razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: deleuze

  • Reading ‘The Logic of Sense’: Preface and Chapter 1

    Reading ‘The Logic of Sense’: Preface and Chapter 1

    from+greenwich+to+london+bridge4_1082387720This is the first in a series of posts, initiated by the suggestions of Evan Duq in his blog ‘Working on concepts‘. I’m in the throes of some intensive writing practice over the summer as I try to get the first draft of my new book into shape and currently am working on a paper for the ‘Strange Encounters: Kant and Deleuze’ conference we’re organising at Greenwich…so throwing LOS into the mix should be good.

    I’m using the Athlone 1990 edition and all references are to that unless otherwise stated. Whilst this is a re-reading (in my case) of LOS I am going to approach it to a large extent as though it were a fresh reading…inevitably this will be slightly distorted by the existing annotations in the text but what I want to note is that these are reading notes rather than sustained critical commentary. Certain comments are inevitably going to be extremely tenuous and at times plain wrong…the freedom to be wrong, however, is part of the nature of the internet and why students quoting texts and online commentaries should remember caveat emptor!

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    LOS begins with a rather short and sweet preface that takes on a quite traditional role of introducing the text rather than philosophically positioning the reader in regard to the text. The first thing of note is the reference to ‘modern reader’ and a set of elements to be found within Lewis Carroll that would ‘please’ such a modern reader. The elements seem to refer to structuralist type aspects of form, as well as aspects of a psychoanalytic interest (children’s books “or, rather, books for little girls” and an explicit mention of “a profound psychoanalytic content“). Who, then, is the ‘modern reader’? Someone embedded within a psychoanalytic practice of reading? Someone embedded, moreoever, in a specifically structuralist psychoanalytic reading, ie; a Lacanian? Is the suggestion – perhaps – that Deleuze is presenting a text which should be of profound interest to the Lacanian reader and as such a common ground of discussion or theoretical concept creation? It seems likely, at least at the moment, that this is the case. If so this suggests a certain ‘audience’ for LOS – viz, the Lacanian reader, but an audience that needs to attend to something usually forgotten. “Over and above the immediate pleasure” Deleuze says (and I would want to check the French edition here to see whether jouissance is the specific term at work in this sentence) “there is something else” in the work of Carroll, that being the play of sense and nonsense. This “connection between language” (one form of sense) “and the unconscious” is readily present, Deleuze says, but he then indicates again the ‘something else’ he wants to bring to attention, “what else is this marriage connected with” (xiii). (more…)

  • Principles and Facts – notes

    Principles and Facts – notes

    There’s an interesting online psych project over here at Project Implicit…an interesting thing mentioned on Thought Capital’s blog post about the use of ’empirical data’ in ’evidenced-based meta-analyses’. I presume these EBMA’s are some sort of peculiar category of philosophical activity, perhaps connected to the idea of ’experimental philosophy’ which, whilst fascinating, seems to sometimes miss the point. Can evidence ever establish particular principles of thought? If not, then is it for a philosophy a question of giving up principles or of giving up evidence? Is there a dichotomy here that cannot (in principle or in fact) be resolved?

    This difficulty, of what we might call the distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris is critical to any attempt to understand transcendental philosophy. There is an argument being made (James Williams, Dan Smith etc) that it is in fact principles that are crucial for Deleuze, that the quid juris has in some sense a priority derivable from an affinity of Deleuze’s method with that expressed by Leibniz ’Principle of Sufficient Reason’. Everything has to have a reason for existing, a ratio existendi, rather than simply a reason for being, ratio essendi. In fact, Smith argue, Leibniz in fact added other epistemological and metaphysical conditions in the PSR with the notions of ratio cognoscendi (a reason for how we can know the thing, the principle of indiscernibles) and a ratio fiendi (reason for becoming out of that which already is or law of continuity preventing arbitrary MacGuffin like inventions during the course of an account). The PSR aims to fulfill all that we would ask for in either of the quid moves, such that a question of fact or principle is capable of being responded to by understanding the sufficient reason for a thing.

