathic in nature (and that in which we are trained on the boards (that allows us to carry on with the sense of self worth needed to carry on.

It’s certainly changed me. When I first started on the boards and anyone attacked me, I retreated into my paranoid/fascist center, re-gathered, and attacked. This has gotten me kicked off of or suspended from many boards. But as I was discovering then, there was always somewhere else to go. Getting kicked off or suspended was little more than a speed-bump. “What was that?” Still, there was the problem of how I reacted: the guilt of having lost my cool. And it was the training of the boards (that is as they developed (that brought me to understand that I have no commitment to anyone whatsoever, not to mention someone I consider to be an asshole, and that the only real solution to such an asshole was to simply ignore them thereby making clear to them the one reality of the boards that they seem to forget: that there is nothing they have to say that is so important to us that we would put up with the disrespect and abuse to get it. Such people are clearly suffering from a pretention based on the fancy one might develop getting too deeply into and becoming a true believer of the TV series House.

But the boards have taught me to let go. Now it has come to a point where I will let an individual go simply because they threaten to turn it into a pissing contest. I just don’t need it. And this is my process! Now my training has brought me to point where I will shut someone out of MY PROCESS well before the point that they have become intolerable, but rather at the point I recognize that it is not a matter of whether they are an asshole, of whether it is THEIR entire fault or mine, but that we simply cannot get along. And FaceBook accommodates me in that when I block this individual they become lacunae, a nothingness, at the same time I become lacunae to them: a part of our individual forward flights that are no longer part of our individual forward flights.

I see the same dynamic at work with those I actually like –only less hostile. In that case, people just move on. And that coldness that the boards have trained me in tells me to just let go, that there is no reason to stalk them down and force them to be your friend forever. Once again:

Connect and forget

:the very motto of the rhizomatic model and manifesto. I mainly bring this up because I noticed today how this sensibility has bled into my real world life. I (a man who has his Einstein’s wardrobes (do the same thing every day –that is while the world around me changes constantly. People (pretty much like they do on the boards (come and go. I have come to a point where I forget their names if they have been gone too long.

This is because their names become buried in the vast rhizomatic network I have built for myself: forgotten words in an always evolving language. I love, but always love based on what furthers my process. I am always with you while clearly being alone.

The following are quotes from Deleuze’s book on Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

“As Deleuze will say, we always start from the middle of things; thought has no beginning, just an outside to which it is connected.” –from Robert Hurley’s preface.

And I would say the same about any intro or preface to a book: it’s never the beginning; it is only the point at which the thinker began to record their thoughts in any possible kind of lasting way. As Deleuze, with Guatarri, pointed out in A Thousand Plateaus:

A book doesn’t reflect the world as much as form a rhizome with it.

And even here we see, in one of Deleuze’s early books, one of the primary themes (the rhizomatic approach (that provided a backbone to pretty much everything else Deleuze wrote after that. It tends to show up in all of Deleuze’s writings as well as writings about him. It could, in fact, be the main thing that anyone that only wanted to dabble in him needed to understand. But in order to truly understand it, one needs to understand the mechanistic model that Deleuze utilized (more for convenience than any final statement about the nature or existence of free will (as described by Hurley:

“Deleuze opens us to the idea (which I take as a contribution to ecological thought) the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us.”

The creative act (that which gives us the experience of free will (never being that far from the back of Deleuze’s mind, he encourages us to treat ourselves as nodal points in a vast rhizomatic network of discourse (much like the model provided in Layotard’s The Postmodern Condition: the earth as a ball drifting through space with individual ball bearings stuck to it, via gravity, clacking against each other in acts of displacement (so that we may participate in the communal creative act he considers himself to be a part of –that is as compared to the leader of it all with some kind of grand narrative.

And while those of a more neo-classicist sensibilty or who, embarrassed by the term “Postmodern” (that which is Passé (would either try to fix him in the post-structuralist category or argue that regardless of how most people take him, he is offering some kind of fixed meaning as his use of scientific and mathematical terms suggests , I would argue that to understand Deleuze is to understand the postmodern sensibility: which is always about participation as compared to control. This is why he works in the elusive style he does, to encourage us to read him in the same way we might a poem. Once again, Hurley:

“The fact is that Spinoza is difficult. And this book on Spinoza is difficult. But the situation is helped by the author’s word to the wise: one doesn’t have to follow every proposition, make every connection –the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway. What if one accepted the invitation –come as you are- and read with a different attitude, which might be more like the way one attends to poetry.”

