by Terence Blake
Richard Dawkins wrote a very eulogious review of Sokal and Bricmont’s INTELLECTUAL IMPOSTURES, which criticises recent French philosophy, a subject that Dzwkins knows nothing about.
Let’s begin with Dawkin’s first quote, taken from Guattari’s late work CHAOSMOSIS:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis.
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Guattari is not a particularly good stylist in French, his prose style is over-full of abstract jargon, and is rather bookish. He is something of an auto-didact in philosophy. He is just one of those people who think differently from others and who need to make use of very abstract language to express their thoughts. I heard him talk once at Deleuze’s seminar on cinema, and he talked using much more jargon than Deleuze, but it was very interesting.
This quote seems rather obscure. First, as I discussed in the previous post, there is the erroneous translation of the expression one-to-one correspondence as “bi-univocal correspondence”, at the beginning. Then he goes on to talk about “linear signifying links” [implicitly referring to Lacan] or “archi-writing” [referring to Derrida]. Thus, here Guattari is criticising both Lacan and Derrida, so Dawkins should be happy about their agreement rather than treating Guattari’s prose as nonsense.
Guattari says that there is no mapping of Lacan’s and Derrida’s ideas of language onto his own idea of the “machine”. This is a key concept in all of Guattari’s work, alone and in collaboration with Deleuze. We must note that the use of the word machine as a metaphor is far more common in French than it is in English. People compare the State, or a company, or school to a machine quite readily, in ordinary conversation. Guattari took up this popular metaphor and gave it a new sense in his attempt to free himself from the linguistic metaphors favoured by structuralism, and also by Lacan and by Derrida.
“Machinic” used as an adjective seems quite abstract and ugly in English, but not as much in French, which quite likes Latinate words ending in the suffix “-ique”(“-ic” in English). On a historical note, we should keep in mind that Lacan dominated the intellectual scene in France for a long time, and Guattari began to break free of that influence in 1969 in a little text called “Machine and Structure”, that Deleuze found quite important. Dawkins’ quote (1992) contains a late reaffirmation by Guattari of the same point, in a far more mature intellectual framework.
We may note also that French favours the use of abstract adjectives, where English would use a noun phrase (“machinic” instead of “of machines”).
Guattari’s conception of language is different from the Anglophone, not aiming so much at semantic transparency as at a pragmatic freeing from clichés. Hence the expression “machinic catalysis”, which is awkward in English, but not incomprehensible in context. It’s machinic because the language is interpreted and evaluated in terms of its function in a particular context, and it’s a “catalysis” because it makes ideas and interventions possible that would not otherwisehave been possible without great effort and special preparation.
“Machinic catalysis” alludes to Austin’s “How to do things with words”, in opposition to Lacan’s “linear signifying links” and to Derrida’s “archi-writing”. This sentence is the declaration of Guattari’s (and of Deleuze’s) pluralist theory of desire, and of their siding against Lacan’s and Derrida’s one-dimensional linguistic paradigms. This is something that Dawkins should should favour, even if he feels uncomfortable about the style.
This is a very compact sentence, condensing a number of theoretical allusions: signifying chain- Lacan, archi-writing – Derrida, machinic – Guattari and Deleuze, catalysis – Austin. My argument against Dawkins is that one needs a lot of background to understand and to unpack the allusive density and to see its beauty. Dawkins sees none of this, he just blindly trusts Sokal’s opinion that it is nonsense, strings together unrelated quotes, and laughs. Dawkins’ argument is “I don’t know anything about the subject, but I can easily see this is nonsense”.
Far from being needlessly obfuscating, allusive density is one of the principles of good style in French, and it is not easy to carry off well. However, if you can follow the allusions it makes for great clarity. Guattari’s allusions are not at all obscure here. He alludes to the work of Lacan, of Derrida, and of Austin, and to his own work with Deleuze, whch everyone reading Guattari in French would have read. Even the mathematical allusion to bi-univocal mapping or “one-to-one correspondence” is high school maths, nothing abstruse.
I do not want to go too far and legitimise everything. Laruelle for instance is unforgiveably obscure. Certainly, Guattari could have been helped to write more clearly. But he does not write nonsense. French philosophers write more abstractly and more poetically than their Anglophone colleagues. True, it can be done more or less well.
I have shown that Guattari’s sentence does make sense, and why it is written as it is. To appreciate it fully, one needs to familiarise oneself with the relevant concepts, theses, and literature, particularly with the ideas of Lacan and Derrida.
Conclusion: with a little attention to (cultural, linguistic, conceptual) context, much of the supposed obscurity of French philosophy disappears.
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by Steven Craig Hickman
Timid, devoid of dynamism, the good is inept at communicating itself. Evil, much more zealous, seeks to transmit itself, and succeeds because it possesses the double privilege of being fascinating and contagious.
– E.M. Cioran
Or is it a question of a real passage of substances, an intensive continuum of all the BwO’s? Doubtless anything is possible. All we are saying is that the identity of effects, the continuity of genera, the totality of BwO’s, can be obtained on the plane of consistency only by means of an abstract machine capable of covering and creating it, by assemblages capable of plugging into desire?
-Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Is that it? Is that all that is needed? A construction kit for abstract machines, a magical tour bus of the impossible in a science fiction apparatus or time-machine between Aeon and Chronos? An entry into the nagual? Hyperchaos? The dark corridors of the Thermospasm? A collective assemblage project to undo two thousands years of western civilization one brick at a time? An exit plan with a treasure map to boot: a path forward: a movement between that which is and that which is not? A conduit for the impossible? Odysseus riding between Scylla and Charybdis? Sirens weaving a song of death? Howling’s in the wind driving us forward in despair?
Having never been born how could we exist? Oh, no, you’ll point to that hole, that cut, that toothed womb – vagina dentata – which the first worm emerged, a bloody pitiful mess of meat crying into the world (no, this is not a gendered slap in the face of time); a gushing out of an immanent ocean of the impossible. A virtual discography set producing time itself as a product of its own production? That wasn’t birth, that was a scandalous act of cowardice, beautiful and ugly. Ever since we’ve been floating between a sadomasochistic pendulum of infernal delights, never satisfied with our gift we seek out our true Body-without-organs; this thing we never are, but are always exiting toward. What would you risk to actually find it?
How many of us are willing to risk it? Experiment. Take the chance on becoming other? If real change is the movement of the world, or we not always changing? Every physical cell in my body is not the same as when I was born out of my mother’s womb, bloody and violently – awakened to the monstrosity I Am? What am I then? Or should we ask more appropriately: What is this thing we are becoming?
Are we fearful of the ugly truth? Is it too disgusting to approach? Why hide from this monstrous existence? Shouldn’t we follow those before us? Aurel Kolnai’s long essay “Disgust” from 1929, the first dedicated philosophical study of this emotion; William Ian Miller’s Anatomy of Disgust (1997); and Winfried Menninghaus’s compendious Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation (2003). It bears affinity with certain theoretical applications such as Martha Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004) and Julia Kristeva’s examination of the abject in The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), as well as the many analyses of the disgusting in art such as Robert Rawdon Wilson’s The Hydra’s Tale: Imagining Disgust (2002). Carole Talon-Hugon’s Gout et degoit: L’art peut-il tout montrer?
But that is for a future study, now we wander the mazes of the Body-without-Organs. Seek a way a long the dark riverrun of abysmal thoughts where origins hide the motioning lust of desire’s broken vessels, those lights of evil energy that seems to seep into our lives from everywhere. Will you follow? What line of flight shall we follow today?
Too long we invested our questions in vaporware, a mind that never was, and could never be, a mere ghost wandering through the body-without-organs; a gaze without an object, a thought without a concept, a lost fragment of time in continuous metamorphosis with no place to call home. If nothing is real then everything is real, too real to be stopped, categorized, targeted, tracked, traced to its source in time; for time is the thing we cannot change, the merciless cruelty of change itself.