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  • Books I like and some hardware/software as well

    Books I like and some hardware/software as well

    Books I like and some hardware/software as well (not much)

    (This is a list produced by Alan Sondheim – not me – and something that he does maybe once or twice a year. I’ve known Alan online for a good few years now, in fact since I was first at University as an undergrad, and his eclectic and curious reading patterns are reflected in his strange and fascinating work as both a theorist and artist. He also simply offers leads and possible avenues of research that I simply couldn’t find anywhere else and as such is a fantastic connection to plug into. In this list I’m particularly interested in the The Alpbacj Symposium 1968 papers, the Steve Talbott, The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus and the Olympus WS-300M, …the last list of these I posted was in November last year and you can see some of Alan’s current work on avatars, utilising the Second Life interface, over here on YouTube.)

    I’m behind in my reviews; the last few months have been a mess. I may be missing some books. I may have misplaced. others. I hunger for reading, but it’s all transparent, pathetic, collapsed. There’s nothing to say about reading that hasn’t been said before. Humans compress history’s repetition until the world’s squeezed out. If I’m missing a book in what follows, forgive me; the oversight wasn’t deliberate, just an effect of physiology. The following books are in no particular order; for the most part, they’re books that have been more than useful, have been inspirational, works I’ve returned to at times. I’m including some miscellaneous reviews of software/hardware as well. (First off, apologies for the poor style below; it’s hard for me to convey sustained excitement, but such underlies most of what follows.)

    Buddhist Dictionary, Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines, Nyanatiloka, Buddhist Publication Society, Sri Lanka. This is an amazing and often technical work, documenting the terms of the Pali Canon and beyond; it has information I literally haven’t found elsewhere. The Pali vocabulary is extensive, often highly structured conceptually, and this has proved, not only to be an invaluable guide, but also an interesting read in itself.

    I am a Cat (three volumes), Soseki Natsume, translated Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson. The original Japanese work appeared in the first decade of the 20th century; it’s an amazing rumination on everything by a cat. The work is reminiscent of Sterne and I found myself enveloped in it (in a manner similar to reading something like The Journey to the West); it says a great deal about Japanese modernization and city life, and is beautifully written. It’s not an ’animal’ story in any sense of the term. The work’s available from Tuttle. (Alexanne Don introduced me to this years ago.)
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  • Various essays in progress…

    Various essays in progress…

    This time of year is always slightly hectic, with marking and ’student progress boards’ and the like – and for me it’s the first time I’ve been really involved because previously, as a visiting lecturer, most of this work was left to the full-timers. What’s good about it of course is seeing the students work come to fruition and knowing that this step is done with and the next is to come but at the same time it’s a time when my own research and writing has to be put on hold. So it’s curious to take a break and look back at what’s going on in your own work…

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  • Some links for my MA students

    First of all here’s the link to Dan Smith’s paper, which I recomend you all read as it has an excellent account of deleuze’s relation to Lebiniz. Dan is coming to Greenwich in July for the Volcanic Lines conference on Kant and Deleuze.

    Secondly here is the link to the animations and basic introduction to the infinitessimal calculus that I showed you in class.  Again, as I said then, I do not endorse anything about the site, I simply think that the animations are useful visual tools.

  • Ah Pook, the destroyer

    Ah Pook, the destroyer

    aion+roman+god+of+time.jpg_5511948381992109266One of my favourite pieces by Burroughs is the short Ah Pook discussion of time, death, control and the ‘ugly american’. I showed it to my Introduction to Philosophy class this week, at the start of the lecture, then came across it again on Muli Koppell’s blog ‘Methods and Black Squares‘ blog. The brief film animation that is famously associated with this Burroughs piece is below, though it misses out (at least in this version) Bryon Gysin’s all purpose nuclear bedtime story from the end, which I’ve previously heard attached to Ah Pook as a kind of coda.

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  • The Eternal Return of the Mack?

    The Eternal Return of the Mack?

    I’ve gone wrong somewhere with the Eternal Return idea in chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition:

    The eternal return, according to Deleuze, effectively realises Being in the following way: “Being is said in a single and same sense, but this sense is that of eternal return as the return or repetition of that of which it is said.”

    The test of something’s return is it’s excessivity, it’s becoming – different:

    “When Nietzsche says that hubris is the real problem of every Heraclitean, or that hierarchy is the problem of free spirits, he means one – and only one – thing: that it is in hubris that everyone finds the being which makes him return…”

    (Both quotations from Difference & Repetition, Continuum Press, 2004, p. 51)

    Hubris is the repetition of difference, and this repetition is the expression of univocal being. The test of returning is concerned with the idea that production is only expressed in actualising new forms, where ‘hubris’ denotes forces that transgress the qualitative state of a subject such that it is destroyed (i.e. not an oppositional but a generical difference?) and a new process of individuation starts its becoming.

