Dear Diary Moments:

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d63
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Re: Dear Diary Moments:

Post by d63 »

Dear Diary Moment 5/30/2022:

I recently confessed to Ian Buchanan that it took me about 4 to 5 readings of his reader's guide to Anti-Oedipus to get a reasonable understanding of what he was describing which, in hindsight, may have been kind of an insult -that is given his goal of giving people an accessible stepping-stone to the original text. And as I realized, between him, Joe Hughes' reader's guide to Difference and Repetition, as well as Massumi's departures from the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series (although Colebrook does a really good job of wetting your appetite for Deleuze in an accessible way you can get on the first reading of her Routledge guide to Deleuze): that you know you're in trouble with a given text when the professionals trying to explain it to you are just as perplexing. It sometimes feels like a lot of etherspeak about etherspeak.

However, I think I have arrived at an analogy that might put some clarity on the situation. As I have thought for some time: theory is a little like someone on psychedelics explaining their high to you. The problem is that unless you were on psychedelics yourself, there is no way you could understand what is being described. And anyone attempting to interpret it for you would (unless they were on psychedelics their selves (pretty much be in the same situation or mind frame as you.

And that is the difference with theory. Those who attempt to explain theory to us have taken the same tab of acid as those they're trying to interpret: someone on acid their self trying to relay what the other person on acid is trying to explain. And all it took was reading a text and getting hooked.

And how’s that for metacommentary (thought to the 2nd power (or nth as Deleuze and Guatarri would put it), Ian?

But then I’m biased. I’ve always considered theory my way of compensating for my inability to handle psychedelics at my age.
d63
Posts: 755
Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Dear Diary Moments:

Post by d63 »

Dear Diary Moment 6/2/2022:

I have, before, brought up Coleridge’s distinction between Fancy (that which naturally flows through the mind and is usually, if not always, based on wish-fulfillment – even when it is negative in nature when it comes to perceived threats coming from the other: think Mexican immigrants (and imagination: that which evolves from fancy by taking the effort of playing it against reality. It’s basically a process.

And it is because of this process that those who have spent a large part of their life daydreaming tends to be the best equipped to make the distinction between fantasy (the way we would like things to work (and reality: the way they actually do.

The cosmic irony of this dynamic is that those who claim to have their feet planted firmly on the ground (with their fantasies of rugged individualism and “pulling their selves up by the bootstraps” (are the ones most prone to fancy: wish-fulfillment propped up by action movies and advertisements: fancy with a complete lack of imagination. And think hard-right republicans here. It is basically their propensity towards fancy that makes them vulnerable to conspiracy theories and Q-Anon.
d63
Posts: 755
Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Dear Diary Moments:

Post by d63 »

Dear Diary Moment 6/3/2022:

Only one ½ hour into my immersion into Buchanan’s Fredric Jameson: Live Theory and, already, I’ve discovered a major oversight on my part. I had recently pointed to the changes in content that occurred in cinema due to the development of color film: the way it initially changed the content of film by making real world landscapes less feasible and staged ones more so, that which resulted in a temporary suspension of the Western genre and the popularity of musicals full of dance routines.

I had previously pointed to this as an example of what Jameson called the reflexivity form of critical dialecticism. But come to find out, the example was being presented as useful but problematic to the extent that it was it was shaped (and thereby biased (by a perspective that came after the fact and was specifically focused on the technological aspect of it. As Buchanan put it (via Jameson:

“It gives us a false view of the past as an underdeveloped foretaste of the present and makes all other forms of literary production seem like unconscious precursors of the novel, when in fact present patterns of literary production would not have been suited to periods before their own.”

In other words, it makes everything that happened before us seem as if it only existed to get us where we are now. And that seems kind of arrogant (almost Capitalist); doesn’t it? And isn’t this how any conceptual scheme with the prefix “meta” works? The thing is that now I might have to reconsider my interpretations of Buchanan’s use of the movies Jaws and The Dreamers in his reader’s guide to Anti-Oedipus.
d63
Posts: 755
Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Dear Diary Moments:

Post by d63 »

Dear Diary Moment 6/5/2022:

Once again, I come up against one of the main obstacles to my process: a lack of confidence in my own process (my own ability to analyze and say something legit about the reality I face (without a full understanding of what the established icons of theory have said. I went through it with Deleuze (that Goddamn Frenchman), and now I’m going through it with Jameson. And mind you: it’s not Jameson’s actual text that brought me to this point of despair, but Buchanan’s interpretation and explanation: his secondary text.

The problem is that I keep coming up with all these schemes to bring me to the kind of understanding a Buchanan has when all I can really do is keep reading it and other rhizomatically connected texts and see what happens in terms of what tools I can use to further my own process. Theory is, after all, democratic in nature to the extent that its opaque nature and oblique approach to meaning is meant to evoke understanding in the reader –sometimes, I believe, through a kind of osmosis.

The problem with my schemes is that they end up trying to force something that is visceral by nature. It tries to make science of what is basically a poetic and hermeneutic (a slow unraveling (process of what is like a relationship with a friend or a lover, something that takes time, that will resist your moving on but always be there when you come back.
d63
Posts: 755
Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Dear Diary Moments:

Post by d63 »

Dear Diary: During my immersion in Rorty and the current stage with Heidegger and Other Essays, I’ve struggled with his (via Heidegger: ontological/ontic distinction. However, today I finally got it and (as often happens with philosophy: felt like an idiot. It pretty much came down to another distinction made in the book (once again via Heidegger: between Being and beings.



What really made it connect was the better understanding I got of the de-ontic as concerns Kant’s Categorical Imperative: a transcendental assertion as compared to an imminent one to put it in Deleuzian terms. As Rorty also points out: ontology is a-historical while the ontic is situated in the historical, the domain of “beings”. However, this presents a problem. Given that Kant’s categorical imperative does not exist in the ontic domain, cannot be thought of as a “being”, should we consider it an ontological statement? An expression of Being?
d63
Posts: 755
Joined: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:55 pm

Re: Dear Diary Moments:

Post by d63 »

Dear Diary Moment 2/17/2023:



In Dosse’s biography of Deleuze and Guattari, I came across a reframing of several concepts I was previously familiar with: “consciousness of something” (the phenomenological understanding associated with intentionality and Husserl) and “consciousness as something” which can be associated with D&G’s materialism (nodes of exchange in a rhizomatic complex (as well as Deleuze’s emphasis on immanence as compared to the transcendent.



We can, as well, see an overlap with Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained in which he attempts to undermine the Cartesian Theater by offering a multiple draft theory in which information is passed around the various nodes of the brain and put through a revisionary process until a given reality is brought to realization. In other words: Dennett works in the “consciousness as something” much as Deleuze (w/ and w/out Guattari (did.



Still, my criticism stands as concerns Dennett’s “multiple drafts” theory and the Cartesian Theater: all Dennett really did was make the actors the spectators as well. So I’m not sure we can totally dismiss the “consciousness of something” at work in Husserl’s intentionality. We can still see the possibility of an ultimate ego at work in those actors in the Cartesian Theater; we can still see the possibility of a pure perceiving thing at the bottom of all experience witnessing what it produces.
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