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).

mapping multiplicity--imagining rhizome

"There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate" (ATP 9).

My initial reactions to the Rhizome chapter are centered around this idea of a multiplicity constantly in flux without any root or foundation. The example of the puppet illustrates how each string, each line of connection is also a line of flight--the strings that control the puppets limbs connect to the puppeteer's--each multiplicity linking or branching out towards others. These ideas, or clusters of ideas begin to form structures; they may even become images or texts. This makes me think of all the diagrams in neuroscience that map out the complex pathways of hormones and neurotransmitters.



These multiplicities form maps, topographies that extend without roots anchoring it in the ground. In this way, I was reminded of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" when she talks about the cyborg as an entity that liberates itself from it's haunted roots, grounded in the structure of military innovation, in the mechanics of war. Coming back to the original quote, Glenn Gould multiplies these lines of flight as he intensifies the piece, forming rhizomes of point and counterpoint that may intertwine, expand, split, etc. Visually, it reminds me of a topo map--a map that uses lots of squiggly lines to show altitude, creating a landscape that divorces itself from the first-person perspective looking at the horizon to an omnicient view that comprises a multiplicity of information.

First Meeting

Hey all, Ben and I met with Christoph this morning, he's going to be posting resources for us on the blog. Basically, what we ended up deciding is that A Thousand Plateaus will be our main text so we should all go ahead and buy that if you don't have it already.

If everyone could please read the first chapter on the rhizome for our meeting on Friday that would be great. Also if you have trouble getting the book before Friday I can make copies, just let me know.

Christoph will also be emailing us some texts from Bergson and others, when we meet on Friday in addition to discussing the intro to A Thousand Plateaus we should also hammer out a final syllabus. Christoph will be posting some material from his course on Difference and Repetition that should be helpful in getting the exact concepts for each meeting laid out. After speaking with him, it seemed best to look at just four other philosophers: Leibniz, Neitszche, Bergson and Spinoza. Christoph's going to guide us with what to read for these guys by posting on the blog.

For literature we'll be looking at Woolf, Kafka and Artaud. I think we've got Artaud figured out but if everyone could think about Kafka and Woolf it would be good to read before Friday then we can get this all squared away and get started.

Also if you are concerned about leaving people out we will all have an opportunity to explore a secondary source of our choice in the final paper. So for example, if you were dying to read Bacon but we didn't cover him as a group you can choose to write about his work and Deleuze's ideas. This way, particularly if we get our papers started early as we talked about, we can have our areas of interest to share with one another and in that way, expand the syllabus.


See you all Friday at 4! If you can, post on the first chapter before Thursday at midnight.