Deleuze Studies:

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d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

A couple of things I’ve gained from my recent reading of Deleuze and Guattarri’s What is Philosophy:

First of all, the general point that (as I understand them and the manifesto that the book represents (it is mainly about a style of philosophizing as compared to any assertion about what the truth is or is not. It treats philosophy like an art which means that any meaning extracted from it must come from the discourse that goes on around it.

Secondly, it centers around three important concepts: the plane of immanence, concepts, and conceptual personas:

The plane of immanence which I only recently came to understand (being slow on the uptake (is best understood as being the diametrical opposite of the plane of transcendence, that is even though the plane of immanence easily absorbs the plane of transcendence in that any embrace of the transcendent is an imminent phenomena. If someone decides to believe in some transcendent God, that is a very real and imminent aspect of our existence: the univocity of being.

We create concepts in the face of the plane of immanence that we are always facing at the same time we are creating it. (It’s a feedback loop between the plane of immanence, concepts, and conceptual personae (

(Conceptual personae are what we present as the intellectually and creatively curious through the concepts we create in the face of the plane of immanence. D&G say:

“No list of the features of conceptual personae can be exhaustive since they are constantly arising and vary with planes of immanence.”

They then go on to point out the Madman as a conceptual personae, as well as the friend, the claimant, the rival, the boy, the lover, the fiancée, to which I would add the rock star. Once again, D&G:

“The conceptual persona is needed to create concepts on the plane, just as the plane itself needs to be laid out. But these two operations do not merge in the person, which itself appears as a distinct operator.”

Given what I have to work with, what else can I do but fumble in my attempt to explain it to you: what I am experiencing? I can only explain it to you through the conceptual persona of the rock star.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

One of the terms that tend to bother and elude readers of Deleuze is the Body Without Organs (BwO). And in a study point (pg. 88) of Logic of Sense I came across a section that led to a kind of epiphany that involves suddenly starting to feel what you already know in the sense of what Zizek referred to (in reference to Rumsfeld (as the unknown known. And it was important to the extent that it crystallized for me how Deleuze chose to be approached and why he, along with other French thinkers, chose to engage in free indirect discourse which I’ll explain below. Anyway:

“To these values a glorious body corresponds, being a new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation , respiration, evaporation, and fluid transmission (the superior body or body without organs of Antonin Artaud.) Undoubtedly, this characterization of the active procedure, in opposition to the procedure of passion, appears initially insufficient: fluids, in fact, do not seem less harmful than fragments.”

Being as focused on Deleuze, a philosopher, as we tend to be, it gets easy to forget that he actually copped the concept from Artaud (a writer who was clearly trying to convey a schizophrenic experience (and assimilated it to the point that he could write as poetically about it as he did above. Note, for instance, the last line:

“….fluids, in fact, do not seem less harmful than fragments.”

It’s as if Deleuze just threw the line in because it seemed pretty and fitted in with the rest of the quote. And the important thing to understand here is that the BwO was conceived by Artaud, a writer, as a literary concept to be felt as compared to a philosophical concept which is meant to be known or understood. And I’m not sure Deleuze ever departed from that original sense of it. He used it because it sounded cool and inspired a lot of evanescent and oblique (that which glances the corner of the eye (systems of meaning.

To engage in the futile effort of zeroing in on an elusive target: this is why we have to consider any attempt to “truly” explain the BwO as suspect. Since it started (and may well have remained in the hands of Deleuze (as a creative expression meant to suggest a schizophrenic state, there is no reason to believe that the BwO is something that was ever meant to be truly understood. Beyond that, any meaning extracted from it is pretty much like that of a dream or abstract art: it comes from the discourse that goes on around it.

Therefore, the question to be asked about the BwO is not so much what it actually means; but, rather, how it feels. You mainly have to ask how it feels to you and play those feelings against how it seems to feel to Deleuze as well as Artaud. And the important thing to take from this is that we are dealing with a philosophy that has engaged in the deconstruction of stealing the privilege of objective presence in philosophy and demarginalized the role of feel and sense. Hence, the book that was one of Deleuze’s first attempts to write his own philosophy: Logic of Sense.

And I’m quite sure if we dug deeper into Deleuze, we would also find points at which he sought to steal the privilege from feel and sense.

