Delueze Study:

Clarification of the above:

It was not that Fuller grew up in an impoverished household, in fact his family was prosperous, affording him a Harvard education, but that the Great Depression caused him to suffer intolerable poverty. Further, it was not the geodific structures, which were to solve the problem of poverty related homelessness, but his concept of the Dymaxion, 4D type structures, which were applied in a limited way.

The geodesic dome was invented by a guy by the name of Victor Norquist, and built by Walter Bauersfeld. The concept originated with Zeiss Optical.

There are levels of congruency here, regardless of specific shapes. So You are right, to a large extent, but motive is clearly present. The domes were thought up when USA was already a booming, prosperous economy.

The fact that Fuller grew up in poverty is not so important when it comes to the other fact: Fuller’s buildings have nothing to do with poverty.

Ultimate,

This is why the Frankfurt School directly opposes this chaos. But such opposition is retroactive , categorically, bringing back the focus on the post Kantian dilemma, whether all of modern philosophy since then, may be suspect as unfounded. The genealogy of modern philosophy is missing in this sense,the implication goes.

Not all of them, the 4D buildings are a precursor, and
They show motive. The character of the man shows an inclusiveness, outside of which perimeters can not be constructed as linearly, as that implies, motives aside.

How is modern philosophy unfounded? It had a founder, therefore it is founded.

Now you are saying that Fuller’s “family was prosperous, affording him a Harvard education” - that contradicts what you formerly said: “Fuller grew up in an abject poverty”.

Fuller was born 1895 - so he was already an adult during the Great Depression you mentioned.

Metaphors overrides Sloterdijk’s bubbles, so the references to poverty, and growing up, need not to do so linearly. The Great Depression shocked him, and in a timeless sense, the poverty permitted him even more so, if he was not raised in poverty. People used to poverty can cope with it, those unexpectedly thrown into it, feel it much more dramatically. He was still very young at the time, trying to raise a young family. The metaphors encompasses both men in both dimensions.

Yes, some say it was Descartes, but I would really start with Kant as reactive to Hume.

But I understand Your doubt, and I raised the foundation in reference to the thought, that, modern philosophy was genealogically finished.

You raised the foundation in relation to the thought that modern philosophy was genealogically finished? I don’t understand what you are trying to tell me.

Please see my annoyances topic.

Ultimate,

They ref goes back to The notion which was raised in the page before this, which Deleuze raised, that modernity is anti-genealogical. He took this up from Nietzche’s Critique of genealogy of morals.
The modern philosophy ends before Nietzche, and most consider him an interloper between modern and postmodern philosophy, per Heidegger. Modern philosophy is supposedly un-founded by this lack of genealogical process, which has come about
. Postmodernism suffers for lack of this unflinching, meaning it once had foundation ,significance, but the signifiers are all chaotic, lost the central signifier to unify genealogical significance. Soldjernic also wrote a critique of it.

I understand Your frustration, Ultimate, but some of the word salad we are finding ourselves are not merely a splash of color here and there, of sights, but actually of sounds. This is the critique Habermas makes of the whole affair, categorically. The foundation is there, but can not be seen.

The idea behind the rhizome was, as I already said, to have a symbol for the anti-genealogy. No ancestors, no origin, no parents, no past, no descendants, no children, no future, no hierarchy - but a mesh (network) of consumers (also drug consumers, of course, because Deleuze and Guattari themselves were professing drug consumers). Deleuze and Guattari had the obsession that the original sin was ancestry, descent, origin, just genealogy. So they said consequently that their rhizome was an anti-genealogy.

That’s my sense of it -that is with a twist different than mine.

Satyr, that you?

Deleuze and Guattari took that up from Friedrich Nietszche’s books, for example Morgenröte (1881), [i]Zur Genealogie der Moral /i, but they probably took that also up from Max Stirner’s book Der Einzelne und sein Eigentum (1844), because (to me) Deleuze’s and Guattari’s anti-genealogical philosophy is more like Stirner’s than Nietzsche’s philosophy. By the way: Max Stirner (actually: Johann Kaspar Schmidt) published his book Der Einzelne und sein Eigentum when Nietzsche was born (1844).

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

There are strains of sickness unto death here. He must have read Kierkegaard, to be able to make the transition from mere vanity to illness due to ressentiment and cynicism.

I referenced it, and found numerous links. Perhaps the combo Stirner and Nietzche would leave at least
emotional entanglements such that, would mask the ideologically opaque state of affairs.

Reading this, Arminius, especially the last part:

“So they said consequently that their rhizome was an anti-genealogy.”

:I now realize that the genealogical was the arborescent approach that D & G opposed to the rhizomatic.

Yes. The invisible underground mesh (network) against the visibly sprouting, striving upward tree. The roots of trees are not networked like rootstocks (rhizomes) of mushrooms, and mushrooms do not have such a long stems like trees have, and do not have branches, twigs, leaves like trees have.

