Notes on description of strata, Hjelmslev's planes, and difference in time.

[1.1] The Earth is an esoteric limit to human material-conceptual structuring.  Its analogues--the BwO, the Glacial, etc.--project varying material-conceptual descriptions of its consistent features, which to Deleuze and Guattari is represented as unformed, unstable matters and flows.

[1.11] This transcendent Earth, resistant to that which names it; too invariable to be encapsulated by particular phenomena which emanate from more particular thinking/beings, is obtusely dynamic but ultimately neutral and stable.  

[1.12] As described, the elusive Earth, inexperienced but inferred "flees" from the hard structural apparatus of stratification; now not simply that which is below, suffocated by worlds (strata), it moves between--away--above (it must escape any and all strata).  Forward-unending--absolute, unquestionably--the all-real.  It knows nothing, but subsists.

[1.2] This pure ontological surface is populated by machinic assemblages, or is in some way the machinic assemblage itself--as unsubstantiated forms of actualized matter.  On each side it faces two planes, the strata; toward the strata as interstratum and toward the Earth--BwO or plane of consistency--as metastratum.  With two distinct objects identified as planes of consistency; the first machinic identification may be considered an intermediary between the two, the 'slowing' of the plane of consistency as "more compact."  I assume that the thickened machinic assemblages are representative of the relatively stable, concrete features of the lived Earth, or of a being, or any complex matter prior to naming, designation or hierarchy.  The use of 'facing,' though, seems to be a stretch considering; as it implies particular states or modes in opposition, as well as distinct spatial-relationships, which belay the concept.

[2.1]  Deleuze and Guattari appropriate Hjelmslev's planes of content and expression to distinguish the basic, pure, and non-actual functions of their strata.  In the context of their meta-system they interpret two of his terms, content and expression, as well as two general semiological categories, form and substance, as analogues.  

[2.11]  The Sausserian general categories, form and substance, are considered mutually contingent--"substance is simply formed matter," though the former is privileged above the latter within this contingency--"it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless forms."

[2.2]  Though contingent, they can each be recognized as doubled sides of each articulation, themselves doubly designated within Hjelmslev's personal terminology.  Expression supposedly refers to functional structures, organizational forms and compound substances; while content refers to formed matters, "chosen" substances and formed orders.  The double articulation of a strata is then the form and substance of content and then the form and substance of expression.

[2.3]  Using these terms in such a way, suggesting what Hjelmslev really meant, exposes them to the entirety of his system and to the particular ways it stratified language, revealing an alternative and direct perspective on the terminologies function.

[2.4] Deleuze and Guattari, at least in their pure formulations, separate the articulations by content and expression; however, in Hjelmslev's literature the form strata are subsumed by a larger structure, schema, which may be considered synonymous in ways with language structure.  As such, any reconfiguration of concepts, or extrapolation from them, should take into account the preformed structural designations.  

[2.41] In this particular case, it strikes me as considerably more coherent to consider the articulations of strata, not based upon communications between between terminologies Hjelmslev himself considered arbitrary--which strangely enough Deleuze and Guattari note; but between the distinctions substance and form, which clearly articulate the inseparability and irreducibility of the two; while providing two inward facing, separate points centered by a spatial actuality which reduces difference in the manner suggested throughout ATP.  It also seems, considering the aim of thinking difference,  that the distinctive, separate, functional relationships between system--The Democratic Party, Microsoft, etc.--and structure--Democracy, Capitalism, etc.--as form and names--The Overcoat, Gogol, etc.--and abstract objects--a text, an author, etc.--as substance, though vaguely phenomenological in nature, offer clear comparative differences that manifest the temporal-ontological difference-in-kind on which their 'intensive' conceptions are contingent.  

[3.1] Nonetheless, inverting the the articulatory double-movement to one of form-substance separation, while modifying the features of each articulation with Hjelmslev's expression-content is key; it is easy to imagine strata as vertical, inward facing, spatial, identifying-differentiators--each representing modes of the actual in form, themselves communicating with a contingent, substantive layer providing the rule set to a particular stratification.  

[3.2] From a singular perspective, or a slice of space(time), a being simply is the interpellated material conditions of their substance-form, and in this sense it is clear to me what Deleuze and Guattari mean and the way in which they are correct about the mental-modal nature of form/substance distinction--they are a multitude of actual-spatial points, identified in different material conditions of the particular identification, at different degrees.  There is in no such thing as the form of "capitalism" and as such one could consider my reorientation of their strata as misguided.

[3.3] However, from the stand point of difference-in-itself, the mutually and cyclically reciprocating rule sets which communicate directly with layers of actual conditions, also temporally reinforce the modal opposite through direct modifications of conditional features and contextual scope, essentially creating the illusion that the actual conditions of a form-substance stratification have indeed always been a way, making the real-virtual modifications of the contingent rule sets appear static, while they are in fact structurally illusory.  This corresponds in someway with his concept of the living present.

[3.31] An aside according to the habit component of the lived present.  Deleuze states, commenting on the habit base of the living present, that "when A appears, we expect B with a force corresponding to the qualitative impressions of all contracted ABs.  This is by no means a memory...or a reflection" (Difference & Repetition, 70).  Christoph offers a clear example of this in his notes on DR, describing this habitual lived present as drawing "something new, something difference from repetition, namely, a general rule. I place my hand in the fire once and it hurts.  I do it again, and it hurts again.  From this [past] experience, I form a general rule [for future experience]: fire burns and hurts."

[3.312]  What Deleuze describes as habit accords with declarative memory, whose loss is recounted in the film Memento.  The account in the film, compared with numerous scientific accounts of the condition that I have read is quite accurate (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Amnesia#Anterograde_amnesia , for a quick gloss).  Moreover, aligned with Deleuze's account of habit as non-memory, the film and certain cases of the related medical condition reinforce his concept.  Despite Leonard's loss of his semantic--language, facial recognition, recognition of certain materials--and episodic--where, when, what, events, etc.--memory, he is still able to act habitually--"I will lose my memory, so I must write to myself." 

[3.313]  In the case of patient H.M., an anterograde amnesiac, she was unable to recognize her doctor during visits forcing her to reintroduce herself each time; the doctor hid a pin in his hand for a few consecutive meetings.  Afterward, she would refuse to shake his hand, but still could not recognize him, nor could she report why she refused.  She had no problem with other handshakes, but was paralyzed when confronted with this particular handshake.  

[3.314] Why this is interesting is that it brings into question Deleuze's declarative rule hypothesis--as there is no prediction of the future, simply a basic recognition of an identified object.  The memory system activated in this case is implicit memory, which shares space with unconscious emotional memory.  I would suggest that in future considerations of time in Deleuze's work, it is at least considerable that there is memory insubordinate to difference, a type of pure moment; a phenomena that has been indicated by William James--i.e. physical stimuli mediate a reaction before a predictive future, as demonstrated by our running from a bear before we are able to process fear or danger; in other words, there is no repetition of "bears are dangerous" required for the response.

[3.4] Materials are stratified by features and systems, which communicate with the map of the machinic assemblage, its milieu and materials as segments of expression-content, which oscillate as if in space, held by the surrounding abstract machines; playing with thier pieces, I can almost envision the shifting, virtual complex; though I am not sure what to do with it.

I will continue later, when I have finished articulating my thoughts.  My intent is to comment on parastrata/epistrata, on intensities, and to further explain my rule layer description.