He is, after all, the suspect.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

“The clue for understanding BwO is to be found in the distinction that Deleuze makes between the vital (physical life) and the organic (biological life). The former may be fragmented and molecular, and the latter totalized and molar... BwO thus involves a schizo-critique of totality...” Frans Maññali

Out of all the responses I gotten to this particular post (or rhizome (this is the one I’m most sympathetic with. Now, first of all, I use the term “sympathetic” because to say that “it seems most accurate” would be to contradict the main point of what I said: that the meaning to be derived from it comes from the discourse that goes on around it. But this not to say that everyone is perfectly free to just offer whatever interpretation they happen to have and all will be considered equal. This assumption seemed to be at work in a lot of the other responses I got. But as Yonathon Listik wrote of Derrida in his article “Derrida’s Performance” in Philosophy Now (which I think can be applied to Deleuze as well:

“The purpose of his performance in writing is to call our attention to the spectacle. For this reason, he is serious about joking, and joking about being serious. We may say that Derrida’s argument is precisely that seriousness and foolery have no clear demarcation.”

In other words, we can assume Deleuze to be meaning something, even if he does it in a playful way. But, as with Derrida, you always have to start with Deleuze’s terminology (the BwO in this case (in terms of how it feels or the sense of it. Still, at some point or other, you will always have to play it against the reality of the text Deleuze actually wrote.

As concerns Frans’ point, I would first admit to a bias in that, whether he intended it or not, it actually complimented my point concerning the FEEL of the BwO. I’m thinking here of Ronald Bogue’s book, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, and the first section on Music which focuses on Deleuze’s preoccupation with a composer who attempted to utilize birdcalls as compared to the more classical preoccupation with “the music of the spheres”.

We get a sense here that when it comes to Deleuze and his focus on the biological that it is primarily about FEEL (that of biology as compared to the music of the spheres (and is confirmed by the various amorphous and biological imagery he tends to use in his writing such as his and Guattarri’s use of Dali images, in A thousand Plateaus, of folds of skin with hairs poking out of it like spikes or the description that starts The Anti-Oedipus:

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the Id. Everywhere it is machines –real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other ones, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating machine, a talking machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy machine: all the time, flows and interruptions.”

And let’s not forget the biological sense of the rhizome.

Once again: FEEL and the meaning we extract from it through discourse.

And if you think about it, Continental philosophy (especially of the French kind (is, more than anything, about adopting a new style of philosophizing. And I cannot help but feel that most attempts to present what Deleuze wrote, and the BwO, as having some kind of fixed and final meaning are basically guilty caveats to the analytic tradition: the desire to justify it by their standards when that really isn’t necessary. True, as Yonathon argues in behalf of Derrida, Deleuze wrote to mean. But I would also note a point made by Deleuze in the intro to Difference and Repetition:

“We write at the edge of what we know.”

He may well have been writing to mean. But it was also a struggle to put into words that which eluded words. The only thing he could have possibly hoped for was to somehow get across the FEEL of what he was experiencing: the biological one described by Frans. As Yonathon said of Derrida:

“Similarly, when Derrida describes the university in Mochlos (1980) and The University Without Conditions, he is not just performing in the sense of being on a stage, he is describing a university as if what he is saying were possible, and so performing an idea into being.”

:I think that we can equally say that Deluze performed his ideas into being in an oblique manner that, paying tribute to the elusive reality he was trying to describe, defied any hope of a final and authoritative interpretation.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

“Regarding the term: yes, he took it from Artaud. Regarding the concept, there are a lot of things resonating there: everything that was mentioned above.” -Juan

Yes, it was as if Deleuze adopted the term then, conceptually, spent the rest of his career trying to capture the rhizomatic matrix that expanded from it: the deferred networks of meaning that leave us no other choice than to find our own way to understanding. This is why everything mentioned above seems to be taking a different route to understanding it, some of which may be contrary to the other, but are legitimate despite any conflicts that might arise. We can apply Deleuze’s point in Logic of Sense here concerning the relationship between series, events, and individuation. We have all had our own series of singularities involving the text by and about Deleuze. We have, therefore, all experienced a given series of events (that which has created changes in us (which has, in turn, led to the individuation of our interpretation.

“Also, I find that there are two things to be avoided in reading the BwO: 1) The pure affirmation of drug use, schizophrenia, ecstatic experiences, etc., 2) The pure dismissal of all these extreme experiences. In fact, Deleuze said over and over again that they start with those experiences because they indicate the correct path to the BwO (pure decoded desire, zero intensity, etc.), even when those paths kill all the life (the intense intimacy with the real) of the BwO, of desire. That´s why they speak about "empty BwOs", "full BwOs", "cancerous BwOs", etc. The schizophrenic is in a direct, intense and intimate relation with the real, with the BwO, with the schizophrenic process, but succumbs to it (breakdown), drowns himself there. The drug addict relates to the same intense process of the real, but kills all the life it has in advance, by reterritorializing himself in a "marginal dependence" (the experimentation fails, no life comes from it, it becomes death drive, etc). “

Throughout a lot of Deleuze’s writings and those about him, you get the feeling that the creative act never left the back of his mind. Production was everything to him. At the same time, he also had the experience of being a heavy drinker. Now I can relate to this since I have always been lucky in that I am technically an alcoholic while also being a workaholic. Still love the booze. But getting things done is too important to me to have time to be a drunk. That may well be what affords me the luxury of still loving booze: it’s so intertwined with what I get done every day on this board. As I like to say:

“I’m expanding my mind while pickling my brain for prosperity.”

