Notes on: Deleuze, G. (2006) Two Regimes of
Madness: texts and interviews 1975--95. Ed D
Lapoujade. Trans. Ames Hodges & Mike Taormina.
New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series
Dave Harris
[brief notes on these brief pieces. Unusually
readable on the whole. Useful background to a
number of other positions --eg on language, the
emotions, smooth space, duration, the
background/intros to the books etc]
1. Two Regimes of Madness
This is about how power exerts itself and why it
is everywhere. There are several 'lines' at work
[like the ones in the Plateau
on the novella]
We might consider the puppeteer who works
with a vertical line in order to make the puppet
move. This is an abstract line composed of many
singularities 'as stopping points' (11), although
these do not break the line. The abstract line is
linked to the concrete movements of the puppet but
not in any kind of binary or biunivocal way.
There are also curved lines expressed in say an
arm or a tilting head. These consist of supple
segments. A third line offers harder sorts of
segments, where the puppet corresponds to the
moments of the story. Segmentable lines might well
display structural binary relations, but this
still leaves a power with the puppeteer to convert
the abstract line to these two segmented lines.
Banking in capitalism operates with two similar
forms of money, an abstract version which does
finance, monetary creation and so on, with its
singularities, and then a more concrete one more
tangible money as payment, something capable of
being segmented and subdivided. And this in turn
produces a third segmented line, all the goods
produced as a whole, total consumption. Banking
gets its power by being able to convert the
abstract to the concrete lines.
In another example, there is absolute war,
something 'irresolvable, singular, mutant,
abstract' (12), a war flow found in war machines
independent of states. States by contrast do not
attempt to construct such a war machine, but
rather to appropriate it through the conduct of
wars, including both limited and total wars, and
actual policies of states can affect and limit the
possibilities to give the third segmented line.
Power really resolves again in the conversion of
the abstract to the segmented.
The three lines do not have the same pace or speed
or even the same territories, and thus not the
same deterritorializations. At the human level,
schizoanalysis might well identify these crossing
lines of desire, abstract lines of escape and
lines of segmentarity both supple and hard, and
how one gets converted into the other.
Guattari is pursuing a cartography of semiotic
regimes. An example here is the two regimes of
signs in 19th-century psychiatry. The first regime
saw signs functioning in a complex way, where a
sign defers to another sign, one sign induces
another in human action and so on. Double
articulation here means that a sign always refers
to another sign, and that the apparently infinite
ensemble of signs refer to some greater signifier
— as in despotic Imperial or paranoid regimes of
signs [and Freud's Oedipus?] . In the second
regime a small bundle of signs begins to flow
along a certain line producing a linear network,
and here a sign can defer to a [human presumably]
subject. This produces delirium where one line is
pursued to the end before another one is
initiated. Clinically this has produced two kinds
of delirium, 'paranoid and passional' [citing
Clerembault]. Psychiatry classically has not
distinguished these regimes, and this results in
anomaly — the paranoid still has impeccable
reasoning, the passional man shows madness only in
'rash acting out'(14) [apparently Foucault
discusses both].
These regimes of signs cross different forms of
stratification, in this case social formations. It
is not that emperors are paranoid, but more that
the Imperial formation operates with a single
great signifier which dominates the network of
signs which then refer to each other. These are
circulated by special people, interpreters, who
will 'freeze the signifier' (15). There are still
subjects to receive the message, but in each case
there is also a possibility that the signified
will generate more meaning, requiring more
control.
In this way, social formations might appear to
work well, but there is always a potential for
escape — the messenger just might not arrive,
those on the periphery will be torn between
obeying the central interpretation or to follow
tangents of deterritorialization, to become a
nomad, to emit their own 'a-signifying particles'
in Guattari's terms. An example here might be the
late Roman Empire and the Temptations felt by the
German marginals who both want to integrate
themselves into the Empire, but also respond to
pressures to form a line of escape and become a
war machine, 'marginal and non-assimilable' (16).
Capitalism also seems to function well. It is
dominated by passional delirium, where
decentralised bundles of signs pursue lines
producing effects like movements of money capital,
subjects appearing as the agents of capital and
work, inequality. The subject is told that 'the
more he obeys the more he commands since he obeys
only himself' [nicked from Guattari?]. The
[self-policing] obedient subject replaces the
commanding subject, giving a different regime of
signs from imperialism. It is more integrative of
peripheral subjects, and it offers 'freezing
nomadism in its tracks'. We can trace it in the
revolution in philosophy from an imperial stage
with an ultimate signifier to one which stressed
the subject as a passional delirium [from theology
to humanism?]. Even here, there are still 'leaks'
since this kind of subjectivation always produces
transversals marginal subjectivities, junctions,
lines of deterritorialization, 'an internal
nomadism' new a-signifying particles — Watergate,
global inflation. [Classic vacillation between
despair and hope].
2. Schizophrenia and society
Schizophrenics do not live as a global machine:
they are instead traversed by machines. The organs
are not provisional machines but only machine
parts, random components connected with other
external components [like objects]. Once these
organs are 'plugged into flows' (17) they can then
develop into complex machines. Schizophrenic
machinery is 'totally disparate', and this gives
us an idea of how the unconscious actually works
as 'a factory' [A case study in Bettelheim
illustrates this, where a particular child sees
himself as being plugged into motors,
carburettors, steering wheels and electric
circuits, and is unable to function without these
imaginary connections expressed in rituals].
Schizophrenics permanently flow along machinic
lines, constructing a circuit, for example from a
walk in the park. Their utterances are the product
of machine assemblages. Wolfson explains the
origins of his invented language in terms of a
machine with components like a finger in one ear,
a foreign book in one hand.
These disparate elements that are put into play
produce aggregate machines in schizophrenics. They
work in order to make a flow or put something to
flight. The machine is not even always made up of
parts from pre-existing machines. The parts are
related to each other precisely because they have
no other relation, almost as if their very
difference becomes a reason to group them
together. They are not able to construct
singularities [from regular flows] but operate
with disparate and irreducible elements connected
by relations like the force of desire. Their
unconsciousness is made of left over elements put
together to become a machine, like the apparently
random elements mentioned by Beckett characters,
producing 'a properly schizophrenic non-– sense'
(19).
Another theme is offered by the notion of the
organless body [instead of the more usual
BwO?] with no working organs, a body
'swollen like a giant molecule or
non-differentiated egg'. It produces catatonic
stupor. It seems to arise from a struggle with the
earlier phase of exaggerated workings of machines,
and this struggle produces characteristics
schizophrenic anxieties. However, it is not organs
but organism which is the enemy, 'any organization
which imposes on the organs a regime of
totalisation, collaboration, synergy, integration,
inhibition and disjunction' (20). It is this
threat that leads schizophrenics to reject the
organs as instruments of persecution [you can't
help but wonder if this is an extreme version of
bourgeois distaste for the body — are
schizophrenics mostly bourgeois?]. The organless
body has to recruit the organs and make them
function in a different way, so that the organ
becomes the whole body, miraculously transformed,
following a different sort of machinic regime
altogether — 'for example the mouth – anus – lung
of the anorexic', or the bizarre bodies described
in Burroughs, or the struggle in Artaud against
the organism and against God, or Schreber's
alternating rejection and attraction of his body.
So the two poles, catatonia and organ machines,
are never isolated. Sometimes one gets the upper
hand leading to paranoia and repulsion, sometimes
the other leads to miraculous or fantastic forms
of schizophrenia. This is just like the way the
egg can be understood not as a non-differentiated
milieu, but as traversed by dimensions and
potentials, thresholds and zones. A variable
intensity flows through it. Similarly,
schizophrenics have 'a matrix of intensity' and
see the organs as intensive, producing various
intensive states, an intensive journey. The
organless body operates at zero intensity, but it
is enveloped by intensive quantities, the organ
machines which will fill up one space or another.
The organless body is the pure intensive matter,
something stationary but capable of producing
organ machines with their own powers. The very
structure of schizophrenic delirium shows that
beneath delirious thinking or hallucination there
is something more profound, a notion of intensity
as a becoming or a passage, and migration, a
feeling which records the intensive relationship
between the organless body and the machine organs.
Pharmacology offers a great deal of potential here
as does molecular biology, 'chemistry at once
intensive and experiential' experimenting with
schizoid states induced through hallucinogenic
drugs, various drug therapies to calm anxiety in
order to dismantle catatonia.
The symptoms of schizophrenia are difficult to
systematize and make coherence as a syndrome.
Earlier attempts have mentioned disaggregation and
catatonia, while others have stressed functional
dislocations of associations which can lead to a
dissociation of the whole person, a dissociation
from reality and society, with a fully autonomous
inner life closed in on itself [once called autism
apparently]. The condition tends to be defined in
terms of the disturbed personality as a whole,
with the symptoms as expressions of this
disturbance. Yet others have talked about
different forms of being in the world and
relations to space and time, one of which has led
to an attempt to repair associations enough to
pursue conventional Freudian analysis.
However, these accounts do not stress the positive
traits. There are negative ones in the form of
deficits and associations. Psychoanalysis has
often found it difficult to deal with
schizophrenia as well as other psychoses, and has
tended to prioritize neurosis. For Freud, the
difference turned on whether reality principles
were maintained and complexes repressed, or
whether reality was destroyed by turning away from
the external world. Lacan has a different
approach, referring to 'psychotic foreclosure'
which fails to operate in the symbolic order, and
instead grasps the symbolic as hallucinations in
the real. Schizophrenia as negative, as lacking
something has also led to a search for origins,
say in the maternal role such as to limit the
classic Oedipal structure [including British
anti-psychiatry], especially if there is an
absence of the signifier of the father. This
particular approach has not proved to be very
successful, however, nor has the overall emphasis
on schizogenetic families — the contradictory
messages are 'in fact a banal part of the daily
existence of every family' (25).
The schizophrenic as lacking something, including
a normal family has failed to grasp the syndrome:
'Beckett and Artaud have said all there is to say
about it',an example of artists grasping things
better than scientists. It is not just a matter of
reproducing an imaginary family story based on a
lack. On the contrary, there is 'an overflowing of
history', covering all the elements of history
['universal history'] and involving historical
knowledge of, for example, kingdoms, wars and
revolutions. The manifest content of delirium is
not particularly relevant. Rather, desire makes a
whole social and historical field relevant, even
where delirium involves the family — there are
still forces acting on families which are 'extra
familial' (26). There is no articulation between
schizophrenic discourse and the discourse of
history, which we can see with the frequent
appearance of proper names, often referring to
'races, continents, classes, persons', although it
is proper names not actual persons.
We might think of more positive terms, especially
if we do not wish just to silence schizophrenics.
Machinic relations are not just dissociations but
more positive outcomes. Autism is not the best
word to describe the organless body.
Schizophrenics do not lose reality so much as
being unbearably affected by it. We can see
schizophrenia as a positive process, something
which involves a break with reality but only to
lead to 'a kind of trip through "more reality," at
once intensive and terrifying, following lines of
flight that engulfed nature and history, organism
and spirit' (27).
This is a difference with paranoia, with not so
much a dominant combination of signs, but rather a
series of machinic assemblages, 'tiny
multiplicities' rather than vast territories,
'active lines of flight'(28). It seems to be more
common because of particular 'precise mechanisms
of a social political and economic nature' which
have broken with the old notions of codes and
territories and which offer instead 'widespread
decoding and deterritorialization' [the basis of
the fascist reading of Deleuze]. It is not a
matter of restoring codes and territories, but
developing even more self decoding and self
deterritorialization. The real problem is to make
sure that a breakthrough does not become a
breakdown [with Laing cited], preventing catatonic
stupor and anxiety or exhaustion. Here, the
conditions of the hospital itself are important,
and the question arises of the best kind of group
or collectivity — that and the ability to harness
'the power of a lived creativity'.
Chapter 3 Proust round table
[Much of the Deleuze contribution is already found
in his book on Proust,
especially the last chapter. This may be the first
draft of it?]
Barthes thinks that Proust offers a particular
kind of 'perforated' discourse (29) with
inexhaustible material, 'always displaced when it
returns'. It also illustrates the desire for
criticism.
Deleuze focuses on the problem of madness in
Proust — de Charlus and Albertine. However the
narrator can be seen as in charge of this madness.
He has 'no organs'(30) [he is disembodied] he can
only respond to signs, like a spider responding to
vibrations in its web, without perceptions or
sensations. The resulting vision resembles that of
a fly, a nebula with bright points, as in the
nebula of Charlus. The narrator sees singularities
inside the nebula, eyes or a voice. With the
Albertine nebula, there is originally a collection
of young girls with singularities, a global vision
at first. Then the singularities produce a series
— Charlus's three speeches [interest/disavowal,
opposition between himself and the other
characters, madness with speech going off track].
There are multiple Albertine series, punctuated by
sadomasochism, and ending with an explosion where
there are only little particles of Albertine in a
transversal dimension. This is another kind of
vegetal understanding, 'a plant like
compartmentalisation' (33), demonstrated best in
the first kiss with Albertine: there is the nebula
of the face, then multiple Albertines, then a
blind experience of Albertine's breaking up.
Genette says the novel presents us with a
challenge for conventional hermeneutics which was
paradigmatic or metaphorical, to develop a new one
that is syntagmatic and metonymical. It is not
just a matter of recurrent motifs which can be
analysed into thematic objects in a network, which
have long been the basis of literary criticism.
Others have noticed the sporadic occurrences of
characters, but there are still unifying themes —
alcohol and sexuality are metaphorically
equivalent, so our displacement and delay with
Albertine which occurs in a number of places and
times, as does the castle in Combray. The
difficulties in connecting these elements arises
because Proust was interested in dispersion and
dissociation as well, an expanding universe from
an original junction of, say, Marcel and Swann,
the original simple connection between the
Magdalen and the cobblestones. This means that
context is important to limit the significance on
symbols, 'an instrument to reduce meaning' (35),
but the context, the space of and in the text,
also generates sense. Hence the possibility for a
syntagmatic hermeneutics to show textual variation
over time, the effects of 'difference, modulation
and alteration'. Perhaps the critic also needs to
interpret variations.
Barthes replies that this would still be
hermeneutic, with a 'vertical climb to essential
object'. Simply describing the writing of
variations would just be a semiology, which
Foucault once opposed to hermeneutics.
Richard wants to identify different themes or
motifs, including the possibility readers are
offered the chance to liberate the different
constitutive elements and thus connect them with
other objects: objects are not finally defined,
and we can use other qualities to find other
motifs [the verticality of the castle keep can be
phallic or erotic, especially since sex scenes
take part in it, and there can be an abiding theme
of depth and clandestinity, including the Paris
subway stations where homosexuals met]. What makes
things thematic is their ability to be divided and
distributed in networks, in woven textures,
including 'a vast signifying spiderweb' (38). They
offer us broken series which can be continually
re-encountered or traversed. Indeed, traversing as
in deleuzian transversals involves relays between
different modalities, but the issue is why the
transversal should be privileged in Deleuze's
reading as opposed to all the other structures
like 'focality symmetry and laterality' (38).
Deleuze replies that a transversal dimension is
neither simply horizontal or vertical, assuming
that it lies on a plane. The issue is why Proust
might need this. One thing is that there is a
great deal of noncommunication, the characters
live in boxes, with their own properties or indeed
possessions. When they do communicate, it is
'aberrent', just like the form of the relation
between the bee and the orchid [a bumblebee this
time]. This mad vision is far more plant-based
than animal-based, as in the analysis of human
sexuality as 'an affair of flowers' – everyone is
hermaphrodite but forced to undergo sexual
fertilization. For example with males and females,
there will be female and male parts as well and
this means four possibilities — relating to the
female part of a woman or the male part of the
woman, and the same for women. This is a form of
communication but between otherwise closed boxes
with openings. The way these relations develop
between orchids and bees is an example of 'an
a-parallel evolution' (40) [a rather confusing
note suggests that this is a reference to the work
of a certain R Chauvin]. In another example, the
narrator runs from one window to the other on a
train journey. Nothing communicates naturally,
'the unity is not in what is seen. The only
possible unity has to be sought in the narrator in
his spider behaviour weaving his web from one
window to the other'. The search is pursued by the
narrator and 'all of the other characters are only
boxes, mediocre or splendid boxes' [another
example of what came to be defined as the realist
text with the omniscient narrator linking together
what the characters saw and thought — for Marxist
critics, this was an ideological positioning --
but see below. Certainly, Deleuze does not seem to
discuss here any possible activity by the reader
to impose any kind of narrative, although he has
more faith in the viewer of avant-garde cinema to
do so]…
It is not that the narrator comes to understand or
know the nature of time [this is the ideological
moment in realism], but rather that he knows what
he has been doing from the beginning, knowing he
is a spider, knowing that madness has always been
there, that people are connected in a web. This
makes the whole work an example of the transversal
dimension.
Doubrovsky says there are also signs of other
major 'psychological laws'. Deleuze replies that
these are localized, and, because they are 'laws
of series' they are never the last word: there is
something deeper. The apparent laws of lying or
jealousy like this, so are the planes crossed by
Albertine's face. Proust manipulates these laws
with humorous intent, and this raises an obvious
problem for [straight] interpretation. There is
always humour in a great author [the only example
is a rather obscure one where Charlus rebukes the
young Marcel as not really caring for his
grandmother at all — this is a prediction that the
narrator's love for his grandmother is not the
whole story, cannot be].
Questions from the audience, for Barthes and
Doubrovsky [who attempts to make all the different
perspectives agree, in the sense that they all
establish a network of differences, and that we
can all see Proust as mildly mad — 'loony'].
Ricardou and Genette discuss the similarities
between Proust and Roussel. Roussel also arranges
an endless proliferation of parentheses inside
other parentheses dispersing the themes, but does
this presuppose that there was an original unity
[called an 'Osiriac' approach, assuming a great
deal of knowledge about Osiris]. At the same time,
Roussel offers us an impossible puzzle because
there are so many separated parentheses that they
can never be recomposed into a unity, hence a new
theme of 'impossible reunification' (43). Is it
that Roussel simply mastered a method more
thoroughly than Proust did, and to what extent do
all texts illustrate distance and separation and
so on? Barthes adds that we can see examples in
music of the development of theme and variation,
although notes that in a particular piece by
Beethoven [variations on a waltz by Diabelli] the
original theme is only there as a joke and the
variations are so substantial that they can no
longer be seen as just variations: the result is
'a metaphor, but without an origin' (45)
Another question raises the issue of Proust's
method. Deleuze thinks that the narrator does
develop the spider strategy as his work
progresses. Doubrovsky thinks there are several
methods, turning on relations between the narrator
as a me and as an I [my terms though]. Genette
says we must distinguish between the narrator and
protagonist. It is the protagonist that learns the
spider method, but the narrator's method is still
to be discussed [the narrator does realism? The
narrator does deleuzian philosophy?].
The questioner then discusses whether there is a
difference between a method that develops little
by little and one that appears only at the end —
Deleuze says they are the same, it is just that
the method is defined right at the end as an
abstract one, not entangled with content. The
questioner wants to ask whether the will not to
understand is not part of the method as well,
involving rejecting obvious understandings in
favour of instinct, which is proved right at the
end. Deleuze says that this method 'functioned
well' in this case but is not universal, merely
developed for this particular work. The method is
not set out at the start, not really even evoked.
The example of the madeleine shows that an
explicitly methodological effort is required from
the narrator, the first 'scrap of method in
practice' (48), but the inadequacies of this early
effort are only discussed right at the end, in
another mode, as the result of a revelation.
Throughout the narrator has to be open to what
constrains or hurts him, and this might be seen as
a method as well.
Another question asks about the role of belief
arising from impressions. Deleuze sees this as the
world of perception and intellect on the one hand
and the world of signals on the other — belief
simply means that a signal has been received.
Spiders have to believe in vibrations of the web
even if they do not believe in flies. Objects only
exist if they emit signals that energize the web.
That requires them to be caught in a web at a
particular moment.
One question asks about the difference between
being mad and being loony. Deleuze says you can
note the use that Proust himself makes of the term
madness, in the The Prisoner, saying that
it is madness that really worries people rather
than crime, and that this explains the disturbing
effects of Charlus, who is not only
homosexual and aggressive, but something more
worrying, mad. If we needed a name, we could say
that the world of Proust is a schizophrenic one.
Doubrovsky thinks the narrator is not completely
mad but that he struggles with madness. There may
be more serious neurosis at work with constant
repetition of the stories and situations,
obsession rather than simple coincidence, one that
even breaks with narrative realism and replaces it
with delirium.
Barthes is asked about some of his earlier work on
the pleasure of the text. He replies that
examining the pleasures in the text might need to
be much more developed, especially with texts that
have broken with conventional narratives and
stories and their traditional comforts. Generally,
it is important to de-structure texts: it is a bit
like free-form music. The text becomes like 'sheet
music full of holes with which one will be able to
operate variations' (53). This in turn raises the
issue of what exactly is the Proustian text. [And
it might be a way of exploring the pleasures of
the skilled reader, presumably?
Richard says that everyone seems to agree that
Proust features 'the perspective of dispersal,
fragmentation, and discontinuity', but there are
also ideological themes as well, organizing
descriptions into, say, 'ways', or the ability of
characters to tie together threads that were once
seen as separate. How important does Barthes think
this sort of ideology might be? Barthes accepts
that it does appear at the end, and may be
described as 'the text's misunderstanding of
itself' (54) [the writing itself does not
recognize the impact of its own ideology?].
Richard suggests that the ideology still
structures the text and sometimes looks like a
deleuzian practice. It may be true that the main
characters only understand the meaning of episodes
later, but there is already 'a theoretical
presupposition and certainty of what is the value
of the experience to be interpreted later'.
Ricardou does accept that there are ideological
elements, but sees them as having two functions.
[The first sees ideological themes represented in
the text]. The second one might even be
opposed to the functioning of the text, so that
fiction and narration come into opposition and we
have not a metaphor but an antithesis. We could
even see it as 'deception' (55), where dispersion
in itself awakens a desire for later gathering
together. It might be seen best in the theme of
'the same becoming other' as much as the other way
around.
Genette says that theory can lag behind practice
in Proust and in many other writers, and his
aesthetic and literary ideology might be behind
the times for us. It might also be the case that
the literary theory is more subtle than the actual
syntheses of the novel — for example he suggest
that readers have to read for themselves rather
than offering a final closure attached to a
classical work. We have also learned about
Proust's texts as he continued to write volumes
and to reveal 'pre texts and para texts' (56). We
still do not have all of the text, and may never
have it.
An audience question reverts to the term madness,
and specifically to why Deleuze thinks that
Charlus is mad. Deleuze says we can find this in
the text. Anyway it is not that important. The
questioner insists that madness might also be
apparent when coincidences pile up towards the end
— we could read this psychologically as proof of
[Proust's] madness?
Doubrovsky thinks that the writer tributes various
disorders to others, including homosexuality and
madness, but thinks of himself as suffering a
psychosomatic illness. There may indeed be an
ideology guiding the construction of his universe,
but there is also a specific mental universe,
which may even be unconscious — the story is being
told but also being destroyed [revealed as a
story]. The questioner asks if this is just an
argument that anything non-realist must be mad,
but Doubrovsky sees the attack on realism as a
major discovery of modern writing [that doesn't
always suggest madness].
Another questioner asks about the economy of
pleasure, and asks who's pleasure this is. Doesn't
Proust write 'beyond the pleasure principle'?
(58), and hasn't the current stress on the
pleasure of the reader missed out the economic
investments that the writer deploys? Barthes
agrees that this might be a future discovery, and
further anticipates that pleasure itself might be
dissolved back into desire and fantasy. The
questioner thinks that this is exactly the
pleasure expressed by the critic!
The question for Deleuze takes up the issue of
Proust's violence towards himself, but wants to
know how Proust discovers things that do violence
to him. Deleuze replies that for Proust the whole
world of signals and signs does violence. The
questioner asks whether or not there are other
important series at work, connected with
sexuality, for example, and the deep social
difference between the sexes Deleuze insists that
there is no separation between the world of signs
and the world of sexuality. The questioner thinks
that it is inscribed somewhere else, but Deleuze
says that especially for Proust, the world of
signs is 'the world of the hermaphrodite... that
does not communicate with itself: it is the world
of violence' (60).
Chapter 4. On the Vincennes Department of
Psychoanalysis
There is been a purge of lecturing staff in the
Department. Deleuze says it is Stalinism. It is
based apparently on the instructions of Lacan, 'in
the name of a mysterious matheme of
psychoanalysis' (62). This particular kind of
psychoanalysis acts 'as a kind of terrorism',
seeing any resistance to its knowledge claims as
unhealthy — the 'blackmail of the unconscious of
the opposition'.