Short responses to both of the previous posts 

[1] The issue with the Socratic question, "what is...?" is painfully overstated.  When ontologically questioning existence, there is an obvious deterministic and transcendent prescription that colors any answer; however, the actual form "what is...?" when directed at a word's use and how it is meant and how that meaning relates to other used meanings does not follow such aforementioned determinism.  It requires no definition and in actuality embodies a clear form of difference.  What better embodies difference-in-itself than the clear shift in a words meaning when modified by condition and context?  This essentially means that the word-object is purely relational and immanent  and that its meaning is derived from the material participants in its use (force like). 

[2] Whether or not molecular and molar are differential levels in physics is largely irrelevant in the case of Deleuze and Guattari's use; they clearly separate the function of the terms as concepts.  The first is described to represent conditions of both/and while the second is described to represent conditions of either/or.  A virtual dualism is still a dualism, if they wish to expel them, they would be served well by avoiding roundabouts and shortcuts. 

[3] We should also look at the ways in which we use the word monster and how it functions in language: "my ex-girlfriend is a monster," "Michael Jordan is a monster," "Hitler was a monster," "I have become a monster," or "it's a monster!"  Monstrosity has no inherent physical connotations nor does a fixed essence.  In each of the previous examples one could describe different conditions of monstrosity--my ex screams at me when I misplace the house keys, Michael Jordan dominates his field, Hitler lead a genocide, I have lost control over my actions, a person sees a disfigured person, etc.--none of which hold primacy over the other.  Furthermore, we could imagine situations where the word is only slightly modified and a statement's meaning changes, such as "that building is a monstrosity" and "that building is monstrous."  Must becoming monster leave behind a human artifice?  Must it be physical?  Must it be a movement at all?  Can it be a state? 

[4] Darwin's use of human is different from Sartre's use of human; if we choose Darwin's use for the basis of a new humanism (human speciesism is probably more tenable to my conception)  then can we reorient an identification?  If knowledge changes the rules of the game, the word may be used in different ways; the word itself had no meaning aside from human use and human propagation, its representative qualities rely on the (con)textual material surrounding.  

resonant, radical, monster

"Anatomical elements may be arrested or inhibited in certain places by molecular clashes, the influence of the milieu, or pressure from neighbors to such an extent that they compose different organs. The same formal relations or connections are then effectuated in entirely different forms and arrangements. It is still the same abstract Animal that is realized throughout the stratum, only to varying degrees, varying modes...[H]uman monsters are embryos that were retarded at a certain degree of developments, the human in them is only a straitjacket for inhuman forms and substances"(46).

I wanted to continue this thread of "at least two" and decided to use the concept of monster to further our dialogue--a kind of jumping-off point. For my purposes, stratification, within the context of ATP, should be conceptualized as some sort of body; a strange, abnormal, and mutated body that writhes in the continuum of fluxuation. Layers of strata can be perceived, described, organized, constructed, or deconstructed in a multitude of ways--they can take up forms, or point towards an absence that swallows forms.

Implicit in this is the idea of double-articulation. In any stratification, we see the dualness of content and expression--but it is important that we do not reduce this double movement into a simple binary--it must be described dynamically: interweaving, colliding, rising up, falling down, etc. This process of stratification is radical in that it requires an overturning, a (literal) up-rooting of the systems that attempt to contain and imprison ontologies. This notion of the "abstract Animal" points towards a mechanization of ontology, an "abstract machine" that simultaneously envelops a body, (for example, embryonically) and spews it out in new arrangements (the radical/up-rooting movement).

The evidence of this fluid motion, essential to a philosophy of becoming, is never completely erased. In examining a movement like this, i.e. a becoming-monster, there are bits and pieces left behind that point obscurely towards some vague origin--remnants, ruins, residues, resonances that reverberate across the human-animal strata; leaving behind mucous trails like a slug would. It is in these gray areas, these resonances, the resdiual mucous, that we begin to see the figure of monster appear and take effect--horrific, yet unsettlingly familiar.

"There is no doubt that mad physical particles crash through the strata as they accelerate, leaving a minimal trace of their passage, escaping spatiotemporal and even existential coordinates"(55). This "minimal trace," is the residue that lies in the in-between regions of strata (parastrata, epistrata), but to say that it "lies" would betray it's inevitable and capricious movement--the dynamics of territorialization, deterritorialization, reterritorialization are always exerting energy that pushes and pulls in different directions, pointing towards different lines of flight--continually resonating in this chaotic process of movement.

At the end of the Geology of Morals, we have another encounter with Lovecraft (from "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"). This paraphrase offers us a brief glimpse into the dynamic strata of monster that both obscures what is human, while simultaneously retaining a residuum of the "abstract machine"--the ghostly ruins of human artifice (echoed in the hieroglyphics, the coffin-like doorway) that eerily resonate a "cosmic rhythm."

at least two

The strata are judgements of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgement of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgement, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized. (ATP,40)

Both articulations establish binary relations between their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth's last word. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that the distinction between the two articulations is always that of the molecular and the molar. (ATP, 41)

But the distribution of these two articulations is not constant, even within the same stratum. (ATP, 42)

I'd like to use the quotes above to think through Deleuze&Guattari and the notion of difference. Difference is often considered within dichotomies, in oppositional forms. We find a problem in this way of thinking though, in that it fundamentally inserts identity as "mediating" structure between differences. This creates in the objects or Ideas that are being posited aside one another a transcendental stability. This is also the problem with the Socratic question of "What is...?" and why D&G propose questions of intensity, questions that rupture and open up the potentials of a given Idea through pure differentiation. Therefore, when thinking about the relation of different to different, there must be a push towards the "differential limit" of the actual and virtual. This push prevents difference from being "subordinated to identity".

In "The Geology of Morals", D&G begin by thinking of God or more specifically "judgements of God" as the "stratifications" that prevent intensities in favor of rigid organizational structure. In ATP, stratifications function similarly to identity and the Earth to immanence or pure difference. Integral to understanding the difference at hand in the discussion of stratifications and the Earth, is an adoption of a differential understanding of dualisms. "In mechanics, molar properties are those of a mass of matter, as opposed to its parts -- atoms or molecules." However, both molecular and molar properties are naturally occuring. There are two, the molecular and the molar and while their function, their result is at different intensities, one should not be abandoned for the other, nothing is suggested rather they function independently from what you or I may identify them as.

We can see the potentials of differential thought as conceived by D&G in the very potent example of Darwin. Darwinian thought or a kind of "molecular Darwinism" places all animals on a plane of consistency "with differential coefficients or variations of relations" (ATP, 49). Feminists and zoontologists responding to D&G have posited that our conception of the human or humanism is constructed from differentiating humans from animals, acceptable human behavior from "barbaric", animalistic behavior. Because this differentiation resulted in identity, "human" and "animal" were both trapped in a dualism that limited the potentials for how each could be understood. For Darwin then to say that, essentially, that all animals are interconnected, resulting from and for one another, totally changes the way we identify human and animal unearthing difference from beneath identity. It makes it harder to say "I am better than a monkey" or even, "I am not a monkey", relinquishing certainty for immanence.

Luce Irigaray, in conceiving an ontology of difference in sexes stated that there are always "at least two" sexes. Similarly, the double articulation at play in this chapter that I've briefly delved into must be considered in difference, as "at least two". But the distribution of these two articulations is not constant, even within the same stratum.

