deleuze (and guattari)

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he doesn't have his own thread. so I am invoking the neglected rule of three so that I can use this thread for my own selfish purposes in the future.

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 03:38 (twenty-one years ago) link

but first: I am told that there are rube goldberg drawings on pages 464-5 of the french version of 'anti-oedipus', in the appendix. but they aren't in the english translation and I can't find them online. a little help?

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 03:41 (twenty-one years ago) link

also, like, discuss, or whatever.

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 03:42 (twenty-one years ago) link

Anti-Oedipus has been looking down on me, unread, from my bookshelf for like 7 years...

Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Friday, 13 June 2003 03:54 (twenty-one years ago) link

nancy just started reading mille plateaux

jess (dubplatestyle), Friday, 13 June 2003 03:57 (twenty-one years ago) link

perhaps unlike me she will read more than 30 pages of it and justify the $25

jess (dubplatestyle), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:00 (twenty-one years ago) link

p 464 of French edition: image of Man Ray's Dancer/Danger (L'impossibilité)

followed by Rube Goldberg - You Sap, Mail that Letter and Rube Goldberg - Simple Reducing Machine

Sorry I don't have a scanner at home! But if you are very much interested in these images in particular, post something to that effect and I will take the book to the lab here and scan them for you.

daria g (daria g), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:02 (twenty-one years ago) link

then let me recommend to you 'deleuze and guattari's anti-oedipus: introduction to schizoanalysis' by eugene w. holland.

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.

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:07 (twenty-one years ago) link

YOU SAP, MAIL THAT LETTER

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:11 (twenty-one years ago) link

A simple way to avoid all this trouble is to marry a wife who can't write.

jess (dubplatestyle), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:12 (twenty-one years ago) link

dancer/danger.

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

and thanks, daria!

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:16 (twenty-one years ago) link

i found his books on cinema to be mostly awful. he implicates the spectator in confusing the screen with life, and so on, all the typical condescending new crit. stuff.

amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:31 (twenty-one years ago) link

more please amateurist. (having bemoaned yr. lack of opinions this is a) a strong opinion from you and b) on a subject where i am interested but know little)

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?

Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:43 (twenty-one years ago) link

I've not read the cinema books but I thought he was supposed to make it clear from the outset that he's not doing some kind of theory 'of' cinema, or books 'on' them, in the usual film theory / critical theory sense. I gather that taking the books in such a way might result in some misinterpretation?

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

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:47 (twenty-one years ago) link

man, i'd have to look at them again (i have them in storage, but maybe i can take them out of the library tomorrow) so as to not sound like an ass trying to interpret them from memory (like i just did in a very dismissive fashion).

amateurist (amateurist), Friday, 13 June 2003 04:49 (twenty-one years ago) link

ams ppl interpret from memory all the time on ilx.

or at least i do.

oh.

Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 13 June 2003 07:15 (twenty-one years ago) link

interpret = from memory
actually going away and reading and thinking = never ever speak of again on ilx

mark s (mark s), Friday, 13 June 2003 08:08 (twenty-one years ago) link

I meant 'connective synthesis of conjunction' above.

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.)

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 20:50 (twenty-one years ago) link

michael hardt's (the empire guy) dissertation is interesting in this regard.

Josh (Josh), Friday, 13 June 2003 20:52 (twenty-one years ago) link

the first two sentences of the intro to that make me want to claw my eyes out, as he uses "problematize" and then "problematic" which are always already annoying.

Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Friday, 13 June 2003 21:29 (twenty-one years ago) link

not that "problematic" is bad, just the way he uses it.

Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Friday, 13 June 2003 21:30 (twenty-one years ago) link

(someone recalled A Thousand Plateaus before I'd had a chance to start it - all I recall were interesting chapter headings & randomly perusing a film about a boy-rat . . .)

Ess Kay (esskay), Saturday, 14 June 2003 04:23 (twenty-one years ago) link

perusing a touching account of a film about a boy-rat, that is.

