Summary
Definitions
Questions
Overall, we may say that music is plugged into a machinic phylum infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line of selective pressure. . . . Painters, at least as commonly portrayed, may be much more political, and less controlled from without and within. (348)
In the Mount Dennis mobile kitchen project, who are the painters, and who are the musicians? How can we encourage painters to become musicians, and musicians to become painters? Or is this a false duality: are musicians always painters, and vice-versa?
The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. (348)
If we consider our mobile kitchen as a refrain, as a territorializing assemblage (the seed of order in chaos, organizing a limited space around an uncertain and fragile centre, open to the future and the cosmos), how does our it instrumentally organize heterogeneous masses? How do we ensure that this organization remains rhizomatic?
Your synthesis of disparate elements will be all the stronger if you proceed with a sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture or extraction that works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively limited, selected. (344)
What strategies (material choice, procedural, conceptual, division of labour, or otherwise) can we employ to prodigiously simplify, creatively limit, and select our final design direction?
Friday, March 28, 2008
1837: Of Refrain
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"
Summary
Definitions
1874: Three Novellas, or “what happened?" Definitions: Gene Mastrangeli
The Novella: a literary genre where, in essence, everything is centered on the question, or evolves in the element of “what happened?” It has little to do with memory because it places us in relation with something unknowable and imperceptible . . . it has a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with the secret matter but with the expression which remains impenetrable) . . . to discovery (its form independent from its matter) . . . it also enacts postures of the body and mind that are like folds or envelopments (where a tale possesses attitudes and positions that unfold and develop)
What happened? (The expression or modality), Secrecy and Discovery (the form), Posture (the content)
First/ Second/ Third Novellas (three parallel concepts)
Couples/ Break Line/ Molar Perception = Line of Molar. . A rigid segmentation of the world . . . an overall survey with clear-cut elements . . . overcoded . . . populated by near-seers that use spyglasses and possess a terrible laser beam that reinforces a molar order . . . a psudobreak
Doubles/ Crack Line/ Molecular Perception = Line of Molecular . . . supple segmentation, fine and shifting compositions . . . vaguely coded . . . far-seers . . . a crack up
Lines of Flight/ Rupture Line/ Perception of Escape = Line of Drift . . . state of becoming . . . “This flight is not a running away from the world but rather the cause of a runoff in the world” . . . It does not tolerate segments . . . it is like an exploding of the two segmentary series . . . a clean break
“She has broken through a wall . . . obtained absolute deterritorialzation.”
“She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. “There were no longer shadows to help her see clearly, only glare.”
A “crack” has occurred at what D&G describe as the “angle of transparency” which gives way to this “line of flight”.
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
– L. Cohen (The Future)
Formless
“But on this third line there is no longer any form”
“In rupture . . . the form of what happened is volatized. . . One has become imperceptible and clandestine in a motionless voyage . . . I have lost my form; I am now no more than a line.
Florence Julien (painter) . . . interest in “lines of flight” . . . “she extracts lines from photographs that are nearly abstract and formless “
“A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meanings of words but their functions. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.” - Georges Bataille (Visions of Excess)
Questions
1) On the matter of secrets in the context of “In the Cage” by Henry James (p.196), Deleuze and Guattari state that “what counts is the form of the secret; the matter no longer even has to be discovered”. They then distinguish the difference between couples and doubles, and that the telegraphist “was literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self”, regarding the telegrapher with the secret she had knowledge of.
Can the “double” be considered the secret itself, then, since its “form” would be the same for the telegraphist and telegrapher? Regarding the point at which “the molecular relation between the telegraphist and the telegraph sender dissolved in the form of the secret, because nothing happened”, would this still be the case if the matter of the secret was spoken aloud? Would a linguistic articulation even be possible considering the “simultaneously present and imperceptible nature” of the “micropolitics of conversation”? Could it be said that it was due to the “molecularized, imperceptible, and unassignable” nature of micropolitics or secrets, that a line of flight can exist?
2) Deleuze and Guattari say that the far-seers are “collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest project of control”, who do not “feel a vague sympathy for the subterranean activity revealed to them” (p. 202). They describe the far-seers as those who “feel as though they foresee things and are ahead of the others because they see the smallest thing as already having happened; but they know that their warnings are to no avail because the cutting telescope will set everything straight without being warned, without the need for or possibility of prediction”, and that sometimes they feel that “what they see differs only in degree and serves no purpose”.