What is representation?

Ben's point about restricting ourselves to the syllabus is well taken and I can definitely agree to only posting about the texts assigned from now on. The stretching of this argument is needless and should be stopped.

However, I must point to the chronology and specifics of the argument itself and suggest that the manifestation of my position's disruption of the study is not one sided. My impetus for arguing my specific point was not created in a vacuum; and if we refer to what I conceive of as a clear chain of causality, we can extract two separate contributing attitudes. Reviewing the happenings in general terms, there have been four connected incidents: (1) the third meeting, where our conversation about drugs spawned a heated debate on the nature of philosophical responsibility and the purpose of philosophy, (2) the continuation of the discussion on the blog, to which I replied, (3) the comparison of my qualm with Trinity's Lacanian objection, to which I was told it was not an apt comparison, where the argument escalated, and (4) a continuation on the blog directly responding to my previous complaints, to which I again replied.

The nature of my issues following the original interaction were spawned not only by the text itself, but the way the text was being defended and the reaction that became increasingly more personalized than the claims I made necessitated; all the while appearing only after the choice was made to continue the argument.

The second consideration that needs to be taken into account is that my later arguments were aimed directly at the structure of the text itself--the way in which Deleuze and Guatarri asked for a particular subjection, the way they considered representation as a lamentable activity all the while ignoring the essential representative feature of using words, or the way it posited a 'different mode' of reading (something that conditions one's opinion of its propositions in advance).

My general point has been that whether it argues in a different style and for different modes of thought in general, it still is making claims about how we view the world and how we should view the world, something that we should never just experience. That entry within is the very feature that defines subjection. The preinscribed suggestion of relinquishment of a critical mode until one "fully understands," as if we were reading a single sentence pouring from an omniscient mind, defines subjection. We cannot be called by a text, that is the very interpellation of ideology that the writers wish to separate their descriptions from.

Whether these phenomena are written into the work itself or simply conditions of it; there is a blatant and obvious parallel between the nature of the system the text intends to critique and disrupt, and the text itself. How can we suggest that the parts of the text should not be read as a whole and then call for the consideration of more of the text? How do we consider an author's text different from a history of identifications and dualisms when it repeatedly establishes them--molecular-molar, becoming-being, virtual-actual? These are not returns to the Dualisms it wishes to dispel? Can their saying the movement between these spheres is irreducible to defined categorizations actually deny that it still refers to substances-modes-systems which are at any moment in opposition with each other?

Even if Deleuze and Guatarri wish to represent something entirely unique and new and succeed, they still cannot leave the representative condition of the use of language. Reporting isn't thinking or experiencing--writing "ow!, saying "that hurt" to a person after feeling a pain, saying it to oneself and feeling the pain are four absolutely different phenomena. Description does not subsume all action--it is only the action of description. The very attempt to normalize innumerable phenomena to the aforementioned words--molecular-molar, etc.--is no different than a reductionist cognitive scientist describing conscious states as "neurons firing" and describing a causal process within a brain. Both of these reports describe something valuable, but neither can claim supremacy over the other; they can only be used to their maximum potentials or limited in their overdesignation and reduction.

I can continue to read the book and find in it positive and negative conditions, leaving my criticism of the nature of accessible language behind, for now; but I will not allow my differentiating view to be relinquished nor will I confuse the imagining of a representation of representations--a writing written about writings, representational art, and histories--with anything but.

This argument can be ended, we can agree to disagree; but there shouldn't be a way conditional to understanding a text. We do not require the preconcieved mode of some philosopher to imagine the monstrous potentials of the world, we read books describing the world once we have already contended with these monstrous potentials.

Words communicate. Words represent. We cannot express something extrinsic to representation, while sitting in its home.

Potential and Limit

1. We have played with the impossibly powerful "Becoming..." for weeks now and I feel confident to speak of it within my own terms, for clarity's sake. I mean this twofold, first in that the literal language of the work is doubly restrictive--I cannot speak as someone else and I just don't wish to speak that way-- and secondly that it is my own philosophical convictions and criticisms that propel me forward, not anything prescribed within their work.

2. I must begin with questions, for unless this text was produced immaculately, surely Deleuze and Guattari felt the need to question before presenting the conceived; why not begin as they began? What then is this immanent plane? What is this thought world of infinite potentials? What are these unending combinations within an ego-less mind? Immanent? Plane? Infinite? Potentials? Ego? Nothing but words and words used at that. Each mind may be, but not every mind is; and with this in mind we must reconsider what it means to have it there.

3. Assuming they speak of the mind and the potentials of argument for discourse; we must return to before the mind's galvanization and before that argument as a formation of language; we must return to the language itself, to what it refers to--in this case that elusive mind--and then to what in language it is we--they--mean by mind.

4. Have you heard that we are subsumed by language? That it cannot be fixed? That its ambiguities disallow systems? Again, questions fill each space upon the plane. I must admit, it was once fixed within me that language could not be fixed; that is until I read and understood and the fixing of non-fixing morphed into the non-fixing of the fixed. This is to say, the propositions of difference as conceived by the continental project urged me to think of language as the sphere outside of spheres--within which all formulations of words floated touching each other momentarily, bumping each other forcefully, and pushing one into another. That the ambiguities of speech--again from a group of friends I've heard this--disrupt a subjecting system of power, of logic. That to point toward possibilities, potentially creates potentials--potentials that return to the external material structures, all of which are supported by linguistic projections of the structure itself in the form of logic or transcendence, and fucks them. But I now am not so sure of these generalized conditions or of these spaces surrounded by concepts.

5. Why do the voices of difference sound so similar? I now search for images of Derrida and Quine or Deleuze and Wittgenstein and find myself recognizing my own features within those names that start with D, as in difference. Are these proponents of difference very different? Maybe the ambiguity they see is only in French? But that surely cannot be what they mean, they keep speaking of humans, of language, of an abyss--all words which transfer across the ocean dividing.

6. Their images would give me comfort, I remember the physiological response when I first saw Deleuze--"nice coat." I remember my surprise when I read that Foucault and Derrida had fallen out over the latter's criticism of the former and that the former ran to John Searle of all people to complain, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, "You didn't understand me; you're an idiot." That's the terrorism part."

7. But Foucault also stated that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian," which one surely must take as a joke, but not without considering the esteem transferred in the formulation of such a joke. Conversely, when Delueze was targeted with a similar criticism to my own--though seemingly with less respect and interest--he responded, "So I’ll move onto your other more cruel and hurtful criticism, when you say I'm someone who's always just tagged along behind, taking it easy, capitalizing upon other people's experiments, on gays, drug-users, alcoholics, masochists, lunatics, and so on, vaguely savouring their transports and poisons without ever taking any risks. You turn against me a piece I wrote where I ask how we can avoid becoming professional lecturers on Artaud or fashionable admirers of Fitzgerald. But what do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy, that is, in the power of falsity, rather than in representing things in a way that manifests a lamentable faith in accuracy and truth?" He continues later in the reply, "Who's to say I can't talk about medicine unless I'm a doctor, if I talk about it like a dog? What's to stop me talking about drugs without being an addict, if I talk about them like a little bird? And why shouldn't I invent some way, however fantastic and contrived, of talking about something, without someone having to ask whether I'm qualified to talk like that? Drugs can produce delire, so why can't I get into a delire about drugs? Why does your particular version of "reality" have to come into it? You're a pretty unimaginative realist. And why do you bother reading me, if that's how you feel? Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. My favorite sentence in Anti-Oedipus is: "No, we've never seen a schizophrenic."