Ess Kay (esskay), Saturday, 14 June 2003 04:26 (twenty-one years ago) link

Ess Kay you crazy man. :-)

Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 14 June 2003 05:13 (twenty-one years ago) link

yeah, I just sort of didn't pay attention to that sort of thing, spencer.

a SOLAR ANUS! ha. that still gets me.

Josh (Josh), Saturday, 14 June 2003 18:53 (twenty-one years ago) link

delude (& guarantee)
*kicks himself, not in earnest tho*

t\'\'t (t\'\'t), Saturday, 14 June 2003 21:49 (twenty-one years ago) link

one year passes...
so what's the deal with deleuze? i'm not good at philosophy but am interested in how 'anti-oedipus' became a crossover hit, i suppose. how did/does it key in to the post-68 world, or the disillusion that struck france/the french left following the defeat of '1968'?

N_RQ, Monday, 16 May 2005 09:17 (nineteen years ago) link

anyone here read his bk on francis bacon?

Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Monday, 16 May 2005 09:26 (nineteen years ago) link

i have spent the last 4 or so months reading up on him but i will not be contributing because i don't think it's a good idea to try spoonfeed philosophy-oriented stuff to NRQ

fcuss3n, Monday, 16 May 2005 09:42 (nineteen years ago) link

hahaha. 'spoonfed'. fuck you too.

N_Rq, Monday, 16 May 2005 10:07 (nineteen years ago) link

but seriously, anyone with a non-gatekeepery attitude towards "philosophy-oriented stuff" (if you need a cv, just ask), i'm genuinely interested and not trolling: full disclosure i'm interested in his/their beef, if any, with lacan, and their insertion into the move away from marxism (or indeed the 'marxism' prevalent in 60s paris).

N_RQ, Monday, 16 May 2005 10:13 (nineteen years ago) link

Big basic diff b/w Lacan and Deleuze/Guattari is that D/G don't theorise desire as a lack, but as a productive force that makes us, um, do stuff.

Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Monday, 16 May 2005 12:22 (nineteen years ago) link

tim's right. there's no real beef, somewhat surprisingly, given how lacan was a freudian and anti-oedipus, as you can tell by the title, is not pro-freud. their main thing in that book is that the oedipus complex is not a necessary result of the human condition but instead is the imposition of capitalism, through their parents' capitalist-derived anxieties, onto children. lacan's mirror stage (partially via althusser's ideology) helped d & g make their case. which is a pretty interesting, even empowering one. if you're thinking of reading anti-oedipus, you should. it's dense but in my opinion much less difficult than lacan. by updating desire as a force rather than a lack, or more properly the force, they demonstrate how all we are is what they call desiring machines. the ego and super-ego freud posits respectively as psychic organizing principle and psychic editor, d & g diagnose as symptoms of a really fucked up set-up--capitalism--which is so nuts true schizoids are, in their opinion, healthier than sane bourgeious.

reich marx sandwich, Monday, 16 May 2005 14:28 (nineteen years ago) link

anyone with a non-gatekeepery attitude towards "philosophy-oriented stuff"

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

fcuss3n, Monday, 16 May 2005 15:00 (nineteen years ago) link

Posts like RMS's make me want to try reading Deleuze again! Starting at the beginning maybe this time? Is the style any easier, there? I am not very smart and cannot handle Lacan but I can deal with eg Derrida if I squint a lot.

(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)

Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Monday, 16 May 2005 15:29 (nineteen years ago) link

gp otm re: uncomplicated wrongness ---> doubt
i want to read d&g but what must i have a good grasp of before reading them? anyone?

caitlin oh no (caitxa1), Monday, 16 May 2005 15:35 (nineteen years ago) link

i hadn't read any d & g prior to anti-oedipus and i didn't have much of a problem. i think if you have the standard theory people under your belt--the basic marx, nietzsche, freud, adorno, etc. stuff you get taught as an undergrad--you should be fine. i really can't recommend anti-oedipus enough. that and bourdieu's distinction have completely blown my mind in recent months

reich marx sandwich, Monday, 16 May 2005 16:23 (nineteen years ago) link

"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."

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!

N_RQ, Tuesday, 17 May 2005 07:50 (nineteen years ago) link

in practice phooey, you will never get inside the head of someone living 150 years ago.