Chapter 5. Author's Note for the Italian
Edition of Logic of Sense
The book may need to be read benevolently to
regain its relevance. It was the first time
experimenting with a form that is not traditional
philosophy. Lewis Carroll was an inspiration for
thinking of different spatial dimensions or
'topological axes'(63) for thought. The classic
approach is to think in terms of depth and height,
and this is found in the Adventures in
Wonderland, but in Looking Glass
there is an emphasis instead on surfaces, and it
is not a matter of sinking or ascending but rather
sliding. [Sylvie and Bruno is different
with two adjoining stories folded into each
other].
In Logic of Sense,
the intention is to show how thoughts can be organized
according to these similar axes, classical thought
with height and depth, the Stoics with surfaces.
Thought can take on different topologies as it
develops its own 'celestial map'. Pursuing these
different axes produces different ways of
speaking, different languages and style.
Difference and
Repetition still operated with
classical heights and depths, where intensity was
a matter of depth, something coming from the
depths. In Logic of Sense the emphasis is
on surfaces. The concepts remain the same:
'"multiplicities," "singularities," "intensities,"
"events," "infinities," "problems," "paradoxes"
and "propositions"' (65) but their organization is
different. Similarly the method adopted a serial
method relating to surfaces and the language
changed, becoming more intensive and attempting to
'move along the path of very small spurts'.
Critics have said it still looks too
self-satisfied over psychoanalysis [? Confident it
has dealt with it?]. Deleuze says it was trying to
make psychoanalysis less offensive, as a surface
art, dealing with surface entities ['(Oedipus was
not a bad person, he had good intentions…)']. and
the main psychoanalytic concepts remain.
Since he met Guattari, it became impossible to
just refer to his own thoughts, however. He and
Félix pursue new directions 'simply because we
felt like doing so', and Anti-Oedipus
has neither depth nor surface. Instead, everything
happens 'upon a sort of spherical body… The
Organless Body' (66). They intended to be the
'Humpty Dumpty of philosophy, or its Laurel and
Hardy'. Politics took the place of psychoanalysis.
Method became a matter of micropolitics and
analysis schizoanalysis, studying multiplicities
upon the different types of organless bodies —
'rhizome instead of series says Guattari'. Anti-Oedipus
is a good beginning but the trick is not be stuck
with it — 'the secret is to become invisible and
to make a rhizome without putting down roots'.
Chapter 6. The Future of Linguistics
Henri Gobard suggests four types of language —
vernacular, vehicular, (to do with exchange,and
circulation), referential, (national cultural
language designed to reconstruct the past),
mythical (referring to the spiritual or magical
homeland). Some of these may exist only as dialect
or jargon. The point is these languages are in
actual conflict and languages are to be examined
in terms of their functions. The functions compete
in different languages according to the effects of
history and milieux. Several actual languages may
be competing to discharge the same function.
The main research here is on bilingualism, but
Gobard wants to avoid simple binaries like one
between major and minor language. The point is to
see how these oppositions are actually generated,
how a language comes to power, as American English
has currently: it's a good vehicular language but
it needs to take on referential, mythical and
vernacular functions as well. The American Western
can speak to the past for Frenchmen too, American
slang affects European vernaculars and so on.
There is no simple colonial imposition, but
'active political struggles and even micro
struggles' (68).
What we need is '"terra-glossian" analysis' [and
we're going to refer to the mysterious 'powers of
the earth' here -- maybe Gobard invented the term?
. In one case, Kafka and other Czech Jews avoided
Yiddish as a vernacular, eschewed Czech, developed
their own 'desiccated German' and dreamed of
Hebrew as the mythical language. We see the same
with immigrant languages in France and England,
and the resurgence of regional languages, some of
which even take on mythical and referential
functions. Some have 'both fascistic and
revolutionary tendencies' (69). We should
understand this as the result of a continuing
micropolitics, seen for example in the struggles
over the teaching of English in France in the name
of preserving '"the right to an accent"' (the
preservation of particular references) and
polyvocal desires.
Some other
linguists [Ducrot is cited] are also turning
from attention to the informational character of
language, and how particular languages require
the assimilation of a code. They argue instead
that semantics and syntax should be understood
in terms of pragmatics or politics, with power
as a crucial dimension. They also challenging
structural homogeneity and universals of
language. Languages become 'gibberish, Joycean
quirks… not anchored to structures' (71).
Functions and movements create 'polemical
order'. Classical linguistics has attempted to
work with many languages in the name of 'pure
research'. Gobard raises another question: 'how
to stammer?', how to stammer language in general
[the example is Luca, the best French poet who
happens to be Romanian and who has invented
stammering language, and other examples include
Wolfson]
The four
functions of language might be seen to map
onto the classical distinctions of language —
the conative and emotive functions linking
sender and receiver, the exchange of
information, verbal context [including
vocabulary], poetic functions, and a
metalinguistic code with necessary agreements
between senders and receivers. However, Gobard
adds 'terra- genesis' so that emotive
functions develop in the child as the result
of the relation with mamma, and mythical ones
with childhood magical languages. Unlike all
the other linguists, there are no universals
like subject, object, message, code, only a
form of power in language. Collective and
social assemblages, in combination with
'movements of the "earth,"' (70) offer
different types of linguistic power,
especially in the power to develop
deterritorialization and reterritorialization:
this is the 'new geolinguistics'. Subjects are
replaced by collective assemblages of
utterance, codes by coefficients of
deterritorialization. Thus migrants are
deterritorialized by colonial languages and
must reterritorialize on their own versions.
Chapter 7 Alain Roger's Le Misogyne
[I don't know this work and it is still in
French so I can't comment much. The stuff on
sexuality at the end is the important stuff].
Apparently it looks like a serial killing novel
with a kind of cod Freudian storyline, so the hero
hates women because he wants to reenact primordial
scenes. However, it is also highly creative. It is
written in subtle alexandrines for example, which
might work to awaken us to something virtual.
In his earlier novel (Jerusalem, Jerusalem)
a young poor woman becomes a cult figure, religion
emerges from what is everyday and banal. In both
cases, a sanctification develops from 'a flash of
intensity' (73) in what is everyday, including a
tendency to reduce everything down to the common
denominator in the everyday.
Roger's language works in this way, bearing
intensity but still threatened by mechanisms of
everyday words [an example follows]. Sometimes
writing works in the opposite direction to profane
and vulgarize [the mechanism often involves a
character with a dignified aristocratic name doing
something awful, a reverse of style, but one which
also alludes to its inverse of sanctification.
We can use the term Epiphany to describe this
process. There is a Joycean notion in some
examples [Wikipedia says that in his collection, Epiphanies,
Joyce uses the term almost as a Freudian slip, to
indicate the true character revealed in some
incident]. Deleuze suggests that Proust is another
'precursor'. Roger offers new dimensions, where
the person itself becomes an epiphany, becoming a
transcendent entity or even an Event, a
multiplicity of events ['an event of the order of
love' (75)]. The character becomes depersonalized
and this is the 'visceral' impact of the novel.
[Details of the storyline follow. A female
character inspires the crimes as an act of love.
Both the female character and the narrator are
bisexual, each in search of the primordial act.
This is its mundane storyline, but the characters
also display an intensity which hints at a
different story.
Another author, Trost [pass -- could be Dolfi
Trost, the surrealist poet who invented/developed
entopic
graphomania?], also deals with epiphanies of
strange young women, one of whom has 'a supple
machine body with multiple degrees of freedom'
(76). She was seen as an abstract line, 'the
blueprint of a human group to come' who would
oppose the difference of the sexes and an order
based on it. There is also a rejection of
conventional psychoanalysis with its notion of
desire as a loss, the role of the nuclear family
and so. The character is self-destructive but
opposed to the death drive: 'she was the young
woman machine of n sexes: Miss Arkadin, Ulrike von
Kleist' (77) [Arkadin presumably refers to the
Orson Welles film, but I must look up Ulrike von
Kleist -- apparently, she was the half- sister of
Heinrich and always travelled in men's clothing].
The female character in Rogers is also every sex,
embracing every sexuality, 'including the nonhuman
and the vegetable'. What we see via the epiphany
is 'the eruption of an intense multiplicity, which
finds itself reduced, crushed by the distribution
of the sexes and one's assignment is either one or
the other'. It is not only biology but 'a whole
social mechanism destined to reduce her to the
demands of marriage and reproduction' (78).
The girls lead, but the boys follow 'to undergo an
inverse and symmetrical reduction'. What we have
here is an argument that 'there is only one sex,
the female sex, but there is only one sexuality,
male sexuality, which takes women as its
object'[underpins all the stuff about the priority
of becoming woman?]. Female sexuality simply
corresponds to male chauvinism. The real
difference is between the actual states of the
multiplicity and whether or not it has been
thoroughly reduced to conventional sexes. The
epiphany in Rogers, or the machine in Trost
opposes reductive mechanism, just like the
'intense proper name that embraces a
multiplicity'.
Chapter 8 Four propositions on psychoanalysis
'Psychoanalysis stifles the production of
desire'(79). It no longer operates only in
psychiatric hospitals but everywhere in society
including in 'schools and institutions'. It always
talks about the unconsciousness, but this only
reduces it. It is thought of as a negative of
consciousness, a parasite, an enemy, and the
production of the unconscious is a form of
failure, the result of 'idiotic conflict, lame
compromise, or obscene wordplay' (80). You are
successful only by sublimating or de-sexualising,
not as the result of any positive desire. There
are too many desires already, and what is required
is to be taught about 'Lack, Culture, and Law, in
other words the reduction and abolition of
desire'.
This repression arises from the practice of
psychoanalysis, the interpretation it pursues. We
see this perhaps best in Freud on fellatio — the
penis stands for cows' udders which stands for the
maternal breast: it can never be a true desire.
True desires are infantile impulses, structured
overall by Oedipus. Any actual assemblage of
desire is promptly to be undone and referred back
to these partial impulses or overall structures.
Many sexual activities are thus understood, as
infantile, perverse, not a true desire.
However Freud's formulation should be reversed.
The unconscious is to be produced not the
conscious, it is to be understood as 'a milieu of
experimentation'(81). This activity is not easy to
reproduce, it is 'social and political space which
must be won', and a revolution is often required.
It is not just revealed by slips of the tongue or
whatever. There is neither the subject nor the
object of desire. Desire is far more a matter of
flows of 'a-signifying signs' in a particular
social and historical field. Such desire always
tests the established order and is therefore
revolutionary. It always seeks new connections.
Psychoanalysis seeks to discipline it — 'it hates
desire and it hates politics' (82). We must
produce the unconscious as the expression of
desires, the formation of utterances, 'the
substance or material of intensities'.
Secondly, 'psychoanalysis impedes the formation of
utterances'. The assemblages produced by desire
and utterances are the same [both machinic]. Such
assemblages feature becomings and intensities,
'intensive circulations', multiplicities of every
kind. In their expression they use indefinite
terms but which are not indeterminate 'some
stomachs, an eye'; infinitives which refer to
processes such as 'to walk, to fuck, to shit';
proper names, which are not persons but
can be groups or animals or singularities
[singularities seem to be entirely written in
capital letters as in A HANS HORSE- BECOMING].
Signs or utterances always connote
multiplicities or guide flows of desire. A
collective machine assemblage produces desire as
well as collective utterances. Whatever has
desire 'is expressed as an IT, the "it" of the
event, the indefinite of the infinitive proper
name' [ wha?]. This "it" is ''a semiotic
articulation of chains of expression' with
unformalised intensive contents. According to
Guattari, "it" does not represent a subject but
'diagrams an assemblage' and in this way, we can
resist the 'tyranny of semiotic constellations
known as significant' [in other words familiar
forms of expression and utterance].
One way to control this is to insist that the IT
should be understood as an expressing subject on
the one hand which codes everything and stands
outside any utterances, and a subject of
utterance in the form of personal pronouns. This
helps the flow of desire to be managed by 'an
imperialist signifying system', a world of
mental representations with no particular
intensities or connections to them. The
'fictitious expressing subject' becomes 'an
absolute I', the cause of utterances attached to
personal pronouns. Those already have places in
hierarchies and stratifications and participate
in 'capitalist exchange', nullifying any actual
relationship with proper names [the singularity
Dave Harris becomes a mere I]. This speaking as
I prevents you from speaking in your own name —
an abstract subject is doing the expression,
related to other subjects, and this breaks the
assemblage of desire. The subject of utterance
become the expressing subject and are rendered
as a result 'docile and sad' (83). [High powered
critique of the author here too, of course --
why autoethnographers are so docile and sad?]
We find this procedure in psychoanalysis, but it
actually belongs to the democratic state
apparatus, where the legislator becomes the
subject, and is connected to the whole notion of
the cogito. However, psychoanalysis has a
therapeutic practice. The patient is treated as
an expressing subject, to be psycho analysed and
interpreted, but is also a subject of utterance
in terms of their own desires and activities.
These are then interpreted in such a way that
the original expressing subject can be 'foisted
on' the subject of utterance, whatever the
patient wanted to say or had desired. This can
be seen with child therapy in France, where
actual children in concrete activities are
eventually reduced to 'the ready-made, standard
utterances which are expected of a child' (84).
This is castration!
The patient actually has no chance of speaking.
Psychoanalysis is designed to stop them
speaking, which we can see with the case studies
of children below. Psychoanalysis starts with
'ready-made collective utterances, Oedipal in
nature', which are then to be discovered in some
personal subject of utterance, with no other
possibilities from the start.
We should work the other way around as in schizo
analysis, beginning with personal utterances and
trying to work out how they have been produced
in machinic assemblages of desire and collective
assemblages of utterance. These 'transverse the
subject and circulate within it' (85). They take
the form of 'multiplicities, packs, mobs, masses
of elements of very different orders, haunting
the subject and populating it' [technological or
sociological understandings are explicitly
rejected]. 'There is no expressing subject.
There are only utterance producing assemblages'.
In the critique of Oedipus they met lots of
stupid objections about Oedipus as symbolic or
signifier, but what matters is the practice of
psychoanalysis and the use they make of Oedipus.
If anything, the 'partisans of the signifier'
are the worst offenders, so that it is
impossible to say anything without being
interpreted [ groupe hippy becomes gros
pipi]. Assemblages of desire are replaced
by an understanding of persons. There can be no
separate grasp of desire or sexuality apart from
Oedipus, thus 'psychoanalysis is the murder of
souls' and the longer it goes on the less the
patient has any opportunity to speak.
The third proposition is about how utterances
are crushed and desire destroyed. There is a
twofold machine at work — an 'interpretation
machine' translating whatever the patient says
into another language, a paranoid regime where
every sign refers to another sign, perpetually
expanding so that signifiers refer to a
signified which then splits back into
signifiers, perpetuating psychoanalytic
discourse 'ad infinitum' (86). There is also
machine of subjectivation, tracing signifiers
back to subjects, especially the psychoanalyst.
Signs then follow a linear path, taking part in
the foisting of expressing subjects discussed
above.
There are whole regimes of interpretation, of
course where emperors are complemented by
interpreters. There are regimes of
subjectivation at work in capitalism as a whole.
Psychoanalysis offers the best penetration of
these two systems, in the form of '"the
subjectivation of the id"'. The combination
prevents any real experimentation or production
of desire or utterances. Psychoanalysis did not
invent interpretation and subjectivation, but
they did find ways to maintain and propagate
them.
Fourthly, psychoanalysis involves power
relations. We see this in transference, but this
is not the real source. Instead, it is based on
the 'liberal bourgeois form of the contract'
(87): even the silence of the analyst is a part
of the contract. However there is another form
of contract silently at work, which converts the
libidinal flows of the patient into manageable
productions like dreams or fantasies. These
become 'exchangeable and divisible'. The power
of the psychoanalyst lies in these conversion
and as with all power, the point is to manage
the production of desire in the formation of
utterances, 'to neutralise the libido'.
Guattari and he are not interested in trying to
combine Freud and Marx. Such a project would
imply a return to sacred texts, but the point is
to look at the actual situation as it now
stands, the bureaucratic apparatus in the CP and
in psychoanalysis. Both Marxism and
psychoanalysis operate with memory [of their
founding concepts] which is to be developed, but
D and G advocate a positive forgetting, focusing
on our own underdevelopment, and advocating a
kind of experimentation. Marxists and Freudians
try to reconcile two economies, political and
libidinal, but D and G think there is only one
economy, where unconscious desire sexually
invests the forms of this economy.
Chapter 9 The interpretation of utterances
[clearer at last on Little Hans and
becoming-horse]
[Follows on from the above. This is a more
detailed analysis of the discussion of children
in Freud and Klein, pursued by D, G, Parnet and
a certain Andre Scala in an early session. The
layout is a bit misleading, organized into two
columns, with the left one allegedly relating
what the child said and the right one what they
psychotherapist made of it. In fact the left
column — summarized first in these notes — is
already an interpretation of what the child said
according to D, G and the others. In the case of
Little Hans, there are no direct sayings of
course — I'm not sure about Little
Richard]
Hans wants to go downstairs to meet his
girlfriend and sleep with her, 'a movement of
deterritorialization' (90). His parents react
poorly and bring him back, so Hans understands
that there is a problem with little girls and
transfers attention to a woman in the restaurant
[sounds a bit like Proust]. Hans attempts
another deterritorialization by crossing the
street. His parents insist that he comes to
their own bed [presumably if he needs a change],
an artificial form of Oedipus. His mother is
able to regulate his attempts to gain pleasure
from her touching him.
Comment. Apparently, Freud simply could
not believe that Hans desired a little girl, and
knew nothing of deterritorialization. The family
was the only valid territory and anything else
could only represent it. Wanting to go
downstairs to meet his girlfriend was therefore
only a substitute for a desire for the mother,
and or an attempt to bring the girlfriend back
into the family.
Hans never actually feared someone would cut off
his penis and was rather indifferent to the
threat. His interest in the penis was as a pee
maker, a function. Obviously girls and women
have a pee maker too. There is a unity of a
plane of consistency or composition, 'the
univocity of being and desire' (92). The
different combinations of types and functions
indicates the notion of a multiplicity or
machinic assemblage. This provides the
possibility of n sexes not just two. Children
get reduced to one sex and lose this machinic
sense, which can cause depression. This happens
first with little girls. It is about the theft
of sexes not losing the penis.
Comment. Psychoanalysis becomes
theological. There is only one sex and then
analogies develop so that the clitoris would be
the analogue of the penis. Or there are two
sexes, which permits a definite feminine
sexuality based on the vagina, but this time an
analogy develops at the level of homology, so
that the phallus becomes a signifier. This also
engages the full weight of structural
linguistics in support. However, in a way it
doesn't really matter whether we think of
ordinary analogies or scientific commodities —
all are theoretical 'and only exist in the
psychoanalyst's mind' (92). This helps bind
desire together with castration and reduce
sexuality to the difference between the sexes,
instead of a broader desire or libido. Children
think differently, univocally with different
connections and positions, machine functions
rather than organic or structural functions.
This is 'the only atheist thought, the thought
of the child' (93). Univocity also brings a
notion of multiple assemblages into which
material enters, n sexes which can be
represented by horses or locomotives. Sexuality
always provides an excess extending beyond the
mere difference between the sexes. Conventional
definitions in effect steal this flexibility
from men and women by restricting their relation
to the 'omnisexual, the multi-sexed' (94). The
difference between girls and boys are that girls
are the first ones to be robbed in this way.
Feminism that demands rights for specific
feminine sexuality are 'radically mistaken', and
should be demanding that all the sexes return to
this original state of girlhood before the
theft.
[Still comment]. Freud misunderstands
infantile sexuality, especially its indifference
to conventional sexual differences, which he
sees as a belief in the possession of an
inferior penis in girls, based on castration
anxiety. Castration anxiety arises after the
reduction to a single sex, however. N sexes
'correspond to all the possible arrangements
into which the materials common to girls and
boys enter but also those common to animals,
things' (95). The difference between girls and
boys is not related to the different types of
castration they are threatened with in families.
Freudian theory here becomes superstition or
theology. This prevents Freud from interpreting
adequately or even hearing what the child says —
he openly notes that what the interpreter does
is to transform unconscious complexes into
conscious awareness.
[Back to what Hans allegedly says]. The family
reterritorializes Little Hans. He tries to take
the family as something machinic, functioning,
but his parents and Freud reminds him that these
people are agents of desire and representatives
of the law, standing for important functions. He
develops the symptom of being afraid to go out
in the street in case a horse bites him, because
the street, which was what he wanted, was
heavily forbidden. The horse is not to be taken
as an analogy or homology, but as an element in
an assemblage, 'the street–horse–omnibus–load
assemblage' (97). The horse has a list of
affects depending on which assemblage it
occupies — 'being blinded, having a bit, being
proud, having a big pee maker, large haunches
for making dung, biting, pulling... Falling,
making a hullabaloo with its legs'. It is not
simply representative. The problem is to see how
these affects circulate in horses, how they
transform into each other, how they become, and
in particular how they become relevant for
Little Hans ['the becoming horse of little
Hans']. For example if a horse is able to bite,
must it go through falling or making a
hullabaloo with its feet first? What is possible
for a horse? [And therefore what is possible for
him, once all the human paths were closed off by
his parents, once he was forbidden to go onto
the street. This is why people want to become
horse, not just to understand them but to
experience their affects].
Comment. Both the father and Freud insist
that the horse represents something else,
something limited — the mother, the father or
the phallus, always represented by whichever
animal. Freud ignores any affects delivered by,
say, seeing a horse fall and being beaten back
to its feet, showing a possibly unique form of
determination. The simple similarities are
developed by the example of the similarity to
the father's spectacles and moustache. Freud
ignores the circulation of intensities in favour
of static analogies, so all the qualities of the
horse are condensed into simple images. Hans
notes that it is more complicated, that having a
pee maker does not mean having to bite, but
father rejects this complication. Freud is
worse, and wants to deliberately reduce
everything to the family, not even disclosing
his intent to the parents. He wants to stop all
movements toward deterritorialization, all
exercise of libido and sexuality, all becomings.
Freud wants to worry the lad, make him guilty
and depressed. Freud never understands libido,
especially the libido of animals.
[Back to Hans]. Of course Hans is afraid by the
implications of becoming an animal. It is a
serious matter, and there are obvious elements
of repression in becoming horse — being
domesticated, exposed to brutality, a loss of
power. This only turns into anxiety after
interpretation by family or psychoanalysis. Is
biting a triumphant act or a reaction to being
beaten? If Hans becomes horse, will he develop
the street as a line of flight, or will he see
the real reason for family discipline? Becoming
animal is an excessive or 'superior'
deterritorialization, pushing desire to its
limit, where desire realizes the need for
repression. This is not like the Freudian scheme
where desire represses itself [far too early].
Comment. Freud interprets the machinic
assemblage as having three parts — the horse
becomes sequentially mother, father, and
phallus. Anxiety is also produced sequentially –
first it is a matter of missing one's mother in
the street, then of being bitten by a horse,
connected to paternal punishment, then, finally
reducing the threatening, strong assemblage of
the horse into family territory. Family members
are to strengthen their roles – the mother must
move towards the father, and the father towards
the phallus. There is no autonomous power for
mothers, even if they dominate [because they are
becoming phallocentrism. Fathers must draw power
from the phallus if proper structural control is
to be exerted, and this brings with it a need to
socialise castration, so that desire represses
itself. Desire can no longer 'bear
"intensities"' (100). Apparently Freud was still
thinking about hysteria, where intensities have
to be controlled, immobilised, understood as
symbolic and therefore made redundant. Desire
has to be made to repress itself by experiencing
its object as loss or lack. Once or this
interpretation takes place, Freud only has to
wait for the child to agree. All irony and
humour [some possessed by the child] are
squeezed out of the analysis in favour of
'extreme tedium... Monomaniacal interpretation,
the self-satisfaction of the parents and the
Professor' (101). Hans finally has to conform
and resign himself 'just so they leave him
alone'.
[ I know the case of Little Richard only
indirectly. I've focused on the criticisms of
Klein here. Note that other bits of D&G are
less than totally critical. Guattari's Three Ecologies
explores the partial object, rather obscurely.
Deleuze's Logic of
Sense explains the issue of
depression or paranoia as reactions to the
threats of the external world intruding on the
private world of the child. Here, these
innovations are rapidly brought back to
conformity with conventional Oedipus after all.]
Richard seems to be very interested in political
events and wars and thinks in terms of
assemblages again -- of countries, ships, means
of transport (also seen as functioning machines
with lots of combinations etc). The
representations seem to carry some erotic
charge. [It is not clear how this depiction of
the world as empire exhibits itself in
paranoia/schizophrenia]. Klein insists on
interpreting everything back into familial terms
and trying to break Richard's resistance to her
interpretations (some of which involve irony).
Eventually she gets him to agree with her and
assume a more manageable type of depressive
response to family authority. His affects have
to be interpreted as fantasies. Ultimately his
utterances will be prevented by breaking the
collective assemblages which generate them.