“It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices.”1 Is this it? Are we a mere movement between desire and non-desire, an oscillating spark, a drum sending messages into time, a vibration calibrated to communicate the impossible? We have no destination, it cannot be reached, to reach it is just that: impossible. Absolute Zero. We ride the curve, the tracery of its dark power, down, down, down into the ever accelerating curve, falling, falling, swerving just at the last moment, moving ever so slightly out of the groove, experimenting with trajectories; dissatisfied, restless, melancholic.
A void, a sack of dust and particles, caught in-between making and unmaking: forces of exchange in which we are both product and producer. Some of us push the limits of the impossible to the point of bursting, navigators in-between, shamans or voodouns. Inside out or Outside in? Riders or ridden? Those who transcend or those who are possessed immanently: to ride beyond the limit, move up and out or down the vertical tree of motioning forces: mediums of power and healing, vision seekers, seers; else those who call down the powers: dancers, drummers, rhythm seekers of a immanent revelation, loa tempters who are ridden like the wild beasts by serpents of wisdom; exiled within, blind and possessed by powers or dispotifs from elsewhere. Experimenters without organs: “All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.” (Antonin Artaud)
“It is difficult to say what station the good man occupies among what we call beings, even if he is one. Perhaps he is a ghost?” (Emile Cioran) A mere wisp, a breath, a figure in the dance of rhetorical gestures, a sign pointing to signs, a difference that moves toward the impossible? “As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of causation (TP, p. 150).” Outside in or Inside out? Does it matter? What is causation, anyway? Occasional disturbances in a void? A sort of collapse into or out of chaos? A wave or particle reflected in the mirror of temporal disorder? A movement of creation toward the body-without-organs, a making and an unmaking, possession or dispossession, composition or decomposition?
A forgetting rather than a remembering, a finding of that which never is nor could be, an empty place, kenoma or Pleroma? Fullness or emptiness? Neither or both? Elimination is the key, subtraction is your destiny. “What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole (TP, p. 151).” Nothing will ever happen, because it is always happening. Caught between two modalities of time we are forever out of joint, never at home in either temporal movement. Coming or going? Past or future? The present triggers a vibration, a spark, an engine; an abstract machine. “The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, howls, or communicating vessels, each with a proper name… a Metropolis that has to be managed with a whip (TP, p. 153).” Who holds the whip?
Is this a torture chamber, a Sadean temple of blood and pleasure? “We see people tormented by the presence of a parasitic idea in their brain, like sheep by the residence of a trumpet-fly’s egg in their frontal sinus. Man, like the sheep, has the “itch.” That ends badly for the sheep — for the man also, very often.”2 Do we have ideas, or do they have us? This is an old war, one that in every generation draws young rebels to their death. Socrates was a bad man, he brought change to the youth of Athens. Fear is a terror from which there is no recovery. Knowledge? Or rather a forgetting and non-knowledge? Bataille or Plato? Freud or Lacan? Is there a choice? Or is this a battle between brothers, twins from the womb, carriers of a truth neither can hold nor release? Syzgy? Rebekah intervenes to save her youngest son Jacob from being murdered by her eldest son, Esau. Is this it, the true messiah a woman after all? Or just the beginning of conflict, the serpent in the garden driving a wedge that will never be done, a parable to our temporal betrayals?
So this is it? Negation: “In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the “negation,” the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object…” – Alexandre Kojève (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel). Or, Bataille: “What is given when one animal eats another is always the fellow creature of the one that eats. It is in this sense that I speak of immanence.” – Georges Bataille (Theory of Religion: Animality). A desiring machine: a cannibal or a brother? Gifts are never free. (Marcel Mauss). Why not? One always expects a return, a movement between giver and receiver, transmitter and receiver: communication begins with where “two or more gathered in my name” there is an obligation, a reciprocal bond that ties us to a killing, to a murder, to the “Death of God” (Nietzsche). Or Joyce: “I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.” (Ulysses)
“The thing – only the thing – is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice (Bataille, Theory of Religion).” Is silence a sacrifice? Is this what we kill in each other, the word – that which is forever the impossible thing in us? Or are we giving each other the gift of communication, the poetry of time and meaning, a movement between the abyss and abyss? Nothing that can be held onto, grasped, caught in the trap of one’s jealousy – neither sacrifice or gift, but rather both at once a whim? “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” (Emerson)
“The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up when power calls him.” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising). A BWO? Dream or Real: ““In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.” ( James Joyce, Finnegans Wake) Intensities? “It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass: it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension (TP, p. 153).”
One of Gilles Deleuze’s major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza’s substance, presents two sides-pure (in)extension and thought-or, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking: – spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace.3 To connect or disconnect, that is the question, whether it is more communicative to mesh together in sexual excess and ecstasy, or disconnect into one’s singular void of thoughtlessness and fracture. Should we formulate a minor communication based on dispersal, delirium, chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work—and emphasize those affective states or emotions such as joy (jouissance – the bittersweet (Carson)), friendship, and longing? Hamlet under the pomo sun?
Rivalries? For Deleuze this was the problem Plato faced from the beginning. “The creation of a concept always occurs as the function of a problem.” (Deleuze) For Plato the problem was Athenian democracy itself – and, more specifically a theory of rivalry (agon). In Phaedrus and Statesman we see step by step his attempts to isolate the true statesman from the lover from the claims of numerous rivals.4 Athens and other Greek City states adapted to a new mathematics or geophilosophy, one that adapted the surrounding territories to a geometric extension in which the city itself became a relay-point in an immanent network of commercial and maritime circuits. These circuits formed a kind of international market on the border of the eastern empires, organized into a multiplicity of independent societies in which artisans and merchants found a freedom and mobility that the imperial states denied them.
According to Deleuze and Guattari once discovers that in striated space, one closes off a surface and “allocates” it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one “distributes” oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one’s crossings. (481) These two functions, allocation and distribution, serve as the dominant organizational principle that differentiates smooth and striated space. (Smith, p. 5) “Whereas the imperial spatium of the state was centered on the royal palace or temple, which marked the transcendent sovereignty of the despot and his god, the political extension of the Greek city was modeled on a new type of geometric space that organized the polis around a common and public center – the agora, in relation to which all the points occupied by the “citizens” appeared equal and symmetrical.” (Smith, p. 5). Ultimately, what came out of the Greek city was the agon “as a community of free men or citizens, who entered into agonistic relations of rivalry with other free men, exercising power and exerting claims over each other in a kind of generalized athleticism.” (Smith, p. 5).
Plato internalized the rivalry of the agora, thereby bringing about a revolution against the poets and priests of external order; allocating the rivalry of Ideas in agon against the athleticism of Athenian games. So that for Plato the true rivalry was to separate the copy from the simulacrum, the true Idea from the false so that the Sophist and the Philosopher (or lover of wisdom rather than possessor) became both claimants and rivals in an agon for the supremacy of thought against the poet and priest of the spatium. The “friend,” the “lover,” the “claimant,” and the “rival” constitute what Deleuze calls the conceptual personae of the Greek theater of thought, whereas the “wise man” and the “priest” were the personae of the State and religion, for whom the institution of sovereign power and the establishment of cosmic order were inseparable aspects of a transcendent drama, imposed by the despot or by a god superior to all others.” (Smith, p. 6).
“Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it.” (TP, p. 154): the priests are, as is notorious, the worst enemies – why? Because they are the weakest. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into a monstrous and sinister shape, a shape which is most crafty and most poisonous. The really great haters in the history of the world have always been priests, who are also the cleverest haters – in comparison with the cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness is practically negligible.5 But what was the priestly revenge? Deleuze will shout it out loudly: it was the proclamation of sacrifice, of lack, of castration: the priest cast the triple curse upon desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. (TP, p. 154). The priest proclaimed “desire is lack,” then linked this desire to “pleasure,” and finally proclaiming the second sacrifice as masturbation brought forth the admonition that “jouissance is impossible, but jouissance is inscribed in desire”. (TP, p. 154). The latest incarnation of the priest: the psychoanalyst, carrier of the three laws of Pleasure, Death, and Reality. (TP. p. 154), all inscribed under the banner of an external ethos of lack, pleasure, and transcendence. There would be no escape, except by way of sorcery.