Would D&G be saying, then, that the far-seers, although without the terrible Ray Telescope of the near-seers, are equal contributors to the cutting of “flesh and blood” and the “misshapen figures or shaky contours” which the telescope performs? They seem to attribute this to the sentiment of: “you should not insist, you should not argue; you should flee, flee, even saying as you go ‘Okay, okay, you win’” when one operates on a line which does not conjugate with another’s. How is this situation improved upon, however, when a far-seer abandons his or her segment and starts “walking across a narrow overpass above the dark abyss, breaks his or her telescope and departs on a line of flight”? If the circumstances of the departure are unknown (“what happened”?) and unimportant once it has taken place, how does this line of flight serve to dismantle the lines of rigid segmentarity that still occur with the near-seers, the Ray Telescope, and the State?
3) On page 206, following a quote from Fitzgerald describing the drunk and the madwoman, D&G associate the various aspects of their relationship to the three lines of rigid segmentarity, supple segmentation, and the line of flight. In the line of flight, each of the two people are now “the clandestine of the other, a double all the more successful now that nothing has importance any longer… nothing will enter memory, everything was on the lines, between the lines, in the AND that made one and the other imperceptible”. Supple segmentation is “the limit of what they can endure in their state with the tacit understandings serving them as internal messages”.
Do you think that in today’s society, relationships can often exist permanently in a state of supple segmentarity, for example where the male character in Fitzgerald’s novella says “she loves the alcohol on my lips and I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations”? What do you think D&G’s stance is on relationships between “drunks and madwomen”, since the stage of supple segmentarity must occur before the line of flight – and also, it is the stress during such a stage which eventually causes the line of flight?
Year Zero: Faciality
Summary
Definitions
The Face : White Wall/Black Hole
Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise
that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. (167)
It is not exactly the face that constitutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape on the white wall. It vaguely
begins to appear in the black hole. (168)
The Abstract Machine of Faciality
Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole. (168)
Fades Totius Universi : The White Face of Christ
Not a universal, but fades totius universi. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the
facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions. (176)
Limit Faces
Whether in the Christian or pre-Christian state, one element may dominate another, one may be more or less powerful than the other. We are thus led to define limit-faces, which are different from both the facial units and the degrees of facial divergence previously defined. (182)
Terrestrial Destiny
The despot or his representatives are everywhere. This is the face as seen from the front, by a subject who does not so much see as get snapped up by black holes. This is a figure of destiny, terrestrial destiny, objective signifying destiny. (183)
Maritme Subjective
Now, on the contrary, the white wall has unraveled, becoming a silver thread moving toward the black hole. One black hole "crests" all the other black holes, all of the eyes and faces, while the landscape becomes a thread whose far end coils around the hole. It is still a multiplicity but constitutes a different figure of destiny: reflexive, passional, subjective destiny. It is the maritime face or landscape. (184)
Faciality Traits
We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of signifiance and subjectification. (188)
Probe Heads
Sometimes the abstract machine, as the faciality machine, forces flows into signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of aborescence and holes of abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable "defacialization," it frees something like probe-heads (tetes chercheuses, guidance devices) that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favor of veritable rhizomes, and steer the flows down lines of positive deterritorializaton or creative flight. (190)
Questions
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?
Summary
Definitions
Questions (Luke)
1) “At any rate, you make one, you can’t desire with making one.” (p.149) If we are each constantly in the process of constructing BwO’s, how is this process tied to our construction of ourselves as architects? Is it helpful to consider the architect not as an organism but as a process of making BwO’s; one whose desire is to produce? Where do we fit in the spectrum of BwO’s consisting on one side with the cautionary, empty or cancerous BwO’s and on the other with those “full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance?” (p. 150) What fuels the architect’s desire to create: lack (the negative law), pleasure (the extrinsic rule), jouissance (the transcendent ideal), or what lies to the west (the plane of consistency)? (p. 154)
2) What do the authors gain by walking us through their scenarios which are described as “not a phantasy,[but] a program.” (p.151) Through the extremes of an unfamiliar experience, are they heightening our understanding of the “program” or alienating us? How are readers, who may not be personally familiar with such experiences, not meant to perform their own form of psychoanalysis (through phantasy, signifiances, and subjectifications) in absence of real engagement with the “program”? Simply, without a real, shared experience does this not risk becoming a metaphor?
3) We are cautioned about the production of BwO’s “because we can botch it” ultimately leading to “demented or suicidal collapse.” (p. 149 & 161) If desire is the mode which fabricates the BwO’s as well as that which determines what “passes or does not pass across it,” how are we meant to be critical of our desires and at what scale (p. 152)? Are they formed from everyday, fleeting desires or only those which deeply motivate us? Is the production of BwO’s an activity which we engage with on the level of something as fundemental as breathing, or epic as the personal quest, or somewhere inbetween?