The interpretations seem a bit basic — Hitler
wants to hurt Mama and therefore he is the bad
father, the connections on the map represent the
sexual relations between the parents, the
English port being entered by the German cruiser
must be mother's genital organs, the colours
used to draw the map are understood as family
members [all these are really representations of
affects]. The overall process is 'worse than
being trapped in school, in the family or in the
media'(106). Even the notion of a partial object
only reinforces familialism and Oedipus — they
become fantasies after all. Klein openly
moralizes, this time borrowing the concepts from
the school rather than the family: the family is
used only to ward off any other 'libidinal
investment' from the outside. Partial objects
might open to concepts like multiplicity,
segmentation, assemblage and 'social
polycentrism' (107) but here, they are
understood as partial, having become detached
from any assemblages, and thus as requiring to
be restored to some organic totality, 'a
signifying structure, a subjective or
personological integrity', even if that will
only emerge as the child matures and progresses
through the cure. Note 12, p. 393 says Klein is
substituting the idea of organs without a body
for the Organless Body]
[Then a third case, of which I know nothing,
Agnes, treated by a certain Hochmann and Andre.
Agnes appears to suffer from epileptic fits
which coincide with her period. She sees these
as showing diminished bodily functioning and
wants to be fixed. Her notion of the body is
organic, not one filled with organs acting like
tools. Her conception of sexuality involves a
rejection of conventional female organs in
favour of machinic differences, so that lots of
things can be sexual. She sees puberty as a
matter of being damaged or having the body
stolen. The family is also a machinic assemblage
with possibilities for deterritorialization away
from the family home — for example towards the
public school 'where her brother and sister used
to be' (110). She sees affects circulating
through the family assemblage but in terms of
the indefinite article — 'a belly, a mouth, an
engine'
The example apparently shows us that
psychoanalysis can operate with privileged
sectors, not just the family or the hospital or
clinic but the socius itself. Agnes is taken out
of public school and then ends in a free clinic
until visited by a team of psychotherapists in
her home. They reduce everything to a matter of
organs and struggles over [understandings of]
them, although the actual organ at stake appears
to vary, to tjheir bewilderment. Nevertheless,
everything turns in the end on 'the differences
between the sexes, castration, and the lost
object'(109).
Agnes becomes violent in response, mostly
because she is told that she never speaks for
herself and is just not heard. She gets her
revenge by deliberately manipulating the
psychotherapist. She experiences being trapped
by family school and socius, but sees the
essential factor as psychotherapy. Psychotherapy
has been responsible for reducing her notion of
sexuality to the basic difference between the
sexes, to the idea of one mother instead of n
[seen here as 'materials capable of
transformation']. She is really endlessly
complaining about these thefts.
Chapter 10 The rise of the social
[This is about the book on the family by
Donzelot]
'The social' refers to a particular modern
sector, [somewhere between civil society and
welfare institutions] that deals with special
cases and social problems. This is recently
formed and rather strange, arising in the 18th
or 19th centuries. For Donzelot, a key
institution was the so-called children's
tribunal, fairly minor reform but with lots of
implications, the growth of experts and a
judicial apparatus for example.
The social sector is able to retain autonomy
with its new categories, for example new
distinctions of rich and poor, new interweavings
of public and private. It is not that these
developments simply express an ideology, more
how it relates to other sectors and intersects
or reworks them, organizing a new field.
Donzelot proceeds by talking about pure and
short examples to show the characteristics of
the new domain, the social is an intersection of
all of these, operating on its main milieu — the
family. The family has its own forms of
development, but it needs to combine with other
vectors. It is not just a matter of a crisis in
the family, which arises only from these new
intersections: it is more about the policing of
families, a term chosen to avoid both social
determinist and moral analysis.
The method proceeds by 'engraving', showing how
the new scene appears in a given framework, how
the Children's Court emerged, or how the
philanthropic visit became institutionalised. We
then need to trace the consequences and identify
new functions. The method is therefore
'genealogical, functional and strategic' (115)
with an obvious debt to Foucault.
The analysis then takes the form of a musical
analogy [Deleuze's?]. First a bass line is
established, a general critique or attack, say
on nurses and domesticity, but this is already
bifurcated into a critique according to the
wealth of the family — the poor are rebuked
because an unsound political economy leads them
to abandon their own children and their own
self-sufficiency, while the rich develop a kind
of 'private hygiene', excessively focused on the
domestic, including domestic education.
Then a second line appears with the growing
autonomy of conjugal relations rather than more
general family ones. Even the old family
alliances are now to prepare people for conjugal
life, marriage as an end in itself, concerned
the descendants. In this way, conjugality
becomes itself socially coded, with a new an
important role for older female relatives. Again
there are differences according to wealth — the
poor woman focuses on husband and children,
while richer women exercise a wider social role
including a missionary role in charities.
The third line arises when conjugal families
themselves evolve away from paternal head of
household morality and authority. Divorce,
abortion, parental destitution are signs. This
has a subjective impact on changing conventional
family relations which regulated families. New
subjective drives also emerge [personal
fulfilment?] and this in turn produces a new
arrangement of aid and dependency, direct
interventions, for example legislation on child
labour, or the encouragement of private
investment, in an attempt to make 'the
industrial sphere a "moral civilisation"' (117).
Families become praised for saving social order
and also simultaneously critiqued for exploiting
women and children. There is also a struggle
between neoliberal and social Democrat notions
of the state — 'two poles of the strategy on the
same line', ending in a hybrid arrangement of
public and private.
The fourth line brings in the medical field in
the formation of public hygiene, including
psychiatric hygiene. Again we find a hybrid form
— private medicine but also increasing state
intervention, and these can produce opposition
and tension. The nature of the state was also
once contested [Donzelot apparently discusses
anarchists agitating for a stronger state].
Again we see the effects on the family on the
development of different schools of parenting or
family planning, for example — these show
complex relations between statements and
policies, sometimes apparently contradictory
ones.
The final line involve psychoanalysis. The
history of psychoanalysis has suffered from
'intimist anecdotes' (119), largely about Freud
and the others, but this simply reflects its
history, initially formed in private
relationships and only rather recently intruding
into public sectors. Donzelot argues that there
was early hybridisation, and that state
involvement was a main factor in the success of
psychoanalysis: in France, it took hold in
'semipublic sectors'like family planning. Again
there is no easy split between neoliberal Freud
and say Marxist Reich.
Psychoanalysts are not like social workers
authorised by the state, but what is revealed is
still the early tension between judicial and
psychiatric orders, the requirements of the
state and psychiatric criteria. Initially, there
seem to be no rules of equivalency and
translation, and psychoanalysis found itself in
a state of floatation, rather like a floating
currency, perhaps with some underlying system of
general regulation. Donzelot compares Freud and
Keynes, and sees the importance of money in
psychoanalysis as a kind of general regulation.
Psychoanalysis developed in this particular way
unlike ordinary psychiatry because it precisely
addressed public norms and private principles,
expert appraisals, tests and memories, and
proposed mechanisms of displacement condensation
and symbolisation.
This had the effect of acting as if all the
social relationships we have discussed above
were aspects of an underlying law, depending on
basic relationships and equivalences. However,
the challenge came from the idea of the social
as more flexible, based on norms rather than
laws, regulations rather than fixed standards.
This makes psychoanalysis only one mechanism
among others, although it has 'permeated all the
other mechanisms, even when it disappears or
combines with them' (121).
So overall we have a map of the social formed by
these various lines. It takes a modern hybrid
form, with both desires and powers, controls but
also resistance and liberation. Even '"having a
room to oneself" [a deliberate reference to
Woolf?] Is both a desire and a control.
Regulatory mechanisms are never adequate and
there is always some overflow. Donzelot's
account shows the way in which the pursuit of
these ideas might be followed.
Chapter 11. Desire and pleasure
[An important essay on differences with
Foucault]
In Discipline and
Punish, the notion of power has
great significance for the radical left in
moving away from series of the state. It also
allowed Foucault to go beyond the problem of
dualist discursive and non-discursive formations
in Archaeology:
these formations are distributed and
articulated, related [by systems of power?].
Power relies neither on repression nor an
ideology, but on normalisation and discipline.
Power forms 'are diffused, heterogeneous
multiplicity or micro arrangements' (122) but
also a diagram or abstract machine 'immanent to
the whole social field' (123) as in panoptican.
This gets us beyond mere dissemination and
articulation.
In The Will to Knowledge, power
arrangements no longer just normalise but
constitute practices, as in sexuality. They
offer truth as well as just bodies of knowledge,
and they have a positive function, especially in
sexuality. However, there is a danger of a
return to a 'constituting subject', and there
are dangers with reviving the notion of truth,
even if it is limited to 'the truth of power',
and further explanation is required.
The relation between micro and macro, first
established in Discipline is not one of
size, nor is there any actual dualism: micro
arrangements are 'immanent to the state
apparatus, and segments of the state apparatus
also penetrate micro arrangements — a complete
immanence of the two dimensions' (124). Nor is
it just a matter of scale. Instead we have a
difference between strategy and tactics, but
this is a problem because micro arrangements can
also be strategic, especially if they are linked
to the diagram of power. It is possible to see
power as determining the micro, but this is not
been developed so far. A heterogeneity persists
between micro and macro. This helps reject the
idea that it is the state that is miniaturised
in the micro, but the problem still remains with
miniaturising power, which is also a global
concept.
Assemblages of desire, developed with Guattari,
might help overcome the problem of using power
to explain the micro. Desire is never natural or
spontaneous, and assemblages like feudalism seem
'totally crazy' although they exist
historically. Desire circulates in heterogeneous
assemblages, as a symbiosis. Assemblages of
desire can include power arrangements, but these
should be seen as different components of the
assemblage. It is better to distinguish states
of being and enunciation on one axis, equivalent
to Foucault's types of formation or
multiplicity, while examining territoriality and
reterritorialization on the other axis. Power
surfaces with reterritorialization, as a
component. However assemblages also include
points of deterritorialization, so power is
disseminated according to the dimensions of
assemblages. Power is connected to desire, but
'desire comes first' and is a necessary element
of any analysis of the micro.
We can agree that there is no ideology nor
repression, since both statements and utterances
on the one hand and assemblages of desire on the
other always exceed them. However power
arrangements also seem vague and ambiguous.
Perhaps they 'encode and reterritorialize'
rather than normalise and discipline. They work
to alter assemblages of desire rather than to
operate on desire directly. Thus sexuality is
limited to actual normal sex, and psychoanalysis
plays a key part here. Sexuality itself is 'an
historically variable assemblage of desire' with
all sorts of points of deterritorialization,
flux and combination, but it is reduced to a
'molar agency'[conventional sexual difference.
The effect if not the actual means is
repressive, dividing some possibilities of the
assemblage into fantasies or shameful social
practices. Repression here is seen as a
dimensional of collective assemblages rather
than as a constant operation to crack down on
spontaneity].
Similarly, we cannot reduce the social field to
a standard contradiction, which already implies
'a complicity of contradictories' to produce,
say the two class system. Rather than
contradictions, society produces different
strategies for Foucault. But this still 'leaks
out on all sides' in the form of lines of
flight, and these are primary — they constitute
the social field as a rhizome or cartography,
and they produce deterritorialization in
assemblages of desire. Thus in feudalism,
flights lines are [pre-] supposed and the same
for difference historical developments,
including capitalism. Flight lines are not
always revolutionary, but they are addressed by
power arrangements, sealed off, as we see with
the 11th century instability, produced by
invasion groups, migrations, urbanisation, the
appearance of systems of money, differences in
systems of love and so on. Strategy comes second
to these flight lines and how they are
connected. They also show the primacy of desire
which is 'indistinguishable' from lines of
flight (128).
This analysis replaces Foucault's view that
power is confronted only by 'resistance
phenomena'. Foucault insist that these are not
just imaginary, but their status is unclear.
They might be just the reverse image of
arrangements of power, but this is too abstract
and leads nowhere. Another direction might lie
with thinking of power arrangements as
constituents of truth, where the notion of a
complete truth can be a counter strategy, turned
against power itself [rather in the way that the
young Hegelianism turned Hegel against the
Prussian state?], but this is still not clear in
Foucault. The third possibility lies in the ways
in which pleasure takes on power, but this is
still not yet clear.
The notion of historically determined flight
lines does not appear in Foucault, but they can
be a way of overcoming the problem of resistance
phenomena — lines of flight both determine power
arrangements [and also their limits]. It is not
just something confined to those on the fringes
of society, the mad, the perverted, or the
drugged. These groups do not create lines of
flight which are instead 'objective lines that
cut across a society' although marginal groups
can be located on them. However, everything
escapes from existing social arrangements,
'everything is deterritorialized' [which is
surely an overprediction of social change?].
Here the intellectual and the political problem
diverge in theory between Foucault and Deleuze
[ref to their debate about the role of
intellectuals in politics]
Foucault confessed that he can't stand the word
desire, which always implies lack or repression.
Perhaps his use of the term pleasure will be
better, but Deleuze has his doubts. For him
desire does not involve lack it is not natural,
it is a part of an assemblage a process, an
affect 'as opposed to a feeling'(130). It is a
'haecceity — the individual singularity of a
day, a season, a life. As opposed to a
subjectivity, it is an event not a thing or a
person'.
This in turn implies the notion of the field of
immanence, in this case, a body without organs,
'only defined by zones of intensity, thresholds,
degrees and fluxes'. This particular body is
biological as well as collective and political
and it displays assemblages and how they are
made and unmade. It also 'bears the offshoots of
deterritorialization of assemblages or flight
lines'. It varies, say between the BwOs of
feudalism and capitalism, but it opposes all
strata including the organism's organisation:
body organisations break the field of immanence
and impose upon desire another kind of plane or
stratum.
Pleasure is not a positive value, but another
interruption to the imminent process of desire.
It is on the side of strata and organisation, it
submits to the law and regulation. This also
explains the interest in Foucault for Sade,
compared to the interest in Deleuze for Masoch,
who is interested in the notion that pleasure
interrupts desire and its field of immanence
[hence the need to delay the organism]. In
courtly love there is also a plane of immanence
where desire is not focused, and pleasures which
interrupt it are ignored. Opting for pleasures
is a form of reterritorialization, and this is
how desire is made to exhibit lack and to
conform to norms. [These examples appear n a
condensed way in ATP,
of course]
Foucault is right to say that power arrangements
are directly related to bodies, but he needs
more detail about how this works, to impose an
organisation on a BwO, how all aspects of
biopower reterritorialize the body.
Are there are equivalences between the
positions? Perhaps the distinction between body
and fleshing Foucault is the same as the one
between the BwO and the normal body? [Apparently
discussed in Will referring to how life itself
involves resistance, through suggesting a kind
of immanence behind all the determined
assemblages. DH Lawrence also discusses this, it
seems, but overemphasises positive flight lines]
The problem for Foucault remains preserving the
value of microanalysis while still operating
with some kind of 'principle of unification',
which is not the state or the party [I think the
same problem arises for Deleuze and Guattari
with all their emphasis on heterogeneity].
In Discipline we have both the micro
arrangements of power and the abstract machine
or diagram covering the whole field. The micro
disciplines are supposed to be one kind of
connection, and the biopolitical emphasis the
other. Perhaps the diagram unifies the micro
through the biopolitical? The same problem goes
when discussing resistance or lines of flight,
comparing the heterogeneity with processes of
unification. Again we can see that the field of
immanence on which assemblages appear also acts
as a kind of 'veritable diagram' (133). We need
to try to discover this diagram and its
implementation, in particular how it operates
with lines and points of deterritorialization.
The notion of a war machine is one example,
remembering that it describes neither the state
nor military institutions. While the state is a
molar apparatus organising micro elements of a
diagram, the war machine diagrams lines of
flight, producing micro elements as a plane of
immanence. We will need to contrast 'a kind of
transcendent plane of organisation' to the
'immanent plane of assemblages', but this would
only revive the problem [of their relation]. We
seem to be left with a problem with Foucault
[and Deleuze in my view].
[In an additional note] the two states of the
plane or diagram engage in historical
confrontations but in diverse forms. The plane
of organisation itself is hidden, but [only]
everything which is visible appears on it. The
plane of immanence has only degrees of speed and
slowness rather than development, and everything
is seen and heard. The first plane is linked to
the state but not identical, while the second is
a 'dreamlike war machine'. Writers about nature
also invoke different types of plane [Holderlin
in Hyperion
and Kleist go for the immanent plane]. There are
similarly two types of intellectual interests,
which we find in music as well. Power knowledge
in Foucault implies a plane or diagram of the
first type, while his counter powers are really
related to war machines and another type,
including all kinds of minor knowledge and
knowledge linked to lines of resistance.
Chapter 12. The rich Jew
A recent film has been accused of anti-Semitism,
although Deleuze can find no examples of it in
the film. The characters seem to all display
intense fear of the future, while the Jewish
character displays 'an indifference towards
destiny' (136) [probably some allusion to
finding some other source of comfort or grace].
It is hard to find any anti-Semitism, unless it
is the actual words '"rich Jew"', but we should
not think about banning that term altogether,
although some people have declared that it must
indicate anti-Semitism. This is an example of
how 'new fascisms are being born' (137), a
matter of building on petty fears and anxieties
so that we stifle every suspicion 'every
dissonant voice' (138). [pretty good account of
modern moral panics about ethnic identities].
Chapter 13. On the New Philosophers (plus a
more general problem)
[It is in interview format]
Deleuze thinks there are two problems with the
new philosophers: they operate with very large
and general concepts, and they tend to stress
the important role of the individual thinker,
the expressing subject, and this goes against a
lot of recent work to develop very fine concepts
'to escape gross dualisms', and to find creative
functions which are not just author functions.
Together these trends are reactionary, and may
have some connection with a recent proposal to
offer 'a significant streamlining of the
philosophical curriculum' (140).
Levy in particular has attacked AO because
he sees some connection with drug addiction,
which is amusing, and has also argued that one
of Guattari's organizations is racist. They are
always attacking and counter-attacking, and
largely not worth responding to, except this
once.
They have been successful, however,
partly due to the system of fashionable literary
schools. These schools have been largely a waste
of time, mostly preserving themselves and
policing their members. The new philosophers
should be seen more in terms of successful
marketing, getting the book talked about,
focusing more on supportive articles and TV
appearances, and offering different versions of
the same book 'so as to appeal to everyone'
(141). The last proper school was that of
Sollers, but even he has recently turned towards
marketing philosophy books through a revived
author system and empty concepts.
The popularity of new philosophy has partly
arisen because of the increased awareness of the
power of journalism to produce stories such as
Watergate, or leaks. Journalism refers to actual
external events 'less and less, since it already
creates many of them' (142). It offers 'an
autonomous and sufficient thought within itself'
[BBC journalism to a tee!]. This is why
newspaper articles written about books or
interviews with philosophers have become more
important than books, and why intellectuals are
forced to become journalists. It began with
television and the willing cooperation of
intellectuals, but intellectuals are no longer
needed. In a way, this is a consequence of
abandoning the author function — radio and
television and journalism can become the new
authors.
France has also been in a permanent state of
election mode, and this has organized the
coverage of events as well as 'elevated the
usual level of bullshit' (144). New philosophy
has developed on this grid despite the actual
opinions it offers — sometimes they were united
in particular causes, including 'the hatred of
May 68'. This is perfect for current notions of
electoral politics, in that it argues that
revolution is now impossible everywhere and
always, and potentially critical concepts
including power and resistance have been
globalized and watered-down. Now the only
possibility is the thinking subject, as long as
the thinker 'thinks revolution as impossible'
There is even the new martyrology, 'the gulag
and the victims of history'. They adopt the
witness function, which fits together nicely
with the author and thinker. Of course the
victims do not think or speak at all like the
new philosophers, and are not morbid, bitter or
vain. As a result, victims could only be simply
duped, unable to realize the impossibility of
change.
It is not just a matter of choosing between
marketing or the old style of writing books, and
modern intellectuals, including musicians or
painters are trying to organize particular
encounters rather than go to conferences or
debates, encountering people in some other
discipline rather than developing comparisons
and analogies, real intersections of lines of
research. One example is to revive the history
of philosophy with computers, not to acquire a
mathematical solution, but to identify sequences
that can be combined with other sequences.
Modern intellectual activity including artistic
and scholarly variants cannot be generalized
under the old terms like Science. It is now a
matter of encountering singular points as the
source of creation, creative functions not
author functions. Disciplinary as well as
interdisciplinary work displays such encounters,
producing new assemblages and new uses for them.
The author function by contrast develops as a
matter of conformity, promotion, as we see in
the contrast between creative film and the
conformist use of film, or rather the conflict
between film and the powerfully conformist
television. New philosophy by contrast has
turned its back on politics and experiment, and
have permitted a reactionary relation between
the book and the press: they are new but they
are also conformist.
They are not even specifically relevant
themselves, because the market will throw up
alternative vectors for its function. Thought is
submitted to the media, although it offers it a
kind of 'minimum intellectual guarantee' (147),
including feeling secure about the absence of
any proper creation. Intellectuals should now
refuse the blandishments of the media, become
producers themselves instead of accepting the
limited author function on offer — 'only the
insolence of domestics or the brilliance of the
hired clown' [even worse in the UK -- hopelessly
waffling nerd or agreeable 'expert']. They
should operate like Beckett and Godard, and
build on the many possibilities still available.
New philosophy is an attempt to stifle all that.
Chapter 14. Europe the wrong way.
[About the Baader–Meinhoff case]
The German government has requested an extradition
of the French lawyer acting on their behalf. He is
accused of maintaining a relationship with
terrorists and of giving details of the state of
the detention of the prisoners. There are clear
political motives. The broader issue is that the
German government is now in a good position to
impose its particular policy 'of repression' on
other European and African governments. The French
press have simply copied German pieces on this
issue, and some have proposed killing prisoners
deliberately in response to terrorism.
On the ideological front, the German government
and press have tried to equate the RAF with the
Nazis, whose leaders also killed themselves 'out
of devotion to a demonic choice' (150). What seem
to be required is some version of the Nuremberg
tribunal, and some more absurd affiliations of
these suggested between Baader and Hitler. Instead
we need proof of accusations [how bourgeois
liberal]. This might be the start of a broader
campaign throughout Europe.
Chapter 15 Two Questions on Drugs
Talking about drugs has been dominated by either
'extrinsic causalities' (151) like sociological
considerations, or by discussions of pleasures,
although these often 'presuppose the drug'. What
is needed is a 'specific causality'.
What this will involve is the mapping of a 'drug –
set' which referred to both internal
characteristics of drugs and to more general
causalities. The parallel here would be
psychoanalysis that attempted to link things like
neuroses or dreams to underlying mechanisms,
specifically the role of desire in producing
'mnesic traces and affects'. That eventually fell
prey to mystification is of its own, and is
notably unable to explain drug phenomena.
As an example of the new problems, the question is
how desire 'directly invests the system of
perception' (152), especially space-time
perception. At one stage there was some early
investigation of these issues, including
Castenada. These investigations changed the role
of perception altogether. It would be worth
pursuing chemical research although not of the
scientistic kind. Overall, the work promised to
explain both the effects of [recreational] drugs
and of therapeutics, but it seems to have lapsed
as a research topic in France.
Another question might concern itself with that
crucial turning point in drug use. At first, drug
users create 'active lines of flight' (153), but
these soon roll up, segment and turn into black
holes. Microperceptions [bad ones] are provided in
advance, things like 'hallucinations, delirium,
false perceptions, fantasies, waves of paranoia'.
Experienced users like Burroughs or Artaud saw
these as disappointing consequences, but also
inevitable. 'Vital experimentation' turns into
'deadly experimentation', an activity that opens
connections becomes one involving self
destruction.
We can even see this with companion products like
tobacco and alcohol, which can become a means to
'conjugate other flows' even if they do not lead
to suicide. Experiment and openness become 'a
simple flat development', 'only a single
line'(154) with alternating rhythms — on the booze
or having quit the booze. Both equally are part of
being an alcoholic. 'Everything is reduced to a
dismal suicidal line with two alternative
segments' rather than multiple intertwining lines.
It often ends in 'narcissism', or authoritarianism
and venom. Is this sort of development inevitable?
Does it have a turning point and if so can therapy
intervene?
Answers will lie at the level of the 'specific
causality of drugs', including their capacity for
drugs to 'alter their own causality'. Overall, the
capacity of desire to influence or invest
perception is intriguing, but wider zero or so
often lead to hallucination and paranoia? It seems
that no progress is currently being made at the
moment no research is being done. Even those who
know the problems personally no longer do any
research.