8. There is an illuminating allusion to the pragmatism suggested in Missumi's quote, as Deleuze criticizes the realist's realism, which must be noted in its own right; but there are two problematic phrases which demand questioning. The first bold statement reveals a contradiction in language. He attributes to himself falsity and secrecy and parallels them with two other words, or beliefs in words, which he considers lamentable; in this case, truth and accuracy. In creating such a dualistic parallel, he fails to recognize the true ambiguity and difference of words and in acknowledging an affinity for falsity, confirms the existence of truth. His mistake is clear if we consider a hypothetical instance of verbal-mental ambiguity: for instance, if one says to a friend, "I'll be glad when she leaves," and to another, "I'll be sad when she leaves," where in the particular case, the woman spoken of had an aggravating dog, but was an old friend of the speaker, the true nature of verbal ambiguity arrises. The double contradiction of language is found in the two statements' irreducibility to truth or falsity; so to identify oneself with a word such as falsity belies the neutrality of seeing in difference. But more important than his identification with a word representative of functions of difference, is his suggestion that criticism requires "knowing" the author of the text; as if we are privileged enough to read the work let alone dream of disagreeing.

9. Further problematizing his concepts and project, he seems to believe--as evidenced in the second bold quote--that speaking from the perspective of another is to speak from their experience. This reduces the real to abstractions extracted from literature, pop-culture, history, and artistic repetitions. How that removes oneself from a privileged experience is a mystery to me; if anything, it multiplies with each reference a continued distance between Deleuze's real and the other worlds both considered and unconsidered.

10. If one cannot see the clear contradictions between Foucault's treatment of his peers, or the uncomfortable nature of a specific philosophy's appearance in a specific area, by specific types of people; or cannot see the specificity of its meaning of difference and contradictions its conception of language--the language of difference is in the unfixable? It is in the ambiguous? It subsumes us absolutely?--then they are undoubtedly blind.

11. I have gotten so caught in words that I have forgotten to answer my own question on their meaning of mind--but it seems in traveling through the empty black abyss of language's ambiguity I have stumbled upon those features of mind--those phenomena revealed, those breaks in our conceptions of truth, of the known, of the absolute--which construct it. But still they seem to wrestle with John Searle over the meaning of truth or of language; they seem to turn to him when they aren't ambiguous enough, or are too ambiguous--I am not sure which and do not care to know. They seem to understand this word sorcery, this word nothing, this word multiplicity.

12. What we see repeated on Deleuze and Guatarri's plane is the present, the idea, the extrapolation; I do not, however, see a totalization of the mind. To whatever extent we are able to connect tentatively this thought to that, or this fixed designation to that fixed designation, such activities do not scratch the surface of being or of experiencing. They mistake language for a structure when it is simply a substructure of memory, for which no ambiguity exists, at least in a conventional philosophical sense.

13. If we look even to the word fixed itself, both at its common use in America and its English counterpart, we can recognize it has an entirely different meanings. Hypothetically, were one to ask the question, "is language fixed?" on the streets of London and New York City, it would sound as if there were two completely different questions being asked.

14. The purpose of these remarks, particularly (4, 5, and 12) is to point toward the mental system which subordinates conversational language, the text, the tool and the self--memory. Singular conceptions of the world are totalizations of memory--compilations of perceptual experience memorized and ordered into rote-mechanical response, visual representation and a linguistic system which narrates both relational experience and conversation constructing of the self. The spheres which subject us to scheduling and production are alignments of ideal linguistic and mathematical signs--tables of transference aligned to linearize through our capacity for mechanization. The text and tool stand as phenomena of use and thought--repeated objects of a collective memory.

15. With memory as its aim, philosophy can take a true position of difference; focusing on the singularity of conscious experience--which stands even if subjectivity is de-centered, the separation of worlds created by repetitions of experience, the appearance of collective narratives and the installation of extraneous ones, the encapsulating power of technology as both a reductive and expansive entity, and the slow interaction between human agents and larger algorithmic structures running concurrent with lived experience--structures that create models and projections of future experience, which propagate predictive memories.

16. Returning to (4), we may begin to identify the the true nature of language and invert it to blocks of use, representative of fixed and collective meanings--colored by correlating complexes of subjection and production--and access to concepts, potentials, and material positions from them. Can we leave the realm of sub-structural wordplay, conceptual hyper-identification, fashionable designation and begin anew with critiques of those concepts which make no attempt to reconcile the real and the ideal--be it by criticism of functionalism or metaphysics--in the way they manifest themselves, differentially, as human-human or human-earth relations? If we conceive of areas of language as representative blocks of a generalized memory, we may attempt to see each world in its complicated real and ideal multiplicity; by its accessible proper names, histories, technologies, systems, its ideals--words, and its real--the surrounding subjective complexes. The intent, then, is to no longer to find the difference in the becoming-criminal or the virtual potentials of drugs within the conditions of the world of philosophizing intellectuals; but to recognize which complexes prevent potentials, which actions degrade possibility--but also which potentials prevent the other's potentials and how complexes may preserve the entity of nature in its difference and separation.

16. We must return to humanism, but within a new form of differential neutrality; we must not run away from a complication of our view, of our techno-algorithmic complex, or our interest in human interaction; and we must begin to recognize the other immanent plane, that of the "if I had" and the multiplicity emanating from the past.

17. The philosophy of difference is a philosophy of the limit--intent on critiquing, modifying and constructing until there are material conditions for Deleuze and Guatarri's proposed theoretical hyper-identification.

poison, science, and becoming

It's interesting that the word alchemy derives from the Arabic al-kimia, which roughly translates as "the art of transformation"--a becoming. I mention this because in reading Nietzsche's The Gay Science, he says, "'description'...distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science..."(p.172, S. 112). In this section, cause and effect, "explanation" or "description," is merely a process of perfecting "the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it"(172, my italics). The process, utilizing this static figure of the image, seems like some sort of transmutation--like taking an element, explaining it, classifying, categorizing, and then, as if a "miracle"--changing it in some essential way.

Nietzche's "miracle" is problematic because it questions the possibility of explanation whatsoever. An attempt to understand "it" and its fluxuations--the phenomena of nature, science, alchemy, etc.--demands working with ideas (or "things" as Nietzsche calls them)--concepts that continually elude perception: "lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces"(ibid.). This perfected image of becoming is an attempt to describe not only the world around us, but most importantly, ourselves. The process of description, scientific or otherwise, hinges on an impulsive act of creation--an ordering of the chaos that suffuses our universe.

How is this creation spread? How does it become habit, custom, common knowledge, etc.? Like a poison, a viral contagion, the continual creation of scientific thinking is that which forms an "impulse to doubt, to negate, to wait, to collect, to dissolve"(173, S. 113). To take this literally, for example, think about batteries. Our scientific understanding of the battery comes from the Voltaic pile (invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800), and is essentially just zinc and copper piled on top of each other with electrolytes in between. As we have discovered in our modern age--once again, scientifically--the battery is a posion and becomes more poisonous and destructive as it degrades. Not only is it a poison in this sense, but also in the sense that it required cruelty, killing, torture, etc. for it to have existed. Only after Galvani began experimenting with his frogs--in essence electrocuting them--did Volta get inspired to make his famous poisonous pile (could we call it a pile of shit?). Not only do frogs get sacrificed for the creation of scientific thought--people do too: "Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to comprehend their coexistence and to feel that they were all functions of one organizing force within one human being"(ibid.). Remember Walter Benjamin's angel of history? This history, this history of scientific knowledge, is a pile of corpses too.