At the same time, it puts me at risk of reading myself into Deleuze. But what can I do? It’s the only Deleuze I have. And it gives me a little insight into how he can recognize the import of the experience of the schizophrenic or drug addict (does not dismiss them, while being adverse to the non-productivity of such behaviors. You go on to say:

“But, still, their question is: how can we approach that intense process, the BwO, and get an affirmation of life from it, avoiding the breakdown, the death drive, etc.? That is: how can we have a breakthrough instead of a breakdown? But they don´t dismiss those extreme experiences. On the contrary, it´s in those experiences, even if they are failures, where the BwO is revealed most clearly.”

In other words, how do we embrace chaos without succumbing to it? Perhaps the best answer to this question was given us via the myth of Odysseus who, out of an insatiable desire to hear the siren’s song, had himself tied to the mast of his ship and the ears of his crew members plugged. In this sense, the mast that Deleuze seemed to tie his self to was writing which is product of the Lacanian Symbolic order. He recognized the import of breaking from the common crowd (the deterritorialization of the nomadic flight (while recognizing the import of remaining anchored to it: reterritorialization.

“The thing is that in the failures the piece becomes the whole machine (an end on itself), when they should be only a piece of the machine, only a relay in a system of relays, extracting the life of each experimentation, connecting them in a livable assembly. That´s why they say, at the end of ATP: "Schizophrenics relate with multiplicities in a passive way, in a suffering way. Instead, sorcerers relate actively with them and have the pragmatics of multiplicities." That´s the whole point of the 10th plateaux of ATP, the plateaux of "becomings". Writers are, therefore, sorcerers (these are words of D and G) when they develop a writing pragmatics of multiplicities. Etc.”

In other words: the social production of social machines in relation to the abstract machine.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

To get a sense of sense:

“As Bergson said, one does not proceed from sounds to images and from images to sense; rather, one is established “from the outset” within sense. Sense is like the sphere in which I am already established in order to enact possible denotations, and even to think their conditions. Sense is always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak; I would not be able to begin without this presupposition. In other words, I never state the sense of what I am saying.” –Logic of Sense (pg. 28)

I would start by noting that this quote is from the first paradox in the Fifth Series of Sense: The paradox of regress, or of indefinite proliferation. My sense of it is that sense is important because it fills in the gaps or chasms left by the complex networks of meaning (the deferred of diffe̕rrance (that break out from any given statement. This is because it is always there like air (or a resonance (saturating every statement we might make and expanding outward. This is why we can never state the sense of what we say because the sense is always in the background feeding our statements.

Still, it plays a part in what is communicated to the other. It hovers around and within the propositional circle of Denotation, Manifestation, and Signification. And the inclusion of the factor of Manifestation (since it has as much to do with sense as the others (suggests the futility of the analytic dream of a value free statement. The sense of any analytic proposition will always be there haunting it -antagonizing even like a poltergeist. Perhaps the analytic smug dismissal of the poetic approach to philosophy is the result of the frustration the analytic feels –haunted by their ghosts as they are.

I would also suggest that sense being established “from the outset” may have something to do with the passive synthesis and doctrine of the faculties that Deleuze describes in Difference and Repetition: that, based on Kant, which works from sensibility to imagination, then on to memory which leads into the thought of the active synthesis. My understanding of it is that whereas Kant’s doctrine of the faculties only saw productivity in the thought process, Deleuze saw productivity in the earlier steps of imagination and memory: the possible domain of sense (or sensibility (which grounds any statement we might make. And this makes perfect sense since the creative act (that which is described in the earlier steps (never seems to be that far from Deleuze’s mind.

And if you think about it, reading this, you might realize that there is no way your mind (the short term memory being engaged (can assimilate every word being written here into long term memory. You have to, by the very nature of language, settle for the sense or sensibility of what I am saying and work from there. You have to let it work on the latent self in order to become part of the active self.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

“ When we speak of demonstration in the most general sense, we mean that the signification of the proposition is always found in the indirect process which corresponds to it, that is, in its relation to other propositions from which it is inferred, or conversely, whose conclusion it renders possible. Denotation, on the other hand, refers to a direct process.” –Logic of Sense (pg. 14)

Many would tend to think of denotation and signification as interchangeable. But here, Deleuze has laid out a clear demarcation. Once again, denotation is direct. In its purest, it would consist of standing with someone in front of cat on a mat, pointing, and saying: the cat is on the mat. However, in the case of this statement, the primary emphasis is on the nouns “cat” and “mat”. It marginalizes the action words “The” and “is on the”.