THE WAY OF SORCERY: CARLOS CASTANEDA
“Your only choice will be between a goat’s ass and the face of the God, between sorcerers and priests.”
– Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau
Deleuze and Guattari will turn to sorcery, follow Carlos Castaneda and his adventures in becoming a sorcerer. For them it does not matter if this is ethnography or fiction, what matters is their experimental nature of self-transformation brought about by a participation in a deprogramming process between the “Tonal” and “Nagual”. Order and Chaos: the tonal realm of the Symbolic Order of logic, rule, law, civilization, culture, language; and the nagual as the outside, the noumenal, the Real which disrupts, causes havoc, destroys, and generally is beyond knowledge and power – the impossible against which the “tonal must be protected at any cost.” (TP, p. 162).
Carlos Castaneda has been vilified, lambasted, castigated, and generally broadcast as a fraud, New Age guru for the mass idiocy of fictional ethnography… and, one as Ward Churchill stated Castaneda is one of many authors who took advantage of, first, hippie culture, and later the New Age movement by “writing bad distortions and outright lies about indigenous spirituality for consumption in the mass market.”6 Yet, as Abram Anders in Castaneda’s Ecstatic Pedagogy: The Teachings of Don Juan will relate it Castenada should be situated in that sub-cultural influx of psychedelic pop-culture that flowed out of the 60’s and 70’s of the last century.7 Instead Anders follows D&G by asking another set of questions of Castaneda’s works: What does it do? What it does is to demand a different kind of reading—to be read as a recipe. (Anders, p. 4).
Don Juan Genaro’s ultimate goal for Castaneda is the injunction: “Stop the world!” As Deleuze and Guattari will argue, “Stop! You’re making me tired! Experiment, don’t signify and interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight!” (TP, p. 139). We are trapped in the symbolic order of civilization like flies in a Venus fly-trap unable to release ourselves from its clutches, we assume the language of reality is reality – that the structuration and organizing force of language that forges the links between thought and being is tied in a knot between concept and idea, linguistic sign and signification. Instead as Anders after D&G says of Castaneda’s apprenticeship to Don Juan: “The apprenticeship will belong to the post-signifying regime, which is authoritarian and passional. It is a regime of exodus from the despotic and paranoid signifying regime of signs.” (Anders, p. 7).
Another sorcerer’s apprentice William S. Burroughs gave us the notion that “language is a virus from outer space”. Burroughs adroit use of elegantly worded but simple seven word sentence, has the power to unlearn decades of cognitive conditioning about the nature of the world we live in. Our view of human reality is a social construction mediated only by the instability, the ambiguity, and the volatility of languages used to signify our perception of the world. Indeed, language is a virus from outer space. A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts.
Michael Serres in an interview with Johannes Wick would describe the parasite somewhat like Burroughs language virus: “Parasites are in operation everywhere—in production, in communication, in the transfer of knowledge and in every form of exchange and networking. We have to learn that parasitism is a normal condition. It is a question of accepting to a certain extent the destructive power of our “enemy” the parasites. The enemy has come to me because it found something interesting.This therefore means I have got something interesting on offer. Parasites are as a rule intelligent, and it is therefore worth waiting before one tries to fight them off, because then you might find out what they are all about. Every interference provides an opportunity to collect new information. This creates the possibility to form an intelligent alliance from which both can unexpectedly profit. By associating cleverly with the presence of my enemy—the parasite—I can discover something completely new.”
So these viral agents order and organize our socio-cultural existence toward a purpose alien to desire. But why? What is their goal? Is this another hyperstitional memetics? A fictional engine of the meme to create or construct a future according to some design? But who’s? Humans are pattern-recognition machines. Scientific American states that we are “adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a noise world,” and notes that this is associative learning: “the belief that ideas and experiences reinforce one another and can be mentally linked to enhance the learning process.” The entire purpose of a virus is to “bypass or subvert a body’s concerted efforts in either blocking the entrance of diseases or defeating them after infection.”8 Several diseases have their own mechanism of infection, be it spreading through something/someone else, mutating frequently to throw defenses off the trail, slowly pick off the reinforcements needed to win, or become stronger the longer it remains dormant. However, most of the focus has been on “leveraging epidemiological studies of disease propagation to predict computer worm and virus propagation.” (Li 338) What of the socious?
For the Man of Knowledge in Castaneda there are four enemies: fear, clarity, power, and death. The first three enemies—fear, clarity, and power—are concerned with the dangers of becoming, of proceeding along a line of flight. The final enemy, however, is the condition of this mode of becoming; it is the condition of the post-signifying regime: “Old age! This enemy is the cruelest of all, the one he won’t be able to defeat completely, but only fight away.” As it is elucidated, this enemy—properly death—is the companion of the sorcerer throughout his life. Castaneda describes the relationship this way: “death stands to your left. Death is an impartial judge who will speak truth to you and give you accurate advice. . . . The moment you remember you must eventually die you are cut down to the right size.” (Anders, p. 12).
Yet, there is a greater enemy as well, one that locks us into a belief in the Man of Knowledge. One might say we need a new immunization program to eliminate, seek out and destroy the viral memes and parasites that have latched onto our socious and seek to reroute it toward ends we have no control over. Germ theory applied to ideas. One might invoke the ancient legends of the trickster or joker who through his playful pranks disturbs the equilibrium of society thereby instigating its collapse and apocalypse. As Serres attests there is a sixth definition of the parasite – a ‘thermal exciter’, that which catalyses the system to a new equilibrium state.9 In the northern tales Ragnarok (“Doom of the Gods”), also called Gotterdammerung is this transitional time between times when the worlds of man and gods are enveloped in a cataclysmic transformation in which humans will ultimately be subtracted from the realm of the gods forever. An age of forgetting and amnesia that gives men a chance to attain another level or mode of being. Serres tells us the capacity for social ordering to proceed in different directions is relative to that of the joker: the ramification of the network depends on the number of jokers. But I suspect there is a limit to this. When there are too many, we are lost as if in a labyrinth. What would a series be if there were only jokers? What could be said of it?10
The lessons of Don Juan, Burroughs, Serres will emerge from D&G this way: “The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal (Symbolic Order) by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual (the Outside). For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death…”(TP, p. 162).
We must create abstract machines strong enough to plug into the nagual, yet weak enough to keep one foot in the realm of the tonal, a plane of consistency that does not abandon the one for the other, nor advocates the reduction of the one to the other: the nagual to the tonal which would tame it, invest it with a mask, an appearance, a conceptuality – to knowledge. The nagual is the unknown, the impossible excess of the Real that lies outside all conceptuality and thought. Rather we must navigate the boundary zones between worlds, seek out the new while salvaging the old. At the same time discovering those alien agents from elsewhere the viral agents of language, the parasitic powers that have discovered in our socius and Body without organs a home and nesting ground to further their own agenda. We need both a diagnostic and critical apparatus, a heuristics capable of inventing new forms of thought and experimentation while at the same time exiting slowly the tonal symbolic order that has latched onto us and enforced its alienating rules, laws, and entropic relations upon us as a BwO.
Sovereignty designates the movement of free and internally wrenching violence that animates the whole, dissolves into tears, into ecstasy, and into bursts of laughter, and reveals the impossible in laughter, ecstasy, or tears. But the impossible thus revealed is not an equivocal position, it is the sovereign self-consciousness that, precisely, no longer turns away from itself.
