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)