This is where signification takes over. And as the above quote suggests, it is the overseer of the deferred matrix of meaning: diffe̕rrance. And in order to get at the role that signification plays in this, we can set aside the deferred aspect of it and look at how difference plays its role in the paradigmatic meaning relationship between sentences. We could, for instance, use the same signification terms to say:

The dog is on the chair.

But if we were still standing in front of a cat on a mat, the statement would be false. The denotation would be off. Deleuze then goes on to say:

“ The logical value of signification or demonstration thus understood is no longer the truth, as is shown by the hypothetical mode of implications, but rather the condition of truth, the aggregate of conditions under which the proposition “would be” true. The conditioned or concluded proposition may be false, insofar as it actually denotes a nonexistent state of affairs or is not directly verified. Signification does not establish the truth without also establishing the possibility of error. For this reason, the condition of truth is not opposed to the false, but to the absurd: that which is without signification or that which may be neither true nor false.” –LOS, Ibid

True and false are shown to be the property of denotative statements. Once again, we cannot point to the cat on the mat and say “the dog is on the chair”. Still, such statements cannot work the way they do (true or false (without signification which shows itself to be indifferent to such qualifications as true or false. The logic of language undermines the trustworthiness of it. In other words, it can’t be trusted, only used.

And I hate to harp on this, but it goes yet again to the false dreams of the analytic/neo-classicist tradition. For them, there can be no distinction between denotation and signification. They think it is all the direct action of denotation while failing to see how signification is playing its little tricks within it.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

As I grow more familiar with Deleuze’s writing (the suspect (I crystallize the recognition that his main appeal for me (at a time when I still doubt my ability to tell you what he actually means (is his writing style. You get the feeling of someone who knows a lot about a lot of different things to such an extent that he can almost randomly play one thought or concept off of another and make it feel as if he is actually writing a coherent thesis, make it seem as if he is being completely serious while engaging in a form of intellectual play.

You can sometimes hear him chuckling in the background.

(In his photos, one sees the grin of an ever elusive suspect with the cockiness to know that he has what he needs to draw you down a path of no resolve and make you love him for it:

As Sokal has proven all too well, Deleuze is not a philosopher for philosophers who take themselves too seriously: the paradox of the serious joke. Deleuze embraced paradox, thought of it as the only authentic domain for philosophy.

“Paradox is opposed to doxa, in both aspects of doxa, namely good sense and common sense.” –LOS, pg. 75

You have to ask: why grovel for the Truth when one could more effectively shine? And how does philosophy distinguish itself from science if it does not embrace paradox: that which can never truly be answered? Of course the truth monger will ask: what use is such a thing? To which we can only respond “Why does it need a use? What use is use?”

Still, we have to nod to the use Camus made of it:

“Ultimately, all arguments for beauty are arguments for freedom.”

And I would argue the reverse to be true: that all arguments for freedom are, ultimately, arguments for beauty. Perhaps Deleuze, out of love of the freedom that allowed him to be who he was, built his writing style around this: a serious form of Play or the idea of connecting one thought to the other just to see what happens.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

“ a) They [Deleuze and Guattarri] did word by word... as I said, there isn't a single word in their texts that" has not a rigorous place in the system.. and when I say, a rigorous place, I really mean, a f#%$ing rigorous place... it is insane... it is a "conceptual cathedral" that Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Cassirer could only dream about... And Spinoza... but well.. Spinoza was not able to be a pluralist...
.. Do you know Gueroult? Vuillemin?... But also.. do you know anything about Alquie, Hyppolite...well.. believe me... you have a quite naif image of french academy lol (and clearly you don't grasp what a "philosophical system" is... but, let me tell you,,, it can be more systematic than physics...

(as I suggested in another comment.. I believe reading him in English is a catastrophe... the translators were not prepared to grasp the conceptual matrix and so.. it is not there...it is a catastrophe...” -Rui

“Okay, you get to win, Rui. Out of the around 20 books I have bought by and about Deluze (w/ and w/out Guattarri (you are the only one that can claim to have any real authority on Deleuze.I mean it makes sense: you’ve read him in French and I had always suspected that one of the main barriers between me and Deleuze is I’m not as comfortable with the French culture that he constantly refers to. So now what happens? Either everyone turns to your authority which won’t do them a lot of good since you speak in the same etherspeak that Deleuze does. I mean I can hardly understand a thing you are saying to me.” –me

First of all, this discourse started with my focus on Deleuze’s sense of Play and Rui’s complaint that I was working from a bad translation. Secondly, I still concede to Rui his right to claim some authority on the matter given that he apparently has read it in its original language and can assume that he has a little more knowledge about the French culture that Deleuze frequently refers to than I do. But as I began to think about it last night at work, it began to make less sense to me.