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  • The method of dramatisation

    The method of dramatisation

    Report from Volcanic Lines reading group, Monday 22nd January 2007

    The essay in question for this session was ‘The Method of Dramatization’, contained in ‘Desert Islands and other texts:1953-1974’; Semiotext 2004:94-116.  I gave a short introduction, not really a paper but simply a set of thoughts and notes intended to begin the discussion…you can find the notes from my introduction and the discussion that followed over here.

    As a kind of preliminary, I just wanted to note some vague connections to phenomenological concepts, though without any intention to ascribe any value, interpretative or otherwise, to these connections. To begin nwith then the initial move to shift the nature of the question from a ‘what’ (quid) to a ‘how’ (quia) form seems in some ways like a development from the phenomenological combination of the quid-quia questions within Husserl’s noematic (quid) / noetic (quia) structure. For Husserl, of course, the quid will be ‘meaning’ or ‘essence’, whereas for someone like Sartre this seems to develop into a more basic notion of quid as investigating the thing (as an in-itself). The phenomenological shift to the combination of ‘meaning’ and ‘way of meaning’ (Husserl) as a method of returning to the things themselves could presumbaly be seen a s a development that adds the ‘how’ top the ‘what’ and in this sense Deleuze’s emphasis on the ‘how’ alone strikes me as perhaps an attempt to move forward from this phenomenological method precisely by radically breaking with the very notion of essence (in whatever form, but predominantly the Husserlian meaning-content structure) as part of an attempt to articulate his own methods’ originality.

    The other possible connection that interested me recently, though this is not directly related to the ‘Method’ essay, was the concept of a “zone of indetermination” that can be found in Deleuze’s book ‘What is philosophy?’ but which is prefigured in a very peculiar passge in Husser;s’ ‘Ideas’. In Section 27 of Ideas, famous as one of the central places in which the ‘natural attitude’ is characterised and Husserls’ concept of presence ot the world is articulated, there is this strange account of the presence we are within in the natural attitude constituting a presence to infinity, temporally, spatially and ideally. The immediate sensuous presence of the world to hand extends infinitely, although indeterminately. At the greater reaches of this extension the indeterminacy is contingent and these regions are determined as and when attention is paid to them, flickering in and out of determinate presence as they continually fall back into indeterminate presence. The regions constitute what Husserl calls a “clear or dark, distinct or indistinct co-present margin” (Ideas:S27) and this margin forms an “empty mist of dim indeterminacy” which is precisely named as “the zone of indeterminacy” which is characterised, as previously mentioned, as infinite.

    Turning back to the ‘Method’ essay then the first thing to note is that the shift in question structure from what (quid) to how (quia) is argued on what almost appears a pragmatic basis. The ‘what’ question is situated as the root of the aporetic dialogues of Plato and Deleuze argues that in the practical, substantive Platonic books, such as The Republic, the ‘what’ question is demoted in favour of a more open question-set. Presumably, then, there is this sense of the ‘what’ question – which we might tentatively characterise as the ‘core Socratic’ rather than ‘Platonic’ moment – being impractical. Reasons’ practice, perhaps, is at stake.

    The next notable distinction I was interested in was that between the essence and accident and the differentiation between contradiction (from Hegel) and vice-diction (from Leibniz). In particular the phrase “to have the inessential include the essential” (Desert Islands:96). As James Williams points out in his ‘Introduction’ to ‘Difference and Repetition’ (DR), this notion can be understood via the arguments about the essential difference made by the inessential, with the example of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon being that found within Leibniz (Leibniz; Discourse on metaphysics:S13). The example of Caesar is used by Leibniz to argue for his notion of a ‘complete concept’ being one in which all the predicates are contained within the subject, such that the inessential (predicates) are part of the essential (subject). Deleuze seems to have a form of almost reversed Leibnizianism in mind when he talks of the inessential (predicates) including the essential (subject).

