deleuze (and guattari)

at the moment I'm a little confused about the 'energy' or 'charge' the connective synthesis of connection is supposed to make, or tap into, or release, or whatever. like, pleasure (whether sexual or not)? the way this kind of thing is discussed kind of implies that any old things could be linked by this synthesis, but the examples tend to be body parts or typically eroticized or sexualized non-biological objects.

I reckon I will be happier with this by tomorrow once I read some more, but then again I thought I had figured it out in the past but I've forgotten.

any idea if this one is associated with a particular part of the text?

and thanks, daria!

a good friend of mine once spent some time trying to explain the stuff he was doing with the film stuff and i sorta got what he meant thirdhand, about some transformation in how images are viewed/used in the 2nd half of the century. at least that far there seems to be something to it, but then i suspected some of that "universal cinematic language" stuff that you had said you were uneasy with. is that where yr. coming from?

sterl, d.n. rodowick's book on the cinema books seems really well done to me.

or at least i do.

oh.

reading with the benefit of the holland book as a guide is really weird, it's like suddenly all my previous difficulties were only terminological. (probably wrong of course but crutches are nice sometimes.)

I don't see how people who haven't tried to familiarize themselves with deleuze's earlier (pre-capitalism and schizophrenia) work can make much sense of anti-oedipus and thousand plateaus. (yes, yes, I know, 'but the point is...' well not entirely.) it's astonishing to me sometimes, how thoroughly they appear to have tried to follow through on deleuze's early work. (if they say something that doesn't make any sense at all to me, and it's not just a matter of weird terminology, chances are it's because deleuze earlier took some alternative stance against a fundamental assumption of lots of western philosophy.)

a SOLAR ANUS! ha. that still gets me.

most major philosophers have a 'gatekeepery attitude' in that they expect you to experience the thought-process behind their work rather than learn the conclusions as stale doctrines. the reason i'm not responding is coz you posted it

(Though I have still not forgiven them for the analysis of Chess vs Go in ATP which is very very ignorant about Go, drawing conclusions around what are pretty obviously false premises based on never having playeed the game or even really bothered to research it.) (I realise this sounds incredibly hobbyhorsical but I have high expectations of philosophers! It bugs me when they are uncomplicatedly wrong bcz it makes me doubt the rest)

a) obviously we can refuse this challenge (if it exists at all -- did these 'major philosophers' state this anywhere to hand?) b) in practice phooey, you will never get inside the head of someone living 150 years ago. the doctrine is as stale as its conception.

"if you're thinking of reading anti-oedipus, you should."

excellent post, rms!

yr. obv. not a historian, or so inclined!

was your argument on that thread the above or was it the following: "God what a facking Nazi. The 'herd' quite clearly means the proletariat. The fact that Hitler liked a ridiculous strawman version of him makes him in an intrinsically right-wing thinker, meaning anything he says is totally worthless and untrue, and anyone on the left who draws from him will be corrupted, which is why I refuse to read him." If you're going to play the everything's political game can I say that you're version of him puts you in the same corner as right-wing assholes who'd prefer not to think twice about the Enlightenment such as Conor Cruise O'Brien. The Nazi Nietzsche was a good example of divorcing the texts from the context they were written in

a) obviously we can refuse this challenge (if it exists at all -- did these 'major philosophers' state this anywhere to hand?) b) in practice phooey, you will never get inside the head of someone living 150 years ago. the doctrine is as stale as its conception.

a)they do state it in that they spend a lot of time polemicising against received ideas, call you to 'saper audis', state that they are attempting to 'think Being', and so forth. you can refuse it, but don't expect to be taken seriously if you do.

b) you're an idiot.

i made it through only about 1/2 of 'a thousand plateaus' but i did read 'anti-oedipus' and while i would never say that i fully comprehend the book, i did come away with a slightly different idea than the one above. at times i recall feeling that they were actually 'pro-capitalism' in the book. i really can't elaborate as it's been so long since i read it. as to the last part about schizoids being the saner ones, i'm pretty sure i've read interviews where deleuze points that out as a common misinterpretation of their work, that in fact they were not trying to romanticize the schizophrenic.