As I enter into this immersion into Buchanan’s reader guide to The Anti-Oedipus, I find myself immediately conflicted -not about Buchanan but D & G’s approach to social justice. And no doubt, this comes out of a conflict I find my own process in: that constant vacillation between the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical.

(And in my defense, I can’t help but feel that Buchanan works in a similar place since as he begins to dip us into the more abstract aspects of D & G’s theory (that is by starting with the concrete issues of the environment D & G were working in: mainly the May 68 rebellion in France (he actually refers to thinkers that are working in the more concrete and practical realm such as Naomi Klein.)

And no doubt this conflict will haunt this present immersion in the book.

I would start by saying that I am perfectly sympathetic with D & G’s agenda: to focus more on a revolution of sensibility than on reform: that is reform being a matter of obtaining the power to institute those policies that will facilitate it. And this recognition could not be more prescient than in America today. There is just so much about its embrace of Capitalism (and I, living in Nebraska, get a daily front seat to this slow motion train wreck (that can’t simply be legislated away. For instance, if one were to buy into about 80% of the TV ads we see today (as well as some of the content of the shows we are watching in between (one might come to believe that they were living in some kind of golden age thanks to producer/consumer Capitalism. And it is the true believers who live in the paranoid/fascist center of having to protect this golden age that others are a threat to. Hence, for instance, Trump’s popularity: the very expression of America’s fascist potential, it being a comparatively adolescent country that embraces the adolescent notion that unless we are number 1, the world will fall apart. We’re basically facing the same thing that every other Western industrialized nation has had to face: that of stepping down from above other countries and taking our place among them. And only a change in sensibility, that which the poetic approach (as compared to the scientific (is most qualified to do, can save us from it.

This is why, for instance, while I am philosophically aligned with Bernie Sanders, I think Hillary is the better/more practical nominee. I just don’t think America has the sensibility for Bernie. And let’s say Bernie did become president. All I see is an Orwellian staged event in which the Weimar Republic is repeated via corporate influence on government and the obstructionist tactics of a Republican legislature. And without a change in sensibility (as D & G advocate (too many Americans will be too willing to buy into the narrative of that staged event. Hence the import of poets and philosophy which leans towards the poetic side of the no man’s land between science and literature.

At the same time (from a practical/pragmatic perspective (we have to be careful of theoretical overkill –that which acts as antidote to theoretical laziness. For instance, much of what D & G are concerned with is the question Wilhelm Reich asked: what is it about people that seem to seek their own oppression? And theory can come up with some really impressive answers such as Sartre’s Bad Faith: the desire of being-for-itself to have the fullness of Being that being-in-itself has. But we have to ask if that is what people are really experiencing when they submit to power. And while we can agree that submission is about more than interest, we have to give some credibility to the answer offered by Malcolm X: the house slave whom the slave owner gave certain privileges so that anytime any of the slaves got uppity and wanted to do something about their situation, the house slave was right there telling them: oh no! you don’t want to do that; ain’t nothing you’re gonna find out there that is better than what you have here.

Now before I go further into this particular rhizome, from a traverse (Deleuze loved that word (reading of Mr. Buchanan’s book, I have to show a little love and appreciation for his willingness to establish connections (a kind of continuum if you will (between the sometimes immersive abstraction of Deleuze (w/ and w/out Guatarri (and the concrete and contemporary: sometimes to the point of pop culture. And I can’t help but see the influence of Zizek in it. Philosophy (or even theory (is useless to me unless I can apply it to the personal and anecdotal.

That said:

“Theory, Deleuze insists, “is exactly like a toolbox. It has nothing to do with the signifier…. A theory has to be used, it has to work. And not just for itself.”

Once again: I find myself drawn to French theory while being equally drawn to the Anglo-American form of exposition. And in the above quote, I see the connection within myself (and my process (the hybrid and fusion (between Deleuze and Rorty’s approach to American Pragmatism. I mean I get it: Deleuze basically dismisses Rorty’s bourgeoisie liberalism in What is Philosophy: dinner and conversation at the Rorty’s. And I’m not sure what Rorty had to say about Deleuze.

Still, I see that hybrid and fusion in my own process.

And what I would say, in Rorty’s defense, is that such an immersion in abstraction as that of Deleuze’s is basically a bourgeoisie luxury. One only need look at our philosophical history to see that. The abstract considerations have tended to be the domain of white Anglo-Saxon males who have a generational advantage. Women and minorities, up until now, have been busy with the more concrete political/social issue of achieving equality.

Now make no mistake about it: I love Deleuze; the guy has changed my life. And he, himself (in the A to Z interview (claimed that friendship is a matter of knowing the other’s madness: which is as much a matter of knowing the other’s faults. And, in that spirit, I would argue that there was a bit of hypocrisy and self contradiction in his dismissal of Rorty.