Chapter 16 Making Inaudible
Forces Audible
[Gripping stuff with obscure context. See
also Ch. 40 below. Much more graspable after
having read Cox
C ( nd). I also liked a piece on duration in
classical music too --here]
[Typical obscure start referring to some sort of
selection by Boulez of five works of music,
unreferenced, of course, apparently which invites
the listener to think of the relationship between
them. I don't think he meant Boulez's own Pli
Selon Pli,which apparently
offers 5 short pieces that build overall to a
portrait of Mallarme -- but it's an 'interesting'
piece and you can hear it here].
For Deleuze, there is no simple progression or
evolution, but rather 'a group of virtual
relationships' (156) describing a 'particular
profile of musical time applicable to those five
works alone'. In other words we are not being
invited to generalize [prematurely] , it is not a
case of taking these pieces as examples to derive
some abstract concept of time, but rather a matter
of taking particular cycles to 'extract particular
profiles of time'. Apparently particular profiles
can then be superposed on 'a veritable cartography
of variables'. The same method might be used for
other artistic works as well.
When we do this with these examples, we see 'a
kind of non-pulsed time emerging from a pulsed
time, even though this non-pulsed time could
become a new form of pulsation' (157). The actual
examples make this clear, apparently, or Boulez's
commentary does, how early pieces offer variations
of pulsation and the last work shows how these can
all be seen to lead to a new original pulsation.
[This makes much more sense following a reading of
Cox. he argues that we can translate pulsed time
to mean the frameworks that guide classical music,
which include not only musical rhythms, but things
like narratives imposed from the outside, often
romantic narratives featuring heroes who are then
embodied in the chain running from composer to
conductor to individual virtuoso. Experimental
music can still have metrical times, maybe
irregular ones, as in experimental electronic
music that features a steady pulse of noise.
However, these serve not to constrain the music
tightly as in some 'plane of transcendence', but
rather to offer some consistency, a plane of
consistency indeed, some steady element to which
the variations return. Once we strip away the
conventional ways to understand music, though,
especially as a kind of familiar narrative, we are
free to break from conventional narrative time as
well and to experience the elements quite
differently, as sequences in their own right, with
earlier elements offering a kind of experience to
understand the later ones, perhaps qualitatively,
exactly as in duration.]
Non-pulsed time is the same as pure time in
Proust. It is duration, with no measure, not even
a regular role complex ones. Instead we find
ourselves 'in the presence of a multiplicity of
heterochronous qualitative, non-coincident,
non-communicating durations'[as in the blending of
sounds in Cox's examples, which include dub
reggae]. We have to rethink how these elements are
joined, having rejected 'the most general and
classic solution that consists in relying on the
mind to appose [sic] a common measure'.
We can find a similar issue in the domain of
biology and biological rhythms. It is no longer
believed that different rhythms are articulated
'under the domination of a unifying form', (158)
some superior form that regulates the 24-hour
cycle. Instead, there is an explanation somewhere
else, 'at the sub – vital, infra – vital level in
what they call a population of molecular
oscillators' which pass through heterogeneous
systems, different groups and disparate durations.
Articulation follows from the action of 'certain
molecular couples' operating at different layers
and with different rhythms. There might be
something similar in music — 'sound molecules
rather than pure notes or tones'. These serve as
the 'first determination of a non-pulsed time'.
This provides us with a new type of individuation
that is not down to the action of the subject, nor
just a combination of [abstract] form and
[concrete] material [so this is going to be an
early sketch of the concept of haecceity?]. In
everyday life, we get particular fragments
combining landscapes, events, and hours of the
day. Individuation in music seems like these
'paradoxical individuations'.
At the most 'rudimentary level, the easiest in
appearance', a phrase in music can remind us of a
landscape, as it does with Swann and the woods of
Boulogne [wha? I don't remember this]. Sounds can
evoke colours, motifs in opera can be connected to
people or characters. However, sound can present
an excess, [apparently as discerning listeners
know] 'music itself envelops a distinct
sound landscape inside it (as with Liszt)' (159).
There is a similar excessive notion of colour
where we can see all durations rhythms and timbres
as sound colours imposed on the usual visible
colours. The same goes for character — Wagner's
motifs become autonomous, 'by themselves become
characters inside the music'. We can see that
these [I have called them excessive] notions of
'sound landscape', 'audible colour' and 'rhythmic
character' are important in explaining particular
[haecceity-type] individuations.
We can now abandon the old schema of substance and
form, and reject notions of hierarchies moving
from the simple to the complex, from substance to
life to mind for example. We used to think that
life was a simplification of matter, but now
instead, vital rhythms seem to originate in
'molecular couplings' rather than aiming at some
unification in a spiritual form. Composers have
stopped producing music based on these assumptions
as well. Music is no longer a rudimentary
substance that is organized by a form, but
consists of 'very elaborate sound material' (159).
This sound material is coupled to forces which are
not sound: the forces become sound or become
audible 'by the material that makes them
substantial' [the example here is Debussy Dialogue
Between Wind and Sea — probably not the
exact title and capable of referring to several
pieces, but a short clip is available on YouTube.
I found it to be the old romantic stuff about
tumultuous forces rising to climaxes and so. Maybe
these are hack notions of 'natural' forces still
inhabiting the old romanticism?]. Musical material
[now] makes 'forces audible that are not audible
in themselves, such as time, duration and even
intensity'. We need to think in terms of schema
using material – force rather than matter – form.
Back to the Boulez examples [or perhaps moving on
to another one], elaborate sound material
including silences makes sensible and audible 'two
tempos that were not of sound'. The first was the
time of 'production in general' [sounds a bit
Althusserian?] , and the second 'meditation in
general'. These otherwise imperceptible forces
became perceptible only through the material. [But
these are Boulez's conceptions not Deleuze's? ]
There are some general implications because music
is no longer just a matter for musicians, because
sound is not its only element, nor its exclusive
element. [Philosophical colonization?] We have to
consider 'all the non-sound forces that the sound
material elaborated by the composer will make
perceptible' (160). This will mean that we
[there's that 'we' again] can even perceive
differences between forces and how they play
together. It is similar to the task in philosophy:
classical philosophy works with rudimentary
substances of thought which are then submitted to
concepts categories, but now we are struggling to
elaborate 'a very complex material of thought',
with the same intention — 'to make sensible forces
that are not thinkable in themselves'
We have rejected the possibility of absolute
understandings ['There is no absolute ear'] and we
need to make audible forces that are not
themselves audible, through devising an
'impossible' ear, or, for philosophers, 'an
impossible thought'. This will make thinkable a
complex material, of 'thought forces' in this
case, 'that are unthinkable'.
Chapter 17 Spoilers of Peace
'In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the actions
of the Israelis are considered legitimate
retaliation (even if their attacks do seem
disproportionate), whereas the actions of the
Palestinians are without fail treated as terrorist
crimes' (161). Israel has also been successful in
getting other states to accept that it is the
Palestinians who spoil piece. However, Israeli
retaliation tends to damage neutrals as well and
thus create more militants.
Chapter 18 The Complaint and the Body
[A very brief review of a new book by a
philosopher and psychoanalyst P. Fedida. I don't
think any of it is translated. The project seems
to be to weave together phenomenology and Freudian
analysis to produce 'theory of intersubjectivity
as a transcendental field' (165). We can see these
interconnections by considering the 'psychosomatic
complaint'.]
Chapter 19 How Philosophy is Useful to
Mathematicians or Musicians
At Vincennes, lectures were public and audiences
often included mathematicians or musicians.
Philosophy is expected to be useful somehow in
terms of other subject specialisms, and this can
orient the teaching of philosophy. This gives it a
'practical and experimental' nature (167).
Traditionalists might object that this does not
lead to mastery in a single discipline, but
Deleuze thinks that disciplines should consider
connections with 'domains of externality',
including those already given in other subjects.
This makes Vincennes particularly useful in
countering 'intellectual lobotomy' (168).
Chapter 20 Open Letter to Negri's Judges
[This challenges the evidence that has led to the
conviction of Negri as a terrorist. The principles
of justice seem to be precisely those which
Deleuze has criticized in his general philosophy —
real special pleading!].
It is important that justice preserves the
'principle of identity or non-contradiction',
meaning that accusations must be consistent and
singular, and this is not the case here, where the
accusation attempts to implicate Negri in the act
of kidnapping because his writing somehow supports
it, or rather the thoughts that informed the
writing.
We should also conform to 'a principle of
disjunction or exclusion: it is this or that'
(170). The authorities have suggested plausible
alternatives for every example of Negri's
whereabouts — if he did not actually do the
kidnapping he conceived of it, his critique of the
Red Brigades is but a mask to cover his real
leadership. This is a problem with revolutionary
intellectuals, however, who feel particularly
obliged to write only what they are thinking
rather than pursue opportunistic thoughts like
ordinary politicians.
The press has played a major role in permitting
these logical abuses. The notion of news involves
an accumulation of statements, 'with no concern
for contradictions'. Much of it involves using
conditionals. In this case, Negri has been
represented as having been at three different
locations on the same day and this is somehow
combined. Other smears involve using his support
for Autonomy to link to the Red Brigades, or to
argue that he deserves what is happening to him,
guilty or not.
Chapter 21 This Book is Literal Proof of
Innocence
This refers to Negri's book about Marx written
while in prison. Italian newspapers have continued
their campaign to disparage Negri as a thinker,
and this is necessary because it's not acceptable
to imprison intellectuals per se: they have to be
false thinkers. This book shows considerable
intellectual insight. It is also focused on
practical struggle, but never advocating
terrorism, so this book should demonstrate his
innocence. However Negri might be two-faced, a
secret agent — but this would be impossible for a
genuine revolutionary agent who could not practice
'any kind of struggle other than what he values
and encourages in his work' (174). [very naive
politics it seem to me]
Chapter 22 Eight Years Later: 1980
interview
[About ATP].
While AO focused
on the unconscious, a familiar field, attempting
to replace a theatrical model with one based on
the factory, hence desiring machines and desirous
production. ATP tries to invent its own fields,
however which are not pre-existing. It is a sequel
to AO, but 'a sequel in live action' (175).
Examples include 'the animal becoming of human
beings and its connection to music'.
AO came just after May 68. Nowadays there is a
reaction requiring a new politics to oppose
'today's conformity'. There is a deliberate
'labour crisis where books are concerned'
[critical academics are being excluded?].
Journalism is increasing in power, recent novels
are rediscovering banality such as the theme of
the family. AO really 'was a total failure'(176).
ATP should really be seen as 'plain old
philosophy'. Philosophers create concepts, invent
new ones, and this is a special form of thought.
Concepts are 'singularities that have an impact on
ordinary life', on ordinary thinking. Examples of
concepts include 'rhizome, smooth space,
haecceity, animal becoming, abstract machine,
diagram'. Guattari is always inventing concepts.
The unity of ATP is provided by the idea of an
assemblage which has replaced the desiring
machine. There are various kinds of assemblages
and different component parts. We are trying to
use it to explain behaviour, hence the importance
of ethology and animal assemblages like
territories. The 'chapter' (sic — 177) on the
ritornello 'simultaneously examines' animal
assemblages and properly musical assemblages and
'this is what we call a plateau, establishing a
continuity between the ritornellos of birds and
Schumann's ritornellos'. The analysis of
assemblages and their component parts 'opens the
way to a general logic' which is still at an early
stage: 'Guattari calls it "diagrammatism"'.
[Deleuze thibks itwillinformtheir future work --
it didn't inform his much?]. In assemblages there
are various things like bodies or combinations of
them, but also utterances and regimes of signs.
The relation between them is complex, and we
cannot reduce things to productive forces or
ideologies. There are also 'hodgepodges',
'combinations of interpenetrating bodies'. Some
combinations are acceptable, others not [incest is
the example]. There are also 'verdicts',
collective utterances, 'instantaneous and
incorporeal transformations which have currency in
a society' [the example here is a cliche from
conventional wisdom about no longer being a
child]. [Badly needs Bourdieu here on the habitus
and its connection to social reproduction]
[Is there an ethics, the interviewer asks]. The
component parts of assemblages can be seen as
criteria, qualifying assemblages [weaselly about
ethics]. Assemblages are a bunch of lines, but
summer segmented, some disappear into black holes,
some are destructive, while others are 'vital and
creative', opening up assemblages. An abstract
line is not just one which does not represent
anything, as in geometry, but rather one that
passes between things, 'a line in mutation' (178).
This makes it living and creative, 'Real
abstraction is non-organic life', and this idea is
everywhere in ATP. It is the life of the concept.
Assemblages are carried along by these abstract
lines. It is like modern technology which are
channelled through silicon rather than carbon, in
a 'silicon – assemblage'. So we have to speak
about 'component parts of assemblages, the nature
of the lines, the mode of life, the mode of
utterance...'
Conventional distinctions are suppressed, like
those between nature and culture. Some theorists
like Lorenz saw human behaviour as only a special
kind of animal behaviour, but the idea of
assemblage replaces the idea of behaviour
altogether, and here 'the nature – culture
distinction no longer matters', with behaviour as
just 'a contour' (179). The coherence or
consistency of an assemblage is a prior problem,
and this is why ATP investigates 'intensive
continuity', with plateaus as 'zones of intensive
continuity', as in Bateson.
We get the idea of intensity from Klossowski, who
provided a philosophical and theological depth of
the notion of intensity, and developed a semiology
[and what limited bollox it was]. Physics and
mathematics are rediscovering intensive
quantities, and biology and embryology also
interested in what they call gradients. The
sciences are not isolated here. 'Intensities are
about modes of life, and experimental practical
reason. This is what constitutes non-organic
life'. [We can see how this informs the general
philosophy as I understand it, that there are
pulsating intensive forces at work which produce
the regularities observed by science and social
science as actualizations]
[After reading this I set off to read Klossowski
on Nietzsche. What a horrific read! I have
confessed in the notes that I am highly sceptical
of Nietzsche and his absurd notion of tonalities
of the soul as a form of intensive fluctuation,
although Klossowski does help explain how these
impulses produce both an ontology and a semiology.
It is bollox though.]
ATP was the result of a lot of work and 'it will
demand work from the reader', although it is
impossible to predict which sections might seem
easier. It is 'precisely the kind of book being
threatened today' (180), so writing it could be
seen as politics. The main issue is whether people
might have some use for the book 'in their own
work, in their life, and their projects' [and we
have all seen how this sort of ludicrous
pragmatism has led to the most absurd attempts to
claim Deleuze as warrant].
Chapter 23 Painting sets Writing Ablaze
[This is about Deleuze's book on Bacon which I
have not yet processed, so I confined myself to
some very short notes here. I have read it now (
writes a later Dave) -- notes here
Bacon fits Lyotard's view of the figural direction
in painting [very roughly, the figure is an image
that conveys both formal semiotic and informal
affective meanings]. Kafka also produces Figures,
displaying both 'unfathomable suffering and
profound anguish', but also a 'certain
"mannerism"' [reflecting artistic conventions?]
(182). In Bacon, there is the violence of the
oppressive situation, but also 'the incredible
violence of the poses' which are figural.
Painters also have specific lines and colours,
assemblages, as do writers. Writing about painting
is difficult — describing a painting somehow
reproduces it and makes it redundant, or there are
the temptations of 'emotional gushing or applied
metaphysics' (183). It is hard to extract concepts
that are based just on the lines and colours of
painting and how they communicate, especially with
Bacon's use of colour.
[Then the famous bit:] 'a canvas is not a blank
surface. It is already heavy with cliches, even if
we do not see them. The painter's work consists in
destroying them: the painter must go through a
moment when he or she no longer sees anything
thanks to a collapse of visual coordinates. That
is why I say that painting includes a catastrophe,
one which is the crux of the painting'. The other
arts also struggle with cliches, but somehow
inside the author rather than in the work: Artaud
shows the 'collapse of ordinary linguistic
coordinates' as part of his work. Paintings follow
from an 'optical catastrophe' that remains in the
painting. (184).
Apparently Deleuze did not confine his thinking
specifically to reproductions of the paintings,
but followed his own insights of 'a certain
internal law' involving the comparison of specific
paintings. For example, he saw triptyches in
apparently singular paintings.
Interviews with Bacon by Sylvester were useful,
but artists generally talk with 'extraordinary
modesty, self-imposed rigour, and great strength'
(185), often suggesting the concepts and affects
in their work.
When he met Bacon, the problem was attempting to
paint sensations, not particularly violent
spectacles, but more 'the cry'. This was a turn
towards sobriety and away from easy figuration
itself. Bacon apparently said that he dreamed of
painting a wave but saw the risk of a lack of
success. This is like Proust or Cezanne who
declared himself unable to paint a simple apple.
'Emotion does not say "I"' (187). Emotion is not a
matter for the ego but for the event. It is not
easy to grasp an event and the first person is not
implied. It would be better to 'use the third
person like Maurice Blanchot when he says that
there is more intensity in the sentence "he
suffers" than "I suffer"'.
Chapter 24 Manfred: an Extraordinary
Renewal
[This refers to the work of Carmelo Bene, whom I
do not know, so I have taken no notes]
Chapter 25 Preface to The Savage
Anomaly
[Negri's book on Spinoza written in prison].
Apparently the argument is that forces can
manifest themselves without mediation, and earlier
view that provided for a notion of legalistic
power, and an inbuilt conflict or antagonism which
would result. Spinoza takes a different view, for
Negri: forces are spontaneous and productive
requiring no mediation but are 'elements of
socialisation in themselves' (191), operating
immediately on multitudes not individuals, and
expressing more of a potential rather than an
actual power. Here, material ontology conflicts
with the notion of a final mediation based on some
ideal society. Negri sketches the background of
this view in Spinoza as a description of the
potential of the growing market in Holland and its
emerging opposition with the monarchy.
At first, Spinoza's work was still utopian, but
this was modified by a growing interest in
ontology based on substance and modes. Because
these were not legally constrained and appeared
spontaneous, it was easy to ignore this material
basis for reality in favour of something more
idealized. The second position involves two moves:
there is a focus on the modes rather than the
substance itself [allowing for more concrete
analysis rather than theology]; thought focuses on
the material dimension instead of idealist utopian
thinking. Antagonism becomes a firmly political
issue not an idealised one.
The body in Spinoza is grasped as a force, defined
by 'chance encounters and collisions' but also by
'relations between an infinite number of parts',
so it is already a multitude. Composition and
decomposition of bodies is a process, affected by
relationships which can therefore be healthy or
unhealthy. Two individual bodies can organise
their relationships in concrete circumstances to
produce another body. The whole point of the
political imagination is to organise such
'composable relationships'(192). Common notions
therefore become the 'cornerstone of the Ethics',
producing suitable physical and political
relationships.
Negri argues that there is this progression from
utopian to revolutionary materialist thinking
[which no doubt endears him to Marxists instead of
Hegel]. Politics are central to the philosophy.
Negri's argument deserves central discussion and
debate.
Chapter 26 The Indians of Palestine
[A discussion with a Palestinian militant, one
Elias Sanbar]. There is now a new Palestinian
Journal, and this has helped to flesh out the
abstract image of the Palestinian combatant.
Palestinians are not just refugees, nor just armed
militants. The Journal helps insist 'that
Palestinians actually exist' (195). The journal is
a forum for many voices, meaning there are many
different Palestinians, indeed, a whole society.
Palestine is also a land which 'has been pillaged
and plundered', featuring a notion of exile and a
desire to return.
Deleuze thinks that Palestinians have been
understood in an unusual way, not in a typical
colonial situation. This is why they are like
American Indians. Colonialists maintain people and
make them work, but in Palestine territory is
emptied of its people. Both the United States and
Israel have gone down that route [and it is the
route followed by the UK in the case of Australia,
defined as an empty land]. However, Palestinians
can draw at least on the Arab world.
Sanbar says Palestinians were exiled to other Arab
countries, and Israel even rebukes those countries
for not integrating them. That would be to make
them disappear again. Israel's policy has only
been to make Palestinians disappear. The old forms
of colonization left possibilities for the
colonized to interact with the colonialists, but
Zionism makes absence a necessity, 'the total
rejection of the Other' (197). They operated
initially with the false idea of an empty country,
or argued that the Palestinians were about to
disappear. The Other was not to be seen as
present. Zionists played the race card here, in
making Judaism itself a justification for
rejection of the Other, confirmed by the
persecution of the Jews in Europe. Jews themselves
have been imprisoned by this argument. Zionism has
to construct some eternal principle for the
otherness of Jews, wherever they lived, some
cursed Other — but this is not a realistic
position, and Jews should not see themselves as
permanently and inalterably other like this. The
PLO propose to establish a democratic state in
Palestine with no permanent walls between
inhabitants.
Deleuze says the journal is right to insist that
the Palestinians are people like any other, and
they need to be recognizedui as such, despite
fears that they will want to destroy Israel. The
journal includes essays on the Holocaust and its
political significance for Israel [presumably
arguing that it limits the political
possibilities]. One consequence is a total
dependence on the west. The Palestinian demand is
simply to be an unexceptional people, and they see
history as a matter of possibility, multiple
possibilities. Sanbar thinks that military force
alone will not preserve Israel, and that their
main political argument is that there is no such
thing as a Palestinian people — that is why that
issue has to be central to the journal.
Chapter 27 Letter to Uno on Language
'Language has no self-sufficiency… No significance
of its own' (201). Signs are always connected to a
nonlinguistic element — '"the state of things" or,
better yet, "images"', as in Bergson [who says,
according to D, images have an existence
independently of us]. Utterances come in
assemblages, with images and signs.
Utterance 'does not refer to a subject, there is
no subject outside of assemblages. Instead
assemblages operate processes of subjectivation to
assign subjects, which can be images or signs. We
see this best in free indirect discourse — 'an
utterance contained in the statement which itself
depends on another utterance. For example: "she
gathers her strength"'. Every utterance is really
composed of several voices like this.
Metaphors 'do not exist'[and see his rejection of
them in Difference and Repetition]. Free indirect
discourse is the only figure, 'the only one
coextensive with language'.
Language is never a homogenous system, despite
linguists like Jakobson or Chomsky who 'believe in
such systems because they would be out of a job
without them' (202) [very vulgar reductionism].
Labov's linguistics shows a suitable heterogeneity
and lack of equilibrium, but this lack of
equilibria is also revealed in literature where
one writes in one's own language as if it were
foreign, citing Proust and Kafka.
This is where the work on cinema comes in because
it is 'an assemblage of images and signs' which
need to be classified. There might be a movement
image which can be subdivided, for example, with
corresponding signs or voices or forms of
utterance. Japanese cinema has extended the
possibilities.
Chapter 28 Preface to the American Edition
of Nietzsche and Philosophy
[Notes on the book here]
Nietzsche's work has been seen as ambiguous, and
there are worries whether he prefigured fascist
thought. Was it even philosophy or just violent
poetry and 'capricious aphorisms and pathological
fragments' (203). Misunderstanding was at its
height in England because the English never saw
the need to combat French rationalism or German
dialectic — they had their own 'theoretical
pragmatism and empiricism that made any detour
through Nietzsche totally unnecessary'. As a
result, his influence was limited to novelists,
poets and playwrights, with the philosophy and
theory downplayed. However his philosophical
influence was massive, and at least comparable to
that of Spinoza.
We can understand the philosophy 'along two axes'.
First there is the notion of force, of forces
which constitute 'a general semiology'. All
phenomena including consciousness and spirits are
signs or rather symptoms referring to a state of
forces which makes the philosopher a physiologist
or doctor. He invented a typology of forces —
active and reactive forces — and analyzed their
combinations. He was particularly interested in
reactive forces. The general semiology obviously
included linguistics or philology where a
proposition expresses 'the speaker's way of being
or mode of existence, the state of forces someone
maintains'. So each proposition refers to a mode
of existence and the point of analysis is to
investigate this mode of existence of the person
pronouncing the proposition, especially the kind
of power that is necessary in order to pronounce
it.
The two reactive human forces are resentment and
bad conscience, which makes humans into slaves. A
slave is not necessarily someone dominated since
even the dominant can be imprisoned by these
reactive concepts, even leaders in totalitarian
societies. We find 'a universal history of
resentment and bad conscience' (205) in the Jewish
and Christian priests and modern day priests, in
Nietzsche's 'historical perspectivism'.
The second axis concerns power and will lead to
both an ethics and an ontology. There is much
misunderstanding here. The will to power is not
just a matter of wanting or seeking power. Instead
power designates the element that makes relations
of forces work, the dynamic qualities of
affirmation or negation. Ordinary individual wills
imply this power but do not directly express it,
except in its lowest and most negative form [I
think he has in mind reactionary conservatism]. We
also need to transform the question what is it
into who is it — who can utter particular
propositions — but again we are not referring to
individuals or persons but rather to events,
relational forces in a proposition or genetic
relations that determined this forces. '"Who" is
always Dionysos, an aspect or a mask of Dionysos,
a flash of lightning' [very obscure — relates to
the idea that there is only playful fate, the
phantasm, in the form of the Return, driving
things ultimately — with all the problems that are
then involved in describing this state without
using conventional propositions as in Klossowski].
