Even art has had to bow to it,
like a common house slave.
It claims to be standing up to its values
while getting rich through art.
One of things that is starting to emerge in my study of Difference and Repetition is the ethical dimension which subordinates difference to repetition, the platonic notion that perfect repetition represents the highest achievement of man. And this makes perfect sense given that a world in which difference ruled (in which it was all about becoming rather than being) there would be no way for the human mind to control it. The issue comes up in the introduction when Deleuze points out how Kant’s Categorical Imperative was basically an appeal to that which can be perfectly repeated. And with all due respect to my classicist peer, Von River, we can see the same tendency at work in the attempt at an objective aesthetic and ethic. We can, of course, empathize with it to the extent that it would allow for a solid foundation against evil and trash. It would give us a solid foundation and consistent criteria by which we could condemn an Islamic fascist for throwing acid in a woman’s face. At the same time, the aesthetic would disallow the unattractive to find love since, given the clear difference between a beautiful woman and a hag, an objective notion of what an individual might choose to love would forbid them from settling. And how would that work for parents of a clearly ugly child? Still, the neo-classicist tendency is towards that which can be perfectly repeated.
Deleuze, further in the book, points towards the classicism of Plato as giving the ideal form privilege over the copies or simulacra, identity over difference.
And don’t we see as much with the trolls that go about these boards flashing terms like objectivity and the scientific method like a badge of authority? Don’t they give privilege to what can be perfectly repeated when there is every indication that the only thing that is truly repeated is difference?
Man! this shit is giving me a taste for psychedelics.
It’s just too profound!!!
One of things that is starting to come to me is the import of and rhizomatic connections to Deleuze’s distinction between extensity and intensity, which roughly correlate to primary and secondary qualities. But what seems more important here, at least at this point for me, is Deleuze’s definition of intensities which consists of that which cannot be divided. For instance, temperature is like this since you cannot take 90 degrees and divide it into 3 30 degree increments since those increments cannot, in any way that has to do with reality, be considered 90 degrees as a group. For instance, if you took water that was 90 degrees and divided it between 3 different cups, each cup would only end up being 90 degrees.
And, no doubt, we could say as much about beauty. Take a Van Gogh painting. We might be able to point to one stroke on it and recognize its beauty. But we can’t say, even if the painting had a thousand strokes and we knew it, that the stroke is 1/1000th as beautiful as the painting as a whole.
Extensity, on the other hand, can be measured and broken down. 2 halves of a square can add up to the quantity of the whole square.
The thing is, knowing what I know now, seeing what I see, I can’t help but feel that this is directly connected to Deleuze’s emphasis on the import of beauty and creativity (what I like to call resonance and seduction) in the process of philosophy. Hence his and Guattari’s description of philosophy as being about the creation of concepts. Although, I would revise this to: the creation of and free play with concepts.
To me, this feels like a response to the analytic approach to philosophy.
*
Also, I can’t help but make a connection between the repetition of difference in the static object due to its always being at a different point in subjective time and Deleuze and Guattari’s advice that we always keep moving, even while standing still. However, the advice seems kind of redundant and superfluous in that if Deleuze’s point about the static object is accurate, then it would seem that we, as objects in space, are always in a process of movement. And note the connection between this and his insistence on becoming. In other words, given the nature of a universe that is always in a Sartrean forward flight, it would be kind of hard not to keep moving even when we are standing still.
*
Being from the 70’s, I can’t help but make connections between a philosopher’s concepts and the drugs they may or may not have taken. For instance, a lot of the descriptions in Sartre’s Nausea, those amorphous forms, remind me of how things look when the brain chatter, from LSD, mescaline, or mushrooms, starts to settle down. And I would note that Sartre did spend a year thinking he was being followed by a giant lobster due to some mescaline he had taken.
And given points made by Claire Colebrook about Deleuze’s excitement about how time is represented on film through individual images in his books on cinema, there is something about his take on the repetition of difference that makes me think of the trails we experience when on hallucinogens.