4) “Mimic the strata.” (p.160) How can this mantra be applied to design processes in a helpful way? If we are meant to: “Lodge [ourself] on a stratum [to] experiment with the opportunities it offers” or “keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn” then are we meant to acknowledge our foundations even as we grow away from them (through flights of deterritorialization)? (p. 160 &161) Is this a vindication of an aware iterative development? Or something else where “the child is the germinal contemporary of its parents?” (p.164)
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
587 B.C. - A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs
Summary
Definitions
SIGNIFYING REGIME OF THE SIGN: “every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum…When denotation (here designation and signification taken together) is assumed to be part of connotation, one is wholly within this signifying regime of the sign.” (112) Radiating circularity.
SYMBOLIC: taking a given semiotic into the presignifying regime.
POLEMICAL OR STRATEGIC: taking a semiotic into the signifying regime
CONSCIOUSNESS-RELATED OR MIMETIC: post-signifying regime
DIAGRAMMATIC: transformations that blow apart semiotics systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency
puissance Noun, feminine (a) power, strength of an army, muscle, brightness of light, force of wind; power, output of hifi; social, economic, electrical power
COGITO
Etymology: New Latin cogito, ergo sum, literally, I think, therefore I am, principle stated by René Descartes
1 : the philosophic principle that one's existence is demonstrated by the fact that one thinks
2 : the intellectual processes of the self or ego
DESPOT
Online Etymology Dictionary
Questions
1a) Deleuze and Guattari introduce early in this chapter the simple conceptual formula stating that for the "signifying regime of the sign (the signifying sign): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign's relation to a state of things it designates...The question is not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other signs it refers..." (p.112) Do we agree, and if we do, why the importance of signs is in the sign to sign relationship insofar that it defines a signifying chain? And if this is the case, what importance, if any, is left of the actual thing that is signified?
1b) Further to their explanation of a regime of signs, Deleuze and Guattari state that "A sign refers to another sign, into which it passes and which carries it into still other signs. To the point that it returns in a circular fashion...the network of signs is infinitely circular." (p.113) This implies that the network of signs ultimately refers back onto itself and its origin of signification. To better understand what this describes, can we come up with an example of such a signifying network that might demonstrate this sort of folding in on itself?
2) Deleuze and Guattari introduce after their discussion of delusion, an interesting sub-concept of mental and dominant reality under the larger idea of subjectification and the postsignifying regime. Subjectification is the point of departure, followed by a subject of enunciation that formulates the mental reality. Through a sort of normalization process causing a series of changes in points of subjectification, one tends to move from the mental reality to conforming to the dominant reality. (p.129) If we take that the mental reality exists in one's mind and the dominant reality approaches some sort of physical realisation, at what point of the "reality spectrum" does design become real?
3) Faciality. "It is a whole body unto itself: it is like the body of the center of signifiance to which all of the deterritorialized signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization....The face is the Icon..." (p.115) In their discussion of faciality, Deleuze and Guattari describe faciality as containing traits of expression and is the culmination of a signifying regime. In the context of capitalism and to be more specific, to the idea of branding, the "face" of companies are often in the form of simplistic logos - the swoosh from Nike, the apple from Macintosh to name a couple. Can it be argued then that these simplistic logos are in and of themselves as expressive as a signifier as any face? At the same time is their simplistic abstract nature the very mechanism that allows for interpretation and therefore a kind of deception?
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics
Summary
Chapter 4 / Summary
November 20th, 1923 – Postulates of Language
Photograph – Depiction of silhouetted (faceless) body of authority at desk with microphone (voice of authority)
November 20th 1923 – “The curtain was rolled down” is the date when the old Riechsmark was declared to be no longer money and was to be replaced with the Rentenmark. This signifies a specific instance where the economic basis for a society was superseded by the culture in which it forms. A roll shift, if you will which according to Marxist theory (in that the economic structure is what all of a society relates back to) does not happen.
Economic structure = Societal foundation (cultural determinate)
Cultural structure = Societal superstructure (based on economic structure)
Postulates of Language . . . the demands or requirements deemed as necessary for communication and understanding. - Oxford
Postulate I
“Language is informational and communicational”
Linguiso-political arguments
“Language presupposes itself and therefore we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic point of departure.”
The politics of language are synonymous to the politics of oppression.