    Deleuze goes on to explicitly state the classically sounding philosophical question of ‘what is a thing in general’ (Desert Islands:ibid) and answers with the twofiold characterisation of a thing as having qualities and extension. (It is worth noting, however, that these qualities and extsnions are “the conditon of the representation of things in general”). The concept of extension is rapidly stretched, however, and ideas such as ‘territoriality’ (much more prominent in later works such as ‘A Thousand Plateaus’) are used to push extension beyond the more commonplace 3-dimensionality of an object towards a notion of ‘organisation’, connecting it to notions such as grid, network and suggesting, perhaps, something like the ‘meshwork’ concept Manuel de Landa has put forward. The notion of the ‘thing in general’ (asked, amusingly, in the form of a ‘what’ question) appears designed to govern our understanding of the process of differentiation. Here another note should be marked, since the concept of ‘differentiation’ as found in the ‘Method’ essay is, it appears, prior to the split c/t notion found in DR (ie; Athlone 1994:209). In DR the ‘t’ version refers to the virtual process whilst the ‘c’ version refers to the actual and the entwinement as a ‘c/t’ mark refers to the reciprocal nature of the process of determination, reciprocal between the actual individuation and the virtual Idea. Within the ‘Method’ essay the ‘t’ version appears to be referring to the actualised ‘thing in general’.

    The crucial notion for Deleuze, however, is that the virtual needs to be posited as the condition of experience of the thing in general and the actual thing in general has qualities and extension or organisation produced by the STD’s – the ‘spatio-temporal differences’ that underlie it. These STD’s are both conceptual and natural and ‘in this sense’, Deleuze suggests, “the whole world is an egg”. The STD’s presuppose a field of intensity which they are immanent to and this intensity is precisely difference itself, hence pushing the need to develop a concept of difference (as against a merely conceptual difference – this after all being the theme of DR) in order to grasp these STD’s as the condition of the world. Differences of intensity, Deleuze suggests, must communicate in order to produce these STD’s and the communicative element, that which brings teh differences together is the ‘obscure precursor’. (A brief note: another translation one participant had with them used the phrase ‘dark precursor, clearly akin to that used in DR, and this ‘dark’ or ‘obscure’ difference couldn’t be directly checked at the time as no French version of the ‘Method’ essay is to hand. Clearly the ‘obscure’ translation seems to connect the notion of the precursor to the concepts of the clear-confused and distinct-obscure more immediately).

    With the notion of STD comes the concept of ‘larval subjects’ and the whole gamut of pre-individual subjectivities that Deleuze will maintain as central to his work. The STD’s, however, form the condition for all concepts, representations and things and the crucial part of the essay in many ways is the structural role that is given to the STD’s. For Deleuze the STD’s are the conditions of experience (not, note, possible experience but, as he will call it in DR, always real experience – the conditions are not limited by the necessary and the impossible as they must be within Kant’s structure of possible experience). Just as in Kant, therefore, something like a schema appears needed to connect the conditions and the experience and it is precisely the method of dramatisation that is named as structurally akin to the Kantian schema – “What I am calling a drama particularly resembles the Kantian schema” (Desert Islands:99). ‘Drama’ refers to the STD’s as a collection of “abstract lines coming from the unextended and formless depth” that is “comprised of pure determinations, agitating time and space, directly affecting the soul” (ibid:98). The notion of this ‘drama’ is explicitly drawn from Artaud’s cocnept of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. For Deleuze the necessity of ‘the method of dramatisation’ is drawn from the necessity to extend the Kantian schema and its inability to determine the concept and is carried out because, for Deleuze, “poure spatio-temporal dynamisms have the power to dramatise concepts, because first they actualise, incarnate, Ideas” (ibid:99). In reference to this I think a key notion of the dramatisation of the Idea can be found in the example of Lenin that Deleuze uses in DR (Atlone 1994:190) where the ‘two faces’ of the Idea, love and anger, the search for fragments and the condensation of singularities, are found clearly. It also points us to indicate that STD’s dramatise concepts as differentiated incarnate actualities and in order to do so they will need to dramatise the concept as having a certain quality and extension (a species and organisation). This also suggests the need for the STD’s themselves to have a double aspect.

    Discussion:

    (no doubt a very limited account here as my note taking is not as rigorous as other members of the VL seminar series we could mention)

    There was some comments on the quia / how question format, with the suggestion that the answers to quia questions are not entities but rather processes (perhaps akin to Whitehead…) and that there are different types of answer to different types of question.

    The issue of examples came up, with some suggestion that the examples Deleuze uses might somehow limit his accout of conditions, infecting it with the empirical, specifically his own bourgeois tastes. Comment was made that Derrida has suggested that a focus on exmaples can reveal the implicit presuppositons of philosophers, it being one of the routes through which ‘conceptual contraband’ can be smuggled in. It is also not just a matter of purifying the examples since there might be nothing but a set of examples.