And if you think about it, the movement of philosophy has been one of moving from the control of Plato’s classicism to the postmodern emphasis on participation laid out by Deleuze.

You know that point in a philosophical process with a given philosopher and a given text where you’re starting to see (or feel (these vague connections that you’re not very confident about articulating? I had such an experience tonight with my study point in Deleuze’s book on Spinoza. In the 4 pages I got through, I filled my notebook with all kinds of points. And as Deleuze encourages me to do, I’m going to have to do a little (maybe a lot of (chancing and write at the edge of what I know (think: Difference and Repetition (and go randomly through the quotes –that is to see what happens and hope I manage to make some kind of sense:

“Adam does not understand the rule of the relation of his body with the fruit, so he interprets God’s word as a prohibition.”

And this refers to an earlier point:

“But because Adam is ignorant of causes, he thinks that God morally forbids him whereas God only reveals the natural consequence of ingesting the fruit. Spinoza is categorical on this point: all the phenomena that we group under the heading of Evil, illness, and death, are of this type: bad encounters, poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition.”

Now I would note the connection with the joyful and sad effects described in Deleuze’s lecture on Spinoza (gold.ac.uk/media/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf) which is basically about power relationships. A joyful effect is one in which the individual is empowered while the sad effect is one in which the individual is disempowered. Easy enough to understand for anyone who has went through a shit phase. Such sad effects have even led to suicide.

But the more subtle point at hand is the distinction being made between Morality, which is social (even socially mandated (in nature and Ethics which is a study of the relationship between sad and joyful effects. In other words (and as I understand it, Spinoza’s book on Ethics makes the revolutionary step of moving beyond the socially mandated (morality (and into the study of how power relationships should best be arranged to maximize joyful effects (ethics: a kind of prelude to utilitarianism and even pragmatism if you think about it.

But even more interesting to me is how this anticipates Deleuze’s work with Guatarri and the notion of social or machinic production. Once again:

“Adam does not understand the rule of the relation of his body with the fruit, so he interprets God’s word as a prohibition.”

As has been often said of Deleuze’s earlier studies: one never knows where the philosopher he is studying ends and he begins. And here we see the larval beginnings of what he and Guatarri described in the Anti Oedipus: this sense of ourselves as nodal points in a vast system of exchange: the plane of immanence. This eventually led to the manifesto of conceptual play for the sake of the creation of concepts laid out in What is Philosophy. In this sense, he eventually comes to a prescription for the failure of Adam.

And don’t even get me started on the univocity of Being –at least not tonight.

Today’s meditative reading of Difference and Repetition (And I call it meditative because, at that point, I’m just reading the text from the beginning to end of a given section without worrying whether I’m getting it or not. I’m basically letting it flow through me just to see what happens. Compare this, for instance, to the study point I return to later and take my time to take notes: that which results in pretty much almost every post I make here.) brought back to me the moral element involved in repetition. One of the main oppositions (as I understand it (and that is among modern and postmodern thinkers (against representation is the overcoding of reality that it represents, often in the form of assuming something that can be perfectly repeated. We see this, for instance, in Kant’s Categorical Imperative. This, consequently, is the main motivation behind the post(modern gravitation towards the eternal elusiveness of difference: that which art specializes in as compared to science. And in that sense of it, we can see Difference and Repetition as Deleuze’s attempt to rescue Repetition (that is given its import to the creative process (from those who would turn it into a moral imperative.