We should never understand the eternal return as
the return of some combination after all the
others have been tried, or as the return of the
identical all the same. Nietzsche as a radical
critique of this form of identity and he
explicitly denies that it will be the same that is
returned. The return must always involve a
selection — a selection of will or thought, hence
the ethics [all the unsavoury stuff about the will
or thought of the aristocracy or the blond
beasts]: we will will today only those things
whose eternal return we also will, to avoid
mealymouthed willing of just this once. There is
also a selection of Being, the ontology — what
returns 'is only that which becomes in the fullest
sense of the word. Only action and affirmation
return'. Being is becoming and so whatever is
opposed to becoming will not return [because the
return will also be governed by the will of the
healthy, the strong and so on]. The Return is
therefore a transmutation, 'the eternity of
becoming eliminating whatever offers resistance',
finally enshrining the active. This will be the
dawn of the overman which has 'no other meaning'.
It therefore involves not wanting but giving or
creating. Deleuze's book is about this notion of
Becoming.
However, Nietzsche also evokes 'affective
dispositions on the part of the reader' (207).
Nietzsche himself always saw 'a profound
relationship between concept and affect', but
these must be grasped according to his own
'climate'. Nevertheless, readers have obstinately
seen the Nietzsche and slave as someone dominated
by a master, the will to power as a will to seek
power in this society, the eternal return as the
return of the same, and the over man as a race of
Masters. This will not produce 'a positive
relationship between Nietzsche and his reader'.
Nietzsche will be seen as a nihilist or a fascist,
as he was well aware: Zarathustra was seen as
likely to be interpreted as both monkey and clown.
Any book must attempt a redemptive reading
['attempt to rectify any practical and affective
incomprehension' (208)].
Nietzsche's nihilism involve the triumph of
reactive forces and the negative, and he wanted
transmutation or becoming instead, tapping the
'transhistoric element of humanity, the Overman
and not the Superman'. Overmen appear when the
reactive is overcome. This is an alliance with
future forces, as well as an analysis of 'the
diabolic forces already knocking at the door'.
These were to be overcome, however, by a desperate
act of reawakening the positive.
An aphorism is a fragment or snippet of thoughts,
but also a proposition, 'which makes sense only in
relation to the state of forces which it
expresses, and who sense changes — whose sense
must change — according to the new forces which it
is "able" (has the power) to elicit' (208). [A
massive claim here which I would like to see
justified in terms of actual aphorisms, especially
the absurdly volkisch ones — presumably Deleuze
means the little cryptic asides in the philosophy.
Lists have been compiled of the wit'n'wisdom
variety -- try this
one].
Nietzsche has transformed the image of thought. He
takes them away from mere truth and falsehood
[meant to be a rebuke of sterile logical analysis
or scientism, but very dangerous in my view]. We
need to interpret the forces at work and make an
evaluation of the power involved, in a 'thought –
movement' (209). Thought itself must produce
movements and speeds, and again the aphorism helps
'with its variable speeds and its projectile like
movement' [pass]. Philosophy has a new
relationship to the arts movement. Nietzsche's
writing was never just discursive and dissertation
like, although his Genealogy of Morals
was written like this and it is a work 'to which
all modern ethnology owns an inexhaustible debt'
[unbelievable! It's a third rate sociology of
knowledge infused with his fantasies about
aristocracy and its decline]. Nietzsche does
identify the overman in figures like Borgia or the
Jesuits, but this is not 'pre-fascist', but rather
like the directors notes indicating how characters
should be played in a theatre.
Overall, 'Nietzsche's greatest teaching is that
thinking is creating. Thinking is a role of the
dice… This is the meaning of the Eternal Return'.
Chapter 29 Cinema – 1, Premier
[Notes on the book here]
The cinema offers a set of images that are best
understood as Ideas. They make us think. It is not
that thoughts exist first and that they then
create images, rather that thoughts 'are
completely immanent to the images' (210). These
concrete images are found in different art forms.
We have to draw out cinematic ideas, 'extracting
thoughts without abstract thing them, grasping
them in their internal relationship with [the
images, in this case movement images]'. The 'great
cinematic authors are thinkers', as are other
artists — it is not just philosophers. The arts
can sometimes intersect, but even here it would be
a mistake to think that there is some abstract
thought 'indifferent to its means of expression'.
Rather thought gets repeated taken up by different
arts, but autonomous in each case.
In Dostoevsky, the characters can encounter urgent
situations that require immediate answers, or
rather, the definition of the specific hidden
problem. This is the Idea for Dostoevsky. It is
the same for Kurosawa, whose characters move from
the facts of an urgent situation to uncover an
even more urgent question hidden in the situation.
Thought is not just the content of the question,
but rather 'the formal passage from a situation to
a hidden question, the metamorphosis of the facts'
(211). The connection between Dostoevsky and
Kurosawa is one where thoughts occur to both
rather than any deliberate adaptation.
Others [including the addressee, Daney]
distinguish different types of images, such as
deep in age where something is hidden, flat image
were everything is visible, combinations of images
where each slides over the others. It is both a
matter of technical facility and also the acting.
Different types of images require different acting
— so the crisis of the action image produces a new
genre of actors who are not professionals, but are
actually 'professional non-actors' who dabble
(Leaud is the only one I recognised]. Actors are
themselves thoughts here.
We should judge an image by the 'thoughts it
creates'. So there is a thought reacting to a flat
image. The director can vary the thoughts. Take
the way they vary the notion of depth — if we
suppress the third dimension as Dreyer does, you
we imply other dimensions. For Welles there is the
notion of depth as a matter of layers of the past,
a new time image.
Cinematographic critique is developing well, and
so far there is no separate classical
university-based tradition separate from what is
modern, no separation between the critique of arts
and the history of art for cinema. Instead, there
is a common 'search for cinematographic Ideas' and
this can even be comparative involving painting
philosophy and science.Chapter 30 Portrait of the
Philosopher as a Moviegoer
[An interview with Guibert]. Painting and film are
not just something to be reflected upon by
philosophy. Philosophy creates concepts. The arts
produce different kinds of image. Concepts
themselves are images of thought, and are no more
difficult to understand.
Philosophical concepts 'resonate'(213) [weasel]
with images. For example film constructs
particular spaces and philosophy constructs
spatial concepts which correspond to them. There
may even be 'zone of indiscernibility', [mistyped
here as indiscerpibility] where an image, a
scientific model or a philosophical concept could
express the same thing, even though there are
different movements, methods and problems.
It is not a matter of neglecting the traditional
objects of study. Concepts are 'modern entities
with a life'. For example Blanchot says his
concept of the event has one dimension that
'plunges into bodies and finds its fulfilment in
bodies' but another that expresses 'inexhaustible
potentiality that exceeds every actualisation'
(214). An actor can play an event exactly in these
terms expressing a ' visual reserve'. Philosophy
can divide things up differently, grouping under
one concept things that appear different, and
separating things that seem to belong together.
Film does the same with 'distinct groups of visual
and sonorous images' which can themselves be
grouped in different ways.
Film is best enjoyed as a permanent spectacle,
even though there is something to be said for
specialised movie theatres [which apparently
existed in Paris and showed things like only
musicals or only Soviet films].
He takes notes soon as he can after watching a
film, and intends to watch them naïvely — 'Every
images literal must be taken literally' so that
you do not add depth to what is a flat image.
Images have to be grasped as they are presented in
their immediacy. Images have their own reality,
even though films can have distinct lives
themselves. Some emotions do induce crying or
laughter. The knowing laughter of the cinephile is
objectionable, though.
The history of what has been written on cinema is
also important — 'Saying what you have figured out
how to see'. There is no original spectator,
beginning or end, we work in the middle by
extending lines that already exist or branching
off from them. It is hard to disentangle qualities
of the image from qualities of the spectator. Some
images are both visible and readable, however, and
spectators can be left 'only with empty
intuitions' if they do not 'know how to appreciate
the originality of an image' (217). [The whole
section as a weasel].
Originality is the only criterion of the work, in
film as much as in philosophy. There is a danger
of repeating what's been said 1000 times already
and pursuing the 'mere pleasure of novelty, in an
empty way'. You are copying the old or whatever is
fashionable. It is different when you cause
something to emerge 'and that begins to exist on
its own account' [this whole discussion seems to
me to contradict what was said earlier about the
utterance always being tied to a context]. It
follows that 'cinematographic images are signed'
(218) that there are great auteurs with different
notions of space or concepts, say of violence,
even of colour.
Lighting and depth can illuminate problems, by
serving as the 'given'against which problems are
discussed. Problems have to be posed in the first
place and this is also creative. For example some
filmmakers see light in terms of shadow or
contrast, as in the tradition known as
expressionism. Things like chiaroscuro effects are
connected to philosophical concepts such as the
conflict between good and evil. Other traditions
see white light as the basic component, and even
here there might be a difference between the light
of the sun and the light of the moon. Here we
might be talking in terms of 'alternation and
alternative'. Different creative paths can
intersect.
He first went to cinema as an infant. He began to
philosophise about film after thinking about the
problem of signs which linguistics did not seem
capable of managing. Instead, he noticed movement
images and from their 'all kinds of strange signs'
(219) requiring a new classification. Again this
is not that film became a new field of
application, but rather it formed 'the state of
active and interior alliance' with philosophy.
Attempts to classify the signs of cinema was the
main point of the book. Writing it required that
he 'invent sentences that function like images'
(220), showing the great works of film.
Underneath, he wanted to show that the great
auteurs worth thinking and making films that were
'creative, living thought).
The second volume will look specifically at time
images, which are only implied indirectly in the
movement image. Film is still pleasurable, and
sometimes the beauty of the film dominates to such
an extent that writing about it is difficult.
Chapter 31 Pacifism Today
[A dated and not very interesting discussion
trying to argue that pacifism is about negotiating
the end of the Cold War not just opposing the
installation of missiles]
Chapter 32 May '68 did not take place
There are always parts of events that cannot be
reduced to any sort of social determinism. There
are similar unstable conditions in physics
according to Prigogine. It follows that
those parts cannot be outdated because they open
onto the possible. May '68 was such an event, 'a
pure event, free of all normal, or normative
causality'(233). It resulted from a series
of amplified instabilities. We should ignore all
the usual slogans and idiocies and focus instead
on the 'visionary phenomenon' (234), the
possibility for something else, a new existence
even a new subjectivity with new relations with
the body and with culture.
To understand it, we really need new 'collective
agencies of enunciation' that match the changes in
subjectivity. We have historical examples here in
the American New Deal and the Japanese boom [sic].
In France in 68, the authorities constantly hoped
that everything would settle down, but May '68
remains as a current crisis. French Society was
unable to assimilate it, unable to redeploy
subjectivity, to offer something satisfying for
people. Instead, every effort was made to
marginalize or caricature the events.
Reactions set in by the left as much as by the
right.
The children of May '68 are still around, however,
although 'their situation is not great'.
They are less demanding, but they also know that
nothing in the present will correspond to their
subjectivity, potential or energy. The
stance is to [lie low] keep things open, hang on.
These '"situations of abandonment"' (235) are
found all over the world, in unemployment,
retirement, the situations in which the
handicapped find themselves. Subjective
redeployment is taking the form of 'an unbridled
American style capitalism or even of a Muslim
fundamentalism'[and 'Afro American religions like
in Brazil' for some reason] (236). The whole
of Europe has been Americanized. Possibilities are
found elsewhere: 'along the east - west axis, in
pacifism' to end the Cold War stalemate, and
'along the north south axis' in a new
internationalism, taking into account 'third
worldification in the rich countries
themselves'. We need new creative solutions
to continue where May '68 left off.
Chapter 33 Letter to Uno: How Felix and I
Worked Together
Guattari might have a different point of view.
'One thing is certain, there is no recipe or
general formula for working together' (237).
They met soon after 1968 through a mutual friend.
They did not seem to have much in common. Guattari
in particular participates in different activities
and does a lot of group work — 'He is an
"intersection" of groups, like a star'. He always
seems to be in motion, jumping from one activity
to another 'He never ceases'. Deleuze cannot
manage two projects at once and is more obsessive
over ideas. He likes to write alone and not to
talk much.
However, Guattari is really alone, and can plunge
into solitude when he is between activities. He is
highly creative and never stops tinkering with his
ideas, although sometimes he gets bored with them
and can even forget them temporarily. His ideas
are drawings or diagrams. Deleuze is interested in
concepts which can seem to have their own
existence, although we have to create them doing
philosophy. Concepts are 'neither generalities nor
truths. They are more along the lines of the
Singular, the Important, the New' (238). They are
inseparable from affects, 'the powerful effects
they exert on our life', and percepts 'the new
ways of seeing or perceiving they provoke in us'.
So we worked between Guattari's diagrams and
Deleuze's articulated concepts, but did not know
how at first. They read a lot, 'ethnology,
economics, linguistics, etc' and this was the raw
material. They were interested in what each other
took from or injected into this material. Anti-Oedipus
rapidly emerged as a new conception of the
unconscious, 'as a machine, a factory; and a new
conception of delirium as indexed on the
historical, political, and social world'. They
began their work with 'long, disorderly letters'
then met for several days or weeks at a time. It
was exhausting but pleasurable. They worked
independently developing points in different
directions, and then swapped drafts. We 'coined
terms whenever we needed them. The book at times
took on a powerful coherence that could not be
assigned to either one of us' (239).
'Our differences worked against us, but they
worked for us even more'. They worked at different
rhythms, not always responding immediately to each
other's letters. They did not do dialogue during
their meetings — 'one of us would speak, and the
other would listen'. They persisted with each
other. 'Gradually, a concept will require an
autonomous existence'. They did not always
understand them in the same way, for example the
organless body. Their work was not aimed at
homogenisation but rather proliferation, 'an
accumulation of bifurcations, a rhizome'. In
general, Felix had brainstorms and Deleuze was the
lightning rod to ground them, but they promptly
leapt up again and changed.
It was different with ATP. There is a more
complex composition and more varied disciplines.
The working relationship had developed to such an
extent that 'the one could guess where the other
was headed'. As a result 'Our conversations now
were full of ellipses' [you're telling me!]. They
could establish 'various resonances, not between
us [NB], but among the various disciplines that we
were traversing'.
The best moments for them were 'music and the
ritornello, the war machine and nomads, and animal
becoming' (240). In those instances, 'under
Felix's spell, I felt I could perceive unknown
territories where strange concepts dwelt'.
Overall, the book has been a source of happiness.
It seems inexhaustible, although maybe not so for
the reader. Guattari and himself had to return to
their own work but they will work together again.
Chapter 34 Michel Foucault's Main Concepts
[Apparently an early draft for the book]. Although the
work is historical and philosophical, Foucault
belongs to neither specialism. His continual
problem instead is 'What does it mean to think?'
(241). The historical is made up of strata but
thinking aims to 'reach a non-stratified material,
somewhere between the layers, in the interstices'.
It has an untimely quality, thinking the past
against the present, while being in favour of a
time to come. Thought displays becoming passing
through historical formations. There must be an
outside of thought and yet there are also internal
sources, beneath and beyond the strata. The aim is
to think differently as a result, breaking from
the conventional history of thought. There are
three axes, 'discovered one after the other': '1)
strata as historical formations (archaeology); 2)
the outside as beyond (strategy); and 3) the
inside as a substratum (genealogy)' (242). There
are also turning points and ruptures in the work.
First, 'strata are historical formations,
both empirical and positive'. They are made up of
words and things, the visible [meaning the
observable, practices and institutions which
routinize and embody observation like the clinic
or Panopticon, and a research technique for
philosophers/historians too?] and the utterable,
[located in whole] 'planes of visibility and
fields of legibility'. [The methodological
emphasis maybe explains what F meant when he said
he was a positivist?] We can use the work of
Hjemslev and speak in terms of content and
expression, each with their own forms and
substances. Thus the prison is a form of content,
and the convicts its substance. In terms of
expression, there is the form, criminal law, and
the substance, delinquency. The criminal law as
expression defines a 'field of utterability', what
may be said about delinquency, and the prison as a
form of content defines a place of visibility as
in 'panoptics'. Discipline
and Punish was in fact the last major
analyses of strata, but the basis was already laid
down in the History of Madness. In
between, Foucault wrote the Birth of the
Clinic and the book on Roussel [which gets
quite a lot of attention here — I must reread it].
Thus Roussel writes about the inventions of
visibility by machines [which embody obscure and
crackpot mechanisms, historical stories and
theories] and the productions of utterances
through various procedures [including R's literary
methods like putting stories inside stories or
starting with two similar sentences and making one
the beginning and the other the end of the
writing?]. The clinic offers the visible, and the
growth of pathological anatomy the utterable. In
the Archaeology of
Knowledge, we find a general theory of
the two elements of stratifications — the forms of
content, nondiscursive formations, and the forms
of expression, discursive formations. Together
these stratify and produce knowledge. We can study
these processes through archaeology, which refer
not just to the past but to strata, so that we can
have an archaeology of the present. Both visible
and utterable are matters of epistemology, not
phenomenology.
Foucault is a bit vague in choosing words and
things to designate the two 'poles of knowledge'
(243), and perhaps uses them ironically.
Archaeology really aims at uncovering forms of
expression which are not just linguistic units,
whether words or phrases or speech acts. Instead,
the underlying unit is the utterance, 'a function
that intersects diverse units'. The same goes with
the visible — they are units of visibility and not
just visual elements like qualities or objects or
'amalgams of action and reaction'. Again there is
an original function — units of visibility are not
objects or forms, but 'forms of the luminous...
created by light itself', so that things and
objects are better seen as 'flashes, reflections,
or sparkles' [argued first in the book on Roussel
apparently] [I think this is a bit of a weasel —
to say things are created by light or force is to
leave large areas unexplained and to work with a
substantial generality].
Archaeology tries to extract utterances from words
and languages in each stratum, and units of
visibility or the visible from 'things and
vision'(244). Utterances are probably primary, and
initially, in the Archaeology, the visible is only
defined negatively, as something nondiscursive,
complementary to utterances. But the visible is
distinct, and there are two poles to knowledge.
There must therefore be 'an "archaeology of
seeing"'. What was seen remained of interest
throughout, and the archive is an audiovisual one.
Utterances themselves can never be directly
legible 'or even utterable' except in relation to
certain conditions which permit them and enable
'inscription on an "enunciative support"'. There
must always be some basic language, but more
specific words need to be analyzed, 'pried open,
split apart' to grasp the way language
specifically appears in each stratum. Otherwise we
will be left just with words or propositions,
concealing the utterance. [Deleuze adds it is the
same with sexuality].
The assumption is that 'every age says all it can
say, hides nothing, silences nothing, in terms of
the language at its disposal' (245) [allowing that
even silences are utterances?], even in politics,
especially in sexuality. The same goes for the
visible — they units are not hidden but sometimes
conditions make them invisible 'although in plain
sight'. Again there must be some basic light which
produces flashes and sparkles, but the visible
must be analyzed to grasp the specific way in
which light appears on each stratum. Thus there
are no secrets in principle, although we must
analyze to make things visible and legible.
There is almost an neo-Kantian line here about
conditions, but for Foucault, we are talking about
real rather than possible experience, with no
universal subjects, and we have an historical
dimension, with strata seen as 'a posteriori
syntheses', with no interest in a priori
syntheses.
Foucault operates instead with a certain
receptivity 'constituted by the units of
visibility along with the conditions', and
spontaneity, constituted by units of utter ability
and conditions. Receptive doesn't imply passive,
nor does spontaneity necessarily mean active
[because the visible can unleash action and
passion, and the spontaneous implies an activity
of an Other — not clear to me]. The cogito
represents the spontaneity of the understanding,
and is to be replaced by the spontaneity of
language. Receptivity is no longer a matter of
intuition, but concerned with the receptivity of
light to produce space and time.
We can see that the utterance is primary, even
'"determinant"', but units of visibility are still
crucial in producing 'a form of
determination'[things resist discourses?]. [Deleuze is going to say
that ensuing problems on the precise relation
between the visible and the sayable can be
resolved by invoking his term the multiplicity].
The visible and the utterable are different in
nature, but are always found interpenetrated in
every stratum or knowledge [a logical or an
empirical necessity?]. The two are linked via 'a
mutual presupposition' (247), so there is always
something other than what we say, something
visible only through images or metaphor. The
visible and the utterable do not have the same
formation or genealogy. Discipline and Punish
shows this over the notion of delinquency, which
has both a set of utterances and a form of content
in the prison, each with different histories,
although they come together in an alliance. Here
the method seems to 'assume its historical meaning
and development' [it runs backwards would be an
unkind way to put it]. In this way [you can have
your cake and eat it], arguing for radical
heterogeneity but assuming a mutual presupposition
on a particular stratum [and as usual, I do not
think that these stratifying forces are adequately
discussed — are they 'philosophical'in the sense
of actualization of the virtual, or something more
familiar and political?]
Each stratum or historical formation displays
different sorts of capturing and holding,
different interpenetrations of utterance and
visibility. Sometimes, visible forms of content
like prisons produce secondary utterances,
developments of delinquency, and sometimes the
other way around [as in prison reform]. Here,
utterances slip between the visible and the
underlying luminescence, between the utterable and
specific languages [and again the book on Roussel
seems important]. This is because there is
something in common between each specific, a
'space of "rarity," of "dissemination", littered
with interstices' (248). This permits particular
kinds of language to be gathered together [at the
virtual or basic level] and also dispersed in
specific strata. The same goes for light, where
luminosity lurks behind specific flashes or
glimpses.
Foucault is not particularly interested in
imprisonment except to demonstrate how the
conditions of visibility appear in a certain
historical formation. Prisons can be seen as forms
of exteriority 'in which utterances are
disseminated and the visible dispersed': 'we
speak, we see and make see, at the same time,
although they are not the same thing'. The
combinations of visible and utterable are
transformed from one stratum to another, although
there are no general rules [so what does the
transformation?]. The strata are heterogeneous,
but sometimes also show 'mutual insertion' [seems
to close it off any criticism whatsoever].
Second the coadaptation of two forms
can be positively engendered. This means we have
to refer to power and not just knowledge — again
the two mutually presuppose each other, although
power is primary. We need to investigate power
relations themselves, as well as the relation
between the two forms — the exercise of power
requires relation to other forces. We are not
talking about the dominance of a class nor a state
apparatus, since power is produced 'in every
relation' [so the familiar criticism arises here —
we have diluted power so much that it becomes
invisible]. Power flows through the class system,
'in such a way that classes result from it, and
not the reverse' (249). The state or its legal
apparatuses can effect the integration of power,
but, like classes, they align forces and integrate
them, 'perform the relation of forces'for the
strata, acting as 'agents of stratification'
presupposing power relations — 'power is exercised
before being possessed'.
We are talking here of strategies, although these
can be anonymous and almost mute or blind. Social
fields do not self structure, nor are they
responsible for self-contradiction. The social
field itself strategises '(hence a sociology of
strategies, as in the work of Pierre Bourdieu)'.
This also explains the microphysics of power.
Strategies of forces are not the same as the
stratification of forms which result. Again, there
is no question of scale here, rather just
'heterogeneity'. (250).
This looks like a return to natural law, but both
law and nature would be too 'global'. Nietzsche
inspires the argument instead. It is rhetoric that
leads Foucault to oppose the notion of repressive
power, because he's trying to argue that we are
not entitled to simply explain it as violence.
Instead, the relations between the forces refer to
underlying 'functions' [sic], like 'sample and
subtract, enumerate and control, compose and
increase, etc'. Force both affects and is affected
necessarily in relation to other forces which are
implied by these capacities.
We should be thinking of different receptivities
as a force, capacities to be affected, and
spontaneities, as capacities to affect [shades of
Spinoza here?]. But now, we have much more
flexibility. Seeing and speaking were matters for
'already formed substances' and functions —
prisoners, students and workers were not the same
substance, nor was imprisonment and teaching the
same function. Power relations are different, they
can mix and blend and work on non-formed materials
and non-formalised functions — exert a general
function of control or 'sectorization' over a
relatively uninformed population. [Again this will
be a more general level than the concrete forms
found on the strata].
Foucault uses the term diagram to express these
relations of force or power, an abstract
functioning, remote from specific use. He talks
about disciplinary diagrams, or diagrams of
sovereignty [which apparently work on sampling
rather than sectorization — all this is in the Archaeology?].
Diagrams also help us explain mutations. 'It is
not exactly outside the strata, but it is the
outside of the strata'(251) [typical bullshit way
to say it operates at the virtual level]. It lies
between two strata as 'the place of mutations'
which explain their connection. We trace relations
of power in a diagram, and the relations of forms
defining knowledge in an archive, and the
genealogy is similarly extended to trace 'a
strategy of forces on which the stratum itself
depends' [I still think the term strategy implies
some concrete social agent and is irreplaceable
although not theorised].