    The role of ‘anger’ came up, connecting the quote on Lenin in DR to an asnwer Deleuze gives to questions about the ‘Method’ in which he connects anger to larval subjects, using the idea of an explosion of anger as an example of the larval subject (Desert Islands:107,108).

    The role of the dark precursor was questioned (see comment above about ‘dark’ or ‘obscure’) and the thought raised there there might be something interesting in Agambens’ discussion of the ‘dark’ and the problems associated with it (I am not familiar with this, so perhaps someone else can comment further?).

    A brief discussion touched on the role of the familiar, again in part with reference to examples and the abstact nature of the ‘Method’ essay. Many artists, it was suggested, are working with Deleuze enthusiastically because they come across something familiar in his thinking about the world and his method of making the familiar unfamiliar – this was connected to Novalis and his concept of the rasing something to its ‘highest power’, clearly of central concern for Deleuze more widely.

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  • Images of difference

    Images of difference


    odilon_redon_originofvision    Originally uploaded by razorsmile.

    On Wednesday this week (24th Jan) in the MA Seminar I spoke about the role of images within ‘Difference and Repetition’ (DR). They are important because the thought of difference that Deleuze is developing within DR is a ‘difference before identity’ and our thought patterns and culture are so imbued with ‘identity’ thinking that it can be strange to try and think of a primary ontological difference. The beginning of Chapter 1 of DR (Difference in itself) is ripe with a series of images, from the lightning flash, the black indeterminacy as against the white indeterminacy, as well as Goya and Odilon Redon in reference to ‘chiaroscuro’. The image here is from Odilon Redon and is called ‘The origin of vision’. In it I find something of this dark chaotic difference that is the primary ontological category and the ‘individuation’ (coming to be) of an object or organ before it’s integration into any sort of system of organisation that might constitute a ‘full identity’. The single eye and the feathered surroundings that appear like the eyelashes catch a sense of an almost fetishistic vision, one in which we catch sight of things not through a simple appearance but precisely because the thing, our interests and the relations between them constitute an individuation from out of a chaotic set of forces that is difference in itself.
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  • Entering the conversation of Deleuze

    Entering the conversation of Deleuze

    I discussed, in the seminar of the 17th, some of the difficulties we have in approaching the text Difference and repetition, not least amongst these the inherent sense of a ‘conversation being overheard’, something I think is interestingly shown in the essay ‘The method of dramatisation’ in which Deleuze presents some of the central concepts of DR to the French academy (I will be examining this essay in more depth in the Volcanic Lines seminar on Monday 22nd). There’s a lovely description of this ‘overhearing of a conversation’ contained in a quote on the following blog…philosophy.com

    This notion of an ongoing conversation that Deleuze is engaged in has a number of pertinent implications. Firstly, if we simply accept that it is the case, then the identification of the various positions that are being discussed is crucially important to developing a critical understanding of Deleuze’s ideas in DR – such as the work on gens/species that we’ll be looking at with regard Aristotle. Secondly, if we question why Deleuze presents like this – aside from the ‘historical’ approach that was part of his academic-cultural background – then we might want to say that it is in part because to present, as an objective observer and assessor, philosophical arguments is always to present an object (such as a concept or argument) as fixed and clear, as identifiable for assessment. This assumes, of course, something like an ‘ideal object’ that can be identified and understood. If, as we might suggest is the case for Deleuze, a concept in fact arises from a struggle or inter-play of more than one idea, then to grasp the concept we in some sense have to re-enact the inter-play (the ‘field’) from which the concept derives. We need to contextualise it, though not historically but conceptually. In fact, even the context is not enough, we somehow have to re-animate the concept in order to find its limits and virtues, ‘what it can do’. The issue of judgement becomes less crucial than the animation of a set of problems in which the concepts make sense, precisely as ‘differences that make a difference’. It is this task that forms the ‘method of dramatisation’ in which we have to do more than merely describe (interpret) a concept from outside but where we must, instead, find the problem (situation or case, the ‘scene’, if we were to pursue the metaphor from drama), animate the characters involved in the problem (the various concepts) and then understand the inter-play between these characters in the specific scene. Through doing this we open up both an understanding of the philosophical problems a concept is responding to as well as open up a space for critical response in the form of creating other dynamics or differences from those that already exist.