That said (and I apologize for the clumsy segway (?: does anyone know how that word is actually spelled; I keep getting the finger wag from Word (allow me to connect this with the quote I offered yesterday:

“Finally, in this book it seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. For example, we suppose that thought possesses a good nature, and the thinker a good will (naturally to ‘want’ the true); we take as model the process of recognition –in other words, a common sense or employment of all the faculties on a supposed same object; we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we suppose that the true concerns solutions –in other words, propositions capable as serving as answers. This is the classic image of thought, and as long as the critique has not been carried to the heart of that image it is difficult to conceive of thought as encompassing those problems which point beyond the propositional mode; or as involving encounters which escape all recognition; or as confronting its true enemies, which are quite different from thought; or as attaining that which tears thought from its natural torpor and notorious bad will, and forces us to think. A new image of thought -or rather, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it: this is what I had already sought to discover in Proust. “–from Deleuze’s preface to the English version of Difference and Repetition

Only this time I want to focus on the first part:

“Finally, in this book it seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. For example, we suppose that thought possesses a good nature, and the thinker a good will (naturally to ‘want’ the true); we take as model the process of recognition –in other words, a common sense or employment of all the faculties on a supposed same object; we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we suppose that the true concerns solutions –in other words, propositions capable as serving as answers.”

Now here, we (by which I mean “I” but tend to work and write better with the philosophical convention of “we” –excuse the arrogance or, rather, cockiness of it (can see the reference to overcoding that evolved into Deleuze’s (as well as Guatarri’s (sense of overcoding involved in the Anti-Oedipus, mainly as concerns the Oedipal Complex as described by Freud and possibly elaborated on by Lacan. And this resistance and rejection of overcoding seems to be an important theme throughout the process of Deleuze as well as post(modern thought: think, for instance, of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Deleuze didn’t work in a vacuum.

This was the import of the Image of Thought as well as Common sense which, as Deleuze describes it, involves a stimulation of all the faculties (sensibility, imagination, memory, and thought) in such a way that the subject is deluded into believing they have achieved some kind of final epiphany. And this is what comes from taking “the model of recognition”, the process described in the doctrine of the faculties, as the model of thought: as that by which we come to true knowledge.

And, once again, we return to the oblique and poetic approach Deleuze chooses (over straight denotation (as a kind of strange attractor towards that which even he can’t fully describe and invites us (like two people on Acid (to describe with him. Joe Hughes, in his reader guide to Difference and Repetition, describes Deleuze’s free indirect discourse as a kind of exchange with whatever great writer he has participated in an “engagement” with. But I, with all humility, would argue that he is also (if not equally (interested in his “engagement” with his reader.

He, like Rorty, is more interested in stimulating discourse in ways that most people are not interested or willing to do –that is as compared to controlling it: of overcoding- and sees that as the only way out of the mess we have created for ourselves.

“Like a painter, I start with the broad swashes: 3 points that have become central to how I understand Difference and Repetition at this point thus far:

1. Joe Hughes’ point in his reader’s guide to the book: that it is primarily a critique of representation. It is here that I see a pragmatic overlap with Rorty, no matter what differences the two may have shared.

2. (And this is where I risk going off the grid: the analytic/metaphysical understanding and core I have extracted from the book and secondary text:
   a: even a pure repetition can only consist of different instances of the same thing

therefore b: the only thing that is ever repeated is difference.

And, finally, 3. The creative act is never that far from Deleuze’s mind.”

And in hindsight, I now realize there is yet a 4th point: that in terms of the analytic/metaphysical dyad of the two, Deleuze seeks to take the privilege given to repetition throughout our cultural history and give it to difference: a clearly postmodern move. And as I see it at this point, much of the book is a survey of the various strategies he has found to do exactly that.

But for today, I would like to focus on one he pursues in Chapter Three, “The Image of Thought”. In it, he seeks to undermine the notion of recognition (that which we do with the objects that occupy our space (as the basic model of thought. And it is a seductive image in that it seems to lie at the very foundation (especially in evolutionary terms (of the various things we can do with mind and brain. We assume, by studying this basic act, we can somehow find clues to the more complex activities of our minds such as philosophy. But if we really look at it, the act of recognition seems too automatic to account for the kinds of things that philosophy (along with the arts and sciences (try to do. Deleuze writes:

“On one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition exist and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is an apple, this the piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus. But who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognize, we are thinking?”