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

Sterling Clover (s_clover), Tuesday, 17 May 2005 12:28 (nineteen years ago) link

on the contrary, i'm actually interested in d/g in a pop-history kind of a way, their 'place' in wider political 'struggles' (ie parisian intello turf-wars) than their ideas as such or their routes to them thru bergson, hume, etc etc etc. in a sense i'm *all* about historicizing. but i don't think the best or, being honest, most time-efficient way of doing that is through rigorous and fair consideration of the texts divorced from context. (basically this is about nietzsche: i don't agree with the sympathetic readings that delberately remove FN from his actual place in history as founder of a kind of anti-history.)

N_RQ, Tuesday, 17 May 2005 12:38 (nineteen years ago) link

N_RQ i think you would really enjoy a book called Nihilism before Nietzsche by Michael Allen Gillespie--kind of a history of the concept of nihilism that argues Nietzsche misunderstood it. it's one of the better "nietzsche ain't all that" books, maybe the best, and explicitly disagrees with readings of Nietzsche by Derrida, Deleuze, etc.

ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 17 May 2005 15:31 (nineteen years ago) link

(specifically it argues that Nietzche's concept of the Dionysian is not in fact anti-metapyhsical but just another entanglement in metaphysics--so basically it is a good corrective to Heidegger's reading since it directly confronts the elements of Nietzsche's thought that everyone complains Heidegger ignored.)

ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 17 May 2005 15:35 (nineteen years ago) link

(basically this is about nietzsche: i don't agree with the sympathetic readings that delberately remove FN from his actual place in history as founder of a kind of anti-history.)

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.

fcuss3n, Tuesday, 17 May 2005 16:24 (nineteen years ago) link

the ego and super-ego freud posits respectively as psychic organizing principle and psychic editor, d & g diagnose as symptoms of a really fucked up set-up--capitalism--which is so nuts true schizoids are, in their opinion, healthier than sane bourgeious.

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.

Amon (eman), Tuesday, 17 May 2005 22:16 (nineteen years ago) link

Me: "(basically this is about nietzsche: i don't agree with the sympathetic readings that delberately remove FN from his actual place in history as founder of a kind of anti-history.)"

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.

N_RQ, Wednesday, 18 May 2005 07:21 (nineteen years ago) link

amon, i could see how i misread their attitudes towards schizoids. i don't believe they were advocating we all go schizo, but rather pointing out that since capitalism is so nuts, the schizoid is the end product of capitalism, who's broken through the wall of representation, as it were, and is living a life where everything about every moment is pure fetish [you know, that's probably wrong too--it's early where i am]. what they do seem to be romanticizing is the moment when the subject recognizes his or her interpellation and resists. the schizoid is the subject perhaps too far gone, but in a sense sets an example, at least, for the rest of us, about how a hyper-sanitizing, self-disciplining "sanity" may be resisted.

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.

reich marx sandwich, Wednesday, 18 May 2005 11:18 (nineteen years ago) link

N. believed that there are no facts, only interpretations: it didn't follow that he believed all interpretations were equally valid. he wouldn't take too kindly to being used an apologia for a political order, or as an apologia for anything. the nazi nietzsche stems from 'The Will to Power', a book his nationalist, anti-semitic, not-too-bright sister edited from parts of his notebooks written several years apart and then pawned off as a definitive systematic work: even then it has been argued that the conclusions they were drawing from it aren't that clear. Unless you think it's a good idea to judge a thinker by putting something he never intended to publish at the centre of his oeuvre, we can probably say that Klossowski's is a better interpretation than Hitler's. Also, a lot of the wilder versions of him tend to stem from folx reading 'TSZ' in total isolation from biographical detail or anything else he wrote.

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

fcuss3n, Wednesday, 18 May 2005 11:21 (nineteen years ago) link

rms - yeah i think maybe you're more accurate than i regarding their stance on capitalism in "anti-oedipus", as i've realized that i got that feeling from the bits i've read of "a thousand plateaus," particularly the rhizome parts. it's been awhile so the two books are mixed in my head. and again, i could easily be wrong either way.