F: "was your argument on that thread the above or was it the following: 'God what a facking Nazi. The 'herd' quite clearly means the proletariat. The fact that Hitler liked a ridiculous strawman version of him makes him in an intrinsically right-wing thinker, meaning anything he says is totally worthless and untrue, and anyone on the left who draws from him will be corrupted, which is why I refuse to read him.'"

there isn't a massive contradiction there, i don't think. i didn't say that FN advocated all aspects of nazism like genocide or europe-wide war (he was, of course, a notable pacifist, cough). what i did say was that his mobilisation of concepts like 'the herd' and the ultra-lame 'resentment' are abhorrent or useless or both as categories. even today 'resentment' is used in entirely elitist ways to discredit legitimate complaints (cf a thousand post-structuralist bloggers). and also that his anti-historical ideas *did* feed into the far right 'German Ideology', so to speak, of the age, culminating in the 1920s with the avowedly anti-progress ideas which circulated in the german bourgeoisie, wherein anti-collectivism meant a total, national failure to confront nazism, even where there wasn't actual active support.

i'm unqualified to judge how inaccurate hitler's version of nietzsche was -- why it is more ridiculous than derrida's, for example? other than arguing from the text, ie privileging *your own* version of FN, which isn't really in the spirit of the thing, i don't know.

i'm not going all out for morley/green type victorian silliness as regards historical progress, but with progress went process in nietzsche, and it's that anti-historicism that i find most problematic (ie it's that which has been picked up by later writers, more than the obviously elitist philosopher/warrior stuff).

but anyway in the same way that i am interested in the uses of nietzsche more than nietzsche in himself, that's then kind of interest i have in deleuze for now. that's perfectly legit, so didn;t deserve such aggressive... ressentiment.

i'm not so sure about them not being anti-capitalist. they argue from a pretty intense marxian perspective, i think. one of their main points against freud is that he was something of a capitalist dupe, who restrained himself from advancing toward the real (d&g's real, natch) in favor of butressing bourgeois family values. i think they appreciate capitalism only insofar as its rapid development portends its demise. they're cheering the car as it drives toward the cliff.

but i'm not remotely an expert on these guys, either, amon. and as i'm sure you know, they're funny, slippery dudes, hard to get an absolute read on (much less in translation). if someone could set me straight, that would be beautiful. but i'm still pretty sure they're marxists.

he is an elitist, but it doesn't mean that he holds the 'dodgy views' you're attributing him; they fit a lot more easily with the stuff he hated: in Plato the belief was that most people are incapable of being smart enough to know how the behave, what's best for them, and how to govern themselves, while in Christianity you have all that stuff about the shepherd leading his flock. he does not think he knows what's best for humanity, he just doesn't care about most other people

there is no 'philosopher/warrior' stuff in there.

you didn't say the certain concepts of his could lend themselves to fascism, what you said was that he was 'on the whole, without being too fine about it, a proto-fascist' as if that's the inevitable outcome of his thought. do you really think someone like Adorno, who spent most of his career critiquing all the parts of German culture that fed into Nazism, would have drawn on him as heavily as he did if he thought there was some intrinsic link between the two. Nietzsche hated the comfortable militaristic bourgeois culture that sprung up in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, thought nationalism was stupid, and he broke with Wagner coz of his anti-Semitism, and because he saw all the pompous mystical New Agey stuff in there, which the Nazis went for, as a symptom of the decadence he was lamenting.

i think you might be a bit confused about what his 'anti-historical ideas' consist of. he was totally apathetic towards the wider historical picture. he was not the only one to believe that: are you saying a nice guy like Kierkegaard is a proto-fascist as well? the reason a lot of left-wing folx don't go for him is not because he is condoning the nastier parts of life as in-and-of-themselves good, he is resigning himself to them; he is a fatalist. (which is why Adorno and Camus and so forth liked him)

