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.