For one, it seems a little arrogant to more or less imply that all the translations of Deleuze (w/ and w/out Guattarri (and the anglo-American attempts at understanding him (those I have been working from (are somehow all lacking in validity, that is given what they have suggested to me is that Deleuze may have never meant himself to be fully understood. As one writer of secondary text pointed out (I believe it was Joe Hughes: thus far, all texts written on Deleuze have been too focused on trying to explain him to actually offer any real criticism. And we are talking about scholars here. Yet what Rui is suggesting here is that such a clear and rigorous understanding of a clear and rigorous system is available to those who read it in French. In other words, our best bet would be to leave Deleuze to the French since all attempts to understand him outside of French culture have basically been failures.

But the bigger problem for me has to do with Deleuze’s etherspeak or what has been referred to as free indirect discourse –which may be 2 different things but similar in spirit. Deleuze’s use of obscure language makes sense as framed by one writer: as the attempt to not control the readers process (that is through a direct impartation of knowledge (but guide it, through what Barthes referred to as the writerly process, in such a way that the reader arrives at an instinctive understanding that falls in the ballpark. And this seems to compliment Deleuze’s emphasis on the creative act and production.

However, if we concede to the notion of D & G working from a clear and rigorous system, all I, personally, can see is Deleuze’s use of etherspeak as something a little more authoritarian and likely to shut down the flows of energy that D&G talked about. In this case, etherspeak becomes little more than the self indulgence of a wannabe guru. Now Rui could take the route of Heidegger and argue that the reason this obscurity was needed was because such a system requires a new language in order to be understood -that is because it is so subtle and profound. But I don’t buy that. It seems to me that such a clear and rigorous system could be described by starting off with the simple and immediate (that is with the understanding that it is starting with the simplified version for the sake of process (and move on through the different degrees of complexity and subtlety. And that is clearly not what Deleuze (w/ and w/out Guattarri (did. Let me illustrate:

“Yes,D&G says that Philosophy is the creation of Concepts (variation), Science the creation of Functions (variables) and Art the Creation of Sensation (varieties). But, "as you know!", the proprieties of the Concept is to be endo-consistent/exo-consistent and self-referent (and not endo.referent and exo-referent, "extension"/"intension" as science and logic). Do you know what it means in Maths to be "consistent"? "non-contraditory"?” –Rui

Now focusing on one of the few things I did manage to decode here:

“But, "as you know!", the proprieties of the Concept is to be endo-consistent/exo-consistent and self-referent (and not endo -referent and exo-referent, "extension"/"intension" as science and logic). Do you know what it means in Maths to be "consistent"? "non-contradictory"?”

Now to blue-collarize (maybe even vulgarize (the point Rui is making here: the conceptual play and creation mentioned in What is Philosophy is a matter of conceptual systems in which the sub concepts are consistent and non-contradictory. Whether that system is consistent with external systems (ie Reality (is of secondary import. In that sense, it is a lot like math which is basically about playing with numbers to see what they can do. And it seems to me that even if the system were more complex and subtle than this, one could easily start from such a simple point and work their way up to it: work part by simple part to the whole.

But let’s say I were not only to concede to Rui his claim to authority, but set my ego aside and make him my guru. Then what would follow in terms of the etherspeak (similar to that of Deleuze’s (he tends to work in? Most likely, his ego would kick in and express itself through an endless powerplay of him making some obscure statement, me trying to decode it, and him saying:

“No!! You don’t quite understand.”

All of which would continue under the understanding that he had some kind of understanding of the rigorous and clear system (the reterritorialization ( that Deleuze and Guattarri presented that I could only gain access to through him –that is since he is the only one reading it in the original language. In other words, while he was shutting down (blocking (my flows of energy, he would be opening up a lot of them for himself.

And this is how he wants us to see Deleuze (w/ and w/out Guattarri.
d63
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

First, in response to Rui​, a quote from the translator’s (Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (introduction to What is Philosophy?:

“But despite its popular success, What is Philosophy? is not a primer or textbook. It more closely resembles a manifesto produced under the slogan “Philosophers of the world, create!”.”

That said, now seems as good a time as any to explain how I map Deleuze (as compared to my other 2 important influences: Rorty and Zizek (in our cultural terrain in terms of the symbolic order, the nihilistic perspective, and the sociopathic and psychotic responses to the nihilistic perspective in relation to the symbolic order.

First of all, the nihilistic perspective (contrary to the negative associations with nihilism (is the value neutral (neither negative or positive (perspective that is not so much a concept as the intuitive result of an ongoing deconstructive process. It is that point at which we accept the underlying nothingness of things and recognize that any argument we can make ultimately reduces to assumptions that ultimately float on thin air. And given that the experience of the nihilistic perspective comes from dealing with the presence of ungrounded propositions, we can never look it strait on. While it is always there (we are as we are when we could easily not be (it can never be looked at directly: it can only glance the corner of the eye. In fact, everything we do is basically a flight from the possibility of nothingness.

