razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: deleuze

Interest and desire

Larvalsubjects has an interesting post on Marx in the academy over here which has generated a lively discussion in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of agency has risen to the fore again. This is still something I find disturbing, something I’m not really able to get a grip on fully, since I tend to understand the problem of agency as responding to something like a desire to answer the question ‘what difference can I make?’. “Where’s the agency“, someone might ask, “in these economic analyses of desire (D&G) or capital (Marx)? Isn’t it all just a huge machine in which I am nothing? And if it is a big machine, how did this machine produce it’s own auto-critique? Isn’t it really the break, the rupture (of the subject), that we need to theorise? Isn’t consciousness really the most important fact in reality since it is inexplicable by reality? Me, I’m important, surely – doesn’t my analysis do anything, offer anything – don’t I have the answers, or at least the right to produce answers or the possibility of finding them?” I’m inclined to dismiss these questions out of hand as the whining desire of a resentiment-filled petit-bourgeois who thinks they’re ‘in charge of their life’ in the first place but have to recognise that at least some of the charge invested in this response is disproportionate and perhaps related to the other peculiar investments I find myself bound to (revolution, majik, sex).

One of the things that I thin I agree with larval about is that the emphasis of thinkers such as Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere and Zizek seems to be inverse to that of Marx – “Don’t these positions [Badiou, Laclau, Ranciere, Zizek] postulate that change proceeds via consciousness, rather than consciousness, thought, emerging from modes of production?” larval asks.

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November 30, 2007
beware desyr: anti-oedipus reading notes

One of the re-occurring problems that Deleuze & Guattari address within Anti-Oedipus (AO) is that of the apparently self harming act. This is perhaps most clearly indicated in the way in which they return to the ‘desire for fascism’ within the masses that Wilhelm Reich attempted to address in his book The mass psychology of fascism. Reich, whom D&G declare “the true founder of a materialist psychiatry” (AO: 129), was unsatisfied with any theoretical explanation of the rise of fascism that failed to account for its popular support. They phrase this in terms of desire – “Desire can never be deceived. Interests can be deceived, unrecognised, or betrayed, but not desire. Whence Reich’s cry: no, the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism, and that is what has to be explained” (AO: 279). The argument is a attempt to allow reality to speak, to let the facts back in, in particular the unpalatable fact that there was this support for fascism (this desire). Such a fact, the argument presumably goes, means that we are faced with the options of (i) either those who voted and marched and applauded the fascists were somehow duped or else (ii) they willingly and knowingly wanted this state of things (which is taken to be a kind of contradictory situation since it is ‘against their own interests’ for the masses to desire fascism). Unlike a simple despotism in which the autocrat installs themselves through violence, perhaps aided in some sense by passivity, the fascist regime came to power through a popular passion, through the desire of the masses. This poses the problem of why people desire that which is against their own interests, why people desire that which oppresses them?

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November 22, 2007
That which is core being

At it’s most exciting and interesting existentialism brings to the fore the problem of the core of my very being and even if it may fall back on the model of the human in its own attempt to think through this problem, the fact that the problem is posed in large part derives from existentialist thought. This ‘core’ sounds naive and simple, as though some ‘true me’ can be found if we look hard enough. This implies something like a essence and the first crucial step that existentialism began to make explicit was was that this core is not some essence to be understood through the philosophical process of distinction and definition supported by argument. Sartre’s crude formulation of this shift in existentialist thought found itself expressed in his famous slogan – ‘existence precedes essence’. Kierkegaards’ investigation of the case of Abraham and his faith is also, however, reliant upon this kind of shift from essence to existence.

A core, like the core of an apple, might be missed by being unthinkingly passed over, almost as though it were waste. Custom and practice where I live is for the core of an apple to be thrown away after eating the flesh and pulp. I’ve always found that strange, always eating my apple cores and once I had children often eating theirs too. The core of an apple is crunchy, tasty and – more importantly – the very point of the apple. It is the seed carrier, which all this flesh and pulp is there to sustain. It contains a small forest within, an orchard of life. My own, naive, magical, thinking has always taken the core of the apple to be that which is the most vital, life-containing element of the fruit.

This core of my own being I also take to be that which is most vital, life-containing. Assuming, as I do, that I am not a deterministic being this core is also something that doesn’t cause anything, including my being. It is, instead, that which is within the eyes that see, not as a pre-existing soul but rather as the confluence of all those forces that have coalesced to form this moment of subjectivity in which I see or feel. At times this core will be in one form, at times in another, though at each time it will present as an eternity. At times, indeed, the core might might be in a ‘non-dual’ form, presenting itself not as my core but as the core of everything.