Amon (eman), Wednesday, 18 May 2005 23:03 (nineteen years ago) link

this is a passage toward the end of anti-oedipus (jargon-ridden, but semicomprehensible I think) that gets at both their stance regarding schizophrenia and their anti-capitalism. they are big on "flows" and "desire" and "territorialization" and "coding" and "deterritorializing" and "overcoding" and "decoding" and so forth

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.

reich marx sandwhich, Friday, 20 May 2005 12:57 (nineteen years ago) link

fcuss3n was right: i will never understand this. sorry folks!

N_RQ, Friday, 20 May 2005 12:59 (nineteen years ago) link

n-rq, it is comprehensible if read with patience and care. they go to lengths to produce lucid definitions of each of the abstractions they introduce. remember that this passage arrives toward the end. they build to this, and as with all great writing, they teach you along the way how to read their text

reich marx sandwich, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:04 (nineteen years ago) link

yeah, i've been going over it since i posted that... it's not that i can't grasp abstract concepts, more that i can't deal with words which i know from elsewhere (eg capitalism) used in a different, or radically different way. i don't know what they mean by capitalism here:

"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..."

i just don't get it, how can capitalism 'need'? this is me just not getting it, i'm not being snarky.

N_RQ, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:07 (nineteen years ago) link

anyhoo, i was reading some of his essays in a bookshop ('how do we recognize structuralism', the i/view with foucault) and i think i got them. i will start there, i think. i read a book about foucault and understood that (actually i read MF himself at college, but forgot most of it), so who knows, perhaps eventually i will get all this.

anyone know of any good entry-level guides to d/g?

N_RQ, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:11 (nineteen years ago) link

feudalism needed peasants to till fields, southern American agrarian plantation culture needed slaves to gather tobacco and pick cotten. in order for capitalism to continue functioning, it needs subjects to imagine that there are limits to how culture can function, which limits capitalists can exploit as being passe in comparison to the new products they're developing. in a sense your objection is quite valid. capitalism per se doesn't exist. people exist. so capitalism can't need anything. perhaps it might help if you replace "capitalism" with "capitalists." but on the other hand, since most of us, certainly enough of us, are convinced capitalism is the way to go (just like back in the middle ages, when enough people were convinced an aristocratic hierarchy was better than the common person; or in the south, where ignorant fucks were convinced skin color had something to do with intelligence), captitalism "exists" as an ideology, like a religion, as a self-imposed (however unacknowledged) internal framing device that qualifies experience. again, this is all clear if you read the book. my explanations don't do the profundity of their thought justice.

reich marx sandwich, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:19 (nineteen years ago) link

there's handy dandy little graphic novel style intros to all these guys. It's a series called "Introducing," and they've done Lacan, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Barthes, etc. i'm not sure if they've done Deleuze and/or Guattari yet, but if so, it bet it would serve

reich marx sandwich, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:22 (nineteen years ago) link

i think i know the series, yeah, and will look. basically my encounter w. 'Theory' has been from history, and the radically anti-history bent of many of the French Theory pantheon has put my back up. a big book for me was ep thompson's 'poverty of theory', an attack on althusser and a vindication of marxist historiography. and theories of ideology have come up a lot in film studies -- althusser especially and again i find the lacanian basis for concepts like 'suture' highly dubious and ahistorical.

so in a way i'm olooking at d/g as a way out of that nexus, because i'm following the trajectory of jean-pierre gorin, a filmmaker who was a young maoist at the sorbonne and ended up a deleuzian in southern california. he made a film about, basically, language acquisition that in its own way is a rejection of lacan. i am determined to give d/g a go, because in interviews they do seem a lot more sympathetic than, especially, althusser or his (english) followers. so perhaps it's d/g's version of 'interpellation' that i'm interested in.