And it’s likely a good thing that we can only glance it from the corner of the eye. While it is a nice place to visit, only a sociopath or psychotic would want to live there. Therefore, we have the symbolic order as the most SEEMINGLY stable flight from the nihilistic perspective. The sociopathic and the psychotic responses are the flights that hang outside it to various degrees of distance and, in that capacity, mobilize or tighten the symbolic order which often involves assimilating aspects of the sociopathic or psychotic.

The sociopathic is that response to the nihilistic perspective which assumes that, since there is no real foundation to any ethical assertion, it is perfectly free to turn to the one criteria that has a kind of praxis about it: power. This leads to a circular reasoning:

“I have power because I am right. Therefore, I am right because I have power.”

The extreme of this, of course, is the sociopathic killer. But we can see expressions of it that are closer to the symbolic order in cut-throat Wall Street types (as was suggested in the movie American Psycho (as well as players as anyone knows who has had their heart broke by one. And in terms of philosophy, I can’t think of anyone who expresses this response better than Ayn Rand who has been assimilated into the symbolic order to a dangerous degree.

The psychotic response is one in which, having no truly grounded criteria to judge one’s actions, the individual recedes into their own semiotic bubble with its own rules of linguistic communication and terminology. The most outer extreme of this, of course, is the psychotic walking down the street engaging in a discourse that no one else is invited to. But we can see it come closer to the symbolic order in the environment of drug addicts and extreme alcoholics: which has shown itself to be socially productive in such artists as Bukowski or Van Gogh.

And we can also consider this the domain of the avant garde and experimental: the very domain of Deleuze (w/ &w/out Guattari. And a lot of the terminology, images, and references Deleuze uses confirms this. One could say as much about Derrida. And we can compare him to Rorty who seems to stick a lot closer to the symbolic order while leaning to the psychotic side in his rejection of the symbolic order of the philosophy departments at the time. We can say as much about Zizek as well in that he sticks close to the symbolic order while violating the academic expression of the symbolic order through his references to pop culture and his rejection of producer/consumer Capitalism.
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

Yet another quote from What is Philosophy? that puts in question the assertion that D&G are actually presenting a rigid system that we're missing out on due to bad translations:


"Nor does philosophy find any refuge in communication, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create "consensus" and not concepts. The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept."


Now I hate to harp on this, but this hardly reads like an approach to philosophy that can result in a rigid philosophical system. Nor can we attribute it to a bad translation. This isn’t exactly one of the most subtle sentences in the book. In fact, if this were a misleading, it wouldn’t be as much an issue of a bad translation as someone completely rewriting the book. And I seriously doubt such a transgression would pass the scrutiny of the general academic community and those who have translated other books of Deleuze –w/ & w/out Guattari.
*
That out of the way, in this recent reading of What is Philosophy?, I’m starting to experience something like a Vulcan mind meld with Deleuze & Guattarri. And I humbly apologize for the pretense this suggests. But as I read how they describe the relationship between Science, Philosophy, and Art, I can’t help but think of my revision of Russell’s description of philosophy: that which lies in that no-man’s land between science and theology. But being of a different time and sensibility (a more secular age (than Russell, I have shamelessly revised it to that which lies in that no-man’s land between science and art. And I can’t help but feel (perhaps because I am reading myself into it (that this is exactly where D&G situate it.

And in my defense, Russell is mentioned several times in the book. So there is every possibility that D&G (or one of the two (were influenced by the very quote I’m working from and revised it as I did.
*
Once again:

"Nor does philosophy find any refuge in communication, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create "consensus" and not concepts. The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept."

I’m not sure I totally agree with this. Once again: maybe I’m reading myself into it or even forcing my desire to reach a point where I can actually be critical of Deleuze –w/ and w/out Guattari. But I have to turn to my Rorty influenced instincts and recognize discourse (much as we do on the boards (as the equivalent of a jam: an opportunity to bounce off of each other (concept to concept (in order (through the communal energy of momentum and inertia (to create new concepts.