And later:

“However, the criticism that must be addressed to this image of of thought is precisely that it has based its principle upon extrapolation from certain facts, particularly insignificant facts such as Recognition, everyday banality in person; as though thought should not seek its models among stranger and more compromising adventures.”

This is why he makes the distinction between the passive synthesis of sensibility, memory, imagination, and thought and (with the overlap of thought)that of the active synthesis: where we creatively create concepts and engage in philosophy.

And we see the folly of this misguided image of thought even today in scientism and Rand’s objectivism which talks a lot about facts (as if they were simple acts of recognition (then steps into conjecture while acting as if they were simple facts. Once again, it’s like saying:

“1+1=2; therefore Capitalism is only valid economic system on the face of the earth.”

Or:

“We can demonstrate and correlate mental activities with brain activity; therefore, all mental activity is little more than brain activity.”

It’s as if we are to be so impressed with the incontestable premise that we should automatically accept the conjecture of the conclusion. In other words, the image of thought that conflates thought with recognition leads to a common doxa (socially programmed responses to socially programmed cues (that those engaged in power discourses can use to shut down the discourses of others. We need only look at what facts can actually tell us in order to understand how erroneous the above jumps and conclusions actually are:

1+1=2

If I hold up a pencil and let it go, it will fall to the ground

And even a relativistic hippy knows better than to step in front of moving bus

Enough said. So how do we, as Deleuze asks, get from recognition (and simple facts like water, at atmospheric pressure, boils at 212 degrees (to the kind of things that philosophy concerns itself with? How else do we approach what philosophy is actually interested in (that which distinguishes it from science: that which can only be sensed as compared to known (but through literary and metaphorical methods?

I would first show the post of my German jam-mate, Harald, in its original form, then offer my translation of it. I do this because I fear when doing so, I’m prone to writing myself into it. So it seems only fair to post the original so that others can “write their selves” into it and offer a translation that may be better than mine.

“Perhaps Spinoza’s derivation of “abstraction” in its genius form,“universals” and “transcendentals” are “produced” by a capacity surpassing flood of images or sound is helpful. “The old thought more in images” -where poetry and narratives steem from. But in Spinpza, ther “more geometrco” method solves the very very very severe “being true”, aqdequate ideas problem !!”

“Perhaps Spinoza’s notion of “abstraction”, in a provocative and intriguing way , suggests that “universals” and “transcendent properties” are “produced” by a flood of images or sound [experience [is helpful. For instance, our primitive ancestors [not having the technology of language [thought primarily in images, which is where our propensity towards poetry and narratives stem from. But according to Spinoza, the “more geometrical” method serves the more necessarily methodical systematic process of seeking out what can be adequately demonstrated.”

Now what I am mainly working from here is the connection I see with Keats point concerning poetry: that it is the spontaneous overflow of emotions that comes from experience. And I would also note that Keats also said that poetry is the pick axe with which we penetrate the frozen sea of knowledge. And this, to me at least, now seems Deleuzian in spirit in that it recognizes that any act we can engage in order to get beyond ourselves (art, science, and philosophy (is a matter of accumulating experience to the point of that spontaneous overflow: what we experience as revelation. This is why Deleuze, in his A to Z interview, talks about the import of engagement: that which we experience in concentrated forms of experience such as a poem, a movie, or a book on science, philosophy, fiction, social commentary, etc., etc., etc… And we can see the pragmatic overlap (yet again (between Deleuze and Rorty in that both seek to facilitate this process by accelerating discourse for the sake of the kind of momentum and inertia required to get beyond the discourse at any given point. We get beyond ourselves (difference (by repeating ourselves (repetition.

That said, I want to tie this into a couple of points made by Deleuze in the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition:

“Every philosophy must achieve its own manner of speaking about the arts and sciences, as though it established alliances with them.”