Rules of grammar are “power markers” . . . authoritative structures . . . a means of controlling the expression of a society.
A distinguishing between Informing/instructing and insigning. . . . “The compulsory education machine does not communicate information but rather imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates . . . the elementary unit of language is the statement which is the order-word . . . Language is not to be believed but to be obeyed”
Ordering is redundancy . . . like speaking to oneself . . . the performative relates not to acts but instead to a property of “self referentiality”. . . . a “closed circuit” if you will.
“Say something once, why say it again” – David Byrne
Words are limiting tools. Information is the bare minimum required for emission or transmission . . . not expression.
Hear/say. . .”broken telephone” . . . language distortion. . . “We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard”
“Language is a virus from outer space and hearing your name is better than seeing your face” - W.S. Burroughs
“Language is not the model for all structures and but rather that the question of language is merely a subset of the larger question of regimes of signs and the question of semiotics.” – M. Hardt
From an anthropological perspective language is inseparable from the culture or society it describes . . . therefore if a culture or society subscribes to a language that is creatively stagnant itself will embody the same fate.
Michael Hardt argues that the above statement according to D&G is incorrect and that this “regime of signs” does not relate to society but is society itself and is not enlightened in the realm of socio-anthropology. He states that “Once we cast the question of language in the larger and proper framework of a “regime of signs”, then, and once we recognize a regime of signs as a society, it is clear that this is a political terrain, simply in the sense that all questions are immediately questions of the polis, of the social field. “Language is a political affair before it is an affair for linguistics; even the evaluation of degrees of grammaticality is a political matter"
Pragmatics
Perhaps rather than ethics I should talk about pragmatics. This is the opening in these chapters toward political action. "Pragmatics is a politics of language," or perhaps more generally, pragmatics is a politics of semiotics. What do they means by political here? It is of course a practical matter, but I would argue that the first thing one need is criteria for political action, and that is what D&G provide. You can recognize when D&G are proposing criteria for political action when they start talking about usage or particular two different usages for something. –M. Hardt
Postulate II
“The Abstract Machine of Language does not appeal to any extrinsic factor”
How can we discover variation, transformation, passage, and deterritorialization in language?
Variation and transformation are attributed to bodies. The independence of the “form of content” and the “form of expression” is not the basis of a parallelism, but on the contrary, a parceling of the two, a manner in which expressions are inserted into contents, a deterritorialization; “The knife cutting the flesh” an “intermingling of bodies”. This is a collective assemblage of annunciations which D&G states are in continuous variation and are themselves constantly subject to transformations.
"Continuous variation constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the majoritarian. Becoming-majoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy" I'm interested in the collective dimension of this explanation, which qualifies what might have sometimes seemed like very individualistic notions of flight. Minoritarian politics is not only collective; however, it is universal or at least potentially universal. It is potentially the politics of everyone. – M Hardt
Postulate III
“There are constants or universals of language that enable us to define it as a homogenous system”
“There is no reason to tie the abstract machine to the universal or constant”
Music
Musicians say that the “theme is the variation”
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” – Laurie Anderson
Modal
Modal playing and composing (in the Jazz context) evolved from not playing or writing compositions using chords but instead using modal scales. For example this means that the player does not have to go from one important note of a chord to that of another as long as he or she stays in the scale being used and accentuated the right notes within the scale. The overall result was more freedom of expression. In fact, the way that a soloist creates a solo changed dramatically from the be-bop norm with the advent of modal jazz. Before, the goal of a soloist was to play a solo that fit into a set of chords. However, with modal jazz, a soloist would create a melody in one scale (typically). Therefore, the goal of the musician was now to make the melody as interesting as possible. Modal jazz was, in essence, a return to melody. This was the basis of Modern Jazz and explored by artists such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman the latter two eventually ignoring melody and tonality all together with the invention of “Free Jazz”, the mode of total freedom where he or she can go virtually everywhere.
Playing style - Chord (arborescent) / Modal (arbo/rhizomatic) / Free (rhizomatic)
Postulate IV
“Language can be scientifically studied only under the conditions of a standard or ‘Major’ language.”
There is a constant tendency to seek out a reduction in language
Major and Minor
“How strange the change from major to minor” – Cole Porter
"'Major' and 'minor' do not qualify two different languages but rather two usages or functions of language" In the context of D&G's order-words, we should recognize that there are two usages of order-words.