– Georges Bataille
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by Terence Blake Laruelle’s project is to “quantize” Marxism. Yet his account of just what he means by the quantum thought is situated at such a high level of abstraction and of vagueness that he might just as well have projected to “magick” Marxism. His confused explanations do not explain very much as he devotes more time to proclaiming his project’s difference from any and every other well-known philosophical perspective than to elucidating his own perspective. Laruelle relies on this atmospheric presence of a set of more developped ideas in order to create in the reader’s mind a sense of familiarity and of understanding despite the abstraction and the unexplicated terminology. In his quest for an expanded “non-standard” philosophy Laruelle fails where Feyerabend succeeded. This failure is not just due to Laruelle’s persisting scientism, in the name of a science that is tautologically articulated without any attempt at confrontation with real scientific practice. It is also due to the lack of any clear account of the developments in quantum theory that he relies on. As to elaborating a non-standard “quantum” expansion of philosophy, Zizek too succeeds where Laruelle fails. An important part of this success is, as in the case of Feyerabend, that Zizek does not proceed scientistically. The quantum model is just one among several, and is overdetermined by his deployment of models taken from Lacan and from Hegel. Indeed, unlike Feyerabend and Zizek (and we may add unlike Deleuze and Guattari, who also developped a non-standard “quantum” thought) Laruelle is not forthcoming with his principles of selection. He does not explain in terms of what criteria he selects, abstracts, and transfers the particular traits of quantum theory he deems pertinent to his research programme. Badiou’s own “non-standard” philosophy makes use of the mathematical models of set theory and of category theory. These constitute no mere vague set of metaphors, but are technically correct in their details and their use is clearly justified in Badiou’s text. If we refer to Laruelle’s ANTI-BADIOU we are presented with the contrast between the appeal to the quantum model and the appeal to the set theoretic model, but we are given no real reason why one should be preferred to the other (or even to making use of both, which would be a more “democratic” procedure. It is increasingly becoming known that far from showing us the way forward to a new practice of thinking Laruelle’s thought is nostalgic. It is caught in the 60s, somewhere between Deleuze’s DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and his LOGIC OF SENSE. The Laruelleans perpetuate Laruelle’s misreading of Deleuze, stereotyping him as a “philosopher of difference”, as they have no other critique of Deleuze that is not even more devastating for Laruelle himself. Laruelle’s failure lies in his method: seeking to escape from the sufficiency of philosophy by a scientistic supplement. Laruelle’s quixotic attempt to overcome scientism by even more scientism is doomed to failure. He deploys a form of surplus scientism intended to combat his primary scientism, resulting in greater reductionism, de-philosophisation, concept-blindness, and intellectual vice (Laruelle’s own “sufficiency is plain for all to see) disguised as its opposite. To sum up, Laruelle’s non-philosophy is scientistic and reductionist and his non-standard philosophy is no better. Both contribute to the reduction of noetic possibilities under the pretence of their expansion. The article is taken from: EME 15 (1) pp. 55–72 Intellect Limited 2016 Explorations in Media EcologyVolume 15 Number 1 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eme.15.1.55_1 Eric Jenkins University of Cincinnati Peter Zhang Grand Valley State University AbstractThe authors argue that Gilles Deleuze can be read as a media ecologist, extending many insights of Marshall McLuhan’s including the idea that the medium is the message, that the content of any medium is another medium, and that media extend and alter human faculties. Yet since McLuhan preferred to write in axioms and probes, Deleuze provides a more robust theorizing of these issues. Specifically, Deleuze advances on McLuhan by providing a more complex notion of media as assemblages, avoiding the dilemmas of technological determinism, by developing a more robust way of under-standing affect and desire, away from McLuhan’s notion of sensory ratios, and by establishing power and ethics as central concerns, against McLuhan’s primarily descriptive scholarly approach. We conclude that Deleuze thus illustrates the continu-ing relevance of McLuhan’s foundational work, yet his advances on McLuhan offer many prospects for improving the study of media from a media ecological perspective. The vast corpus of Gilles Deleuze has recently found significant uptake inthe wide world of critical theory. The corpus’ sheer volume helps explainthis widespread interest, since Deleuze theorizes on issues relevant to a broad diversity of topics of central concern for critical scholars such as power,desire and affect. Furthermore Deleuze’s concepts, such as smooth and stri-ated space, deterritorialization, control society, the rhizome, the molar andmolecular, the refrain, and machinic assemblages, seem particularly relevantfor today’s postmodern capitalism and digital media age. Arguing that this isthe proper role for the philosopher, Deleuze seeks to develop concepts thatmight spark new ways of thinking. As such, Deleuze frequently borrows fromand refines concepts from other thinkers, especially those either ignored orexcluded from mainstream western philosophizing such as, in the twentiethcentury, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, Paul Virilio and William James. Tracing Deleuze’s intellectual heritage further into the past, Todd May(2005: 26), one of his most lucid interpreters, elucidates how Baruch Spinoza,Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche represent the Christ, Father and Holy Ghost of Deleuze’s thinking. In this article, we would like to add another theorist to this list of Deleuze’s forebears – Marshall McLuhan. This is perhaps a surprising addition since, unlike these other theorists, Deleuze’s references to McLuhan are sporadic and brief. Nevertheless we argue that Deleuze can be envisioned as a proper heir of McLuhan’s, that is, as a media scholar with an ecological perspec-tive. This is, of course, not an exclusive claim, since Deleuze is also concerned with many issues not directly relevant to communication media, at least in McLuhan’s conceptualization. Yet many of Deleuze’s concepts have relevance for media studies, and his theorization often proceeds from insights originally developed by McLuhan including, as we illustrate in the first section below, the idea that the medium is the message, that the content of any medium is another medium, and that media extend and alter human faculties. Despite these shared insights, Deleuze develops a more rigorous and complex theoretical perspective than McLuhan, who preferred to write in axioms and probes designed to innervate thought, rather than elaborate an entire framework. As such, we also make a second major claim, namely that as a media ecological scholar Deleuze refines and advances McLuhan’s initial explorations. Deleuze does so in three ways, thereby fine-tuning McLuhan’sthoughts in ways that mitigate some significant criticisms. First, Deleuze defines the hazy concept ‘media’ with a turn towards ‘machinic assemblage’, addressing the widespread indictment of McLuhan for technological deter-minism. Second, although both Deleuze and McLuhan recognize that media generate different affects and hence desires, Deleuze provides a more exten-sive understanding of affect and desire that grounds and warrants McLuhan’s, at times, hasty proclamations. Finally, Deleuze directs attention to power and ethics, issues that McLuhan only briefly touches upon and that, due to their submerged role, risk turning McLuhan’s scholarship into a purely descrip-tive and hence politically debilitating enterprise, as evidenced by McLuhan’s work as a consultant for advertising firms. In sum, we argue that Deleuze, as an heir of McLuhan, takes up the work of his forebear in ways consistent with a media ecological perspective but in a manner that greatly advances that perspective. Media and assemlages in McLuhan and DeleuzeAlthough Deleuze prefers the label ‘philosopher’, one can envision Deleuze as a media theorist in much the same vein as McLuhan. For one example,Deleuze’s (1995) description of the transition from disciplinary to control society relies upon the shift from analogue to digital technics, and his (Deleuzeand Parnet 2002: 112–15) distinction, borrowed from Henri Bergson, between the actual and the virtual gains enhanced relevance with the onset of the digital age. Furthermore, Deleuze’s canon includes works explicitly focusing on cinema (1986, 1989), the art of Francis Bacon (2005), and The Logic of Sense (1990), in which Deleuze theorizes sense as the faculty with one side turned towards actuality (the thing or the state of affairs) and the other turned towards the proposition. In Deleuze’s (1990: 22) words, sense is ‘exactly the bound-ary between proposition and things’, and, in McLuhan’s language, we could see this boundary as a medium, which, for McLuhan, extends and translates human senses. Indeed, in Cinema 1, Deleuze (1986: 7–8) sounds a note similar to McLuhan’s emphasis on media as extensions of human faculties when he remarks that cinema is ‘the organ for perfecting the new reality’, an ‘essentialfactor’ in a ‘new way of thinking’, or when he and Félix Guattari (1987: 61) write, ‘The hand as a general form of content is extended in tools….’ Deleuze is often concerned with other media topics discussed by McLuhan, such as language, music, literature and, especially, different types of space. In addition, many of Deleuze’s major concepts hold direct relevance for the study of media. Peter Zhang (2011) has illustrated how Deleuze’s notions of striated versus smooth space map onto McLuhan’s distinction between acous-tic and visual space, a distinction Stanley Cavell (2003) portrays as central to McLuhan’s corpus. The connection is not lost on Deleuze, who makes positive remarks about McLuhan and other media scholars such as Lewis Mumford and Paul Virilio.1 Although Deleuze rarely uses the term ‘media’, preferring to discuss assemblages, modes and machines, his use of these terms remains consonant with McLuhan’s emphasis on media, since both are concerned with how different modes of thought, perception, language, affection and action shape society. D. N. Rodowick, one of the best interpreters of Deleuze’s cinema work, thus describes Deleuze’s fundamental task as to ‘understand the specific set of formal possibilities – modes of envisioning and represent-ing, of seeing and saying – historically available to different cultures at differ-ent times’ (1997: 5). McLuhan, on the other hand, may seem more narrowly focused on media than Deleuze, especially since his chapter headings in Understanding Media (1964) are all different media technologies such as movies and television. Such a seemingly narrow focus has led to many criticisms of McLuhan’s supposed technological determinism. Yet careful consideration of McLuhan’s work reveals a broader focus than media alone since McLuhan is also concerned with the interfacing of culture with media, something that Deleuze’s terms machine, assemblage, and modes point towards. Indeed, McLuhan’s (1967: 159) later work frequently employs the concept of modes, stressing that the study of media is the study of modes: ‘All that remains to study are the media themselves, as forms, as modes ever creating the new assumptions and hence new objectives’. McLuhan’s use of the term modes resonates with Deleuze’s, indicating their shared concern about how culture interfaces with media. As McLuhan states, ‘Vivisective inspection of all modes of our own inner-outer individual-social lives makes us acutely sensitive to all inter-cultural and inter-media experience’ (1969: 64). Here, McLuhan under-stands modes as the manner of interfacing with media, as things that make us sensitive to inter-cultural and inter-media experience. This quotation seems to make clear, then, that McLuhan understands modes as liminal, in-between media and culture, just as Deleuze’s conceptualization of modes, assemblages and machines understands human experience as a coupling of media andculture, of human faculties and technology. A focus on how culture inter-faces with media denies the frequent accusations of McLuhan’s technologicaldeterminism. Like Deleuze, McLuhan is well aware that, to generate an effect,a medium first needs to be taken up by a social matrix. Although the accusations of technological determinism may be based in a less than generous read, they remain a necessary cautionary note and their existence is far from surprising. McLuhan’s predilection for axioms and probes, part of a writing style he saw as an adaptation to an electronic media environment, produces claims that may seem, to the more deliberate scholar, to be overstatement, hyperbole, or a gross generalization. Take ‘the medium is the message’. McLuhan’s famous axiom seems to dismiss any socio-cultural effects from message content. Other statements supporting this axiom seem to confirm this extreme position, such as when McLuhan remarks that ‘the medium shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’, or when he earlier claims that the assembly line altered our ‘relations to one another and to ourselves’, and it ‘mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs’ (1964: 24, 23). The automobile certainly had a major impact on society, and elsewhere in the same work McLuhan treats things like the wheel, the bicycle, and the airplane as media, seeming to contradict his earlier dismissal since, with Cadillacs, the content of the assembly line is another technological medium. Yet, despite his hyperbolic style, McLuhan’s basic claim that media intro-duce changes of scale, pace or pattern into human affairs remains undeniable. Furthermore, McLuhan’s notion of medium at least points towards a more complex understanding than just the material technology. Indeed, it is McLuhan (1964: 23) who first recognizes that the content of one medium is ‘always another medium’, such as in our assembly line and Cadillac example. If media shape human affairs, and the content of a medium is always another medium, then McLuhan’s position on the effects of media form versus their content is more complex than the accusations of technological determinism entail. The warnings against a simple and direct technological causation should be heeded, but McLuhan can be read more generously without infer-ring such a notion of causation. In fact, we can see McLuhan’s axioms and probes as the first volley, necessary to shake free some encrusted biases towards content analysis, and Deleuze's work as the more sustained ground strokes. Deleuze and Guattari(1983: 240) cite McLuhan’s realization that the content of one medium is another medium approvingly, in their extended criticism of Saussurian linguis-tics’ emphasis on the signifier. Whereas Saussurian linguistics stresses content(the signifiers, which mean only in relation), ‘the significance of McLuhan’ analysis’ is to have shown the import of ‘decoded flows, as opposed to a signifier that strangles and overcodes the flows’. They continue: In the first place, for non-signifying language anything will do: whether it be phonic, graphic, gestural, etc., no flow is privileged in this language, which remains indifferent to its substance or its support, inasmuch as the latter is an amorphous continuum… (A) substance is said to be formed when a flow enters into a relationship with another flow, such that the first defines a content and the second, an expression. The deterritorialized flows of content and expression are in a state of conjunc-tion or reciprocal precondition that constitutes figures as the ultimate units of both content and expression. These figures do not derive from a signifier nor are they even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are non-signs, or rather non-signifying signs, point-signs having several dimensions, flow-breaks or schizzes that form images through their coming together in a whole, but that do not maintain any identity when they pass from one whole to another. Hence the figures… are in no way ‘figurative’; they become figurative only in a particular constellation that dissolves in order to be replaced by another one. Three million points per second transmitted by television, only a few of which are retained. (1983: 240–41) Some elucidation is necessary, since Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical vocabulary is quite different from McLuhan’s. Basically, Deleuze and Guattari argue, against linguistics, that content does not determine or ‘overcode’ the communication. In other words, similar to McLuhan’s idea that the medium is the message, Deleuze, and Guattari stress that the signifier is not what is signifi-cant. The quotation begins by calling attention to media besides language –non-signifying languages – and, based in their understanding of machinic assemblages, calls attention to the flows that compose these languages, like the flows of gestures, graphics, and sounds on television. They are argu-ing that we cannot understand all media communication on the model of language, as Deleuze also concludes in his cinema books. Instead of the dialectical linguistic model based upon signifier-signified relations, they draw upon Louis Hjelmselv’s four-part model, which recognizes a substance and form of a content and an expression. A substance (say a television show) is formed when the flows of content (the gestures and sounds and images) and the flows of expression (the video camera and the editing, cuts and montage)are combined. The form is the arrangement and structuring of the substance; on a television show, the form is the order of the shots and the linkages between them. Hence why Deleuze and Guattari cite McLuhan’s recognition that the content of any medium is another medium; the content of a television programme is the flows of gestures, sounds, and images. Only combined with the flows of expression (the televisual flow, its camera, and editing techniques), does a figure or a whole (something with both substance and form) emerge. This four-part model emphasizing couplings or combinations lead Deleuze and Guattari to refer to what McLuhan would call the medium with the term-machinic assemblage. Drawing on the insight that the content of any mediumis another medium, Deleuze and Guattari prefer to describe this media coupling as an assemblage. This assemblage is machinic in the sense that it works like any machine, combining flows and breaks into a whole operation. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, An organ machine is plugged into an energy-source machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it… For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. (1983: 1–2) Lest the reference to breast feeding leads us astray, think of television again. There are flows of gestures, images and sounds that are interrupted or broken by the television camera, through such devices as editing and montage. The coupling of the two produces the whole, a machinic assemblage. As the last line of the quotation above indicates, the assemblage and its machinic couplings do not end here but have another component, another break – the viewer, who sees only a few figures from the three million points per second transmitted. At this level, the content of the television programme (the flows of light) become coupled with the viewer’s senses to constitute a new assemblage, one that may evoke significance and affect. Once again, in this assemblage the content of one medium is another medium; indeed, what was once the flow of expression (the tele-visual flow) now becomes the flow of content that the viewer’s sensory system processes into expression, into figuration. In other words, the expression (the figures perceived) only emerge from the tele-visual flow, which only emerges from the flows of gesture, image and sound and their coupling by the camera and in the editing booth. This notion of humans plugging into other machines to become machinic assemblages seems consonant with McLuhan’s idea of media as extensions, such as the wheels and the accelerator of a car being extensions of our feet. As McLuhan (1964: 272) remarks about television, ‘With TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the “Charge of the Light Brigade” that imbues his “soulskin with subconscious inklings”’. Shortly thereafter, McLuhan continues, further illustrating his like-mindedness with Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The TV image offers some three million dots per second to the receiver. From these, he accepts only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image’ (1964: 273). The existence of the machinic assemblage (or what McLuhan would call medium) of television means both that the dialectical signifier-signified model is inadequate to understand media, with their non-signifying semiotics, and that this model must be expanded to include both content and expression. Precisely because the content of any medium is another medium, precisely because all media are machinic assemblages, we must pay attention to the coupling of content and expression, of flows and breaks, not simply to the linguistic content alone, the chain of signifiers that so occupies Saussurian linguists and rhetorical critics. Recognition of assemblages of content and expression also means that a linguistic model that only addresses content (signifiers) cannot adequately describe the production of communication and, as we will see, desire in the social. Asking what signifiers are present on tele- vision, for instance, misses the sensory intimacy of the televisual experience, which McLuhan describes as ‘cool’. This intimacy can explain why Nixon flops on television while Kennedy soars, whereas attention to their string of signifiers offers no insight (as the radio listeners who thought Nixon won this famous debate attest). Indeed, this televisual intimacy has dramatically transformed political discourse, which now prefers the cool stylings of a Reagan and Clinton to the hot Nixon or McCain, which now demands political oratory characterized by sound-bytes, narrative form, and self-disclosure that Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1990) deems the ‘effeminate style’. In politics, television has certainly been the‘message’; the change in content can only be explained by consideration of the media constituting the social environment since, considered apart from their machinic assemblages, political signifiers lack significance. With John McCain and Barack Obama equally and fervently appealing to the American Dream, for instance, consideration of only their signifiers cannot account for the vast differences in affect and desire innervated by the coupling of those signifiers (and images and gestures) into a televisual assemblage. Obama emerged as the preferable figure in this media environment. This is not to discount party loyalty, ideology or other factors for causing some voters to prefer McCain but only to say that Obama crafted the more attractive televisual image. Shifting the critical focus from the content to assemblage entails examin-ing the perceptual and affective aspects of media experience. In other words, it is not so much because of their content (since the content is mostly full of repetitive, generic promises anyway) but because of how they feel and seem that some politicians make better images for television. Thus McLuhan bases his claims about how television has changed politics on an explanation of the viewing experience. To do so, McLuhan depicts the tele-visual experience as a primarily tactile perception, one innervating a syn-aesthetic affect. In this depiction, McLuhan offers a typically eccentric notion of tactility, closer to what people mean when they say they were touched by art. As McLuhan (1964: 67) remarks, ‘It begins to be evident that “touch” is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and keeping in touch or getting in touch is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell’. Since the television image is profoundly participatory and in-depth, it touches viewers by causing a sort of synaes-thetic interplay among the senses. The cool medium of television involves the viewer in the image construction, engaging an in-depth interplay of all the senses. McLuhan states, ‘The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive, sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object’ (1964: 273). For McLuhan, we are ‘touched’ by the televisual image, affected by flows of sight and sound to not only see and hear but to feel and think. Needless to say, McLuhan often brings on criticisms of technological determinism with such claims. Indeed, unlike Deleuze who describes differ-ent regimes of the cinematic image, McLuhan treats television and cinema as distinct media with dissimilar image qualities. To do so, McLuhan (1964: 273) must dismiss anything like high-definition television as simply not television: ‘Nor would “improved” TV be television. The TV image is now a mosaic mesh of light and dark spots, which a movie shot never is, even when the quality of the movie image is very poor’. McLuhan’s argument here is defensive and belies the history of cinema and television, including the advance of technol-ogy and the evolution of image forms, readily apparent from today’s perspec-tive. In contrast, Deleuze’s emphasis on assemblages allows him to recognize different cinematic images, some of which are closer to McLuhan’s depiction of television than cinema. For instance, Deleuze (1989: 6, 59–64) describes the moments in musicals where characters break into song as pure sonsigns. Pure sonsigns are part of the time-image regime in cinema, which presents a moment in time directly, like a musical performance the audience pres-ently enjoys (instead of a representation of a musical performance that the characters enjoy). These sonsigns are participatory, involving and non-linear, possessing the same characteristics that McLuhan attributes to the televisual image. Lest we wander off into an extended discussion of Deleuze’s cinema theory, let us summarize the conclusions of this section. Deleuze and McLuhan shared a concern with media, directing our attention to media and away from the content focus of early media studies and linguistics. Deleuze presents an advance over McLuhan, however, by conceiving media as a machinic assemblage, the coupling of flows and their interruptions. Conceiving media as assemblages helps avoid some of McLuhan’s more totalizing claims about media considered as stable categories, claims often evoking accusations of technological determination. The assemblage concept is more nuanced than simple technological determinism, and, as we will see, leads directly into a more developed theory of affect and desire, whose basic precepts can be unearthed in McLuhan’s writings. Again, however, Deleuze provides the theoretical backing for McLuhan’s probes, spelling out in more detail the scholarly task – to perform a mapping of assemblages and their modes. Affect and desire in McLuhan and DeleuzeAffect and desire remain consistent concerns shared by Deleuze and McLuhan, concerns pointed to by McLuhan and further developed in Deleuze’s work. To illustrate these concerns for McLuhan, let’s stick with television. McLuhan (1964) seems distinctly concerned with how media alter cultural attractions and desires, claiming that, among other effects, television led to preferences for cool stars like Ed Sullivan, for skin diving and the wraparound spaces of small cars, for westerns and their ‘varied and rough textures’, for the beat-nik sensibility, for football over baseball, and for different forms of fashion, literature, music, poetry and painting. The warrant for each of these claims is basically the same. Television is low-definition, fragmented and disconnected, requiring images that are iconic and in-depth. Such images demand a high-level of audience participation to complete, and therefore creates attractions to cool, participatory forms and qualities that allow viewers to participate in their construction. For instance, viewers must interpret a cool, rounded, diverse character instead of being directly shown how to understand an easily classifiable character. Football is a collaborative, in-depth sport whereas base-ball is mano-y-mano, an individualized challenge of batter versus pitcher. Yet, setting aside the correctness of these claims, the point here is that McLuhan remains primarily concerned with how media spawn differences in cultural attraction and desire. Furthermore, at least with television, McLuhan attributes these changes in attraction and desire to alterations in experiential sensation, which Deleuze will describe as affects. In other words, both McLuhan and Deleuze understand desire as a production of affects that are enjoyable. Media become desirable because they produce affects such as fear, surprise and joy that ‘touch’ audiences. Such a view sees desire as a surface phenomenon, rather than resorting to a depth explanation as does psychoanalysis, which relates desire to some more fundamental longing such as the desire to mend the split in subjectivity from the entrance into the symbolic, or as a representative of the Oedipus myth. Both McLuhan and Deleuze and Guattari (1983) stridently criticize psychoanalysis, faulting it for, in part, ignoring mediated experience. Psychoanalysis must focus on content to portray it as a representation of some more fundamental desire, thereby dismissing the production of affect as irrelevant at best or at worst as a cover for this somehow more real source of desire. In contrast, Deleuze, Guattari and McLuhan conceive desire as machinic production that generates pleasurable affects. Such a conceptualization requires no deep mystery – unlike in psychoanalysis, which often reads in a compelling manner but tends to lack any empirical support (how do we know the Oedipus myth is fundamental, universal?) – and instead allows the scholar to focus directly on media and their affect-laden experience. Yet while McLuhan senses that media spark affects that thereby