(this painting is by Giovanni Aldini, Galvani's cousin)

force of concepts and the question of causality

just a start, will elaborate after we meet
He calls his kind of philosophy "pragmatics" because it's goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don't, but instead...to pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterimages of dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives...Some might call that promiscuous. Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.(Massumi, 8)

"On a first, tentative level, meaning is precisely that: a network of enveloped material processes." (Massumi, 10)

i. If we consider time the force of potentials on either end of our conception of time (past, present future) then there may be a loss of the constrictions of linear time for a cyclical ball of what can be.

ii. We do not eliminate the sign but understand it as a passage, a between where it "picks up speed" in a non identifying multiplicity of actions.

iii.Every force is important insofar that it informs the multiplicity of potentials for discourse. If you can think it, it should be thought of, taken seriously, moved away from, gone back to, differenced and refrained.

"The problem of specific causality is an important one. Invoking causalities that are too general or are extrinsic (psychological or sociological) is as good as saying nothing. There is a dscourse on drugs current today that does no more than dredge up generalities on pleasure and misfortune...The more incapable people are of grasping a specific causality in extension, the more they pretend to understand the phenomenon in question." (ATP, 283)

This is not to say that extrinsic causalities are useless or that, in the discourse suggested, wrong or untrue. Rather, the notion is that invoking these specific causalities as a means to understand the potentials of, for example, a drug, is to understand that drug only within the system of power it has been formerly and presently enacted. It is not that causality does not exist but that a line of causality, or a potential signification or passageway to understanding must be "effectuated only in connection with general causalities of another nature, but is in no way explained by them" (ATP, 283). The intention then is not to abandon causality or disregard it but to posit causalities as unstable, uncertain and consistently movable.

Political action and historical event do not necessitate a specific causality. Anything factual has been made so only by the word of another, the word of before and who is to say that there is anything to trust in this word? Accordingly, we cannot be dictated by the perceived causalities of these events and structures in how we approach them in the process of liberating our selves. We must shift the way that we understand a given thing by avoiding definable attributes in the form of a causality that defers responsibility to a higher power; the priest of psychoanalysis, the god of the political or socio cultural machine. The suggestion is not that these do not exist or are not possessing of a great power, but that this power is made all the more pervasive when it excuses us from considering all the potentials available in concept or force. The key then, is a kind of antiexclusivity of thought that at times can lead us to encounter troubling or contradictory things but existing things nonetheless.


No unity, but a region of clarity. (Massumi, 11)

the problem of abandoning the self without care

BwO is in many ways an elusive concept for me. Mainly, at this point I am having difficulty reconciling D&G's desire with Lacan's. For D&G, desire does not approach lack and pleasure in the same way that these three inform one another in Lacanian theory. I cannot help but feel that there is a gloss to this, something that avoids the actualities of the workings of our minds for a means; the means being (as usual with D&G), a shift away from the trappings of impossibility, of death or the death drive that they often speak against in this chapter.

For Lacan, experience is structured around the extraordinary moments, the possible moments of rupture into an opening up. In order for a rupture to occur, something shocks us with the way it makes us feel, something unexplainable is felt in the body, an overwhelming unspeakable rush that seems to have no accessible cause. This vascillation causes the "I" the ego, the subject to collapse. This "I" is the "I" who knows. This "I" desires in the hopes of attaining a certain pleasure. This pleasure, in turn, is ultimately unattainable, it is intrinsically linked to a fundamental lack, that which can never be filled. Desire exists in the gap between need and recognition, the request for pleasure and the answer or delivery of pleasure. However it is in that space, in desire, that we become most deeply human.

Similarly, D&G advocate a motion away from subjection, performed by the self or otherwise. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffering: it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire.(ATP, 155) What I am missing perhaps, is how desire functions positively with a BwO. D&G are innacurate perhaps in their slaying of psychoanalysis with such a long sword. Both Lacan and D&G find that desire is the point of access, the point that opens and allows for difference. In Lacan that difference is in the form of the unconscious which must be built as a language, through signifiers, limited as they are, because the signifier is what has enslaved us in the subjected selves. As with Heidegger's notion of language as the "house of being", language in Lacan is a neccessary entry point to allowing ultimate freedom from its constraints.

Further, D&G also seem to miss the very vital aspect of Lacanian analysis that is the map. Psychoanalysis is not so much a history or uncovering of childhood as it is "a structure of all these points of collapse" (A. Rogers), the points where the ego is ruptured by an uncanny experience, or even, I would go so far as to say, where the ego (conceived self) encounters speeds that attack or disrupt the narrative it has come to be enslaved in. In this sense, the intersection of Lacan and D&G is much more extreme then D&G intended. However, there is still the conflict of the body or the BwO.

I find in this chapter only what it may be. The BwO in that way, fails me in the limits of my thought currently. There is no acknowledgement of trauma, of pain and of the power imposed on our own lives as they have been written on us by the worlds of pain that preceeded us. Therefore there is no practical way for a person, any and all people who are trapped in these pervasive constructs without even knowing, to even have access to this notion of a BwO. The examples of the masochist and drugged bodies, while helpful, do not truly broach the difficulties of uncovering the structures of thought that our bodies have relied upon in the same way our minds have relied on other structures.

How can we relinquish signification before we understand that things have signified us? The signified is simply an illusion for Lacan, a flawed totality. I feel as though they are objecting to the same limits but as D&G tell us, The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive...(ATP, 162). In this chapter, I sometimes felt that we have destroyed the tonal for an inaccessible (at this moment) becoming.

So I've basically hit a wall with this, look forward to hearing what you all have to say.

Structural Responsibility-Propositional Responsibility

1. “There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure.  It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight of deterritorialization; this line can be effectuated only in connections with the general causalities of another nature, but is in no way explained by them. It is our belief that the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as the imperceptible is perceived.” (D&G, 283)

2. We engage a text of tools with which we are asked to change ourselves, our connection with the world, the connections of the world itself, etc.  One cannot confuse D&G’s works with anything but a rethinking of the ethical text, which instead of concrete rules of identification we are provided with differentiated possibilities--the infinity of connections instead of limits.  The nature of the ethical propositions, however, has been inverted; from differentiation one cannot find a set proposition which illuminates transcendently above the entirety of possibilities, but immanent potentialities which spread—surrounding—connectively and shifting, malleable but ambiguous.  Such an ethics is also an ontology, a human of possibility—a human with a new form of agency cutting through a world beyond being.  Still, the apparatus looms ominously and beneath its shadow, obscured by walls of hierarchy and systematic productions a plane of bands held together in their essential animalism, re-centered subjectively by the apparatus of the anomalous and then again de-centered by one’s placement within this deterritorialization.

3.  There is no simple causal structure within such terms, which D&G are correct to specify; however, in their referring to both larger subjecting systems for which their tool box is intended to dismantle, those bands and packs which subvert and shift those systems, moving below—entering an abyss or space untouchable by them—and outside of filiations and by extension the Oedipal system that D&G abstract as this filiation’s genesis, they structuralize two spaces for which all later propositions on these dismantling tools require the reader to be entirely settled with, if they are to adopt any of them. 