The study of strategies begin in Discipline,
but is developed in The Will to Knowledge.
Naturally, there is no simple progression between
these two books. The diagram is used as an
argument to explain how 'the receptive spontaneity
of forces accounts for the receptivity of visible
forms, the spontaneity of utterable statements and
their correlation' [so it does everything]. We see
the relationship between forces in the strata
'which would have nothing to embody or actualise
without them', although without being actualised,
the forces would remain 'unstable, fleeting,
almost virtual'.
This has already been hinted at in Archaeology,
where regularity was seen to be a property of the
utterance. [Naturally] this is not just frequency
or probability, 'but a curve connecting singular
points' (252) [so an evasion relying on
unspecified natural forces producing curves].
Forces relate to determine singular points as
affects, 'such that a diagram is always a
discharge of singularities', but as in mathematics
[evasion!], singular points or singularities are
distinguished from the curve. The curve expresses
the regular relations of force, and alignment, a
convergence of series, a general line of force,
and this is what he meant by saying that the
utterances are regularities. This [must] imply
that the utterance always related to something
else of a different nature, something that is not
the same as just the meaning of the sentence or
the referent of the clause: instead, these are
singularities adjacent to general curves of
language. The same might be said of visibilities,
where [some] specific paintings can be seen as
singularities 'by tracing lines of flight [from
the general curve] that make them visible'.
Foucault was to develop this notion of a general
painting description into a theory of description
[in order to explore the visible?]. The whole
thing must 'result from the diagram of forces that
is actualised in them'.
[Then another one of those logical arguments that
philosophers like but which are really
tautologies]. If a force is related to other
forces, there must be some 'irreducible Outside...
Through which one force acts on another or is
acted on by another' (253). The outside confers
the 'variable affectations' produced by either a
distance or a relationship. 'Forces are therefore
in a perpetual becoming', another history to the
history of formations, or perhaps one which
'envelops it'. This is argued in F's article on
Nietzsche where struggles or conflicting relations
do not take place in a closed field but in some
'"non-place, a pure distance"', which operates in
the interstices [of stuff which has been
actualized]. This outside is not just the external
world, nor any conventional form of the exterior,
but is represented by the diagram, which can show
the disturbing effect of changes in distance or
relations. Seeing and speaking relate to
conventional exteriors [which can be each other]
but 'thinking addresses an outside that no longer
has any form. Thinking means reaching
non-stratification'. It takes place in the gap
between speaking and seeing. The Outside is seen
as an '"abstract storm"' which occupies the cracks
between seeing and speaking. It follows that
thinking itself is not the exercise of a faculty
but something that 'must happen to thought',
following the intrusion of the outside that
produces an interval. It does not offer some
subjective interior to unite the visible and the
utterable.
We can further see the intrusion of the outside as
'a roll of the dice, as a discharge of
singularities' [the reference is to an article in
Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology,
presumably a collection of Foucault pieces, 1998].
The relationships of forces are re-worked between
two diagrams [2 diagrams in historical terms? A
diagram for seeing and a diagram for speaking?].
It is not the case that 'anything can connect to
anything else', but there is an element of chance:
'It is more like the successive drawing of cards,
each one operating on chance but under external
conditions determined by the previous draw' (253 –
4), or like a Markov chain [Wikipedia:
serial
dependence only between adjacent periods (as
in a "chain")] . It can thus be used for
describing systems that follow a chain of linked
events, where what happens next depends only on
the current state of the system. . The composing
forces transform when they enter a relation with
new forces, so we're not talking about either
continuity or something interior, but
'reconnection over the breaks and
discontinuities'. This notion is derived from
Nietzsche referring to '"the iron hand of
necessity shaking the cup of chance"'.
When Foucault talks of the death of man [The
Order of Things], it is not that man somehow
surpasses himself, but rather that the forces that
composed man enter into new combinations. Those
forces did not always compose man, but were
related to other forces to compose God, producing
a notion of the infinite and making thought to
refer to the infinite. Then those forces entered
into relationship with 'another type of forces',
things like 'forces of organization of "life",
"production" of wealth "filiation" of language'
(254), which produced the sort of man who was
finite with a definite history. However, there is
a 3rd possibility where new compositions can arise
['must arise'], and both man and God undergo death
and new flashes or utterances appear. So the order
of man is something that only exists on a
particular stratum with a particular relationship
of forces. The outside is always 'the opening of
the future', an endless one where everything
changes. We can draw a diagram to determine the
relationships of groups of force, but this does
not exhaust the possibilities [surely a proper
diagram would?].
The outside is something more than any diagram: it
draws [as in drawing cards] new diagrams. There is
always a potential in the relation to a specific
diagram, provided by a force which is depicted —
'this third power is resistance' (255). Resistance
also appears in the form of singularities,
'"points, nodes, foci"' that act upon the strata.
Resistance actually comes 1st because it 'has a
direct relationship with the outside'. Thus 'the
social field resists more than it strategises'
[all argued in The Will, apparently].
Third. On desire. We have discussed
the formal relationships on the strata — knowledge
— the relation of forces at the diagram level —
power — and the relationship with the outside
[philosophised as an absolute relationship or a
non-relationship, meaning something beyond the
control of human beings?]. What about the inside?
Normal conceptions of interiority have to be
critiqued, but there might be an inside that is
deeper than the usual conceptions, just as the
outside is further from the normal external.
The argument here is carried by the notion of the
double. The doubling occurs when the outside is
folded to become an inside, as in 'the
invagination of tissue'. [Again a reference to
Roussel]. Thought contacts the outside, but this
implies that the outside must appear inside as
something which it has not thought [!]: There is
an 'un-thought in thought' [a fancy way of saying
thought must think about something that is other
than thought itself?]. For the classical age, this
unthought was the infinite, but for us, it became
a fold of the finite, a depth, an inside [often in
the form of something that determined thought?].
For Foucault, the fold makes the strata curve
[very useful diagram in the
book on Foucault, where the outside is
literally hemmed in]. [Naturally we have a witty
French way of putting this, in terms of the
outside now having an inside, or the hemmed
section being inside the outside].
Foucault now re-values his earlier work according
to this new axis of the inside, the unthought. It
was already connected to the question of the
subject, who would clearly possess qualities
outside of their own thought. This leads to the
notion of subjectivation, '(which does not
necessarily mean an interiorisation)' (256). The
inside is really an operation of the outside, and
the relation with the outside is a matter of
becoming subject. [Foucault's usual obfuscation
renders this as a relation of self to self, which
makes sense if we make this a relation of
subjective self to objective self]. We might also
be able to understand the notion of resistance in
this way — something from the outside that is not
exhausted by force [maybe]. In any event, we are
left with a marvellous French paradox: 'the
relationship with oneself forms an inside that is
constantly derived from the outside'.
The relationship with the outside comes first, yet
it does not determine the relation to self.
Subjectivation can oppose stratification or
codification. We have an irritating detailed
historical example to argue this. The Greeks saw
the world in a particular way and had particular
utterances which helped them actualize the
relationships of forces in their diagram to
produce the city state, the family, but also
'eloquence, games, everywhere where at that moment
the domination of one over another could take
place' (257). A particular relation to self
emerged as well, involving such domination —
Greeks were expected to manage themselves as well
as their house and the citystate. Even so, there
was no tight alignment: the relationship to
oneself developed only after disconnecting selves
from other social forms of power and virtue. We
can apply the metaphor of the fold again — 'the
relationships of the outside folded to make a
double... and allow a relationship to the self to
arise that develops according to a new dimension'.
Indeed the relationship to the self, governing the
self, becomes primary as a model of regulation.
The Greeks might have invented this dimension.
For Foucault, this relationship to self 'found the
opportunity to occur' [!] in sexuality, because
sexual relationships feature some important pole
terms — 'spontaneity – receptivity, determinant –
determinable, active – passive, masculine role –
feminine role' (258). Sexual activity also
particularly needs regulation 'because of its
violence and expenditure'. Thus it became a key
case for self-regulation, and activities took the
form of 'governing oneself sexually [regulating
pleasures of the body]... Marital relations
[connected to the economy of the household]... A
mature homosexual pederastic relationship with
young men [teaching young boys how to regulate
themselves]. Of course there will be no necessary
connection between self-regulation and sexual
relations, and Foucault struggled to establish a
connection, which is why he focused on the Greeks
as offering a particular case. In classical
Greece, the connection between self-regulation and
sexual relations became increasingly "necessary".
The Greek case can be contrasted to Christian
notions, defining the body in terms of the flesh,
and pleasure in terms of desire. So there is a
whole history of 'modes of subjectivation' and
their connection to the desiring subject.
The inside can take many forms. For example,
desire can mean the inside in general, or the
particular connection between the inside and the
outside including the strata. The relation to self
can therefore become 'homologous' to the relations
with the outside, making a nice connection where
'all the contents of the inside are in relation
with the outside'. The strata can work in
different ways, including putting the outside and
inside into contact, or, more, making the contents
identical.
Thinking combines these 3 axes in a 'constantly
changing unity'. It faces different sorts of
problems in 'figures of time'. The strata can
delve into the past but only to extract successive
presents from it, while the relationship with the
outside offers possible futures. The inside
condenses the past into modes which may not be
continuous [Greek or Christian subjectivity], and
there is a problem with choosing between 'long and
short durations' — when it comes to knowledge and
power, Foucault emphasizes short durations, but
when referring to pleasure it is long durations.
Happily, it all makes sense because we don't save
knowledge of power over the long-term, but we do
preserve moralities even if we don't believe in
them any more [as usual, I want to know who the
'we' is]. The self seems to accumulate the past,
the strata carries the present, and the future
refers to the relationship to the outside. When we
think, we do so within the limits of the present
strata. The point of thinking the past for
Foucault is to assist a future to come. [Then
there is a bit of a weasel about what social
change we are talking about — the strata can also
'produce layers that show and tell something new',
while the outside offers a more radical
questioning], and we need to examine the
relationship with our self 'to inspire new modes
of subjectivization'.
It is this topology that is his great
contribution, 'an entirely new system of
previously unknown coordinates', singular
philosophical insights and 'unprecedented curves
of utterances' it has 'changed what thinking means
for us'.
Chapter 35 Zones of
Immanence
[About Gandillac, who was Deleuze's supervisor]
The Platonic and mediaeval traditions saw the
universe as a chain of being, suspended from the
One, a transcendent principle which was serially
emanated to form a hierarchy. Entities had more or
less actual being or reality according to the
distance from the transcendental principle. There
is also a rival inspiration involving zones of
immanence which proliferate at various stages and
levels sometimes connecting levels, and here
'Being is univocal, equal' (261) [so that is the
origin of the term?]. Each entity is equally real
since each 'actualises its power in immediate
vicinity with the 1st cause'. Actual entities are
not organised in terms of their distance from the
glory of God, they coexist and display two
movements — 'complication and explication'
[discussed in the book on Leibniz, I recall]. God
complicates each thing but each thing explicates
God: so 'the multiple is in the one which
complicates it, just as the one is in the multiple
which explicates it'. The Renaissance did much to
develop this imminent conception
Much debate has ensued to reconcile or order these
different conceptions. In practice, the notion of
immanence tends to produce proliferation in
hierarchies, as a kind of inherent anarchy in
hierarchy, and atheism in God. Such contamination
arises whenever the two conceptions are related,
for example when transcendence is reasserted.
Gandillac did much to trace these themes in the
development of modern philosophy, through Leibniz.
Specific concepts were developed in the early
stages such as 'the notion of Posset, which
expresses the immanent identity of act and power'
(262) [as a kind of potential?]. The seeds of the
notion of immanence could also be found in
Neoplatonism, where Plotinus argued that as being
proceeds from the One it complicates each entity
as well as being explicated. The underlying
notions were 'Immanence of the image in the
mirror, immanence of the tree in the seed' and
this produced a whole expressionist philosophy.
'Philosophical concepts also modes of life and
modes of activity for the one who invent them...
[or gives] them consistency' (263). In the case of
Gandillac, it was a matter of implying zones of
immanence within hierarchies which then
destabilised them, in a humorous whole art of
living and thinking, which came over in his
interest in friendship and debate at conferences.
Again the point in conferences was to organise
them 'like successive terraces', to point out
zones of immanence within the same topic. He often
used philological approaches: again the original
thought of an author must include the source text
and the target text [linked by the same ideas of
complication and explication].
Chapter 36 He Was a Group Star
[as in an etoile]
[Obituary piece on F Châtelet, D's friend and
chair of phil at Vincennes. Member of a group of
friends that included Tournier. Gems include 'for
me, Fitzgerald is one of the greatest authors
there ever was' (266), and C's own novel linked
the creative life with processes of
self-destruction, thought with fatigue. An early
critic of the author function insisting there are
other functions in creative domains, inspired by
the cinema: 'managing {your life and your work} is
really a function'. A director {of other people
studies} and in this sense of pedagogue.
Interested in endless renewal of philosophy,
explaining his interest which ranged from
classical Greece to Marxist atheism, which also
drew on substantial collective work at Vincennes.
A combination of creativity production and
management].
Chapter 37 Preface to the American Edition
of the Movement Image
[I think this is the same preface as in my edition]. The aim is
to 'bring certain cinematographic concepts to
light' (269) not based on technical matters like
shots, nor critical terms such as the genres.
Conventional linguistics are also rejected.
Instead cinema is seen as 'a composition of images
and signs, and intelligible preverbal material
(pure semiotics)'. Linguistics by contrast
abolishes the image and does away with the sign.
Cinematographic concepts are types of images and
the signs which correspond to them. Images of
cinema seem automatic. They appear first as a
movement image and this can be broken into primary
types — perception, affection and action. These
images also produce a representation of time but
indirectly, through editing and movement.
A more direct time image appears in cinema after
the war, which reflects the trend in philosophy to
reverse the link between time and movements — time
no longer is an effect of movements, rather 'the
anomalies of movement depend on time' (270). These
can include false movement. New images arise
combined with new signs. Perhaps the key trend is
the 'explosion [destruction] of the sensorimotor
schema', which used to bind perceptions affections
and actions together. Its abandonment has had a
more important effect than say the emergence of
talkies.
There is no question of valuing modern cinema more
highly. In each case, the analysis deals
'exclusively with cinematic masterpieces which do
not allow any such hierarchy of evaluation. Cinema
is always perfect, as perfect as it can be, given
the images and signs it invents and uses'. The
monographs written by the great auteurs are
important sources. Auteurs should be considered as
great thinkers as much as other artists: it is
unlikely that they will be threatened by
television and new technology.
Hitchcock emerges as important at the end of book
one because of the image he seems to have invented
— 'the image of mental relations' (271). Relations
of always been important in English philosophy as
affecting the meaning of the terms that are
related. Hitchcock shows this in his 'minor
comedy' Mr and Mrs Smith, where a couple
suddenly learn that their marriage is illegal.
Hitchcock is also situated between the two
cinemas, classic and modern.
Chapter 38 Foucault and Prison
There were a lot of groups formed as a result of
1968, some of which survived afterwards. Foucault
had no historical legacy from 68 and so formed a
new kind of group — the GIP. He did not wish to
come under the control of other left-wing groups
or parties. The group was quite new as a result,
reflection of him and of his colleague Defert. It
had no immediate policy goals, but acted rather as
an information group, actually as a 'thought
experiment' (273).
The heritage from Nietzsche led Foucault to see
the need to think about particular kinds of
experience, in this case of prison, to make
something visible. The initial interest was to
research the experience, but the research found an
important dimension focusing on humiliation, the
social use of prison to break people, aside from
the official theoretical purpose. Those activities
were not supervised. There was a prison inside the
prison. The GIP worked with prisoners' families
and former inmates.
Foucault developed his political intuition, 'the
feeling that something is going to happen and
happen here' (274). He saw there were all sorts of
small disturbances and little movements in
prisons. He did not intend to encourage them, but
simply to make them visible in their full 'comedy
and misery'. Seeing was as important as writing,
and it uncovers the intolerable. Thinking was a
reaction to this intolerable experience. As a
result Foucault developed 'thinking as
experimentation and thinking as vision, as
capturing the intolerable' (275). It was not the
result of an explicit morality or system of
ethics, but rather pushing thinking towards a
limit of what was tolerable. Everyone knew that
the prison inside the prison existed, but no one
actually saw it. There was sometimes even humour,
not really indignation. The group was highly
specific and thus influential, and all sorts of
unexpected people took part [some are listed 276].
Deleuze joined. He remembers participation as
endless activity driven by Foucault's 'enormous
life force'.
Eventually Foucault disbanded the GIP, partly
because other organizations and individuals, often
former inmates, continued the work. However,
Foucault saw it as losing, and thought that
everything had returned to normal soon after the
group closed — 'not repression but worse: someone
speaks but it is as if nothing was said' (277).
However, much was actually achieved especially in
the formation of prisoners' movements, finding a
voice. Significant voices are often excluded, such
as those of the children in conferences on
elementary school. The GIP was a way of forcing
people to listen to the prisoner voice, to uncover
that things were being done beyond the deprivation
of freedom, that everyone knew about this but it
still happened.
Foucault's notion of the intellectual and the way
of life were different from Sartre's. Sartre saw
the intellectual as classically operating in the
name of superior values like 'the Good, the Just
and the True' (278). Foucault was 'much more
functional; he always was a functionalist', but it
was his own functionalism, seeing and speaking
with what was available. It was not just a matter
of gaining information, nor of finding the truth,
but rather producing 'statements about prison'
which none of the participants had been able to
produce themselves [emphasising 'produce']. When
Foucault spoke, it was exceptional — he was
decisive but not authoritarian. A statement was
something special, based on both seeing and
speaking, using words as the production of
statements, and things as 'the visible
formations'. 'The idea is to see something
imperceptible in the visible' (279).
Of course others have to speak, but the question
is about the importance of what is produced by
statements, new types of statements [the example
is the novel statements produced by Lenin]. The
point is not to seek the truth 'but produce new
conditions for statements' [horribly multicult].
1968 produced new statements that no one had used
before. Hitler produced new statements, and in his
case they were 'diabolical and very annoying' [!].
Involvement in the group produced very full days,
producing new practices. Although there were no
major changes in prison, there were movements in
prison which GIP amplified as a result of articles
and lobbying. This paved the way for new types of
utterances on prisons.
Foucault had a different conception of society
from Deleuze. Deleuze sees societies as 'something
that is constantly escaping in every direction…
More fluid… It flows monetarily; it flows
ideologically. It is really made up of lines of
flight' (280). The problem really is to stop flow,
and these powers 'come later'. For Foucault, the
surprise was that we could still resist powers,
but Deleuze's view is the opposite, that
governments are able to block flows. Society as a
fluid for D, but for Foucault it was an
architecture.
Foucault was admirable and very funny. He was
someone with whom you could 'speak of
trifles'[lovely chance for a misunderstanding
based on a direct quote there]. He was prone to
regard those who invented new styles as mad.
Although they liked each other they worked
separately and lost contact towards the end — 'in
the end I needed him and he did not need me'.
Chapter 39 The Brain is The Screen
[Already
summarised on the website]
Chapter 40 Occupy Without Counting: Boulez,
Proust and Time
Boulez has often discussed his relationship to
writers and poets. Musical and literary texts are
continuous across what seems to separate, but
these relationships are varied and irregular. For
example Boulez often cites Proust, but has another
sort of implicit relationship as if he knows
Proust by heart.
Boulez produced an important alternative: 'count
to occupy space–time or occupy without counting'
(292). In the first case we measure 'to generate
relationships' in the second, we 'implement
relationships without measure'. We can see the
relationship with Proust as of the second kind —
to occupy without counting, without measure.
Boulez noticed that in Proust sounds and noises
are separate from characters, places and names and
become independent 'motifs' that can change over
time. For example a motif can be associated at
first with a landscape or character, 'like a
signpost', but then it takes on a life of its own
and becomes 'the sole varying landscape or the
sole changing character' (293). We see this with
the little musical phrase that stands for
emotional alchemy, and apparently there is some
homage to Wagner. For Boulez, Proust understood
the independent life of the motif as in Wagner,
the way it 'enters a continuous variation that
presupposes a new form of time', initially for
'musical beings'. All the emotions, the jealousies
and slumbers are detached from characters and
themselves become characters, 'individuations
without identity, Jealousy I, Jealousy II,
Jealousy III'.
Variables developing in independent time become 'a
"block of duration"', specifically a variable
sound block. The variation by these blocks can be
traced along an 'independent, non-pre-existing
dimension', the diagonal, which indicates that we
cannot reduce sound to harmonic vertical or
melodic horizontal. The musical act is epitomized
for Boulez in this diagonal, under different
conditions, polyphonic combinations, fusions of
harmony and melody, the abolition of vertical and
horizontal [traced back to various composers]. The
diagonal becomes 'a vector–block of harmony and
melody, a function of temporalization'. We can see
the composition of Proust as similarly offering
'constantly changing blocks of duration, at
varying speeds and free modifications, along the
diagonal forms the only unity of the work, the
transversal [NB -- sohere the transversal is a
matter of a different dimension?] of all the
parts' (294). The search is not governed by
vertical dimensions, harmonic cuts in landscapes,
nor melodic lines of journeys. Rather the diagonal
runs '"from one window to another"', a succession
of points of view and the movement of the point of
view, 'joined in a block of transformation or
duration'.
However the speeds, augmentations or deductions of
duration 'are inseparable' for more conventional
metric relationships and proportionalities. The
smallest unit is the pulse, the tempo involves
'the inscription of a certain number of unities in
a specific time'. Both are found in striated
space–time, permitting the rational determination
of cuts, and some measure that grasps the sizes of
intervals between cuts. By contrast smooth
space-time is not pulsed and is detached from
striated space. Cuts are indeterminate,
'irrational', chronometry is only global,
'measures are replaced by distances and
proximities', according to the density of what
appears. A measure of occupation replaces a
measure of speed, so that one occupies without
counting. Boulez called the corresponding blocks
of duration '"bubbles of time"'.
Numbers are not fully metricated, but act as
[nominals] indicators, 'numbering numbers' (295).
They distribute elements. One block of time
succeeds another not as a normal series but rather
as an order. Boulez sees striated and smooth space
as in constant communication, however alternating,
overlapping and exchanging. Sometimes, a
homogenous block in striated time can look like
smooth time, and vice versa if there are unequal
distributions in smooth time so that we get
'densification or the accumulation of
proximities'.
We see these distinctions when Proust described
the difference between the Sonata and the septet,
a closed plane on the one hand and an open space
or bubble on another. In the Sonata, the little
phrase indicates speed, but in the septet the
phrases indicate occupation.
More generally, characters can be seen in two ways
— as a box varying in speed and quality depending
on the period in time, or as a multiplicity or
nebula, displaying degrees of density or rareness,
'according to a statistical distribution'(295) —
the example is the two Ways which offer 'two
statistical directions'. Albertine is both
striated and smooth, sometimes transforming, other
times offering diffusion. The whole novel can be
read as both smooth and striated.
There is far more than just a theme of memory in
the novel. Boulez talks about the '"praise of
amnesia"', from Stravinsky. Memory, even
involuntary memory, is rather limited in Proust,
and is exceeded by overflowing art. The real
problem of art turns on perception not memory.
Music 'is pure presence and calls for an extension
of perception to the limits of the universe'
(296). Expanded perception is the whole aim of art
or even of philosophy, and this requires a break
with memory and the identities that limit
perceptions.
Tonal language in music can be specifically
identified with the first-degree octave or accord,
but blocks and bubbles of music reject such
identity and require us to think again about
variations and distributions. This highlights the
problem of perception — how can constantly varying
individuals be perceived, especially if they evade
measurement. In musical sound, for example,
metrication can describe real phenomena but convey
no identity. There are holes in perception in
music.
Sometimes these can be filled by writing [not sure
if this means writing music or writing
commentaries on music] , so that reading provides
a kind of memory. But this displaces the problem
because we then have to perceive the writing in a
nonmetric way, without conventional
understandings. Boulez suggests a third
space-time, 'adjacent to the smooth and striated',
'the universe of the Fixed' (297) where we can
perceive such writing. We enter it through some
'surprising simplification' in musical pieces,
unusual accentuation, 'like a gesture brushing
against the formal structure or an envelope
isolating a group of constitutive elements'. Some
of these are identified in the little phrase,
where a particular sustained high note apparently
conceals 'the mystery of its incubation' [quoting
Boulez]. We are also told that in 'writing' the
septet [that is commenting upon or explaining
it?], Fixed indications were used. Thus 'that is
the role of involuntary memory in Proust, to
create envelopes of fixed [sic]'.
It is not that these fixed elements re-establish
simple identity. Proust saw that even when
repeated, elements do not acquire an identity.