alter desires, Deleuze provides further theoretical refinement of affect and desire. Following Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: xvi) define affect as the body’s ability to affect and be affected. Affect designates a pre-personal, embodied intensity experienced in the transition from one state to another. Affect accompanies and provides the texture for all of experience. At particularly sharp moments, we experience it as a spark or shock (see Jenkins 2014) but it persists throughout lived experience regardless of its degree of intensity. Affects are thus pre-conscious, continuous flows of intensity that accompany experience. As pre-conscious, they take place before their cognitive processing into the separate sensory channels – I saw this, or I heard this. In this sense, affects are like the synaesthetic touch depicted by Deleuze and McLuhan alike. As one of Deleuze’s interpreters and translators, Brian Massumi, explains, ‘Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in … the actually existing, particular things that embody them’ (2002: 35, original emphasis). As intensities, affects are the flip side of the extensions McLuhan associates with media. That is, affects are the experienced impingements that rebound onto the mind-body from its mediated extensions. Without using the term affect, McLuhan evinces a similar conceptualization, especially in his retelling of the Narcissus myth. McLuhan (1964: 51) argues that Narcissus did not fall in love with himself but instead mistook the image in the water for another person. This is because Narcissus indicates a state of narcosis or numbness, and self-love does not evoke such affects. Instead, Narcissus experienced a shock from the extension of himself that he mistakes for another person, and that shock sparks a physiological response of numbness, similar to battle shock or auto-amputation. As McLuhan explains, We speak of ‘wanting to jump out of my skin’ or of ‘going out of my mind,’ being ‘driven batty’ or ‘flipping my lid’… In the physical stress of super stimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. (1964: 52) Thus Narcissus’ narcosis is a defence mechanism, and McLuhan perceives a similar defensive numbness in response to electronic media that extend central nervous systems. Just as Narcissus responds with shock and numbness to seeing himself extended, extending central nervous systems exposes and makes vulnerable that system, thereby inducing a similar narcosis. This numbness is a particularly strong affect (intensity) resultant from the mediated extension, one with potentially dire results according to McLuhan. In shock, we risk mistaking media as something other than ourselves extended and hence become ‘servo-mechanisms’ of technology (McLuhan 1964: 55). Such surrendering of ‘our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves’ leaves us without ‘any rights left’, McLuhan (1964: 73) continues. Thus for McLuhan awareness is the solution to narcosis, ‘As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse’ (1964: 73, original emphasis). McLuhan describes such affects via reference to sensory ratios. He contends that when one sense faculty (like vision) is super stimulated, human beings respond with narcosis, unable to perceive their mediated environment. Television stresses the sense of touch to such an extent that cultural desires alter in favour of the tactile and participatory. Thus McLuhan bases his ontology upon and begins with a pre-organized human body, with certain sensory faculties whose ratios are re-ordered by media. Such a perspective often leaves readers wondering how McLuhan knows these changes are effected, such as in the television examples above. The equation that television is a tactile medium and thus evokes tactile desires seems too simple, and reduces tactility (and vision, hearing, etc.) to a single mode. In contrast, Deleuze, following Spinoza, begins with an ‘I do not know’, one more open to differences and the vast possibilities of becoming. Thus Deleuze repeatedly quotes the famous passage from Spinoza that reads, ‘Nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do’ (1992: 105). Instead of beginning with an organized body, with particular sense organs and their faculties, Deleuze starts with the Body without Organs (BwO). The BwO is the unorganized body, prior to its extensions and couplings in machinic assemblages, the body conceived as a glutinous mass of potential rather than a solid substance and form. Deleuze thus often compares the BwO to an egg, a soup of undifferentiated cells prior to its organization into limbs, organs, and the like. From the perspective of the BwO, the body only has potential affects, virtual affects, affects as yet unactualized into various assemblages. Massumi offers one of the clearest explanations: Call each of the body’s different vibratory regions a ‘zone of intensity.’ Look at the zone of intensity from the point of view of the actions it produces. From that perspective, call it an ‘organ’… Imagine the body in suspended animation: intensity = 0. Call that the ‘body without organs’…. Think of the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality. (1992: 70) Where as McLuhan begins from bodies presumed to be structured by certain sensory organs, Deleuze begins from the BwO and asks how the body becomes organized through various machinic assemblages. Such a perspec-tive allows Deleuze to recognize difference, to leave open the possibility for a wide variety of becomings. Rather than a visual medium necessarily producing visual ratios, affects and desires, beginning with the BwO allows scholars to recognize becomings where an eye is not just an eye, an ear not just an ear, a hand not just a hand. Massumi (1992: 93–94) offers the example of a man who wishes to become a dog who wears shoes, only to discover that, walking on all fours, he has no hand left to tie the final shoe. The man employs his mouth-as-hand, tying the shoes with his teeth, in the process of becoming this strange monster. This example may seem to lie at quite a remove from media studies, yet it is only by beginning with an ontology that conceives the body as a pool of liquid potential, rather than a pre-organized sensory apparatus, that scholars can account for the differences in the translations and actualizations of media form, such as the shift from movement-images to time-images in the cinema. McLuhan’s ontology requires that he envision cinema as singular, a highly visual and hot medium, rather than recognizing the potential for cinema to become otherwise, to become aural, or tactile, or many other admixtures of percept, affect and cognition. Beginning with this different ontology beckons a different scholarly gesture, especially with regard to affect. In his work on Spinoza, Deleuze describes this different scholarly gesture as an ethology. An ethology does not describe bodies according to their form, function, or organs, as does McLuhan, but according to their modes, that is, their manners of becoming, their capacities to affect and be affected. As Deleuze remarks, ‘Every reader of Spinoza knows that for him bodies and minds are not substances or subjects, but modes’ (1988: 123–24). Bodies are thus not bundles of sensory ratios but capabilities or capacities, such as the capacity of the hand to act like an eye. Such a perspective precludes McLuhan’s gesture, which confidently predicts the effects and affects of the senses, but instead presumes difference and that we do not know what a body can become in different combinations or assemblages. The scholarly gesture changes because bodies are not conceived of as organizations of form but as complex relations with other bodies, as assemblages, or as modes, those manners in which these relations become organ-zed. As a result, the scholar sees life differently. Thus Deleuze writes, Concretely, if you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things change. You will define an animal, or a human being, not by its form, its organs and its functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the affects of which it is capable. (1988: 124) Deleuze’s advance upon, and difference from, McLuhan’s implicit notion of affect does not end here, however. Again following Spinoza, Deleuze also gives us clues into how modes produce different affects. Modes produce affect in two primary ways, by composing a relation of speed and slowness and by composing a relation between affective capacities. In Deleuze’s terms, ‘For concretely, a mode is a complex relation of speed and slowness, in the body but also in thought, and it is a capacity for affecting or being affected, pertaining to the body or to thought’ (1988: 124). Deleuze employs the example of music to describe the relations of speed and slowness. Beginning from form and substance, one can describe a musical piece as composed of notes, arranged in a particular order. Yet such a perspective misses something fundamental in music – the rhythm and tempo. The same order and notes can produce widely variant songs based upon the speed of the playing. As Deleuze (1988: 123) explains: The important thing is to understand life… not as a form … but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles… In the same way, a musical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slowness of sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms. Ethology first of all studies relations of speed and slowness, organized via modes. Second, ethology asks how the modes relate different capacities for affect. Deleuze often employs the example of the wasp and orchid, conceived collectively as an assemblage. The wasp’s capacity to fly, to smell, and to gather pollen combines with the orchid’s capacity to flower, to produce pollen, and to emit scents. In combination, the orchid reproduces and the wasp feeds, forming a complex assemblage that studying either the wasp or orchid in isolation would miss. To return to a media example, HBO employs television’s capacity for home broadcast and episodic organization combined with cinema’s capacity for high production value and epic narrative to produce many shows that are closer to McLuhan’s depiction of cinema, yet that still