4.  Early in Becoming… D&G subvert the state apparatus as being a hierarchical construct which one cannot identify as an assemblage, while the crime-machine in its fluidity and its supposed non-filliative accordance, forms a band—the pack beckoned by the common need, the desire of money or the desire of personal power.  But with such identification, D&G conflate those things they wished to combat with their own sweeping generalization; the crime-machine, as a assemblage, as an amalgamation of cogs with converging desires, have a causal infrastructure circumscribed—one can assume their interest is crime and it is the mutual desire for such that propels them forward.  Now obviously, the crime-machine is not the drug-machine, but from my reading of D&G, such a hole leaves room for a new point of access.

5. There is an objectifying glorification in their crime-band and war-band connexions, which ultimately distort their previous positive propositions with a double-movement that reduces the complexity of drugs; denying their power as objects relevant only in human to human relation.  By first exonerating the crime-band as something absolutely different than the state apparatus, they differentiate in an entirely ineffective way.   Their mistake is muddling the separations of type and kind.  War and crime are of two different systems. 

6. The former, and this refers to their structuralization, requires the coexisting of two larger subjecting apparatus which send men into a material open field—the battlefield—from which all independent subjective spheres dissolve, to be replaced by a singular, becoming interpellative call of the home-state-history into a propulsive force, driving man back to the basic instincts of survival.  The World—and I use world to designate a totalization of the subject’s entire experience, memory, understanding and knowledge—is centered below this interpellative call for animalism and to the reflection seen within this totalization, the band can do nothing but assemble.    

7. The crime machine may suffer from a similar type of subjection, but its kind is wholly different.  The drug user, dependent on the crime-machine, is subjected to it; the crime-machine propagating disruptions of state structures, resembles a breaking of subjection to it, but its re-territorialization within areas where man is called to differentiate outside of subjective calls is essentially in itself a subjecting apparatus of the state.  Moreover, the drugs themselves, and in this case I call to specific drugs with specific effects—heroin, cocaine (particularly crack-cocaine), meth-amphetamine, etc.—do have inscribed within them chemical causal structures which supersede the perceptual modifying natures of them, calling to a third subjecting power which has little to do with choice.

8. The revealing of these distinctions is meant to show that D&G confuse their explanation of drugs and, wishing not to contradict their system, hold onto a considered potential, which when truly differentiated is no potential at all.  Empirically recognizing the example of the impoverished, who living within a particular subjected sphere of apparatus, are left to—and this is marked by historical repetition, external sociological and psychology study and verbal reporting by those who actually live within such a subjection—a type of subjugation where the drug interpellates just as the religious Subject  subjects its subjects.  The criminal apparatus too, cyclically reproduces the relations of its production and in doing so empowers the repressive governmental apparatus.  Using two historical examples, the movement of crack-cocaine into Los Angeles during the early eighties and the proliferation of heroin in post-WWII Italy, we can see moments where in place of a conventional state apparatus the crime apparatus fills the void of subjective power, retaining beings under its systems of law.

9.  If we look toward specific points of causal relations, returning to the level of the assemblage, we are again met with the problematic of D&G’s analysis.  In distinguishing causes as particular and in designating the happenings of the material world as primary, they require we return to either imaginary constructions or memory contingent experiences of the causalities which lead to the drug-becoming.  But if we return to such memories or hypotheticals, we are left in view of the impossibility of mapping causal relation without seeing attached to each possible world an impossibility prescribed by the natures of the subjections attached to drugs within societal and cultural structures.  Moreover, returning to the truly inscribed causal infrastructure of chemical addiction, the hierarchy multiplies when one looks at the drugs’ (heroin-crack-meth-etc.), modification and reterritorialization of desire; again interpellating the subject to the chemical call of need.

10.  But I must separate my distinction from their distinctions—or lack thereof—on difference between drugs. “All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modification of speeds.” (D&G, 282)  This implies a drug essence which subordinates hierarchically all conditions and correlations between drugs, where one could say in a hypothetical theoretical system, “all drugs fundamentally concern limits, and modifications of limits” and suddenly, if accepted simply as tactical, one is then given the opposite totalized view of what the Drug is.  But there is no thing called drugs and when looking for the meaning of drugs, we venture down a path of simplification which reduces the value of the target object.  Those things designated under the scientific hierarchical structure of Drug are indeed, in manifold ways, different.  So to call to drugs as a platonic form undifferentiated as tools for perceptual modification and becoming, reduces our understanding of their true multiplicity to rudimentary language form in which we identify with “this is that.”

11.  D&G commit a form of hyper-identification, which installs humans, in relation to a specific Drug, into a functional causal algorithm, with a single randomized variable whose output corresponds with whatever feature fills such a randomized input.  But if they wish to return to material reality they must recognize the difference between marijuana and crack-cocaine, just as they should differentiate the choice of drug use as perceptual modification for an act of becoming and a subjection to a larger drug-apparatus which precedes any venture into their project.

12.  Their final mistake is found in their attempt to reconcile the obvious dangers, the guilt I assume they suffered from the consequences—note their tone on drugs is considerably more radical and limitless in Anti-Oedipus—and the very soundness of their tactical system.  Instead of admitting that drugs are a subjective force and that this mythic crime-machine is nothing but a feature of a repressive apparatus which requires a subordinate force to reify its power or that particular drugs do have an installed chemical causal structure, which while never guaranteed, is always guaranteed as possibility; D&G choose to simply warn against the possibility that Drugs may botch your, the subject of the book, becoming. This is entirely a cop out, for lack of a better term.  They both betray the proposed limitlessness of the rhizome, of the plane of consistency and of becoming by speaking of the “wrong horse” and entirely botch—to use their terminology again—an actualized viewing of the Drug in its true differentiated forms.

13.  Of the mistakes made, the problem lies within their unpredictable oscillation between the ideal itself, the ideal in relation to the real and the real itself.  Rarely do they take care to resolve the absolute potentials of their differentiations outside of the differentiating in the material world; and in doing so, ignore the place where the undifferentiating came.  The reason why this oscillation manifests its negative qualities in this case is that their tactical system requires a point of access which aligns, at least regularly, with those outside of the subjective sphere of the drug or crime apparatus.  But to have a true opening, our tactical systems must be intent on destabilizing the subjective forces, even if they can be potentially used for some material perceptual modification which resembles becoming—an act that is entirely imaginary.

14.  We may now return to the original point of interest, the role of philosophy, or more specifically the meaning of responsibility in philosophical terms; responsibility may not be reduced, as D&G reduce “drugs,” to simply meaning.  There is a relational web of responsibility which, within the realm of the text extends like chains from the work to the authors, from the work to the readers, and from the work to world.  The author has responsibilities to the structure of the text and to the validity of the structure and also to the validity of its propositions; independent of a larger statements from which any single proposition could be removed while continuing primacy of the theoretical system.  The reader has the responsibility to read the text removing conscious bias and also to question the system and its propositions.  The reader, author and text sit amalgamated but irreducible in their placement within the world—the powers of subjection color each end—but it is the author who initiates this collision of subjective spheres, so despite their inability to remove themselves from their own spheres of subjectivity, the power lies within them to predict the subjection they must contend with and that which lies outside their immediate grasp, which is effected ultimately by those within it.