Having read a lot of different secondary literature on Deleuze (along with the original text itself), I’ve come to notice how diverse the interpretations of his thought can be –especially as concerns Difference and Repetition. What this leads me to believe is that the work of Deleuze must be approached in same way we might abstract art or dreams in that meaning is not so much extracted from the text itself, but rather the discourse that goes on around it. And I would argue that Deleuze would encourage this approach and did so through his heavy use of free indirect discourse. And I see as much in the work of other French intellectuals such Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and even the existentialists such as Sartre and Merleau Ponty. And I would argue that this tendency was articulated by Barthes’ (who tended to work in much clearer terms) in his distinction between readerly text (that in which the writer seeks to determine the reader’s response) and writerly (that in which the writer leaves it to the reader to extract their own meaning). In fact, I have read of Lacan and Foucault that the reason they expressed themselves with such obscure prose was explicitly to force the reader to exercise their freedom of process through interpretation rather than mere apprehension.
And this is why I would tend to disagree with those purists that would argue that reading secondary literature is a waste of time when one should be focusing on original text. The implication of the above is that it is, at bottom, about an individual process, and that what we read is essentially a supplement to that process. Therefore, it would seem to me that reading secondary literature is as productive (productive in the sense of an intensity that cannot be divided into the parts of its sum) in that by taking in these interpretations, we are engaging in a dialogue that has every bit as much a possibility of facilitating our individual process. The key thing though, in order to avoid the pitfall the purist seems to be concerned with, is to keep the process going. And this is what makes it important to read original text as well. As Pope put it:
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or not at all, from the xerian springs.
Shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.
While drinking deeper largely sobers us again.
And as it is with reality, you frequently have to return to the original text in order to make any engagement in the discourse meaningful and productive. And it is this that counters the concern of the purist that we might fall into a relativism that might make any interpretation as valid as any other. Once again like reality, you have to actually refer to the object in question in order to make valid statements about. There can still be any point in the spectrum of bad and good interpretations of Deleuze. At the same time, there is the issue of which interpretations are useful to our individual processes.
*
As most of us know: Hegel’s dialectic defined by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was not so much the product of Hegel himself, but the product of those agents faced with the task of educating others on the philosophy of Hegel. Still, even if it isn’t exactly what Hegel argued, wouldn’t it seem a useful model to someone just starting out on their philosophical process? Contrary to the purist’s assertion, productive work can come from misinterpretation.
One of my goals is to find a synthesis between my love of French concepts and my love of the American propensity towards straight-forward exposition.
Like Prometheus, I want to to bring the fire of the esoteric to the people while leaving them subject to the subtle, the sublime, and the real.
If I offer them the first, or even the second, steppingstone to it, I will consider myself successful.
Been recently reading Ian Buchanan’s reader’s guide to The Anti-Oedipus, which is a little less obscure than some of the other text I’ve been reading in my present fixation on Deleuze. And I’m starting to find some connections between his later work with Guattari and Difference and Repetition. As Buchanan points out, one of the central concerns of many French (and continental in general –i.e. the Frankfurt school.) was how power worked in social systems in ways that were a little more subtle than the traditional notion of one group of people exerting power over another. And the one of the catalysts of this movement was the question what it was about people that seem to seek their own oppression through cooperation with it. As one thinker put it (I believe it was Marcuse):
The question isn’t why people steal food when they’re hungry or strike when they feel exploited; it’s why they don’t do it on a regular basis.
In Deleuze and Guattarri, this evolved into the question of how desire turns on itself and seeks its own repression. This, in turn, goes to D & G’s agenda of seeking out all forms of fascism including (and most importantly) those within ourselves.
And one connection here might be found in their distinction between the molar and molecular or, more importantly, the inherent territorialization of the molar and its potential for fascism. We see this, for instance, in the racist view of The Other: a constructed whole that completely neglects the molecular aspect of the group that the racist seeks to contain in a molar order. And we can see as much in a more active way in which popular culture has sought to assimilate The Other. For instance, as blacks were assimilated, what we tended to see in TV commercials were not so much black people, but rather yuppies that happened to have dark skin. And the same can be said for the sitcom Will and Grace. In it, we’re weaned into accepting homosexuality through an attractive male who also happens to be some kind of professional. In other words, if we look through the semiology at work, the process of assimilating The Other, whether they be minority or homosexual, is a matter of their being compatible with the molar territorialization of our general role as producer/consumers. It was as if they could not accepted on their own merits, but had to be accepted strictly within perimeters of producer/consumer Capitalism.