But the thing to understand is that we have reached an age that Deleuze and Guattari never did, one in which, as Baudrillard describes, there is nothing new left to be done, one in which we can only play with the fragments of the past, a plateau that can only be overcome through the same collective energy utilized by computer programmers and which heralds the end of the lone genius, and, finally, one in which the only way we can hope to create truly new concepts is through the group effort of discourse: the jam.
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

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"Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word "concept" itself and said: "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers." Information and creativity, concept and enterprise: there is already an abundant bibliography. Marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the concept and the event. But here the concept has become the set of product displays (historical, scientific, artistic, sexual, pragmatic), and the event has become the exhibition that sets up various displays and the “exchange of ideas” it is suppose to promote. The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold.” What is Philosophy, D & G, pg. 10

Here I get some intersubjective juice for my own concerns concerning the tyranny of the functional that is infiltrating the academic system through the tyranny of the functional and undermining our initial idealism (that actually described by Rorty in Philosophy and Social Hope (about secondary education mainly promoting “enlightened thinking” and better citizens. And, consequently, it seems to me that no task could be more important to philosophy than the rejection of the tyranny of the functional as compared to the analytic approach of submission. And let’s not forget Stephen Hawkins’s assertion that science will make philosophy obsolete.

And what makes it even more imperative (or scary (is the recognition of how easily this coup by marketing could win. As Layotard points out in the appendix of The Postmodern Condition: we have to be wary of the terroristic potential of the accessible and easily communicated. For instance, I could walk into a party with a de Koonig and show people and say: hey! look what I have! I have a deKoonig. And a lot of those people would look at me anxiously and say: yeah, D; that’s nice. But let someone pull up with an illustrated Harley or well made tattoos and I’m going to be standing there alone with my de Koonig.

(And this, BTW, has been one of my main problems with the hipster –or not so much the hipster as the packaged hipster: it has become the latest and greatest concept offered to us by the marketers, that which offers us the promise of unrestrained consumption of a system of signs (signs that one must purchase –usually a certain kind of beer (in order to be part of an in-crowd: that is while pretending to be “down to earth”. And their advocates have told me directly that they’re basically anti-ideological which pretty much amounts to conformity at a time when we’re facing the dismantling of our democracies through global Capitalism, the depletion of our natural resources, or our extinction through man-made climate change. Hipsters have become the new yuppies.)

What we’re looking at here are a lot of socially programmed responses to socially programmed clues, all of which come down to the tyranny of the functional or the desire to be part of an in-crowd: the concept as the accessible and easily communicated. What more important task could philosophy take on than to steal the concept back from marketers? To be more interesting and appealing?
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

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“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.
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

Post by d63 »

First of all, in terms of Deleuze’s triad of the proposition (denotation, manifestation, and signification (and his argument that philosophy’s primary embrace is paradox, couldn’t we argue that paradox is basically signification without denotation or manifestation? I’m mainly working from another understanding brought to my attention through secondary text (I believe it was Joe Hughes’ reader’s guide to Difference and Repetition (that we have 3 ways of arriving at a proposition: the syntactic, the semantic, and the existential. In those terms, it seems to me, the paradox works by failing to make the leap from the syntactic and the semantic to the existential. For instance: Zeno’s arrow, from a syntactic and semantic perspective, seems perfectly rational. But who among us would make the existential leap of prancing between an archer and his target?

[And if you think about it, the strength of the pragmatic approach lies in that failure of paradoxes: while it works at a syntactic and semantic level, it fails to work at the existential. Anyway:[

And in some loose way that I’m hoping you can articulate for yourself (hopefully better than I am here: I can’t help but FEEL a connection between the above and Deleuze’s sense of sense described on page 25 (paragraph two (of Mark Lester’s translation of Logic of Sense:

“The duality in the proposition is not between two sorts of names, names of stasis and names of becoming, names of substances or qualities and names of events [that which creates change; rather, it is between two dimensions of the proposition, that is [I really need to adopt that “that is” move], between denotation and expression, or between the denotation of things and the expression of sense. It is like the two sides of a mirror, only what is on one side has no resemblance to what is on the other [think here of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (“…all the rest was as different as possible”). To pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression –without pausing at the intermediaries, namely, at manifestation and signification. It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes, but only that to which it expresses, that is, to sense.”

In other words, as Deleuze has expressed elsewhere, even nonsensical expressions (such as those of Carroll concerning Wonderland (have a sense no less valid than the very sense of our virgin encounter (the doctrine of the faculties described in Difference and Repetition (with objects in our given spaces. And we have to put in mind here that given that we go from the raw encounter (the passive synthesis (to the more cooked (the active synthesis (we have to ask how we can assume, as Kant did, that the territorializations of our minds must be given privilege over our sensations (or the sensible as Kant described it.

But I seriously doubt Deleuze would let us off with such a territorialization and hierarchy. I think (perhaps even believe (he would d.construct further by pointing out that since the constructs of our minds are the products of sense (that raw encounter with reality (they are as about a raw encounter with reality as our initial raw encounter w/ reality….
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

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“There is a surprising and yet important role for a new sense of risk in Deleuze's philosophy. In Difference and Repetition it appears through the concept of the ‘dice throw’. Any act is entangled with an event constituted by multiple precursors and influences which determine the act and to which it is passive. Nonetheless, the act retains freedom with respect to its destiny. This freedom is translated into action as a risky and experimental dice throw rolled within an event.” -Williams, James (2013-01-15). Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide . Edinburgh University Press. Kindle Edition.