OwBs and BwOs

I'm interested in this relationship between the Body Without Organs and the Organ Without Body. In paintings from the Enlightenment, like the one above, like Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson" the distinctions between BwO and OwB become more complicated. In the process of dissection there is an inherent authoritative power executed by the surgeon--he is at will to make claims about the structure of the body and its organs. However, what we see above and in "The Anatomy Lesson" seems to be, in my opinion, an attempt to develop a structure of the organs that disregards the body, the subject. By ordering and categorizing the organs, we begin to see a different sort of body emerge. If this is the case, what has happened to the body? It has been subjugated, opened up, and, in a sense obliterated. By forming organs without bodies do we sacrifice the subjective value of the body (in the sense that "this" body does not belong to "me" anymore)? There seems to be some sort of answer, although it still seems a little hazy to me:

"A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference...It is not at all a question of a fragmented, splintered body, or organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentieaded in relation to a differentiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or multiplicity, inside an assemblage, and according to machinic connections operating on a BwO (ATP, p. 182).

This may be a wierd question, but how do we consider anatomy? Does the scientific, anatomical figure--the cadaver--lose its organs or lose its body? Could it be both, even though D&G say they're opposite? By taking the organs, ordering and structuring them, can we, in effect, create a new body--this time composed of scientific knowledge instead of organs?

I guess I wanted to conclude this inquisitive, confused post with some Artaud. This is what got me on this track:

By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,

god,
and with god
his organs.

propositions and possible becomings

To write becomings and multiplicities into literature is to locate in people, or rather in the personal, the world as it is experienced, the potential for these things. Our discussion on Sunday at times hit what I think is a very controversial aspect of Deleuze&Guattari. While the focus of the conversation was more specific, ultimately it was a question of the role of philosophy.

Philosophy proposes various ways of thinking. It asks us then, to come to it, bringing with us the many facets of experience and layers of thought that we have come to carry in our lives. When we reach philosophy how do we encounter it and what does it give to us? In giving that thought, in proposing that way of looking at the self and at the world, does philosophy then have a certain responsibility, ethical or otherwise, to be specific about its suggestions, to take care? Or do we have a responsibility, to read tactical systems as potentials, as ways of being that we must live with care?

It is difficult to say, and perhaps both philosophy and the reader, deeply connected as we are in the conversation that it has become, must think carefully. However what we find in Deleuze&Guattari is not a decision through which we must live our lives but a map of what life may become, ridden as it is with the pitfalls and dangers and lines of abolition that we encounter every day. They choose not to say here is a right and a wrong or choose a right and a wrong (choose what to live your life by, what law will guide you through each thought and act). Rather, they present to us potentials without necessary advocacy, active ways of being that can indeed be dangerous. Maybe this avoidance of danger, this proposal of right and wrong is part of what philosophy has chosen to hide us from. It is its lie, the lie that we will not fall sometimes, some of us more often than not into the black holes, we will not take lines that lead us away from productivity, from freedom.

Further, and on the subject of drugs in the becoming chapter, Deleuze&Guattari are suggesting a change in the conception of where drugs can lead us, of how we can encounter them in our lives. "To reach the point where "to get high or not to get high" is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather, the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them." (ATP, 286) Drugs then, are simply a door (dangerous though it may be) to becoming and one that ultimately, for Deleuze&Guattari is not needed as long as the stakes of our becoming and the speeds that we can experience have reached that place of radical challenge that drugs present. As Ben mentioned when we met, drugs function to stretch our mind, with a use, they present a difference that we are capable of becoming. For Deleuze&Guattari, this becoming should be accessible with or without the actual drug use. It is a virtuality that the mind can take on, a way to stretch, a borderline or anomaly.

And as for you, philosophy, do not save me from myself.

H.P. Lovecraft and Becoming

On pg. 264 ("...of forms both human and non-human...") D&G use a quote from Lovecraft's short story entitled "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." You can read the entire story here but I will post the paragraph they use from Chapter 4 of the story for you:

There were Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of Earth's history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge, suspicion, and credibility; Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua; spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the glimpses recalled dreams--both faint and vivid, single and persistent--which he had had through the long years since he first began to dream; and a few possessed a haunting, fascinating and almost horrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain

The story itself is pretty long so you don't really have to read it all. However, Chapter 4 is key.
Another good one that D&G don't reference but relates is "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family". It is a good companion to our discussion about the exception or special one of the pack (on pg. 269 of ATP "...there is a contradiction: between the pack and the loner;...") and it's not too long of a read. Enjoy!

Between

Here are a few comments on the beginning of the chapter. Just as with Trinity, I didn't feel comfortable tackling the whole essay just yet.

1. Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the direction of something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its own line "between" the terms in play and beneath assignable relations. (D-G, 239)

Sorcerers have always held the anamalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes they are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. (D-G, 246)

2. D-G reveal a dual-system--series and structure--the mathematical equivalence--the formula--the known. As a feature of the human complex it propagates removal from animal-hood; placed upon, set above and "responsible for" the outside. This material constructing, this Oedipal reterritorialization which reflects the world as an avatar of man or as an equivalence of him, reduces and defines. Correspondence delimits movement and man is either totemic or serialized, but never outside of "is to."

3. The presence of correspondence and proximity of the reflective properties of filiation cast shadows upon the lines of flight between the human and the animal. The shadows of the idea, which D-G also reveal as fluid and oscillating, subject the human and 'animal' alike to progressive and restrictive movements. But the obscuration of the spaces between does not truly delimit movement under or in them, the terms of idea and relations of correspondence and filiation do not prevent the contraction of involution and cutting of the rhizome.

4. The between becomes the pathway of becoming. The space is neither physical, limiting or static; it carves and etches through, under and around culture and complex. It presses against the edge of space and slides below, and in its opened valleys fills with becoming. Against the edges of the known, stretching outside of the village, alliance is made--cutting between the shadows of totems which slide slowly, leaving behind them tracks of history, we find the choice of becoming.

becoming not human -- becoming alive

For this chapter, since it's a lot to discuss and will span two weeks of discussion, I'd like to begin by presenting some quotations from the text and my thoughts about them rather than a more complete response. Hopefully I'll get there next week and I will also address concepts in the rest of the chapter (I really only broach the first 20 pages in this entry).

Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance...Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. (ATP, 238&241)

For Deleuze&Guattari, becoming is not concerned with the connections of the self (as it has been constructed, as subject, as human: human is the key to what we are parting from in this chapter in that the first delineation that is made, before race, sex, etc is that between human and animal. We define ourselves as human in that we are not animal, we are civilized, we are possessing of a great intelligence...). Becoming is instead, "alliance". Alliance implies a kind of cooperation, a working along side. It is not filiation with its forced ties, to human, to mother, to father, to body; alliance reveals instead a choice, a decision. So foremost, becoming is about alligning oneself with things that surprise. What is human? In becoming, you must think on what is not human.

There is no "like", no filiation, no mimecry. There is only the speed you pick up that is beyond what you thought possible when running, becoming cheetah. Thinking, faster, you are becoming computer, becoming virtual. But always, always becoming. It is contagious, it is viral in that is constantly changing as it replicates and infects.

...Becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature...If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. (ATP, 249)

I like to think about multiplicites as these interconnected rings. Within those, in the movement of the circles, the speed of those lines as they go around and around is becoming. Further, across these, within them or cutting across we find a "plane of consistency", a location of imperceptibility where everything is understood through its vibrations. Again, motion is key, the continuous motion of all things, of every conceivable thing. If it can be thought then it is set into motion, it is alive in the vibrations leaving and approaching, within and without.