(sorry that was autobiographical -- really appreciate the posts, rms)

N_RQ, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:32 (nineteen years ago) link

i couldn't say for sure where they stand on althusser. i don't think they ever use the term "interpellation." i don't see their work as being antithetical to his, though. thompson's books sounds interesting to me, since i'm pondering althusser at the moment. but anyways, again, i can't recommend anti-oedipus highly enough. it's like a primer on sanity. you might have some issues with its lack of rigorous historicizing. but if, as i'm guessing from your prior posts, you appreciate foucault (and respect him as a historian?), he was smitten enough with anti-oedipus to write an almost polemically positive preface to it.

reich marx sandwich, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:44 (nineteen years ago) link

foucault interests me because he is almost a conventional historian in some ways -- it's just the addition of philosophy of science ideas like 'episteme' and 'break' (neither of which many 'professional historians' believe in) (for obvious reasons) makes his stuff problematic. so i think for some 'professional historians' he is redeemed by just being a historian of marginal groups or mentalities, in a way. (of course, he is also quite glamorous as an intellecual.)

'poverty of theory' is a number of things, but mainly against the dissolving of history into philosophy, with the main argument being about althusser's definition of 'empirical'. the abject retreat of the british althusserians (hindess and hirst) means that he has a far lower reputation among academic historians than among cultural theorists, i think.

N_RQ, Friday, 20 May 2005 13:59 (nineteen years ago) link

'poverty of theory' is out of print isn't it? what other ep thompson would you recommend?

Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Friday, 20 May 2005 14:31 (nineteen years ago) link

his main books were on william morris (which is in turn about the early history of what became the british labour party), the industrial revolution (ultra-famous classic, titled 'the making of the english working class' -- a ragged 1000 pages), and one i haven't read about enclosure (i think) in the 18th century.

the original 'poverty of theory book' from 1978 is the main anti-althusser piece and three other brilliant polemics, and i can't recommend it highly enough. it isn't hard to find, it's always in oxfam!!

'writing by candlelight' is a bunch of essays from the late 70s about the 'secret state' among other related themes, a state-of-the-nation book, which i like a lot. in the 80s he wrote or edited a few books about the new cold war, in general, when he got involved in END, a cross-iron-curtain anti-nuke organization. he was big in CND in the 50s and 80s.

committing to 'the making of the english working class' is a tall order, and it took me a long time to read it in all truth. it isn't difficult to read -- EPT was good At Writing -- but it's tough all the same and it helps to have some prior knowledge of the period (1780-1830). i must read the william morris book, though it is long.

N_RQ, Friday, 20 May 2005 14:44 (nineteen years ago) link

do you know, does the william morris book do much correlation of morris's socialist activism and his utopian fantasy narratives like the well at the world's end? i get a kick out of arguments (like Jameson's, and the Adorno of Minima Moralia) that undermine the dismissal of utopian fantasy as childish escapism. william morris is the perfect figure through which to dismiss the dismissive, and yet i'm not aware of anyone doing justice to the nexus in morris between socialism and fantasy.

reich marx sandwich, Friday, 20 May 2005 15:02 (nineteen years ago) link

N_RQ: im kinda interested in this project of yours. but would mind explaining what you mean by "anti-history" and why you think certain philosophers (i guess philosophers of "historicity" rather than historicism like the po-mos, heidegger, nietzsche) fit that description? what kind of historicism are you trying to retrieve?

ryan (ryan), Friday, 20 May 2005 15:22 (nineteen years ago) link

r.m.s. and N_RQ - the two volumes of "the accursed share" by george bataille might also be of interest to you. highly recommended by me at least

Amon (eman), Friday, 20 May 2005 21:54 (nineteen years ago) link

i have started on deleuze. i like what i unerstand of it. ryan's question is good. i think i'd say the historicism i'm trying to preserve is really 'the becoming of history', ie the brit-marxist tradition. this was accused of historicism, which perhaps wasn't always absent, but also wasn't always present. it had its faults but as i said the hirst-hindess assault on what it deemed 'empiricism,' and the related idea that marxism was 'the science of historical change' (quote forgotten) sort of closed of *all* enquiry into the past, made 'history' an invalid procedure -- without really acknowledging that history, like (i would guess) all intellectual disciplines, has a meta sphere where this stuff is worked out in less ideologically tendentious ways. certainly althusser's ideas about 'generalities' (more or less that the primary materials of histoprical enquiry already have an ideological dimension before they are interrogated by the historian) can be picked off by anyone with a-level history.