Every move in a process (every rhizome (is an experiment: a throw of the dice –at least in my case. Every book I choose to read (or section of that book (every weekly commitment (or every around 500 word post I set out to write (including this one (every system I devise for myself to get things done (even these one way parentheses (is a choice (or maybe not (I make to just see what happens.

(And it is important to note (or remind (here that the French word for experience is the same for experiment: the poetry that gets lost in translation.

(And in that process, I forget who I am to become something else.(

It has brought me to points where I’m not sure I’m walking on solid ground. Still, Deleuze assures me that that’s okay: the best place to be in fact:

“Deleuze constructs an association of transforming events, novelty and free-play as the primary form of existence. All is revolutionary becoming.”

As a middle aged man with, hopefully, 20 to 25 productive years left (and a large intellectual and creative wish list (and death always breathing down my neck, the freedom to vacillate (to take a taste of everything (the Kierkagaardian aestheist (can only appeal. Still, one in my position sometimes longs for the feel of solid ground beneath their feet: perhaps as a stay against death. On the other hand, it gets things done (the kind of things I want to do (and in that sense, Deleuze seems therapeutic in that he gives me a way to live and reason to be.

And this is not say that I or Deleuze could not be wrong. A refusal to assert anything does not constitute the only right position one could hold. It is only to assert that even our wrong moves may lead to something right:

“This does not mean we are freed from error and absolved of any responsibility for mistaken paths, but rather that error and decisions for the worse are also systemic rather than individual.”

Sometimes even a misinterpretation can prove productive. And productivity is all that matters, right? Take, for instance, the philosophy 101 misinterpretation of Hegel’s synthesis based on the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This wasn’t exactly in Hegel’s text. Still, someone extracted it from Hegel …. or it would better to say that some individual came up with the triad while reading Hegel and, thereby, furthered their own process. And how many Philosophy 101 students have furthered their process by accepting this simple model until they moved beyond it by recognizing that a synthesis is any process by which we come to know the world, that their process is a matter of reaching more sophisticated models of how we do so?

Once again: even error is productive. We should not be so afraid of it.
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Re: Deleuze Studies:

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Listening to David Foster Wallace’s audiobook, Supposedly Fun Things I’ll Never Do Again, and given my present draw to him, I’m starting to better understand my draw to Deleuze: that Goddamn Frenchman. Both, for me, establish a bar I am comfortable with as a writer in their commitment to striving as far beyond themselves as possible, of seeking excellence while maintaining a sense of humility in the face of having seemingly been chosen, disposed, and equipped to do such a thing, that promethean sensibility that seeks not to empower one’s self through arrogance, but to empower everyone they come in contact with and be empowered by them. Both see themselves as playing a part in the bigger picture which is why neither allowed themselves to be limited to the expectations that surrounded them: Deleuze to the expectations of a “serious philosopher” (think here of the engagement in which Deleuze asserted that a day at the cinema was as philosophically productive as reading Kant (or Wallace’s willingness to admit to the import of Pop culture.

This, of course, would naturally involve a certain amount of cockiness. In every photo I have seen of Deleuze, there is always that shit-eating grin of some kind of philosophical bad boy: the look of a suspect that always has, is currently, and will always elude the authorities. It always seems like there is something on that eternal school boy's mind. Wallace crouches in front of you, speaks in a gentle but authoritative voice, makes some self deprecating joke, and smiles when you laugh.

Both make it clear that they know a lot about a lot of things.

(And it would be important to note here that Wallace makes reference to Deleuze and Guattari(

But what they know is always in the service of cockiness. And this is not a bad thing as compared to arrogance. Arrogance judges its self worth by its ability to diminish others. It seeks its power at the expense of others. Cockiness, on the other hand, winks at you out of the corner of its eye and waves you along with it. It assures that you will be alright reaching beyond yourself, whatever that might result in. It does not judge you on your mistakes; it even admits to its own. While arrogance is the equivalent of a schoolyard bully, cockiness is just looking for someone to play with and impress in the process. Arrogance is hate. Cockiness is love.

We can see a connection and analogy here between Deleuze and Wallace and Rorty and Jaspers, the kindly old Professors who were as interested in your process as theirs. Rather than seek to be your guru, they chose to simply further your process. Now compare this to Heidegger who, throughout his dense and opaque text, was basically arguing: if you want to reach my level of understanding, you’ll have to work for it…. slave!!!!!! While Heidegger wanted disciples, Deleuze and Wallace just wanted fans. They just wanted to be loved, respected, and remembered for doing something no one before them had: the performance. They just wanted to touch history.
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