'ressentiment' refers to reactive thinking, turning the status quo on its head instead of moving beyond it. i don't think he would side with a political movement based on a desire for the revenge of the German people on all others. although he wouldn't side with any political movement at all coz he saw politics as totally trivial and impotent

i hope you aknowledge that the uses of nietzsche are not nietzsche himself: the fact that a philosophy could be used by asshole x or dickhead y does not mean it should be off-limits to cool person z. i mean, some supply-side economists think Marx is cool.

can i note as well that in English-speaking countries 'Nietzsche' more often than not means Kaufmann's or Nehamas's, where his main concerns are seen to be: human psychology, destroying anything remotely like religion, and art

i've been agressive; but you've been competing to be the Marxist A Nairn

Oedipus at last: in the end it is a very simple operation, one that indeed readily lends itself to formalization, although it involves universal history. We have seen in what sense schizophrenia was the absolute limit of every society, inasmuch as it sets in motion decoded and deterritorialized flows that it restores to desiring-production, “at the bounds of all” of all social production. And capitalism, the relative limit of every society, inasmuch as it axiomatizes the decoded flows and reterritorializes the deterritorialized flows. We have also seen that capitalism finds in schizophrenia its own exterior limit, which it is continually repelling and exorcising, while capitalism itself produces its immanent limits, which it never ceases to displace and enlarge. But capitalism still needs a displaced interior limit in another way: precisely in order to neutralize or repel the absolute exterior limit, the schizophrenic limit; it needs to internalize this limit, this time by restricting it, by causing it to pass no longer between social production and the desiring-production that breaks away from social production, but inside social production, between the form of social reproduction and the form of a familial reproduction to which social production is reduced, between the social aggregate and the private subaggregate to which the social aggregate is applied.
Oedipus is this displaced or internalized limit where desire lets itself be caught. The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social reterritorialization. Oedipus was always the displaced limit for every social formation, since it is the displaced represented of desire. But in the primitive formations this limit remains vacant, precisely insofar as the flows are coded and as the interplay of alliances and filiations keeps families extended according to the scale of the determinations of the social field, preventing any secondary reduction of the latter to the former. In the despotic formations the Oedipal limit is occupied, symbolically occupied but not lived or inhabited, inasmuch as the imperial incest effects an overcoding that in turn surveys the entire social field from above (the repressing representation); the formal operations of flattening, extrapolation, and so on, that later belong to Oedipus, are already sketched out, but within a symbolic space where the object from on high is formed. It is only in the capitalist formation that the Oedipal limit finds itself not only occupied, but inhabited and lived, in the sense in which the social images produced by the decoded flows actually fall back on restricted familial images invested by desire. It is at this point in the Imaginary that Oedipus is constituted, at the same time as it completes its migration in the in-depth elements of representation: the displaced represented has become, as such, the representation of desire. Hence it goes without saying that this becoming or this constitution does not develop under the categories imagined in the earlier social formation, since the imaginary Oedipus results from such a becoming and not the inverse. It is not via a flow of shit or a wave of incest that Oedipus arrives, but via the decoded flows of capital-money. The waves of incest and shit are only secondary derivatives of the latter, insofar as they transport the private persons to which the flows of capital are reduced or applied.

Lamp, if you start talking here about subjective realism and ooo I am disowning you.

Spec realism, sorry, pwned by preemptive ire

haha i remember reading some thing where deleuze is like "we explained the body without organs to a classroom of seven-year-olds and they all uderstood it immediately" and i was like, uhm, i'll just be over here scratchin my nuts if you need me

http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=5&groupe=Anti Oedipe et Mille Plateaux&langue=2

gilles talking to richard pinhas :)

ya this is a v good read, richard understands the relation between music and deleuze's philosophy way better than g himself does, i think.

after the pretty tame references to synthesizers in a thousand plateaus i was surprised to come across the impressive discussion of analog and digital synths in the francis bacon book. then it all made sense when it turned out it was taken straight from pinhas.

it's one of those books that when i'm reading it i tell myself i will spend a couple of years or more just re-reading it to the exclusion of everything else.