Rather that identity is seen as 'a quality common
to elements that would not be repeated without it'
[the example is the common pitch in music]: the
fixed is not the same. Instead, we are to identify
'variation or individuation without identity'. In
this way perception is extended to include
variations and distributions, the identification
of 'difference as such'.
It is the underlying set of tastes common to
isolated moments that identify [the Guermantes
'way', for me, Combray for Deleuze], and this is
'always different from itself' [that is capable of
endlessly novel and apparently spontaneous sets of
judgements as in the elite habitus in Bourdieu].
In specific terms we can see in music and in
literature the 'functional play of repetition and
difference' and we are to infer the 'organic play
of identity and variation'. In these fixed
moments, we are forced to perceive variation and
dissemination, and the relationship between the
envelopes display a continual moving relationship.
We can perceive forces that are ordinarily not
perceived, imperceptible. These forces combine
with the forces of time. We often perceive things
in time, and we are aware of units of chronometry,
but we do not see 'time as a force, time itself'.
Sound can be used as an 'intermediary that makes
time sensible', perceptible. The material can be
organized to 'capture the forces of time and make
them into sound'(298) [apparently the project of a
certain Messiaen].
Boulez's project echoes the literary project of
Proust in new conditions. He develops the
'temporalization functions' in sound material, to
be captured by the musician. He operates with
'implicated time'. Like Proust, aspects of
implicated time are multiple, but are also 'simply
reduced to a "lost – found"'. Lost time is a full
function of time, and extinguishing sound 'is an
affair of timbre', it's extinguishing 'in the
sense that timbre is like love and repeats its end
rather than its origin' [beats me, maybe that once
timbre or love is extinguished, they persist even
in a strange absent form, their endings echo, a
kind of indication of their importance?].
When we search for time again or research it, we
form blocks of duration and trace their journey
along the diagonal. This does not take the form of
harmonic chords, but often appear as 'veritable
hand–to–hand fights', sometimes rhythmical, or
sometimes like embraces where one sound subdues
another and vice versa. Time is re-gained by being
identified, but only in the instant: with any luck
we can go on to perceive the envelope of fixed
[why we leave out the indefinite article is beyond
me]. Finally, Boulez identifies utopian time which
is discovered after we penetrate the underlying
secrets, discovering the smooth, realizing that
human beings occupy a place in time which is far
more significant than the places they occupy in
space. When we count, we can also perceive a place
which is beyond measure.'
Overall Boulez meets Proust to produce some
significant 'fundamental philosophical concepts'.
(299)
Chapter 41 Preface to the American Edition
of Difference and Repetition
[Already summarised here]
Chapter 42 Preface to the American Edition of Dialogues
[Already summarised here]
Chapter 43 Preface for the Italian Edition of A
Thousand Plateaus
[Notes on the book here].
ATP follows up AO, but they have quite different
destinies and contexts. AO was written in the
middle of 68, but ATP emerged 'in an environment
of indifference, the calm we find ourselves in
now' (308). 'A Thousand Plateaus was the least
well-received of all our books', although they
still like it. AO was a big success, although it
failed in the long term in that it did not 'put
Oedipus to rest once and for all' (309). Political
reaction to 68 demonstrates the power of the
Oedipal family to this day with its effects on
psychoanalysis literature and thought. ATP seem to
be a move forward into unknown territory, only
hinted at in AO.
The three major claims of AO were: (1) the
unconscious works like a factory and not a
theatre, focusing on production not
representation; (2) delirium, 'or the novel' [?]
is world historical, about races, tribes, cultures
and social position [a weak Marxism dealt with
this in AO]; universal history is real, but it is
a history of contingency — flows of the object of
history and these are 'canalised through primitive
codes like the over coding of the despot or the
flexible decoding of capitalism.
The ambition was Kantian in a way, 'a kind of
Critique of Pure Reason for the unconscious',
focusing on syntheses proper to the unconscious,
history as the functioning of these syntheses, and
Oedipus as an inevitable illusion falsifying
historical production. However, ATP is post
Kantian, but still not Hegelian — it is
'constructivist', a theory of multiplicities for
themselves, 'wherever the multiple reaches the
state of the substantive' (310) as opposed to the
multiple in syntheses conditioned by the
unconscious.
The Plateau on the Wolf man dismisses
psychoanalysis and argues that 'the distinction
between the conscious and the unconscious, nature
and history, body and soul' is not enough to
explain multiplicities, which are 'reality
itself'. There is no necessary unity or totality
or subject — processes that produce them are found
in the multiplicities. The main elements of
multiplicities are singularities. Relations are
becomings, and events haecceities '(...
subjectless individuations)'. Space-time is smooth
in the multiplicity. The model of actualization is
the rhizome. The plane of composition is a plateau
'(continuous zones of intensity)', traversed by
vectors and producing territories, all with
various degrees of deterritorialization.
History becomes a matter of much more variety [and
empirical investigation] — 'where and how does
each encounter come about?' [Absolutely impossible
to study of course, and again weak generalisations
from Marxism and/or Autonomism really guide
the study] we can certainly reject the usual
notion of progress towards civilization and
replace it with coexisting formations. There are
'primitive groups' occupying 'a bizarre
marginality'; despotic communities, centralized by
apparatuses of state; nomadic war machines in a
paradoxical relation with the state — unable to
control it without risking the state appropriating
it; processes of subjectivation in the state and
in warrior apparatuses; convergent processes in
capitalism and in its states, and modes of
revolutionary action [so the usual political
pessimism here and in the two above]; the
'comparative factors' (311) of 'earth, territory,
and deterritorialization'.
The last three factors are 'playing freely, that
is aesthetically, in the ritornello' — birdsong,
the 'great song of the earth, when the Earth cries
out' [what is that shit — some gesture to
eco-concerns?], the harmony of the spheres, the
voice of the Cosmos. The book would have liked to
assemble ritornellos or lieder for each plateau.
Philosophy is nothing but music or cosmic
sprechgesang {chant]. The owl of Minerva has
screeches and songs, so 'the principles in
philosophy are screeches, around which concepts
develop their songs' [Arty bollocks].
Chapter 44 What is the Creative Act?
[About cinema and philosophy. Originally a filmed
lecture paying homage to Straub and Huillet]. What
does it mean to have an idea? Everyone knows it's
a rare event, a celebration. And it is never just
a general idea, but one that is already 'dedicated
to a particular field' (312) like philosophy,
painting or science. Ideas are best seen as
potentials which are already engaged in a mode of
expression, and thus already inseparable from a
mode of expression.
Can philosophy think about cinema? Actually, no
one needs philosophy to think and the only
effective thinkers in cinema are filmmakers and
critics, or enthusiastic spectators, and they
don't need philosophy, any more than
mathematicians do. Philosophy has its own content,
and it is just as inventive or creative as any
other discipline — it creates or invents concepts.
These do not simply exist ready-made 'in a kind of
heaven', (313) but have to be produced [Gale
quotes this, but not in its context of course].
This production is in the context of a necessity —
philosophers do not create for the fun of it. The
necessity itself is rather complex. It implies
that philosophers create concepts but do not get
involved with specific thinking, even about
cinema.
People who do cinema create blocks of movement or
duration. It is not just a matter of invoking a
story — it has to involve blocks of movement and
duration to be cinema, unlike painting or
philosophy. Science also constructs its own blocks
— scientists invent rather than discover, and do
so as creatively as any artist. Scientists invent
and create functions. The function 'occurs when
there is a regulated correspondence [later
'correlation'] between at least two sets' (314):
the basic notion of science is the notion of a
set, but this is not a concept.
Of course practitioners in different fields can
speak to each other, but not about creation — that
'is something very solitary' (315), although
discussion can take place on the basis of the
creation. All creative disciplines have 'a common
limit' in that they deal with space–time. The
formation of these is always involved, but that
'never emerges for its own sake'.
So in Bresson, we find disconnected spaces, like
corners of a cell [Joan of Arc obviously]
which are assembled together as a series of little
pieces. Other filmmakers use wholes spaces.
Bresson was one of the first to show space like
this and others have borrowed the idea. Overall,
his blocks of duration and movement 'will tend
towards this type of space among others' [weasel].
He raises the question of what connects these
pieces of space if not the usual determinants, and
the answer is 'the hand connects them', the hand
in the image has particular 'cinematographic
value'; there are manual links, hence an
'exhaustion of hands in his films' (316). He has
particularly valorised tactile values, and that's
what 'the excellent images of hands' do — it is
not done for fun but out of necessity.
Some ideas in cinema would work in other
disciplines, like a novel, but they would not have
the same appearance. Ideas in cinema must be
cinematographic, already engaged in the
cinematographic process. It becomes a problem when
filmmakers want to adapt a novel — they must have
ideas in cinema that 'resonate' (316) [weasel]
with those in the novel. Sometimes this is
powerful. It is not necessary for the novel to be
particularly brilliant, as long as the ideas
'correspond'
In Kurosawa,, the link is with Shakespeare or
Dostoevsky, and the oddity is that he is from a
different culture. We can resolve this if we look
at Dostoevsky's characters, which are often
troubled, curious — characters suddenly forget
what they're doing, they are constantly caught up
in emergencies, but they know that there are still
more urgent questions which they cannot put their
finger on [much seems to depend on The Idiot].
'All of Kurosawa' characters are like that', which
shows he shares a problem with Dostoevsky
[especially in Ikuru, but also in The
Seven Samurai, dealing with immediate
emergencies, but haunted by the profound question
of what a samurai is in that particular society
An idea is not a concept, not philosophy. It might
be possible to draw a concept from ideas, as when
Minelli had an idea about dreams — that they most
of all concern 'those who are not dreaming'(318).
Someone else's dream produces danger, 'dreams are
a terrifying will to power' and the rest of us
become victims.
Cinematographic ideas are also seen in
dissociations between seeing and speaking in films
like those of Syberberg, the Straubs or Duras.
Cinema seems to have developed these
dissociations, although perhaps the idea could be
implemented in the theatre. Someone speaks, but we
are shown something else — the speech is 'under
what we are shown'(319), and only film can really
show this. The words rise, but what they are about
sinks underground. This is a cinematographic idea,
impossible to develop in other media. It offers
nothing less than 'a veritable transformation of
elements', that 'suddenly makes cinema resonate
with the qualitative physics of the elements'. It
offers transformation, a circulation of cinematic
elements. The Straubs show this best — we see a
deserted ground, but something lies underneath it,
as we know from what the voices telling us: if the
voice speaks of corpses, for example, a whisper of
wind or a hollow in the land also takes on that
meaning. [Can't thinkof the example -- I'm sure
I've seen it]
Having an idea is not just a matter of
communication, 'the transmission and propagation
of information' (320). It might consist of
imperatives directions — 'order words', which make
up a system of control. We might well be entering
a control society. Foucault talked about sovereign
or disciplinary societies, the latter being
characterised by establishing areas of
confinement. However, this was not his final word,
nor did he say that disciplinary societies were
eternal. We are entering a new type of society,
still with remnants of the disciplinary ones, but
focus this time on control. Places of confinement
are no longer needed, there is a decentralisation
tendency which extends to workshops and factories,
and new kinds of punishment. Even schools are
changing [with hints of an impending education
permanente, 322]. Control is not discipline, but
the means of control are multiplying: at the same
time they seem to provide full freedom of movement
[the example is the combination of freedom and
regulation produced by the modern highway].
There may well be counter information, as when
escaping Jews told us about German concentration
camps. This was not a problem for Hitler. It only
becomes a problem if it turns into acts of
resistance.
A work of art is not an instrument of
communication and has nothing to do with it. It
contains no information. It should best be seen in
terms of 'a fundamental affinity' with acts of
resistance. Works of art are not universally
accessible, however, so what makes it a genuine
active resistance? For Malraux, art was the only
thing that resisted death. We might take these
remarks as a preliminary to inventing a concept —
works of art do indeed resist death, for example
ancient art still affects us. [Then some
ridiculous Parisian waffle: 'Every active
resistance is not a work of art, even though, in a
certain way, it is. Every work of art is not an
act of resistance, and yet, in a certain way, it
is' (323)]
Back to the Straubs. The speech act arising in the
air while the object goes underground is an act of
resistance. This is so in all of their works
[Moses, America, Not Reconciled, or the music
video on Bach]. Bach's speech act tells us his
music is an active resistance, a struggle against
the separation of the profane and the sacred. The
active resistance ends with a cry [out out get
out]. This shows a double aspect to an act of
resistance, both human and the act of art [applies
to all politicised art, surely, even to all signed
art?]. It resists death with both aspects.
There is a close and mysterious relationship
between human struggle and a work of art. Klee was
right to say that sometimes the people are
missing, that they do not yet exist, so the
fundamental affinity is postponed and unclear.
[Luckily for the political thesis] 'there is no
work of art that does not call on people who does
not yet exist' (324).
Chapter 45 What voice brings to the text
Philosophy creates concepts with 'speed and
slowness, movements, dynamics that expand and
contract throughout the text' (325). They are not
easily linked to separate characters ['actors'],
but our characters themselves, clashing or
fulfilling each other, following rhythms,
'movements of the mind in space and time'. Actors
can however dramatize the concept.
Giving concepts a voice reveals that concepts are
not abstract [and help us see that?] Concepts
cannot be distinguished from a way of perceiving
things: 'the concept forces us to see things
differently', as in philosophical conceptions of
space. Concepts 'are also inseparable from
affects', 'new manners of seeing, an entire
"pathos," joy and anger that formed the feelings
of thought' (325 –6). The combination of concept,
percept and affect 'animates the text'. The
actor's voice should bring forth new perceptions
and new affects that surround the concept as read
or spoken, in a whole 'theatre of reading' (326).
[He particularly likes a certain Alain Cuny and
describes an ideal reading of Spinoza] 'the
powerful slowness of the rhythm is broken here and
there by unprecedented precipitation. Waves, but
also lines of fire.' We would then get the
necessary perceptions through which Spinoza grasps
the world, and 'all the affects to grasp the
soul'.
Chapter 46 correspondence with Dionys
Mascolo
[On M's book, which he likes. M replies with
classic French courtesy. I've tried to summarize
the meat of the correspondence below]. M
apparently proposes some '"upheaval of general
sensibility"' which will lead to new kinds of
thoughts, dispositions to thought. M explains that
this statement of his is largely implicit, because
everyone is suspicious of thinking, even in
philosophical thought. D proposes friendship, but
does not see it as particularly important,
focusing rather on categories and situations as
pretexts for thought — jealous love for Proust,
for example. M seems unique in seeing his
friendship with Blanchot as a pretext for thought,
as in philos, and argues that this sense
of philos has been crucial in the
development of European philosophy. M replies that
the wariness in thinking about thinking can only
come from a certain confidence following the
sharing of thought, although we must be wary about
that too. This still leaves the problem of the
origins of feelings of friendship, especially if
it excludes distrust. Apparently, it all turns on
the notion of 'communism of thought' (331). D
still worries that a friend can become a condition
of thoughts 'without losing his or her
singularity' (332). [I think much of this is
beyond me, because it seems to turn on shared
understandings of French literature and what
people have said about thinking].
Chapter 47 Stones
[About Palestinians again]. Palestinians are being
made to pay the debts that Europe owes the Jews.
Zionists have built their case on the recent
genocide but have used the sufferings of
Palestinians as stones to build the new state —
Irgun's bombs killed Palestinians as well as
English settlements.
The Americans have made the whole thing into a
'multibillion dollar Western' (333). The whole
thing depends on Israel being established in an
empty land, denying the existence of Palestinians,
while asking them to recognize the state of
Israel. The Palestinians had been fighting in
defence of their land, stones and way of life,
from the very beginning. It is a mistake to think
of them as Arabs from somewhere else. It is a
mistake to think of Arabs as all sharing some
common bond. The Palestinians will never be
totally chased away and erased.
The recent fighting [this piece was written in
1988] involves the suffering of the innocent
again. The Israeli secret service may be
admirable, but should not be allowed to determine
its politics. There are uncomfortable historical
echoes [highly relevant to the recent debates in
the Labour Party about Zionism and whether or not
accusing Israel of Nazi tendencies is
anti-Semitic];
'"They are all
named Abu," declares an Israeli official after
the assassination of Abu Jihad [a mate of
Arafat's, apparently assassinated in 1989 --but
the dates in the notes conflict!]. Does he
recall the hideous sound of those voices that
said: "They are all named Levy?"' (334).
The Israelis hope to succeed through 'infinite
occupation', but protest from Palestinians ['the
stones raining down on them'] will only remind us
that there is a place 'where the debt has been
reversed'. Palestinians own these stones. Europe
cannot pay its debt at the expense of several
murders a day, nor with third-party agreements,
because there is no third-party. 'The Palestinians
have become part of the soul of Israel', and are
able to constantly torment it.
Chapter 48 Postscript to the American edition:
A Return to Bergson
[ I have notes on this here. In my edition
it appears as Deleuze's Afterword]
Chapter 49 What is a Dispositif?
Foucault analyses concrete dispositifs or
apparatuses, and these aren't to be understood as
'a skein, a multi-linear whole' (338) composed of
lines which follow directions and trace processes
[rather than enclosed areas or objects, including
subjects and language]. The line sometimes
converge and sometimes diverged. Each one is
broken 'bifurcating and forked', and there are
derivations. Thus objects utterances subjects are
best seen as 'vectors or tensors'. When Foucault
examines three major instances — 'Knowledge, Power
and Subjectivity', they should be seen not as
definite areas defined once and for all, but
rather as 'chains of variables that are torn from
each other'. There are always new dimensions or
lines, appearing in a crisis, and that includes
crises in thought. It is like Melville on the
importance of lines. Lines both sediment and
fracture. We can map them, like 'a survey of
unexplored lands', and this is Foucault's '"field
work"' (339). You have to position yourself on the
lines and see how they don't just compose an
apparatus but pass through it.
The main dimensions of an apparatus are best
understood as curves [see above], of visibility
and utterance. Apparatuses like Roussel's machines
which 'make one see and talk'. Visibility itself
is not a general light illuminating objects, but
rather lines of light that produce 'variable
figures inseparable from an apparatus'[the usual
circularity to avoid determinism]. Each apparatus
has a 'regimen of light' distributing the visible
and the invisible, 'generating or eliminating an
object'. We see this in painting, but also in
architecture, as when the prison becomes an
optical machine. Utterances also have their lines
of enunciation where their elements are
distributed. Enunciations are also curves that
distribute variables, grouped in regimes of
utterance, producing for example a science or a
literary genre, laws or social movement. They are
not subjects or objects, but rather regimes.
Sometimes the lines cross the thresholds becoming
aesthetic, or scientific or political [utterances?
Utterances and apparatuses?] [I still think this
notion of a threshold was introduced horribly late
to cover some embarrassment of relativism in
Foucault's Archaeology].
Apparatuses have lines of force to move along the
lines, sometimes rectifying curves, drawing
tangents, surrounding paths, linking 'seeing to
speaking and vice versa'(340), mixing words and
things to 'carry out their battles'. Every
relationship between one point and another is a
line of force and every point in an apparatus
therefore has one. The line of force specifically
is combined with other lines, but it can be
untangled [in some sort of history of thought —
Foucault combines 'Roussel, Brissett and the
painters Magritte and Rebeyrolle {try this
link}'] lines of force offer a necessary
dimension of power, as a third dimension of space.
Again this is interior to the apparatus and varies
with them, and it is 'composed with knowledge'.
[So we are ignoring, as the McCannell's once argued,
crude nasty and direct forms of power including
physical violence?].
Lines of subjectivation in Foucault have been much
misunderstood. Foucault discovered them after a
crisis in his thought when he had to rework the
apparatuses and in particular 'prevent them from
closing up behind impenetrable lines of force
imposing definitive contours' [he risked
objectivism]. It is the same crisis as in Leibniz,
when thought breaks out just when it threatens to
become complete and fully resolved. Foucault
realised that apparatuses could only be
circumscribed 'by an enveloping line' [that gave
them coherence?] and which prevented the intrusion
of other vectors.
Lines of force can bend back, meander and go
underground, turn back on themselves, become a
'Self' (341). These are not pre-existing
determinations, but rather a process, 'a
production of subjectivity in an apparatus' [a
kind of coming to self-consciousness?], and thus
dependent on the apparatus for its development.
'It is a line of flight', escaping the previous
lines. The self involves a 'process of
individuation'affecting groups and people,
'eluding established lines of force and
constituted knowledge. It is a kind of surplus
value. Not every apparatus necessarily has it'.
These processes of subjectivation are found first
in the apparatus of the Athenian citystate. There,
forces operated through the 'rivalry between free
men'. In turn, another line develops 'according to
which the one who commands free men must also be
master of himself', developing a peculiar kind of
autonomous subjectivation, eventually able to
provide new knowledge and new powers. [So the old
dodge of resorting to a detailed empirical example
-- see De Certeau].
Lines of subjectivation can operate at the extreme
edge of an apparatus and produce another
apparatus, as in '"lines of fracture"'. There is
no general formula. Foucault was going to show
that there could be other processes of
subjectivation beyond the Greek model, say in
Christianity or modern societies. We might also
speculate about apparatuses where subjectivation
goes through marginal excluded people rather than
aristocrats or a limited number of free men [and
Deleuze has an example of his own relating to
China, 341 – 2 — apparently freed slaves were left
isolated and so develop their own form of social
life with corresponding forms of knowledge and
power]. The agenda set by Foucault here will be
eventually very fruitful [it wasn't because there
was no method to follow]. Nietzsche stressed the
role of the nobles in defining the good, but in
other circumstances the excluded, the sinners, the
hermits or heretics can be subjectivised, so we
could have a whole typology of subjective
formations.
In summary then, apparatuses are 'composed of
lines of visibility, utterance, lines of force,
lines of subjectivation, lines of cracking,
breaking and ruptures' (342). These are mixed and
intertwined, sometimes augmenting and sometimes
mutating assemblages [general theory as usual to
cover all possibilities]. [At least] we can
repudiate any universals — they themselves must be
explained. [In reality] all lines are lines of
variation without even constant coordinates. When
we talk about apparent universals like 'the One,
the Whole, the True, the object, the subject', we
are citing the effects of processes 'of
unification, totalisation, verification,
objectification, subjectivation' and these are
always 'immanent to an apparatus'. Each apparatus
is a multiplicity where there are processes in
becoming, and different forms of operation from
other apparatuses.
Foucault offers us a philosophy which is 'a
pragmatism, a functionalism, a positivism, a
pluralism' (343) [with no consistent methodology
to explore any of these aspects, only virtuoso
performances]. The attempt to apply reason to the
segments or regions 'may cause the greatest
problem', and Foucault prefers Nietzsche's
'historicity of reason' [itself based on a really
weak and partisan sociology of knowledge]. He is
aware of other research on forms of rationality
[and Canguilhem and Bachelard are quoted here] and
of 'sociopolitical research into the modes of
rationality in power' [actually citing none other
than Max Weber!]. He wanted to explore for himself
'study of the types of "reasonable" in potential
subjects', but denied any universal Reason,
'reflection, communication or consensus'.
Apparently, here he had 'a relationship with the
Frankfurt School'and its successors, but this was
misunderstood — there could be no general crisis
or disaster for Reason either. For Foucault,
reason constantly bifurcates, with only local
constructions or collapses.
There is no point in objecting to Foucault on the
grounds that we cannot judge the values of
apparatuses if we abandon transcendental values.
One option might be to say that 'all apparatuses
are equal (nihilism)', but instead we might
evaluate them against 'immanent criteria' as in
Spinoza or Nietzsche, relating to possibilities
for freedom and creativity. Foucault's aesthetic
criteria, applied to life, offers exactly this
sort of immanent evaluation in place of a
transcendental judgement — and this takes place in
his final books. [But the problem does not go away
— these possibilities are still limited and
relativized by apparatuses? As Deleuze puts it,
Foucault was offering 'an intrinsic aesthetics of
modes of existence as the final dimension of
apparatuses']. [This implicit notion of the
immanent, or the virtual in D's term, is at the
heart of D's rescue of
Foucault charged with inconsistency on the
relation between the sayable and the visible].
Another result is a philosophy that turns from the
eternal to the new [very important for a
professional academic, of course]. The new here
relates to 'variable creativity for the
apparatuses' (344), and is a contribution to the
great debate about how we can never produce
anything new. Foucault did not want to judge
utterances by their "originality"and emphasised
instead their regularity, but here what he meant
was a curve passing through singular points, 'the
differential values of the group of utterances'
[that is their incorporation of different rates of
change?]. Even if utterances contradict, we are
still not entitled to claim that that makes one of
them new: the regime of enunciation is what is
new, including its ability to include
contradictions. Thus there is a regime of
utterances appearing with the French or Russian
Revolutions, providing a whole 'content of newness
and creativity'. Whether this turns into social
change depends on the operation of lines of force.