I bitch a lot about scientism. But this pretty much describes where I stand as concerns the role of philosophy in relation to science and literature: that which lies in that no-man’s land between it. What I am mainly reacting to is scientism’s smug dismissal of all other approaches to understanding not just out of some selfish desire to justify my own role in it, but out a desire to see us advance as a species and perhaps even save ourselves. This is because I believe such smug dismissals (as I have been encouraged to believe by both Deleuze and Rorty (only act as blockages to the flows of energy required to create the momentum needed to get beyond ourselves, to reach that “spontaneous overflow” –such smug dismissals being more about one’s role in some petty power struggle encouraged by producer/consumer Capitalism. And we can see this blockage described in Deleuze’s further point:

"Finally, in this book it seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. For example, we suppose that thought possesses a good nature, and the thinker a good will (naturally to ‘want’ the true); we take as a model the process of recognition -in other words, a common sense or employment of all the faculties on a supposed same object; we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we suppose that the true concerns solutions -in other words, propositions capable of serving as answers. "

And given the limited window I have here, I would like to focus on one part of this and get back to the rest tomorrow:

“….we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we suppose that the true concerns solutions -in other words, propositions capable of serving as answers.”

First of all, what we are looking at is the tyranny of functional. And, hopefully, I’ve committed myself to going deeper into this tomorrow.

But what is immediate to me here is a point made by Picasso: that taste is the enemy of art. Of course, he being an artist mainly concerned with images, he wasn’t one to define his terms. What he meant (as anyone who has engaged in the creative act knows (is that the creative act must always involve a sense of play. And play is hardly play under the scrutiny of a critic. And I think this is what Deleuze was getting at: that error (or the fear of it (is the enemy of thought.

I suppose one of the main appeals of Deleuze to me is that, when writing about him, I’m always writing at the edge of what I know: it’s always a dice throw that can take me places I’ve never been before. In this sense it’s always an act of experimentation or Play.
*
I would first add an inquiry made by xhightension appropriately titled Rhizome Meditation:

“Hey, I’ve been reading through your posts about Delueze. I have the book “Anti-Oedipus.”

How do you apply the the artistic flow, that you learn from Delueze or Derrida, and make it practical for daily life?

From what I remember from your posts, you said something along these lines: we believe in things like afterlives, higher powers and higher principles. The point from A to B is a given, so we should Play with our minds. Given that the results are an import of individual experiencing them, why would it matter who happened to be having the superior experience?

I don’t remember exactly where you said it or I would have quoted directly. “Finding the flow,” as you say, "because anything else is a block to the flow of energy.

?: isn’t that our main issues with analytics

Is there a mantra for Play, like some kind of meditation that joints one into the now? Or is it feeling or instinct that one coils into?”

I bring this into this rhizome because it shows a deep understanding of what I’m approaching with Deleuze as well as to illustrate its connection with today’s rhizome and as a segue to tomorrow’s more detailed and focused response to their points. As Deleuze encourages us: connect and forget. Anyway:

“He wants to show how real learning and teaching involve a search for signs and a creative experimentation with them that triggers learning as radical change in another or in oneself, as opposed to the concepts of learning by rote or acquiring knowledge of facts and procedures associated with correct moves on those facts. This explains the relation between critique and the search for conditions, followed by an experimental and creative work with signs. He criticizes learning through the repetition of the same, in order to clear the way for learning as the triggering of intensities. The only way we move towards a complete learning is by expressing the intensities locked up in a situation in a new way (How can I make the industrial revolution live for them?).” -Williams, James (2013-01-15). Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (p. 21). Edinburgh University Press. Kindle Edition.

Now I have spent a lot of time here working at the more superficial social/political level of Deleuze’s agenda. And I’m hoping, given William’s reasonably clear explanation of it early in the book, to drive deeper into the metaphysical/phenomenological aspects of it. (And I’m hoping my response to xhightension’s inquiry tomorrow will facilitate that.) But William’s quote allows me to tie up some loose ends before I do.

What we see in Deleuze’s point concerning learning is his general manifesto for how to live a life. We see in it a mandate to treat our intellectual and creative processes as experimentations that (via the dice roll (that can land us somewhere exciting at the risk of landing us somewhere less so. And I’m guessing that he would agree that the risk of landing us nowhere is minimal to the point of being irrelevant. Still, we have to consider William’s following point:

“An interesting paradox is worth pointing out at this point. It may be that forcing someone to repeat and learn by rote is the best way of setting down signs for a more intense learning.”