this feels p true. there are certainly bits and pieces of it floating around my brain since i read it last year, to the extent that i always feel like im reading it even tho im not

i am currently reading "anti-oedipus" as a result of discussion here and in the "academic obfuscation" thread. focault preface and mark seem intro have made the descent into D&G's language and approach a lot easier than they might have been otherwise. context is everything. i find myself frustrated but intrigued, but wonder if this type of critical thinking is simply alien to my own intrinsic mode of thought. i'm only a few pages in, and already i've wanted to object strongly to several aspects of the premise-building. i'm trying, however, to stay my mind-hand and just burrow in. wish me luck...

the heavy reliance on what are obviously references to other texts/ideas, but that are unsourced and unexplained, for instance, grates

you are obviously not smoking enough weed yet

i have never had enough free time from my own academic pursuits to dive into D&G beyond a general familiarity with them. (i have read and enjoyed Guattari's "Chaosmosis" however.)

oops. i meant to add that i plan to! i have logic of sense and difference and repetition all lined up in my "to read" pile.

i am very thankful that nobody in the humanities cares about these dudes anymore. (at least, publishers don't want to publish any more "deleuzian" studies anymore.)

why was it making your life hard

i am very thankful that nobody in the humanities cares about these dudes anymore. (at least, publishers don't want to publish any more "deleuzian" studies anymore.)

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, 17 February 2012 19:48 (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know next to nothing about theory but i thought deleuze was super in vogue right now, so much cultural stuff i see in public is always flagged up as being poignant when considered through a deleuzian-lens. maybe we are just behind the times here.

my friend is doing his PhD on him and his supervisor writes about him so I don't know when it went out of vogue but I'll let him know it has

nah it's out of vogue already. good luck getting that dissertation published.

someone had better tell continuum to withdraw the dozen-plus books on deleuze they have due out this year.

ok maybe i'm wrong. that's the impression i was given my editors--that they are sick of deleuze manuscripts. but maybe that's only some editors.

anyway, in vogue or out of vogue, he's useless to me.

(or a bit more srsly - i think the trend of applying deleuze and guattari here there and everywhere is slowing down [if not at all dying], but there's a lot more in the way of deleuze-as-philosopher stuff emerging now.)

amateurist had no use for deleuze, RIP

lol what's happened to ilx lately.

some douche in my class kept whipping out deleuzian phrases like deterritorialization and lines of flight in class the other day, and looking really smug about it. but he was using them wrong. like in this really mundane way where it was like he had just heard someone saying them and decided to use them in sentences without having any idea that they actually meant anything. this guy is such a pain in the ass.

a thousand plateaus is so much fun. i've read rhizomes so many times this last year that it just reads like a regular essay to me now. its weird, they're ideas are kindof easy to understand but not necessarily to explain, bodies w/o organs is such a visceral image, the egg as an illustration. desiring machines, war machines. becoming-woman. so great, so much fun.

i am going to buy rhizomes at the book store tomorrow

glad 2 see contenderizer tryin 2 vibe w/ delueze. itll come 2 u dude, just fake it till u make it

haven't read anti-oedipus since college, this thread makes me want to revisit but I've been reading the same pulp sci-fi novel for the past 2 months so I don't think it's gonna happen. maybe I'll just listen to this

http://shardsofbeauty.blogspot.com/2010/01/amor-fati-body-wo-organs-lp-another.html

dug this:

http://www.bard.edu/mfa/summer/readings/documents/DeLeuzeWhatistheCreativeAct.pdf

sorry for bard url

haha i remember reading some thing where deleuze is like "we explained the body without organs to a classroom of seven-year-olds and they all uderstood it immediately" and i was like, uhm, i'll just be over here scratchin my nuts if you need me

― Dark Noises from the Eurozone (Tracer Hand), Thursday, August 4, 2011 4:18 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'how could mad particles be produced with anything but a gigantic cyclotron?'

easily. the body without organs does it.

professor challenger

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Professor_Challenger.jpg

http://home.howstuffworks.com/grass.htm

'this is not reassuring, because you can botch it.'

http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/3/341/F3.large.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/world/asia/china-fences-in-its-nomads-and-an-ancient-life-withers.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

If modern material comforts are the measure of success, then Gere, a 59-year-old former yak-and-sheep herder in China’s western Qinghai Province, should be a happy man.