Lines of subjectivation seem 'particularly
apt'(345) to outline paths of creation, which can
be tried out until an apparatus breaks —
apparently Foucault was to explore this in terms
of Christian processes, but this remains
unpublished. Of course nonreligious struggles can
also be creative, and a general Christian
subjectivation does not describe all the current
possibilities.
The newness of an apparatus provides its currency.
This notion refers not only to what we are at the
moment [since 'we belong to these apparatuses and
act in them'], but what we are becoming,
especially becoming other. This needs to be
distinguished in each apparatus. We can
investigate history, the archive, 'the design of
what we are and cease being', and what is current,
turning on a notion of an Other with which we
'already coincide'.
Foucault did not just see modern societies as
offering disciplinary apparatuses instead of
apparatuses of sovereignty, but also saw
disciplinary apparatuses as 'the history of what
we are slowly ceasing to be'. He foresaw the
importance of an apparatus based on constant
control. There are emerging productions of
subjectivity which can resist this as well. We
must untangle lines of force and possibility, the
archive from the current, and in particular 'the
part of analysis and the part of diagnosis' (346)
[the latter presupposing possibilities for
action?]. Foucault wanted philosophy to act
against time, for the future, the untimely or
non-current, 'the becoming that splits away from
history, the diagnosis that relays analysis on
different paths'. This is not prediction exactly,
but rather just being aware of the unknown
possibilities. A quote from the Archaeology
indicates this — [Foucault says we should look at
things that surround our present, things outside
the archive, the possibilities involved in the
archive, perhaps by reawakening older discourses,
looking for what can no longer be said. This is
diagnosis which 'releases us'from continuity,
challenges our temporal identity, breaks with
teleology, attends to the other and the outside.
In particular, diagnosis '"does not establish the
recognition of our identity through the play of
distinctions. It establishes that we are
difference, that our reason is the difference
between discourses, our history the difference
between times, our self the difference between
masks"' (347)].
So we have groups of lines of stratification or
sedimentation, of actualization or creativity.
Foucault's method first of all establishes a
specific archive, using 'extremely new historical
means' [his archaeology or genealogy], focusing on
things like hospitals and clinics. But there is
another half of the analysis, which he does not
pursue explicitly in the works [but does in the
interviews] because this would 'avoid confusing
things' and enable 'trusting in his readers'. This
other half would investigate what is meant by say
madness or prison today, what new modes of
subjectivation are appearing [which apparently
haunted him until the end]. The interviews were
therefore very important and 'in them he traced
lines of actualization that required another mode
of expression than the assimilable lines in his
major books. The interviews are diagnoses'. It is
the same with Nietzsche [I only really discover
the importance of the unpublished work, especially
the letters, the Nachlass, after reading Klossowski].
Foucault's complete works include the books and
the interviews. Together they will lead us towards
a becoming based on 'strata and currentness'
(348).
Chapter 50 Response to a Question on the
Subject
Philosophical concepts exercise functions in
fields of thought. Those fields have internal
variables and external variables '(states of
things, moments of history)' (349) related to the
internal ones and the functions. Concepts are
therefore not created nor do they disappear on
their own — the new functions in new fields
'dismiss it relatively'. That is why there is no
point in criticising concepts — better to
construct new ones or discover new fields that
make concepts 'useless or inadequate'.
These rules affect the concept of the subject. Its
classic functions include
(a) a universalising function, where the universal
was not a matter of objective essence but rather
of 'noetic or linguistic acts'. Hume is important
here in arguing that acts that go beyond the given
are connected to the activities of the subject [as
I recall, the context was the issue of general
moral principles — Deleuze here just makes a more
technical point of what is involved when the
subject says '"always" or "necessary"']. This
introduces a necessary field of belief as a basis
for knowledge, the conditions under which a belief
is legitimate.
(b) a function of individuation, especially when
the individual is no longer thought of as a thing
or a soul, but a person 'a living and lived
person, speaking and spoken to' (350).
The philosophy of the subject in Hume, but also in
Kant, turned on problems arising from these two
aspects, how and whether they were connected and
if so how conflict might be resolved. Kant
developed the notion of an I, 'the determination
of time' and a Me as something 'determinable in
time'. Husserl addresses the issue in the last of
his Cartesian
Meditations.
Functions of singularisation have also developed
in the field of knowledge following new work on
the variables of space–time. Here, singularity is
not something opposing the universal, but rather
'any element that can be extended to the proximity
of another such that it may obtain a connection: a
singularity in the mathematical sense' [I vaguely
remember this being discussed in Difference and
Repetition -- there, singularities
emitted ordinary points which extended to the
boundaries of other singularities, and then you
could read multiplicity for singularity] .
Knowledge and belief now have to include notions
like assemblage or arrangement 'that indicate
discharge and distribution of singularities'.
These will be 'of the "toss of the dice" type' [I
have never understood this, although I take it to
be an unpredictable occurrence arising from within
a fixed number of legitimate combinations, a
specific actualization arising from virtual
potentials]. Discharged singularities like this
form 'a transcendental field [surely a virtual
one?] without a subject. Multiple options become a
noun, 'multiplicity', with philosophy as the
theory of multiplicities: this need not refer to
any subject or preestablished unit.
As a result, [classic notions of] 'truth and
falsehood no longer count' [no universals to judge
them. Dangerous slip enabled here from science and
maths to culture and politics?] . Instead we need
terms like the singular and the regular, the
remarkable and the ordinary. There are no
[classical] universals: [things like regularities
are explained by the 'function of singularity'].
We can see this in the development of legal
judgements based on case or the notion of
jurisprudence — this then enables us to judge
'singularities and functions of extension'[but
this is just a way of avoiding any charge of
ideological collective judgement in law?]. This
will abolish any notion of the subject. Such a
notion of jurisprudence would be supported by a
philosophy without subject [warrant for the
dangerous slip?].
There are, however, new types of individuation.
These are no longer personal but can extend to the
individuality of an event — 'a life, a
season, a wind... a battle' (351). They do not
constitute persons. We can think of them as
haecceities. Perhaps we ourselves are haecceities
like this instead of Is. This is a theme in
Anglo-American literature as well as philosophy.
Both show themselves 'incapable of finding an
assignable meaning for the word "I" other than a
grammatical fiction'.
Events like this raises complex questions of
composition, speed, longitude and latitude, power
and affect. As an opposite of personal is in
psychology or language, they seem to promote a
third or even a fourth person singular, 'the
nonperson or It'. These help us 'recognize
ourselves and our community better'[a
philosophical apology for the overwhelming power
of capitalist collectives?].
Overall, the notion of the subject 'has lost much
of its interest' [academic research agenda
apparent here]. We now think of 'pre-individual
singularities and nonpersonal individuations'. As
the concept changes, so does the field of problems
to which it corresponds. We should now investigate
the forces that make the problems change and
require new concepts [these are going to be social
ones, which Deleuze is ill-equipped to follow]. It
is not that major philosophy is now redundant
[heaven forbid-- as Bourdieu explains, the field
must always be preserved in philosophy]. Instead,
thanks to that tradition we now have new problems
to discover. We cannot return. In this way,
philosophy is in the same position as science and
the arts.
Chapter 51 Preface to the
American edition of The Time-Image
[Heavily summarized
already in my edition of the book]
Chapter 52 Rivette's Three
Circles
[The Gang of Four in English]. [The plot is
summarized and diagrammed as a set of circles.
There is also a commentary on the notion of
playing a role:]In the first circle, young women
are rehearsing the roles they will play and are
finding it difficult to express authentic feelings
with words that are not their own: 'this is the
first sense of play: Roles' (355). There is a
connection with the everyday lives of the girls,
and here roles are no longer governed by a program
but follow 'a haphazard change of attitudes and
postures following several simultaneous stories
that do not intersect. This is the second sense of
play: the Attitudes and Postures in their
interconnected day to day lives' (355-6).
Apparently, Rivette is interested in types of
individuation — comic and tragic graceful and
clumsy, but 'above Lunar and Solar' (366). This
second sequence is diagrammed as a second circle,
partly parallel with the first circular segment.
Then there is a plot involving a man with unclear
identity pursuing the girls, one of whom finally
kills him. These are 'Rivette's greatest moments:
absolutely beautiful', and reveal a third sense of
play: 'Masks, in a political or police conspiracy
that goes beyond us, which no one can escape'.
This is diagrammed as a prolongation of the second
circle, intertwined with it. It increasingly
polarizes the girls attitudes but also spreads out
to cover all the separate segments — for example
the director of the theatre is an essential
element in the conspiracy, and some of the girls
have peculiar backgrounds.
Thus 'we are all rehearsing parts of which we are
as yet unaware'(357); we slip into characters
which we never fully master; we 'serve a
conspiracy of which we are oblivious. This is
Rivette's vision of the world' (357). It needs a
theatre for the cinema to exist, but this is a
special cinematic theatricality, aiming to show 'a
piece of reality' [claiming realism by
contradicting theatrical realism?]
Rivette also has characteristic places like the
back of the theatre or a suburban house. Here,
'Nature does not live' (358), but they exhibit a
'strange grace' left out development. Rivette made
these places important. Conspiracies are hatched
in them , people live together, schools are
established, but 'the dreamer can still seize the
day and the nights, the sun and the moon'. Deleuze
sees this as some 'great external Circle governing
the other circles', dividing light and shadow.
Rivette can be understood as filming only light
and its lunar or solar transformations. In this
film, the lunar is represented by Lucia and the
solar by Constance, although these are not persons
but forces. There is no simple division into good
and evil, but rather a subsistence between lunar
and solar in certain places. Apparently, Rivette
was much influenced by the poet Nerval, at an
encounter rather than a matter of influence. It is
this that has made 'Rivette one of the most
inspired auteurs in cinema, and one of its great
poets'.
[I have since viewed the film, and here are my
thoughts]
Chapter 53 A Slippery Slope
[A discussion about whether Islamic girls should
be permitted to wear the veil in French public
schools].
The actual issue is absurd, but parents see it as
having some significance. The issue is how far the
demands will go
Demanding the right to Islamic prayer, a
reassessment of the literature taught in the
classroom as a possible 'offence to Muslim
dignity?' (359). These demands should be made
explicit. Religion should not be seen as the only
way to claim an identity — there are plenty of
secular Arabs. Overall, 'religions are worth much
less than the nobility and the courage of the
atheism's which they inspire' (360). It's
important to maintain that the state should not
finance religious schools. We should beware 'an
alliance among religious groups to impugn a
hesitant secularism'.
Chapter 54 Letter – Preface to Jean-Clet Martin
[Apparently a preface to a book on Deleuze's
philosophy]. Philosophy should be seen as a
system, unless it possesses coordinates like 'the
Identical, the Similar and the Analogous' (361).
It should instead be a system as in Leibniz. Any
system must be 'in perpetual heterogeneity, it
must also be a heterogenesis', and this would be
new.
So the critiques of metaphor seemed justified.
Instead, we need to see it as an operation which
denies radical immanence — 'hence the essential
relation to territory and Earth' (362). Philosophy
is indeed the creation of concepts, an activity
that is not just reflective or contemplative but
creative: this is to be pursued in the forthcoming
What is Philosophy.
The notion of multiplicity is really important. It
is indeed connected to the notion of singularity,
and these terms replace the classic ones of the
universal and the individual. '"Rhizome" is the
best term to designate multiplicities'. The notion
of a simulacrum is 'all but worthless'. ATP
is dedicated to 'multiplicities for themselves
(becomings, lines, etc)'
Chapter 55 Preface to the American Edition of Empircism
and Subjectivity
[I have notes on this here]
Chapter 56 Preface A New Sylistics
[Based on a book once a thesis at Vincennes
by G Passerone]
This is really a study of 'procedures or
operations in literature', but there are
implications for other disciplines. The argument
is first that style is syntactical not rhetorical,
'the product of syntax and through syntax' (366);
second that as in Proust, style is a foreign
language within the language.
The view of conventional linguistics is that
language is a homogeneous system at or close to
equilibrium. Sociolinguistics draws attention to
external social factors, and the implication is
that each language can be seen as a heterogeneous
group, always bifurcating, never at equilibrium,
as in 'Black or Chicano English' (367). We do not
just switch from one language to another as
bilingual speakers do: instead there is another
language play, a heterogenesis.
We can see this in the notion of free indirect
discourse as 'a unique syntactical form'. Another
expressing subject is included in the statement
which already has an expressing subject [the
example is '"I realised that she was about to
leave…"']. The second 'she' is a new expressing
subject appearing in a statement that already has
an 'I' as an expressing subject. It is thus
possible for every expressing subject to contain
others each of which can speak a diverse language.
This notion led Bakhtin to the idea of 'polyphonic
or contrapuntal' language in the novel, and
apparently it also inspired Pasolini's view of
poetry. Passerone analyses the great authors like
Dante to argue that free indirect discourse is
actually 'coextensive with every language; it is
the determinant element of syntax', even where it
is not actually central [apparently, it is more
visible in Italian than French]. Balzac offers a
similar splintering of languages, as many as there
are 'characters, types, and milieu'. This is a
kind of non-style, naturally to be seen as grand
style itself, 'the purest creation of style.'
Some linguists would argue that these indirect
forms are not proper languages, but that assumes
that language is a homogeneous system and not a
'heterogeneous assemblage in perpetual
disequilibrium' (368). Style can build on these
diverse languages which should be seen as foreign,
'a foreign language in the language'. Here, we are
elevating stylistics and pragmatics into primary
factors in language, not secondary determinations.
For Passerone, language 'has no constants, only
variables [and] style varies variables'. Each
style is a particular variation. Another linguist,
G Guillaume wanted to replace phonetic oppositions
as constants with 'differential morphemic
positions' in order to trace variable points on a
line or movement of thought. As an example, the
indefinite article can be seen as 'a variable that
performs cuts or takes points of view on a
movement of particularization', while the definite
article does the same for movements of
generalization. Verbs can also be seen as cuts or
points of view or differential positions, tracing
'movements of incidents and decadence (and we
could add "procadence")'. [The example is the
imperfect tense in Flaubert]. Verbs contained
dynamisms or trajectories and the tenses and modes
'set up positions and effect cuts'. These
variables occupy 'zones of variation' which
constitute 'style as a modulation of language'.
Buffon is [apparently] famous for saying that
'"style is the man himself,"' (369) but this does
not refer to the personality of the author, but
rather 'the form actualized in linguistic
material; it is a mould'. The mould is not just an
outer layer, but rather it affects the whole, 'it
is a modulation'.
Passerone uses this notion of modulation to show
how a particular 'melodic conception of style' can
develop, in Rousseau, but also in the Baroque and
the Romantic era [apparently in the latter,
'polyphony and harmony, consonant and dissonant
chords' offered a kind of autonomous modulation].
Nietzsche can be seen as the greatest example of
post Romanticism. Modulation here traces a broken
line, perpetually bifurcating, offering a rhythm
which can produce harmony and melody. The visible
form of this are rhetorical figures, but even
Proust thought that these figures grasp different
objects through the lens of a style: 'imagination
relies heavily on syntax'.
The variables of language are positions or points
of view on a movement of thought, a line. Each
variable passes through a number of diverse
positions on a modulating line, producing features
of style such as 'progression and repetition'
(370) [apparently, examples include Mallarmé,
someone called Claudel, and 'the vibrating
spiral-line of Artaud']
Style stretches language, letting its tensors
work, pushing towards the limit. This limit is not
something outside of language, but rather 'it is
the outside of language itself' [I have never
really understood this formulation]. Style is like
a foreign language, although it is always the
language we speak — 'it is a foreign language in
the language we speak', stretched to its limit. As
it approaches a limit it begins 'to stutter, to
stammer, to scream, and to whisper' [so normal
formulations do not work with unusual or foreign
conceptions?]. This can appear as a form of
non-style, madness or delirium. The closer
language approaches its limit the more sober style
becomes, the non-style of Tolstoy or Beckett.
The great writers always know that they are still
far from what they desire and seek. They are after
what Celine called an abstract line, without
contour or outline but which is found in any
figure. This line might be found in nature or in
mysteries, or even in particular hours of the day,
or in events that are either about to happen or
have already happened, in postures of the body, in
cases where language extends towards painting or
music.
So language is heterogeneous, free indirect
discourse is coextensive with language, language
shows variables being modulated and varied,
languages feature tensions or extensions that
traverse them, experimental writers seek an
abstract line is the outside or limit of language.
These abstract points are illustrated in a number
of concrete examples of styles in Passerone's
book.
Chapter 57 Preface The Seeds of Time
[Preface to a book by E Alliez: Capital Times:
Tales of the Conquest of Time 1996. Another
doctoral student of Deleuze's. I haven't read the
book. This is baffling as a result].
It seems that Alliez refers to 'conducts of time'
[conduits?]. Time actually operates with several
speeds in the same conduct, and we can encounter
multiple conducts. Sometimes the elements in them
seem more appropriate, and at other times strange.
A conduct is 'the number of the extensive movement
of the world' (372).
Speeds can change within mobile elements, times
can interlock or dislocate. Aberrant times can be
refocused in a more abstract way. Apparently,
meteorology works with these notions of time, and
so does money and '"chrematistics"' [ ' the study of
wealth or a particular theory of wealth as
measured in money.'] (373).
Time can also be seen as an integer of intensive
movements of the soul of the world [!], a
synthesis distinguishing present past and future.
These imply a certain leaning towards what comes
after, or turning back to what came before.
However, these different movements introduce a
tension, exacerbated by thinking about zero points
[pass].
[More baffling remarks ensue about intentionality]
Apparently, there are implications for the history
of philosophy which displays different conducts
and speeds. The notion of time becomes
increasingly less dependent on extensive movement,
on the description of objects, and favours instead
the description of space. Time therefore becomes
'a condition of action'.
Apparently the main themes of the book are
'processes of extension, intensification,
capitalization, subjectivation' (374).
Chapter 58 the Gulf War: a Despicable War
[The first Gulf War that is]. The Americans are
disingenuous in their claim to follow a quick and
precise war. They are not just destroying
strategic targets but killing civilians. Even
historical sites are threatened. The war is 'a
branch of state terrorism', trying out new
techniques and weapons.
The French stance seems to involve hoping to wage
war well so that they can participate in peace.
Many journalists are willing to go along with US
policy. Intellectuals are silent — do they really
think that this is a UN approved war? That Saddam
is like Hitler? Israel is claiming to fully
support the UN even while its domestic policy
denies the inclusion of Palestinians [again a
contemporary debating point here in that any peace
settlement with the Palestinians is made 'the
equivalent of the horrors of the Nazis "final
solution"' (376)]. Triumph threatens American
hegemony with the complicity of Europe.
Chapter 59 We Invented the Ritornello
[Rather a hostile interview on the publication of
What is Philosophy].
The definition of philosophy in the work might be
offensive, but inoffensive definitions are vague.
Philosophy creates concepts, whereas science works
through functions, but there is no claim that a
concept is superior to a function.
There is a need to distinguish becoming from
history even though there are connections between
them: 'becoming begins in history and returns to
it, but it is not of history' (377). It is an
opposite of history. History might describe the
emergence of an event in terms of certain
functions, but if events emerge by surpassing
their coming, we can witness an event more
philosophically: 'becoming as the substance
of the concept'.
The creation of concepts is a disagreement with
those who think that philosophy should be
communication, including Habermas. Philosophy once
also considered itself to be about contemplation
or reflection. But in both cases a concept had to
be created, of contemplation and reflection.
Habermasian communication has '[not] yet found a
good concept, a truly critical concept' (378). Nor
has Rorty with his emphasis on consensus or
democratic conversation.
The emphasis on images of thought leading to
geophilosophy can be explained. There is a reason
why philosophy arises in Greek city states and in
Western capitalist societies, but these reasons
are contingent [empirical?]. The principle of
reason itself is 'contingent reason not necessary
reason'. Instead, the social formations should be
seen as 'hotbeds of immanence' (379), societies of
friends which promote opinion. Philosophy emerges
in particular historical conditions with these
fundamental traits, but cannot be reduced to
these. Philosophy becomes because it is always
questioning its own conditions. Geophilosophy is
important in reminding us that thinking is not
just about subjects and objects, but goes on 'in a
variable relation to territory and to the earth'
[this mysterious relation to the Earth might mean
a relation to natural forces rather than to
geography as such?]
[NB after reading Genosko's reader on Guattari
p.11, the term takes on a different meaning. It
refers to the milieu, the immediate neighbourhood
in which psychiatry was to be found rather than
the clinic. The term was introduced in discussions
of 'community psychiatry' -- that term has all
sorts of definitions, including historical,
sociological and economic which were unsuitable.
The whole thing depends on Guattari's indifference
to the social class etc of his patients, I reckon
-- he had rejected the other views of madness as
alienation. The overwhelming importance of
the immediate milieu of the clinic for their
identity was opposed to older identities based on
social class or occupation?]
The current political situation may not justify
any calls to revolution. People confuse 'the quest
for freedom with the embrace of capitalism', but
the joys of capitalism are probably never enough.
Socialism might have failed but so has capitalist
globalisation, producing violent inequality
and exclusion. 'The American Revolution failed
long before the Soviet Revolution'. However,
revolutionary situations seem to be engendered by
capitalism itself. Philosophy is limited in being
'tied to a revolutionary becoming that is nothing
to do with the history of revolutions' [that is
tied to abstract bourgeois liberal notions of
revolution?]
Discussion is not particularly fruitful, but what
about the relationship with readers? It is hard
enough to understand what people are trying to
say, and too often, discussion becomes 'just an
exercise in narcissism where everyone takes turns
showing off' (380), and the focus on ideas is
dissipated. It is more difficult but more
important to think about the problem to which
propositions respond. If you understand the
problem, there is no desire to discuss it — you
either work with that problem or pose another
problem [dangerously relativist as we know. Good
on reminding us that D's work addresses particular
philosophical problems and is not some all-purpose
ragbag]. There is nothing to say if people share
'a common source of problems'. The problems
themselves produce particular solutions. If
problems are indeterminate, discussion is still
'just a waste of time'. Conversation, however, is
different and we need it. When it works well, it
is 'a great schizophrenic experiment happening
between two individuals with common resources and
a taste for ellipses and shorthand expressions'
[must only be him and Guattari]. Conversations
have long silences. They give you ideas. But
discussion has no place: 'the phrase "let's
discuss it" is an act of terror' [an echo here of
Lyotard on Habermas's proposals to promote
continual challenge in the ideal speech act].
20th-century philosophers have indeed created
concepts. Bergson uses the word duration as a new
concept, which is not to be confused with
becoming. He also sees memory as a matter of 'the
coexistence of sheets or layers of the past'
(380), and talks about the elan vitale as
a concept of differentiation. Heidegger creates a
new concept of Being 'whose two components are
veiling and unveiling'. Sometimes concepts need
strange words 'with crazy etymologies' or familiar
contemporary words 'but… With distant echoes'
(381). Derrida's différance is a new concept of
difference. Foucault creates a concept of
utterance, separate from concepts of phrase,
proposition or speech act. 'The primary feature of
the concept is its novel distribution of things'.
[As our contribution to the creation of concepts]
'We formulated a concept of the ritornello in
philosophy'.
Chapter 60 For Félix
The work with Félix was a constant source of
discovery and joy. The books he wrote on his own
have 'inexhaustible riches', covering three
domains and offering 'paths of creation in each'.
First in the psychiatric domain, Félix introduced
notions of group subjects and transversal
relationships. These were political as well as
psychiatric concepts, because madness implies a
power at work in the social and political arena —
it 'unmoors continents, races and tribes' (382).
It has to be both treated and seen as something
politically determined.
Secondly there might be in there a system linking
together segments of science, philosophy, life
experience and art. There might be something which
makes possible scientific functions philosophical
concepts, experiences and artistic creation [and
we get to the usual problems with this...] 'This
possibility is homogeneous while the possibles are
heterogeneous'. We see this with the 'four headed
system in the Cartographies
— '"territories, flows, machines and universes"'.
Thirdly, there are artistic and literary analyses,
on Balthus (see notes)
and Fromanger [see wikipedia
entry which includes the mention of a text
by Deleuze and Foucault on photorealism and the
blurb from
the Tate] and literary analyses like the
stuff on the refrain in Proust, which links 'the
shouts of the shopkeepers to the little phrase'.
There is also apparently a text on Genet and the Prisoner
of Love.
These insights are what will keep him alive,
providing a substance to the remembered gestures
and glances.
Chapter 61 Immanence: a Life
Already summarized here.
The note says that this was the last thing he
published before killing himself on November 4,
1995. There is apparently a companion piece in the
annex of the second edition of Dialogues. Both
pieces 'belong to a project entitled "Ensemble and
Multiplicities"'. {It's pretty good, nice and
terse, apparently based on notes}. Apparently,
Deleuze wanted 'to flesh out the concept of the
virtual which he felt he had left relatively
unexplored' (410).]
back to Deleuze page
|
|