And it is in Difference and Repetition that we see an ontological/phenomenological foundation for this in Deleuze’s aversion to representation. Once again, we return to the virtual nature of the static object. In a Molar sense, the object does seem to be standing still. And that is how we, in some sense, need to see it. And in this sense, we have a natural tendency towards territorialization. And this, through the passive synthesis, comes natural to us and lies at the heart of our potential for fascistic responses. But in order to get beyond it, we have to take the active effort of diving into the molecular in order to see that the static object, because of subjective time, can never be the same object it was only split seconds ago. The universe is always in motion. It is only through the human tendency towards the molar, territorial, and fascistic that we can hold it still long enough to control it.
Whether it has come from my study of Deleuze, or Deleuze and Guattarri, or not, it could be coincidence that I have suddenly realized that one (among many) legitimate descriptions of philosophy is that it studies the mechanics of reality. But I think not. Of course, that would seem to focus on the metaphysical aspect of it. But let’s look at it in terms of my revised version of Durrant’s list of the concerns of philosophy:
Metaphysics/ontology/>phenomenology>epistemology/logic>ethic/aesthetics>social structures/politics
which, in turn, given the back and forth aspect of the spectrum, can be written as:
Metaphysics/ontology/<phenomenology<epistemology/logic<ethic/aesthetics<social structures/politics
Now the question is does the mechanics of reality apply throughout the back and forth cycle of the spectrum? I would argue that it does. I have already pointed out how it applies to metaphysics and, by proxy, ontology. But isn’t phenomenology also an underlying mechanic in that it describes how consciousness interacts with reality? And given that there is no other way for us to interact with reality, doesn’t that make consciousness as much an aspect of the mechanics of reality as what is “out there”? Epistemology/logic applies to the mechanics of how we organize reality. And the ethical/ aesthetic is how we establish the mechanics of the very real social/political.
*
Nothing could be more essential to our philosophical process than being able to actually experience the abstractions we are being presented with. For me, in Kantian terms, philosophy has always worked when pure reason meets with practical reason. And I am lately getting a sense of what Deleuze is hinting at when he refers to the mind as a kind of machine (or system) interacting with all the other machines (or systems) in its universe. For me, it has been this endless process of input and output: I read, or just experience reality in itself, then I write. Sometimes, it begins to feel like this endless process of input, output, input, output, and so on and so on.
I begin to feel as Warhol must have when he described himself as a machine that produced art.
It gets to a point where I feel like I’m just pumping it out.
*
One of the main points of the Anti-Oedipus is to undermine is the over coding of the Oedipal model on our natural experiences. And one has to give credibility to the project since the oedipal complex does make any resistance we engage in to the powers that be seem like little more than a reenactment of some issue with our fathers. It turns all resistance into a form neurosis or even madness. Take, for instance, what happened to Francis Farmer. In the TV version (or corporate one) she was presented as a drug and alcohol addicted deviant. In the movie version, we were given the bigger issue of her being thought she was deviant because of her participation in socialist causes. In other words, even with strong (almost men-like) women the Oedipal model can be coded on to the reality.
Still, the Oedipal model works. I can apply it in all kinds of ways in my own personal narrative. For instance, the reason I can’t stand intellectual arrogance is because I dealt with it all the time with my father, that is while being a synthesis of his intellectual and creative ambition and the alcoholic simplicity and compassion of my mother.
But then, maybe that is why we have to be careful of narratives. Even more important, for our purposes, it may be why we have to be careful about the imposition of the Oedipal model.
Actually, Matt, Sartre had some interesting shit to say on this as concerns what he called The Vertigo of the Possible. As he described it in Being and Nothingness:
“The vertigo of the possible, then, is not so much a fear of falling into the abyss as throwing oneself in.”
It ties in with his notion of being confronted with a “monstrous freedom” in that, given the kind of nothingness (the open space) between the person we are now and the person we might be 2 seconds down the line, we have no real way of assuring that we’ll be the same person then as we are now. We experience this in very real ways when we find ourselves looking over a high ledge and suddenly imagine ourselves leaping over. This isn’t because we have some subconscious desire to do so as Freud would describe it. It is, rather, the natural tendency of the mind (or even brain) to consider the options available to it.
And we see the same thing at work in the reverse in that when we second guess ourselves, we see a different person in our memory than the sentient being looking back. Once again: remembering having done something and actually being there doing it are two different things.