There is therefore a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artifical and the natural...Its unity has nothing to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project in the mind of God. (ATP, 254)

I especially like this bit, where they seem to be digging in a bit to the limitations of the metaphysical project, or of any project for that matter. Again, we find a turn away from something that is buried, something before, or a desire for completion, a finished thing, an end. Things are not conceived in the mind, of God or any other; rather they are alive in the world, vibrating fiercely, alligning and encountering us, ultimately becoming.

freeing the line

"Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems" (ATP, p. 326).

I wanted to focus this post around the structure of becoming and the distinction to the structure of memory because it strikes me as a very complicated distinction which I'm still trying to grasp. These structures are imagined as if on a graph, with vertical and horizontal axes; however, they both behave very differently. Memory's structure employs a point system--referring to a located coordinate and moving to the next--a narrative structure moving serially from one place to another, like the electric energy that flows sequentially through a circuit board.
On the other hand, the structure of becoming is a line-system, or block-system. In the example of the wasp and the orchid, the line/block system does not merely link the two species together in a unity--it passes between them and creates "a shared proximity" mediated by time and space. In this way, becoming is a liberating process because it is always a movement of deterritorialization that illuminates an affinity or symbiosis on the in-between level: the wasp "becomes a liberated piece of the orchid's reproductive system," while the "orchid becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp" (326). The liberation is in the sense that in this system of becoming, each organsim exceeds the reproductive faculty of their respective species.
What really interests me is how these two systems--memory and becoming--or punctual and linear--interact with each other in the act of creation. "One elaborates a punctual system or didactic presentation...with the aim of making it snap" (326). Creativity is liberated in this opposition, when the creator stands against the structure of memory, against the opressive narrative of history. To wrap this up I want to return to the first quote. The mutant abstract lines of creation are liberated from the punctual system of history by creating a new sphere of existence, "because they assemble a new type of reality..." All of the references to Lovecraft and werewolves and vampires, lead me towards the horror genre, where the impact of the creature is precisely in the sheer possiblity and implication of its creation. Like in Frankenstein, what scares us most is how the urge for creation in itself facilitates the possiblity for the genesis of a new subjectivity in opposition to the world it was borne into.
"Werewolf"
Lucas Cranach Sr. (ca 1510)

Syllabus

Week 2: Meeting on February 13th - Chapter 10 Becoming...

Week 3: Meeting on February 20th – Chapter 10 Becoming cont. Woolf, The Mark on the Wall

Week 4: Meeting on February 27th – Chapter 6 BwO Artaud, letters to Jacques Riviere, Here with others and To Have Done with the Judgement of God Note: Trinity with Artaud texts

Week 5: Meeting on March 6th – Nietzsche, texts TBA

Week 6: Meeting on March 13th - Nietzsche cont. Kafka, Metamorphosis

SPRING BREAK

Week 7: Meeting on March 27th - Bergson and Deleuze Note: Michael with Cinema I & II
March 28th - Screening Day

Week 8: Meeting on April 3rd – Chapter 3 Geology of Morals

Week 9: Meeting on April 10th - Geology of Morals cont. De Landa, sections from A Thousand Years of Non-linear History TBA

Week 10: Meeting on April 17th – Leibniz and Spinoza texts TBA

Week 11&12: Week of the 20th-End of classes - Workshop

The Rhizome and the Complex

I. Being within the rhizome—seeing as the rhizome—walking within fissures and canals, following the space into and out of connections. Deleuze-Guatarri call to these fissures and to a tendency to delimit such canals as system or structure.  The pathways of the rhizome resemble the complex when one is attuned to proximity and returns to the hierarchical tree, linking canals and fissures by resemblance and analogy—turning toward canals taken and those represented as similar, tracing a space of relevance and history.  But the rhizome connects each canal by strands on a plane while the hierarchical structure situates above, external, breaking the fluidity and movement of the rhizome—any resemblance is the convergence of the branches of the rhizome and the outlines of these convergences can never be reduced to a simple binary or genesis.

II. The use of the text, their dissolving its separating triple movement as representation-subjectivity-reality, is within the rhizometric activity of relational opening. The text, in its spreading and deterritorialization makes a movement of opening into a physical-spiritual space where which neither gains priority.  The text as mapping and connecting, illuminating strands of the underlying rhizome is also an opening activity.  But the danger in such an opening is still the external activity of the complex-tree-reduction; the text as rhizometric is then both connective and disruptive as it moves to make the world, earth.  Thinking within the rhizome without root and decentered—removed from temporality, transcendence, and logos—disconnected from a place or home, marking each moment of movement and recognizing the spaces between external systems and the beckoning root—all open and disrupt.

III. The opposition of dualism, while reconciling the map-trace difference still leaves me questioning the nature of the opening disruption—the reorientation of thinking as the rhizome.  Situated in a physical space, even while revealing the rhizome; the hierarchical complex still operates as a tangible physical opposition.  Is this reduction a feature of rhizometric connection or an innate movement of accommodation-appropriation-assimilation by forces of Power?  If there is this irruptive force of Power as a human feature, the General demarcating the space of the complex and systematizing by hierarchical-temporal-technological apparatus; then does the relational opening of the rhizome—the realizing of movement in and out of the rhizome—conceive a dualism of the rhizome-complex, the opened and the closed?

Meeting

Just to clarify in case there's any confusion, 4 pm FPH

towards radical difference, towards "and"

For this first chapter, this Introduction, Deleuze&Guattari create a very unusual kind of text. In my mind, they are not so much detailing their thoughts or defining their way of thinking as they are enacting a new tactic of thinking. In their writing they embody a language of thinking away, a radical turn from metaphysical and traditional thought.

Clearly, for Deleuze&Guattari there is a kind of fascism inherent in the symbols and constructions that have become the acceptable manner to think critically. In considering something as a subject it is awarded a certain power. It is a singular thing, operating independently from other things. D&G posit the notion of the multiple against the substantive. Once a thing becomes substantive or solid, singular, unmoving, it is no longer multiple. The multiple must necessarily be alive in order for an assemblage, a multiplicity to be thought of. It is in solidity, subjecthood, in slowness or fixed totality that we find our point of opposition. These call out for difference in the form of ruptures or lines of flight.

So, in reading, care must be taken not to try to formulate something finished or substantive out of what is being said. As readers of other thinkers and as people who have been thought of as human bodies thinking in the world, we desire a narrative, a linear progression of signifiers that function with unique meaning. In that sense, we are being asked to read away from our desires and from the common functions of our minds. We must then remember, one thing does not mimic or signify the other. As with the wasp and the orchid, imitation "is true only on the level of strata--a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other" (ATP, 10). These things are parallel in that they both move alongside one another, both moving without condition from the other. This goes for all things, an unreliance but a continuous compliance and cooperation.

Most importantly, even the differences they are asking us to look at should not be thought of in simple binaries to what they oppose, in formulating good and bad things. More accurately, one could say they are advocating active thought, assertive thought that is empowered through difference to think away from dualisms. We are looking not for answers but for possibilities, potentials to be actualized. Rupture that thought, if you think it for even a second and see where its pieces take you.

"the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be" but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and...and...and..."...Where are you going? Where are you coming from? Where are you heading for? These are totally useless questions." (ATP, 21).