What Williams is pointing to here is the important role that repetitions can play in the intellectual and creative process: how we can embrace order for the sake of embracing chaos without succumbing to it. Think, for instance, of Einstein’s wardrobe. Deleuze, himself, describes 3 types of repetition: habit, memory, and creation. So isn’t it possible that the habits of Kant was more about how he managed the creative acts he did as compared to expressions of character limits to Kant’s philosophy that Deleuze and Nietzsche described them as?

I mean I, myself, am all over and excited by Deleuze’s manifesto. But that could prove less an endorsement and more of a vulnerability in that Deleuze’s critics could easily point to me and argue that Deleuze’s philosophy seems perfectly accommodated to my psychedelic/70’s addled mind as well as my middle aged propensity towards AADD.

Still (at least to me (it has value. At the same time, we have to recognize the value of repetition even if it is illusory. We have to recognize the value of the momentary stay against confusion (the aborescent as compared to the rhizomatic, if for nothing else, as a resting place. Once again: Deleuze’s agenda has the ability to excite, especially the creatively and intellectually curious. At the same time, you have to look at how unappealing it might be to people, today, who are feeling the pressures of constant change (becoming (under producer/consumer Capitalism. We have to ask how appealing Deleuze’s agenda could be to people who are already experiencing speed smear.

“Where Fichte had lectured: ‘Act like nobody!’, Stirner replicated: ‘Do what you can do alone on the world: Enjoy yourself!’” - My translation of: “Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit” by Peter Sloterdijk, 2014, S. 461.

“»The rhizome is an anti-genealogy. The rhizome passes through conversion, expansion, conquest, catch and stitch … The rhizome is about … ‘becoming of all kinds’.« (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Rhizome, p. 35.) The invisible underground mesh (network) against the visibly sprouting, striving upward tree …” My translation of: “Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit” by Peter Sloterdijk, 2014, S. 472.

Against any past and future - the anti-genealogy - that is one of the main aspects of the modernity, when fashion replaces customs (morals).

In Habermas vs. Adorno/Lyotard, which presentation of rhizomes offer a more acceptable scenario?

Is modernity, in it’s self indicative of such
interpretation? On what ground?

It might be a ground of intertransferenced ethical-moral, aesthetic and political consideration. The

three dimensional bubbles also resemble Bucky

Fullers’ geodesic domes.

The semantic unity at the price of more literality of meaning. Fuller’s domes were meant to house the increasing world populations’ underclass, by constructing affordable, and using cheaply manufactured materials.

Most of the buildings Richard Buckminster Fuller constructed were built because of his and other’s interests. So the increasing of the dense of the cities was merely his excuse.

In the third part of Peter Slotredijk’s “Spheres” (especially in chapter I) Fuller is often mentioned, yes, but his buildings are primarily representation buildings.

For the modern human there is only consumption, no past, no future, no children, no parents, thus no familiy, no genealogy but only consumption, enjoy-yourself-ism. So there is also no sacred thing for the modern human, because for the modern human there is only consumption, no custom (moral) but fashion that has replaced all customs (morals), no sacred things, unless they are consumable. The modern religion (ideology, consumistic manifesto) is consumption, enjoy-yourself-here-and-now-ism, anti-genealogy, the devil-may-care-attitude.

The main mistake of the modernity is to put the “social question” in the in the foreground and to forget to ask the genealogical question.

Thanks for the rhizomes, Arminus.

My pleasure, D 63.

Arminius-

The fact is, that Fuller grew up in abject poverty as a young man, and his primary starting point was exactly, the elimination of poverty, homelessness, in ref.to the construction of geodesic domes. Academic circles may have overlooked here.

If you have solved it, why not share it with us? Boy, d63 has solved all the mysteries of the universe, but his mind is no match for Deluze.

Seems like a bunch of meaning making anyway. Difference and repetition…can easily be explained with the aphorism of a splatter painting. A splatter painting is repetitive chaos, the mona lisa is ordered intelligent chaos. If deluze’s book doesn’t explain consciousness, it just seems like a social commentary, something a girl would write. I don’t see what the purpose of it is, id rather see a movie, they are closer to the truth than words.

Delueze’s claims about order and chaos, seems rather “deluezional” to me.