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.
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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.