The major usage of them is as commands or orders "You will do this, you will not do that", each of which, according to D&G, is a little death sentence. The major usage of order words is always a “verdict”. But of course that is not the only usage possible: "the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected, like a warning cry or a message to flee"
The minor usage of order-words is part of a” line of flight”. “Flight must be creative”. We have seen these lines of flight posed as the political alternative before, but what interests Hardt here is that flight or escape is not enough. "In the order-word life must answer the answer of death, not by fleeing, but by making flight act and create," by transforming "the compositions of order into components of passage” (which harkens back to that of “variation and transformation”)
“This illustrates that minoritarian usages are creative and majoritarian are not or in other words, that minoritarian usages are becomings.”There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian.”
“It is a minoritarian usage that possesses no standard but only variation. It deterritorializes the major language. According to this understanding all great authors invent a minor language, or more properly, they make minoritarian usage of the language.” – M. Hardt
The major usage of order-words is a death sentence. Its usage of language insists on unity, uniformity and on the fixity of its constants.
The minor usage of order-words is also a death sentence but part of a “line of flight”. Its usage operates a reduction of constants and proliferates in the variations of the language to create expression.
“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different after they are said, a little distorted, a little foolish.” - Herman Hesse (Siddhartha)
Definitions
Questions
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals
Summary
plateau three: the geology of morals
a [tentative] summary by jesse colin jackson
In the first three chapters we have two different kinds of argument. Chapters One and Two present an ethical alternative: we prefer rhizomatic to arborescent structures and systems; we prefer packs to masses. Chapter Three, however, even though its title indicates it is about morals, does not seem to present such an ethical alternative. It describes what is, not what ought to be. That chapter tells us simply how life is articulated, structured, formed, etc.
(Hardt 1)
It was over. Only later would all of this take on concrete meaning.
(Deleuze 73)
Plateau Three: The Geology of Morals, is constituted within the framing narrative of a lecture by Professor Challenger, and consists of five major divisions: a general theory of stratification (pp. 40-45), the unity and diversity of a stratum relative to substances and forms (pp. 45-57), the variation between strata relative to content and expression (pp. 57-64), three remaining problems within Challenger’s formulation (64-72), and finally, a summary and recapitulation (72-74) (Protevi).
Let us begin at the end, as Hardt recommends. “Each stratum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition.” (Deleuze 72) Distinctions between strata are of three types: differences of content and expression, differences of form and substance within content and expression, and differences in relative movements and associated states of territorialization. Strata are divisible into parastrata (irreducible forms and associated mileu) and epistrata (layered substances and intermediary milieus). Machinic assemblages regulate relations between strata, borrowing contents and expressions from each connected stratum as necessary, and effectuating the abstract machine upon which all strata lie: the plane of consistency. “Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of the contents and expression on each stratum, and at the intersection of all the strata with the plane of consistency. They rotate in all directions, like beacons.” (73)
Michael Hardt interprets this chapter as “three specific challenges to structuralism: the correspondence between words and things; the relation between base and superstructure; and the division between matter and mind. In short, words don't correspond to things. Rather, forms of expression and forms of content intersect through their equal participation in an abstract machine.” (2) Deleuze and Guattari object to the structuralist social metaphor and its false dichotomy between an economic base of content and superstructural institutions of expression: both content and expression form parallel parts of a double articulation, pointing towards the abstract machine via the interstratum vehicle of the machinic assemblage. As such, Deleuze and Guattari also object to any ordinate/subordinate relationship between the signified and the signifier: again, these constructs are only one of many substances and forms of content and expression, and they operate in parallel. Deleuze and Guattari establish (within Professor Challenger’s biological framework) that life is organized through this double articulation on all levels, from geological formations to cell chemistry. “If we then accept the claim from Anti-Oedipus that there is no difference of nature between the human and the nonhuman, between the biological and the social, that all life (mineral, animal, vegetable) functions along the same lines, then human society too must be organized according to the double articulation.” (5)
Manuel De Landa further explores these case studies in geology and biology that serve to test the applicability of the double articulated strata model. “Sedimentary rocks, species and social classes (and other institutionalized hierarchies) are all historical constructions, the product of definite structure-generating processes which take as their starting point a heterogeneous collection of raw materials (pebbles, genes, roles), homogenize them through a sorting operation and then give the resulting uniform groupings a more permanent state through some form of consolidation. Hence, while some elements remain different (for example only human institutions, and perhaps, biological species, involve a hierarchy of command) others stay the same: the articulation of homogenous components into higher-scale entities.” (6) The distinctions between stratum are made concrete by example, as are their characteristic differences in content and expression, and within these, substance and form. For example, in the double articulation of geology, sedimentation (content) contains both pebbles (substance) and uniform layers (form), while consolidation (expression) contains both new couplings between pebbles (substance) and an entirely new entity, sedimentary rock (form). Strata can then grouped to become a higher scale entity, a mountain, a new stratum subject to further double articulation (4-5), or divided into lower scale entities, such as rocks (parastrata) or rock-piles (epistrata), but it can never be entirely separated from the associated milieus of its constitution and its experience. In human groupings, the double articulation consists of social segragation, followed by ideological imposition: “to transform a loose accumulation of traditional roles (and criteria of access to those roles) into a social class, the latter needs to become consolidated via theological and legal codification.” (6)