In the two years since the Chinese government forced him to sell his livestock and move into a squat concrete house here on the windswept Tibetan plateau, Gere and his family have acquired a washing machine, a refrigerator and a color television that beams Mandarin-language historical dramas into their whitewashed living room.

But Gere, who like many Tibetans uses a single name, is filled with regret. Like hundreds of thousands of pastoralists across China who have been relocated into bleak townships over the past decade, he is jobless, deeply indebted and dependent on shrinking government subsidies to buy the milk, meat and wool he once obtained from his flocks.

“We don’t go hungry, but we have lost the life that our ancestors practiced for thousands of years,” he said.

In what amounts to one of the most ambitious attempts made at social engineering, the Chinese government is in the final stages of a 15-year-old campaign to settle the millions of pastoralists who once roamed China’s vast borderlands. By year’s end, Beijing claims it will have moved the remaining 1.2 million herders into towns that provide access to schools, electricity and modern health care.

Official news accounts of the relocation rapturously depict former nomads as grateful for salvation from primitive lives. “In merely five years, herders in Qinghai who for generations roved in search of water and grass, have transcended a millennium’s distance and taken enormous strides toward modernity,” said a front-page article in the state-run Farmers’ Daily. “The Communist Party’s preferential policies for herders are like the warm spring breeze that brightens the grassland in green and reaches into the herders’ hearts.”

But the policies, based partly on the official view that grazing harms grasslands, are increasingly contentious. Ecologists in China and abroad say the scientific foundations of nomad resettlement are dubious. Anthropologists who have studied government-built relocation centers have documented chronic unemployment, alcoholism and the fraying of millenniums-old traditions.

: (

https://twitter.com/DeepdreamBot

read the faciality chapter just the other week

this is the WRONG DIRECTION

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/07/20/study_neurotic_people_see_faces_in_things_it_s_called_pareidolia.html

About 1/3rd of the way through Anti-Oedipus at the moment - I suspect that I'll end up disagreeing with a lot of it*, but if nothing else it's as wild a ride as I was hoping for and just great for clearing mental bad air.

*(At least in terms of their positive thesis about how desire works - in terms of the more critical/polemical side of things, dunking on psychoanalysis is obv always fun but no longer feels like a v urgent project).

Keep resisting the urge to skip through to the parts where they discuss deterritorialization & reterritorialization in detail, because those are the concepts that to me seem the most relevant to geopolitical events of the last few years - but at this stage I'm committed to doing the whole thing properly.

deleuze’s son is a management consultant 🙃 pic.twitter.com/VocSB99SeV

— nash 🦉 (@pnashjenkins) November 20, 2018

hahahahahah!!!!!

alas it is not true, the ages don't work

There is a resemblance, yes. But Julien, son of Gilles, is born in 1960, making him 58. This Julien graduated from his engineering school in 2002. So a relation perhaps but not Deleuze's son. Sorry to spoil the fun.

— Antoine Bousquet (@AJBousquet) November 23, 2018

dammn

ah!

Marxism is back

deleuze (and touche)

D&G are a classic example of where their enemies tell you more about themselves qua enemies than they do about D&G

deleuze and guattari vs. dolce & gabbana

SAME

haha i remember reading some thing where deleuze is like "we explained the body without organs to a classroom of seven-year-olds and they all uderstood it immediately" and i was like, uhm, i'll just be over here scratchin my nuts if you need me

― Dark Noises from the Eurozone (Tracer Hand), Thursday, August 4, 2011 4:18 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'how could mad particles be produced with anything but a gigantic cyclotron?'

― j., Sunday, March 10, 2013 8:50 PM (six years ago)

https://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze

'If the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode the entire educational system.'