N_RQ, Saturday, 21 May 2005 18:16 (nineteen years ago) link

N_RQ, I think Althusser has been thoroughly discredited by almost everyone at this point (though a lot of his concepts eg. "interpellation" are still quite popular and useful) - especially his attempts to draw a distinction between science and ideology (and place historicism on the side of the latter and marxism on the side of the former)... plus his use of Lacan is really rather superficial.

If you haven't read it already you might enjoy Michele Barrett's The Politics Of Truth, which basically traces the history of "ideology" as a concept from Marx up to Laclau/Mouffe and then contrasts the concept of "ideology" generally against Foucault (who comprehensively does away with the real-truth/perspectives-serving-power-interests divide present in most of Marxism). She doesn't talk about Deleuze & Guattari though.

Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Sunday, 22 May 2005 01:34 (nineteen years ago) link

oh, yeah, i realize it's been mostly officially discredited, but it has left a deep impression on film theory precisely because interpellation was such an influential concept -- i don't think it's at all useful, as it goes. but i'm mainly interested cos i'm writing about the 70s, it's a historical thing.

N_RQ, Sunday, 22 May 2005 09:20 (nineteen years ago) link

thanks for the thompson tip. i'm about twenty pages into "the poverty of theory" and finding it very interesting. i enjoy his swiftian battle-of-the-books conceit. i feel like i'm there with him as he climbs the crags to assail the citadel of the althusserians, and as he marauds across the plains in chase of althusser's heretical disciples.

reich marx sandwich, Sunday, 22 May 2005 13:28 (nineteen years ago) link

i should probably fess up that i take most of my positions based on seductive prose style... but here is a nice quote from deleuze:

"For me, a text is nothing but a cog in a larger extra-textual practice. It’s not about using deconstruction, or any other textual practice, to do textual commentary; it’s about seeing what one can do with an extra-textual practice that extends the text."

N_RQ, Sunday, 22 May 2005 16:40 (nineteen years ago) link

in one interview he quotes, of all people, lawrence ferlinghetti (key SF beatnik, owner of city lights book shop, ect), from the novel 'her', which mentions the 'fourth person singluar'. deleuze says this is a good thing to write in, and i'm feeling that.

N_RQ, Friday, 27 May 2005 09:39 (nineteen years ago) link

five years pass...

been tempted by deleuze for a while. not so interested in the french post-marxists he was in dialogue with, but thinking of trying his stuff on hume or kant as I am very curious about his concept of immanence as a possible outgrowth/solution to the problems of the latter. earning the ire of alan sokal is probably a badge of honour, but i'm a little Curious about how he structures his writing - feels like i might need to decide on a character-class before i can read a thousand plateaus.

ogmor, Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:11 (thirteen years ago) link

oh man so classic

pro EVOO sucker (acoleuthic), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:15 (thirteen years ago) link

- oh yeah?

ogmor, Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:19 (thirteen years ago) link

Negri says in an interview somewhere that Mille Plateaux is sort of like a conceptual history, setting up these huge dynamic systems and then showing what revolutionary transformations look like within them. Not totally sure that I 'get it' (or that I'm representing Negri's words accurately), but there's a thought.

underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:20 (thirteen years ago) link

read Nomadology and was straight-up brainblown to the extent where I wrote my greatest academic & creative work, the latter very much as a response to it - and no you don't need to read anything else in preparation, just dive in. I wrote 6 A4 pages of quotes in a notebook, and reading back thru them the other day I'm struck by how fiercer and truer still they seem now

pro EVOO sucker (acoleuthic), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:22 (thirteen years ago) link

yeah, it's pretty and seductive, but basically snake oil. louis kinda proving my point here^^^

ed chilliband (max arrrrrgh), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:24 (thirteen years ago) link

"Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish ... they try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's nothing there." -Chomsky

ed chilliband (max arrrrrgh), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:26 (thirteen years ago) link

oh man not this argument again

underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:27 (thirteen years ago) link