More generally, Antonio Negri synthesizes some of the ideas begun in this Plateau: “Machines, the reality constructed by capitalism, are not phantasms of modernity after which life can run unscathed - they are, on the contrary, the concrete forms according to which life organizes itself, the world transforms itself, and the material connections within which subjectivity is produced.” How can we engage with the abstract machine? Is there another structure that permits us to escape our strata, and access to the plane of consistency, without participating in a machinic assemblage? “He whispered something else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs proliferate. Panic is creation.” (Deleuze 73)
Sources:
De Landa, Manuel. The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/geology.htm
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizoprenia. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Hardt, Michael. Notes on 1000 Plateaus. http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/mp1.htm
Protevi, John. ATP3: Geology of Morals Outline. http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/ATP3.html
Definitions
Questions
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
1914: One or Several Wolves
Summary
Definitions (Luke)
Patronymic - A component of a personal name based on the name of one's father as a means of conveying lineage.
Neurosis and Psychosis - According to psychoanalytic theory, neuroses are rooted in ego defense mechanisms which are a normal way of developing and maintaining a consistent sense of self (i.e., an ego). Neurosis is a normal human experience which should not be mistaken for psychosis (which refers to loss of touch with reality).[1] “The comparisons and identifications of the neurotic are guided by representations of things [as a tool to separate themselves from their surroundings], whereas all a psychotic has left are representations of words [which is merely a name with no connection to its original reference].”[2]
Body without Organs (BwO) – The conventional understanding of a body is as stable entities or collections which contain a set of traits. BwO introduce the idea that these collections more importantly contain unexpressed connections, potentials, and forces which actively reject an identity based on the organization of its parts in favour of one understood through the activation of its host of virtual potentials and forces. These connective forces may not be apparent but actively produce the world that is apparent.
Rhizome – “One of the essential characteristics of the dream of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance in relation to the others… they cannot increase or diminish without their elements changing in nature.”[3] Despite the strong criticisms of dualities and of posing oppositions, rhizomes are introduced as a social aggregation concerned with dynamic connections as opposed to arborescent structures which are hierarchical and static. Rhizomes are one type of dynamically organized system or multiplicity which is invoked in opposition to ordered totalities or unities (eg. the rhizome vs the tree and the pack vs the mass). The difference between these systems is not their content but their constitution and as such one system can become or contain the other. Multiplicities can be both arborescent or rhizomatic: “On the one hand, multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable, totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious – an on the other hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold.”[4]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotic
[2] A Thousand Plateaus, p. 27
[3] Ibid. at 30-31
[4] Ibid. at 33
Extensive and Intensive - An intensive variable is one that can be defined locally within a system; its magnitude does not depend on whether we select a system or a part of a system (eg colour or density). An extensive variable is one that is defined for the system as a whole; its magnitude does depend on how much of the system we choose to select (eg mass or size).
Packs and Crowds – These terms are another way to categorize multiplicities. Crowds (or Masses) are “large [in] quantity, divisibility, and equality of members, concentration, and sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way hierarchy, organization of territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs.”[1] While packs are characterized by “ small or restricted numbers, dispersion, non-decomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility for a fixed totalization or hierarchy, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles.”[2] Through the prose of chapters 1 and 2, the reader is presented with an ethical alternative: it is suggested that rhizomatic structures and systems are preferable to arborescent and that packs are preferable to crowds. “The leader of the pack or band plays move by move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or deterritorialization that is component part of it, and to which it accredits a high value, whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign.”[3]
Assemblages – “For the moment, we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal apparatuses; and counter Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning.”[4] We are warned not to reduce the idea of an assemblage to the combination of the external groups an entity belongs to as well as those internal collections which combine to constitute it. Instead, assemblages should be thought of as relations between differing multiplicities which “coexist, interpenetrate, and change places.”[5]