How can such a shifting form in any sense be called a ‘core’? Moreover, how could such a core be both continuously shifting and yet also ‘that which is most vital’? Implicit in the notion of a variable core is something like a ‘variable object’. Why is it difficult to imagine an object that has enormous variation? It seems that at the point at which we allow the enormous variation the object is no longer identifiable. We cannot recognise something as an object unless there is enough stability of identity, so it might be argued – and yet we seem entirely capable of handling the weather, of handling things which have enormous variability. The lower intensity of the rate of change in many objects perhaps inoculates us from the pressure of handling the higher intensity objects. It seems that if a core does exist, almost by definition this core must be that which is most vital – these two notions seem to co-define each other. The difficulty is not, then, in recognising this core and this vitality but rather in handling an intense core, that intensity now being understood as a high degree of flux.

October 30, 2007
Anti-Oedipus reading group

The Volcanic Lines – deleuzian research group, which I co-organise with Ed Willatt from Greenwich University, is beginning a new series of work next week. Details have already gone out in various forms. Reading for week 1 is Chapter 1 of AO (The Desiring Machines) and the reading group will last 6 weeks, each Wednesday night. All welcome at any time, online or in flesh. You can follow the online discussion with the session reports which will be posted at the dialogues page of Volcanic Lines and full details of how to register (it’s free) are at the main site for VL.

Technorati Tags: deleuze , guattari , volcanic lines , anti-oedipus , kant , greenwich , philosophy

October 28, 2007
to survive da’ath

I gave a paper at the Manchester Metropolitan University conference on ‘Deleuze and the event’ that was held earlier this year and the organisers have videoed all the papers, a practice they have had for a while now as part of their online journal A/V (now defunct it seems). A dvd came through the post this morning with copies of all the papers in video format, which is cool since I can now see those papers I missed on the day. Here is my own paper (in mov format). These are ‘direct download’ links, so right click and save-as or do whatever it is you do on your system. You can view a streaming versions here. Comments of course welcome.

The video is available on YouTube here. (Probably the best available version in terms of sound).

A PDF copy of the unfinished paper – partially covered in handwritten notes – is available here.

To_survive_daath Download

October 28, 2007
Movement and the Knights within ‘Fear and Trembling’

It is perhaps dangerous to be too assertive when giving an account of Kierkegaard. There’s a whole series of multiple meanings and possibly even the odd trap and foil for the unsuspecting, though less so than in Nietzsche. To think on from Kierkegaard, however, is to grant oneself a license to be wrong about what he said but still right in what is said. An exculpation, no doubt, but one that seems almost ‘truer’ to Kierkegaards’ thought than a slavishly accurate but effortless exegesis. Nonetheless this is an excuse even whilst it may be an exculpation.

It is with these caveats covering my back that I approach the ‘Preamble from the heart’ [Fear and Trembling: Penguin 2006, henceforth FT]. It is, to locate the exculpation within Kierkegaards’ own words, in an attempt to do some of the work so that I may get my bread with justice that this approach is made. The ‘Preamble’ is the introduction in the drama that is FT of the Knight of Resignation and the Knight of Faith within FT. We are to meet these key conceptual personae – as Deleuze would call them – as Kierkegaard attempts to conceptualise and think the problem of movement. It is how things move that is crucial to the Preamble, what it is that makes something a movement. To tighten this some, it is what makes a specific kind of movement exemplary or vital to the very notion of movement itself.

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October 18, 2007
Necessity and empiricism via Kierkegaard

The first three elements in Fear and Trembling are the ‘preface’, the ‘attunement’ and the ‘exordium’. In the preface Kierkegaard makes an almost direct, if somewhat ironic and sarcastic, appeal to the audience, an audience beyond his contemporaries. The tone ranges from a side-swipe at those who would be reading him, an almost arrogant assumption that he will be read, to a hubristic tragedy in which no matter who reads him he is to be misunderstood. It’s amusing to read these rather brash lines and there is a lightness that we read into him which might be less kindly if he were to be taken seriously. From the beginning Kierkegaard makes the reader of FT feel as though they are in the midst of someone who says a little too much for their own good, whose passion is as readable as their words. Moreoever, he does so in the mode of doubt. He makes us doubt this ‘Silentio’ from the start. He seems a little smug, a little too perfect and yet he also seems to be standing up against that mob, that crowd of dumbskulls, that queue we find ourselves in for no reason.

The attunement is far more beautiful a piece of writing, the beginning of the beauty of FT. The preface might mark its opening philosophical moment, though even then we might instead want to mark this point in the lines of the epigraph. It is the epigraph that signposts the issue or method of indirect communication with which FT is entwined. Here, in the short moment during which Tarquin slices off the heads of the poppy flowers whilst walking with the messenger, we find the idea that a story can have two drastically different meanings. The messenger might recount the story of his walk with Tarquin and gain nothing of its murderous intent, merely report accurately and verbatim – a true representation – what happened. Tarquins son might understand something different, moreover he might understand the truth of the message hidden under the representation.