"this argument"

underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:27 (thirteen years ago) link

arrrrrgh

pro EVOO sucker (acoleuthic), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:28 (thirteen years ago) link

"This is really obscure! But at the same time, I know exactly what he's trying to say, and I could say it more clearly than him so that more people would understand it!"

underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:28 (thirteen years ago) link

a way-in is pretty tough because he covers a lot of ground in v different styles and it can be difficult to see where the connections are, and for the same reason there isn't, as far as i know, an all-encompassing introduction that's adequate for both breadth and depth. if immanence is yr thing then the slim and v readable spinoza: practical philosophy may actually be a good place to start. then read the two 'memories of a spinozist' section of a thousand plateaus' 'becoming-intense' chapter. then of course ???, then profit. on the other hand don't listen to me because i'm biased towards certain spinozist perspectives in his writing. i've been working around this fella for three years now and it was only as i was finishing off my 25,000 word dissertation on him that i really felt i had an understanding of him. now, again, i'm not so sure. (p.s. will accept that deleuze was from time to time a bit of a silly hippie, will vehemently oppose any suggestion that he wasn't an excellent scholar and a thinker of huge merit.)

Antoine Bugleboy (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:28 (thirteen years ago) link

yeah I think that spinoza book was the first one I read (not all of it, but enough to get some idea of where he was coming from) — seconding yr recommendation

underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:30 (thirteen years ago) link

[xp to myself] damn so much odd phrasing there, wish i'd proofread before looking like a mealy-mouthed continentalist.

Antoine Bugleboy (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:30 (thirteen years ago) link

lj is yr great work about kant's categories?

couldn't give a whisper of a shit about what the seer chomsky has to say about anyone's critique of kant.

thanks merdeyeux, the spinoza might be a good call.

ogmor, Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:32 (thirteen years ago) link

[blowing of own trumpet]"I LOVE WRITING" MAIDEN VOYAGE appendix: self-appointed and unwieldy meisterwerks[/blowing of own trumpet]

pro EVOO sucker (acoleuthic), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:36 (thirteen years ago) link

you must be capable of circular breathing

ogmor, Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:39 (thirteen years ago) link

hahaha yeah sorry about that

pro EVOO sucker (acoleuthic), Tuesday, 23 November 2010 01:40 (thirteen years ago) link

eight months pass...

'a thousand plateaus' is really... seductive? it 'flows' really well, it submerges you. at the same time im not really reading it skeptically, just admiringly, w/o 'seeing it from the middle' (vs 'seeing it from the inside')

anyway i wish my french wasnt so lousy but its still nice to read, much more so than i remembered

C:\ (Lamp), Thursday, 4 August 2011 06:07 (twelve years ago) link

i couldn't manage it in French but yeah it is pure fun times. i'm not sure how you cd read it skeptically since it uses such deft judo to avoid dogmatism. i think about assemblages in the world around me a lot, then i wonder whether i will ever get my head around the body without organs, then you get to a funny joke and forget it for a bit. 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.

i'm sorry for whatever (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 4 August 2011 06:36 (twelve years ago) link

part of the seductiveness is the adventure of it i think, i never approach them trying to nail down each sentence before moving onto the next, i'm happy to go for a wander and maybe get a bit lost but then find myself somewhere quite recognisable and think "yes this is a thing" and then wander off again. it engages like literature and never pretends to be some banal science thesis.

i'm sorry for whatever (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 4 August 2011 06:40 (twelve years ago) link

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

bamcquern, Thursday, 4 August 2011 07:35 (twelve years ago) link

Spec realism, sorry, pwned by preemptive ire

bamcquern, Thursday, 4 August 2011 07:39 (twelve years ago) link

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, 4 August 2011 09:18 (twelve years ago) link

six months pass...

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

gilles talking to richard pinhas :)

contreatable logorrhea (Noodle Vague), Friday, 17 February 2012 10:54 (twelve years ago) link

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.

Merdeyeux, Friday, 17 February 2012 14:09 (twelve years ago) link

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

99x (Lamp), Friday, 17 February 2012 18:15 (twelve years ago) link

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...

