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.