And I was warned about it. In a book I once read about reading existentialism, in the section on phenomenology, it was explicitly pointed out to me that part of the process was a loss of faith in reality. And why wouldn’t that be since, as phenomenology points out, for every external event (noema) there is a corresponding internal event (event). Whether there is a real world out there or not, for us still happens in our minds and brains.
The upswing though, is that the vertigo of the possible stands up against Freud’s wish fulfillment when it comes to dreams. Regardless of where we find ourselves in dream (robbing a bank, killing someone we love, or sitting naked in a bathtub with our mothers) there is no longer any reason to assume that it we have some deep desire to do so. With the vertigo of the possible, all it becomes is the brain’s perfectly natural tendency to know all the options embedded on it -a kind of inventory.
In a sense, this makes sense of the literature I have been reading on Deleuze in that the Oedipus Complex may not be so much a matter of the natural productions of the brain and mind as a product of society being imposed on the mind and brain.
My study of Deleuze has been a kind of confession in that it has revealed that my love of philosophy has come out of seeing it as a stand in for the psychedelic experience.
I love seeing what the mind can do: art, poetry, philosophy, science, mathematics, acid, or mushrooms (mechanics:
It all can justify a point A to point B.
If I get Deleuze right, philosophy is the study of the mechanics of reality:
as we experience it.
Deleuze makes philosophy rock-n-roll.
All French philosophers are rockstars. You have to have a sense of poetry and life-is-goodness to appreciate them.
I drive to the molecular:
which lies below the molar terms of liberal and conservative.
I drive to the chaos from which we extract our personal sense of identity.
I drive to that which is beyond the language we might use to describe it.
I drive to the pure chaos
which becomes
everything
we r.
That fucking Frenchman, anyway.
Are you typing this as you are driving?
In a figurative sense, yes.
I tend to live and embrace D&G’s mandate to the nomad:
Always keep moving, even while standing still.
In Deleuze’s Negotiations, he makes a distinction between 2 ways of approaching a book. The first one involves approaching it like a box that holds a meaning in it, a meaning that one must merely open the box to get to. The second involves approaching it like a machine or system (I believe the 2 terms in this case are interchangeable (interacting with a universe of other machines interacting with and encompassing and folding into other machines: systems interacting with other systems either in isolation from each other as two distinct intensities or sub or supra systems. We see as much in the point made in The Anti-Oedipus:
That book does not mirror the world as much as form a rhizome with it.
And this is clearly the approach that Deleuze prefers for his writings and the reason his process gravitated towards free indirect discourse, or what Barthes referred to as writerly text: that which is created for the pure purpose of creating an event from which the reader can extract their own meaning –like a dream or a work of abstract art. And it is the primary argument against those who would dismiss postmodern thought as esoteric and elitist obscurantism.
And think about how it applies to what we do here: the d63 machine, through the language sub-machine, interacting with the Stuart and Obe machines under the supra-machine of our common ground equally interacting with the Ucci machine, and always under the watchful eye of the moderator machine which interacts with the protocol sub-machine that, in turn, interacts with the theoretical proper discourse sub-machine, all of it working under the supra-machine of the message board that, in turn, works under the supra-machine of the general discourse that, in turn, is sub-machine to the reality machine.
And given this Brownian universe of ontological and epistemological swirl, how seriously can we take our attempts at territorializing it into concepts that we can use like tools to fix it? It’s just too big and too far beyond us. Nor does it, in its indifference, do anything to justify the paranoid/fascist position of exerting and wasting our will to power on controlling it. If anything, it directs our will to power to what our mind machine is best equipped to do: interact. And interaction, in a sense, implies Play. It, of course, can imply control. But given our situation, that seems like a doomed project. So why not turn to Play? The history of atrocities has been that of those who didn’t know how, who failed to see themselves as one kind of machine interacting with a universe of other machines and who could not settle for the play of interacting with it but chose, rather, to secure it within the territorialization of the fascist machine that turned to paranoia when anything threatened it.
Unfortunately, desire is desire (the desiring machine) and goes where it goes: in far too many directions. Is it any wonder that the fascist/paranoid seeks to contain it?
But, at the same time, doesn’t this make it seem like the only real place that philosophy can truly happen is in the Sandbox?
Once again: I refuse to be taken seriously.
Pandora’s box?
Honestly, Heland, if the full measure of your intellectual process is heckling me, knock yourself out, brother.