Little GTFO (contenderizer), Friday, 17 February 2012 18:24 (twelve years ago) link

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

Little GTFO (contenderizer), Friday, 17 February 2012 18:26 (twelve years ago) link

you are obviously not smoking enough weed yet

TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, 17 February 2012 18:33 (twelve years ago) link

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.)

ryan, Friday, 17 February 2012 18:33 (twelve years ago) link

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.

ryan, Friday, 17 February 2012 18:37 (twelve years ago) link

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 (twelve years ago) link

why was it making your life hard

lil kink (Matt P), Friday, 17 February 2012 20:43 (twelve years ago) link

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.

john-claude van donne (schlump), Friday, 17 February 2012 20:50 (twelve years ago) link

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

encarta it (Gukbe), Friday, 17 February 2012 20:57 (twelve years ago) link

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

flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, 17 February 2012 21:01 (twelve years ago) link

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

shart practice (Merdeyeux), Friday, 17 February 2012 21:06 (twelve years ago) link

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.

flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, 17 February 2012 21:07 (twelve years ago) link

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

flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, 17 February 2012 21:07 (twelve years ago) link

(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.)

shart practice (Merdeyeux), Friday, 17 February 2012 21:09 (twelve years ago) link

amateurist had no use for deleuze, RIP

BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 17 February 2012 21:22 (twelve years ago) link

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.

judith, Saturday, 18 February 2012 01:48 (twelve years ago) link

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.

judith, Saturday, 18 February 2012 01:50 (twelve years ago) link

i am going to buy rhizomes at the book store tomorrow

99x (Lamp), Saturday, 18 February 2012 02:49 (twelve years ago) link

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

max, Saturday, 18 February 2012 03:53 (twelve years ago) link

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

I GUESS THAT CINNABON GETTIN EATEN (Edward III), Saturday, 18 February 2012 04:48 (twelve years ago) link

eleven months pass...

dug this:

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

sorry for bard url

suze (Matt P), Thursday, 31 January 2013 16:44 (eleven years ago) link

one month passes...

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., Monday, 11 March 2013 01:50 (eleven years ago) link

easily. the body without organs does it.

markers, Monday, 11 March 2013 01:51 (eleven years ago) link

professor challenger

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

j., Monday, 11 March 2013 03:46 (eleven years ago) link

seven months pass...

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

j., Thursday, 24 October 2013 02:30 (ten years ago) link

one year passes...

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

j., Tuesday, 7 July 2015 04:47 (eight years ago) link

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

j., Thursday, 9 July 2015 04:45 (eight years ago) link

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.

: (

j., Sunday, 12 July 2015 14:33 (eight years ago) link

https://twitter.com/DeepdreamBot

read the faciality chapter just the other week

this is the WRONG DIRECTION

j., Thursday, 16 July 2015 16:21 (eight years ago) link

two years pass...

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).

Unbreakable Kim Jong-Un (Mr Andy M), Saturday, 16 June 2018 19:15 (six years ago) link

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.

Unbreakable Kim Jong-Un (Mr Andy M), Saturday, 16 June 2018 19:21 (six years ago) link

seven months pass...

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

— nash 🦉 (@pnashjenkins) November 20, 2018

xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:05 (five years ago) link

hahahahahah!!!!!

sarahell, Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:06 (five years ago) link

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

L'assie (Euler), Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:08 (five years ago) link

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

jmm, Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:10 (five years ago) link

dammn

sarahell, Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:15 (five years ago) link

ah!

xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:17 (five years ago) link

Marxism is back

xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:17 (five years ago) link

deleuze (and touche)

the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:23 (five years ago) link

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

Stephen Yakkety-Yaxley-Rosbif (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 12 February 2019 18:57 (five years ago) link

deleuze and guattari vs. dolce & gabbana

sarahell, Tuesday, 12 February 2019 19:42 (five years ago) link

SAME

Stephen Yakkety-Yaxley-Rosbif (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 12 February 2019 19:52 (five years ago) link

five months pass...

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.'

j., Tuesday, 6 August 2019 00:54 (four years ago) link


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