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October 7, 2007
The breath as an organ

The snoring man on the train, just behind and to our left, revolts us. Their noise is more penetrating, more cutting, even though it is lower in decibel than the irritating child a few seats in front with their high pitched and hyperactive voice testing the patience of the father figure accompanying them. The snoring man is filthy in his activity, that rasping breath, that grasping for life calling out to be silenced and with its silence comes death. The sound of the breath is a broken tool that reveals its function, its equipmentality as Heidegger would call it, precisely by being heard. That filthy, contaminating breath, no gentle rythmn of life but a crushed, rushing in-out-in-out intimacy that brings the Other too close, too far within the experience of living together that repulses us within our modernity, repulses us because of its forced confinement amongst each other.
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September 10, 2007
Principles and Functions – notes

(Working notes, not likely to be accurate but part of the process of working through various thoughts as I continue writing – comments welcome if they bear this in mind.)

It is clear for anyone reading Kant that the priority of principles is central to his thinking. It is the clash between principles and experience which motivates the whole problem of the first Critique, we are told in the opening paragraphs of the ’Preface to the First Edition’(1). The nature of human reason is the problematic tension deriving from the combination of the rational principles and the sensuous experiences that constitute actual thinking. The sensuous experiences ’insure’ the ’truth and sufficiency’ of the principles – not, however, their production. The force of questioning which produces principles as answers or solutions soon finds that it goes far beyond, in its questioning, any solution we might propose. The force of questioning overwhelms the capacity to produce a testable solution. Of course, we might produce what appears as a solution, some abstract untestable principle that offers us a sense of solution to a problem but any real solution principle must needs be capable of being tested to be accepted or ’insured’ against falsehood. It is experience that is the testing ground and thus anything that is in principle beyond experience is untestable. The classic tension of the Kantian system is found in the fact that we can ask unanswerable questions.

Of course, this is not simply a Kantian tension. The very idea of an unanswerable question is, whilst peculiar in itself, something we find at various points within philosophy – for example, there is a strange resonance between the way in which Kant establishes the key productive problem of his transcendental philosophy and the way the verificationists would rule out of court any talk of God or Soul, even though they soon fell foul of the reflective moment which revealed the unverifiable dogmatism of their own central principle. This, perhaps, is not so surprising given the shared model of philosophy as a practice of giving answers which both Kant and the Verificationists possessed. The scandal of a discipline of reason that cannot provide final and definitive answers can be imputed as a motivation to Ayer as easily as Kant.
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July 17, 2007
Reading ‘The Logic of sense’: Series 2

(A slightly delayed note on the second Series due to preparations for the Volcanic Lines conference we held last week on Kant and Deleuze, a report of which is over here).

One of the most fascinating lines here in this Series is the following: “For this reason the stoics can oppose destiny and necessity” (LOS:6). A footnote follows which refers to Cicero’s De Fato. A comparison with the Epicureans immediately follows this.

What is crucial, at this point, is the way in which it is the causal relation, the cause-effect couple, which prompts these claims about the conceptualisation of necessity within the Stoics and Epicureans. The reference to Cicero is a peculiarity. I am currently reading Kant’s Logic at the same time as Deleuze’s LOS and a comment Kant makes there about Cicero offers a curious complication to Deleuze’s account. Kant claims that “Cicero was in speculative philosophy a disciple of Plato, in morality a Stoic” (Logic: Introduction, S4; 35). The complication in reading Deleuze seems to be that he is advanced as an example of the Stoic account of necessity, yet precisely in line with Kant’s characterization of him as a ’Stoic in morality’. It is not a logical account of necessity that Deleuze is focussing on, though in later sections he will refer to a notion of ’modality’, but rather the moral dimension of necessity which is tangled into the concept of ’destiny’. We might want to ask whether Deleuze too, like Cicero, might be classed as a Platonic in speculation and a Stoic in morality. There seem at least some who might want to assert just such a claim, at least in part – Badiou, for example, seems to claim a level of Platonism can be found within Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual / actual distinction.

What happens in this 2nd Series of LOS, however, is a kind of philosophical-historical conceptual topography. Deleuze brings to the foreground the concept of the ’event’ which is plainly of central importance to the whole project of LOS. In the first Series he had indicated the role of the ’depth’ of ’mad becoming’ that was incapable of being contained within a model of knowledge. The motor force of the problematic relation to identity is found in what Deleuze names there as the ’paradox of infinite identity’ which is caused by a di-directionality of couples such as cause-effect (LOS:2). The name, that which “is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir“, is that which is lost in Alice’s adventures in the realm of becoming. The name is lost within the event and yet the event is communicated through language.
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July 14, 2007