take place in private, intimate locales and via the lower-definition television screen. With these shows, we have a hybrid becoming of cinema and television, a cinema made for television, that shapes different modes of production (such as elongated narratives told episodically) and consumption (40-minute viewings without commercial interruptions). In this sense, Deleuze’s conceptualization of assemblages, modes and affect is fundamentally based upon an ecological perspective, just as McLuhan repeatedly beckons for ecological thinking about media. For the media scholar, each such modal relation, each assemblage, must be mapped independently, rather than reduced to global categories such as cinema or television as McLuhan is wont to do, since each relation of speed and slowness has, to quote Deleuze, its own ‘amplitudes, thresholds…, and variations or transformations that are peculiar to them’ and since each relation of affective capacities remains unique due to ‘circumstances, and the way in which these capacities for being affected are filled’ (1988: 125–26). Deleuze depicts these two functions of modes as a longitude (speed and slowness) and a latitude (affective capacities). Ethology entails depicting these longitudes and latitudes, drawing a map of the embodied modes as they actualize from virtual potential of the BwO. Ethology constitutes a major theoretical advance over McLuhan’s earlier probes, although one with many similarities to McLuhan’s thinking. Primarily, the advance occurs because the theory of modes and affect are more open to flexibility, becoming and the acknowledgment of difference. Instead of a pre-formed body with certain sensory ratios, beginning with the BwO allows scholars to recognize a wide variety of virtual potentials whose becomings offer more possibilities than McLuhan’s static understandings entail. Furthermore, conceiving modes as manners of relating speed and slowness and of relating affective capacities backs away from McLuhan’s more general and totalizing claims about media forms, such as television or cinema, considered as whole and static. Doing so allows us to better understand the transformations of media over time, as television becomes cinema and cinema becomes television and they both become some-thing else. This is especially important in a digital age, which has created the capacity for any content to be translated across a wide variety of mediums. Ethology also entails a final advance over McLuhan because it offers not only a prescription for a scholarly approach but also an outline of an ethics. Ethics and Power in McLuhan and DeleuzeThe practice of ethology is based in an ethics that offers guidelines for becomings in process, not a morality that proffers proscriptions from above. According to Spinoza, an ethical becoming or mode is one that produces joy and heals whereas an unethical becoming produces sadness and illness. Similar modes (say, drug use or a certain sexual practice) may be ethical for some and unethical for others depending on the situation, illustrating why ethology constitutes an ethics and not a morality. Besides providing this criterion for discerning ethical versus unethical modes, the ontology behind ethology represents an ethical gesture, in part by rejecting the imperializing and totalizing gesture of morality. As Deleuze elucidates: Spinoza’s ethics has nothing to do with a morality; he conceives it as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on this plane of immanence. This is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does; you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination. (1988: 125) By starting with an ‘I do not know’ about the body-mind instead of a confident and imperializing ontology of what the body-mind can do, ethology constitutes an ethical gesture because it remains open to difference and to the possibility of things becoming otherwise. Doing so also demands that the scholar begins in the middle, amidst embodied experience and its assemblages, rather than passing moral judgement and attempting, through force of word or often law, to make worldly actualities fit into those boxes. Ethology, then, offers guidance for a mode of living, one that begins in the middle and asks what new modes can be thought and produced which might spread love instead of hate, might heal instead of make ill, might produce happiness instead of sadness. Thus ontology and ethics fuse into ethology in Deleuze in a way perhaps best described as an interology. The ethics of ethology is entirely Other-oriented, since it is based in an ontology that rests on percept and affect. Per this ontology, the becomings of humankind are no longer finished but radically open-ended. It is a matter of what assemblages or environments take him up, what assemblages or environments he is capable of being taken up by, what Others – human or non-human – he enters into composition with. To live in an intensive mode means to have a good encounter, to compose a good interality, to be taken up by a good assemblage, to unblock life so the mind-body can do what it is capable of doing – affecting and being affected, so it can enter into composition with what suits its nature, or what affirms its elan vital (roughly, life force). What makes humankind virtuous is precisely our radical unfinishedness, our affinity, affectability, versatility, empower-ability, extendibility, composition-ability, or assemble-ability. Horseman-armour-lance-entourage-land makes a knight assemblage, which embodies the social posture of chivalry and courtly love. Archer-bow-arrow-mark-air-distance-gravity forms either a Zen assemblage of self-cultivation and satori or an assemblage of hunting or belligerence. Fiddler-violin-serenade-night-window forms a courtship assemblage. To live an ethical life entails switching from a ‘to be’ mode to an ‘and… and… and…’ mode, that is to say, from a subject orientation to an assemblage orientation, from ontology to interology, from being to becoming. When we imagine humans as machinic assemblages, ‘I’m watching TV’ no longer makes sense because TV is me at this moment. The person-remote-TV-couch assemblage is my mode of being, which means I’m not in another mode of being. When I multitask, e.g., when I drive a Penske on the super-highway while listening to the news on radio plus some music on MP3 and also having a phone conversation with someone who’s trying to follow the vehicle I’m operating, I’ve composed a busy and dangerous assemblage, and invented a schizophrenic mode of being, which is nothing like the mode I’min when I’m meditating while washing dishes. Neither assemblage is evil but one is potentially bad and the other good. Bull fighting and petting your dog involve two very different assemblages (spectators form an important element of the former) and two very different modes of being, which should not be conflated as ‘interacting with animals’. The one catalyses the bull-becoming of the bullfighter, whereas the other catalyses the pet-becoming of the one who pets. This is not to deny the possibility of fighting the bull in a petting mode –bringing the two assemblages together makes possible a strange becoming.‘I’ am capable of doing very different things depending on whether I’m in the ‘Penske and…’ assemblage or the dishes-water-meditation assemblage. As such, ‘I’ is more a function of the assemblage than the organizer of it. While McLuhan occasionally seems concerned with ethics, as in the earlier quotation about becoming servomechanisms of media, or in his promotion of art and games as anti-environments indispensable for awareness and survival, more often than not McLuhan’s project remains descriptive, assiduously avoiding issues of power. The chapter on TV in Understanding Media (1964), for example, speaks of TV as a new cultural ground that reconfigures people’s tastes. It is not, however, interested in the fact that many parents leave their children in front of the TV set not by choice but out of economic necessity. If there is an ethics in McLuhan, for the most part it remains implicit and ambivalent, to be derived by the readers for themselves. The telos of McLuhan’s explorations is laid bare in the title, Laws of Media: The New Science (1988). The subtitle gives it away; although McLuhan subtilizes what he means by ‘science’ so it is synonymous with what Vico means by ‘poetic wisdom’, it is nevertheless a descriptive enterprise, rather than an explicitly ethical and creative one. If there is an ethics in McLuhan, it is a power-blind ethics that ends with understanding – like the artist, the critic’s role is to promote under-standing so we can change course. Thus the scholar’s task becomes merely descriptive, an attempt to promote understanding. Yet this purely descriptive enterprise is surprisingly humanist and elides power, since it fails to attend to the assemblages of understanding and description, including the scholar’s role in regimes of power. In short, McLuhan fails to comprehend power-knowledge as a machinic assemblage, one that enables and disables certain forms of understanding, description and awareness. This descriptive project leaves McLuhan without a politics or ethics, unlike Deleuze who makes these concerns front and central. For instance, McLuhan (1964: 199) contends that ‘the Gutenberg technology and literacy… created the first classless society in the world’. For ‘[t]he highest income cannot liberate a North American from his “middle-class” life. The lowest income gives everybody a considerable piece of the same middle-class existence’ (McLuhan 1964: 199). The way McLuhan (1969: 140) sees it, Marxists were thus wholly misguided because they did not understand the media environment: ‘The Marxists spent their lives trying to promote a theory after the reality had been achieved. What they called the class struggle was a spectre of the old feudalism in their rear-view mirror’. Sociological realities of the time and of the present day strictly deny McLuhan’s claims, and ignoring the realities of economic inequality and oppression leaves any critical philosophy without an ethical and political grounding. Consider, in contrast, Deleuze’s treatment of class and capitalism. Deleuze, with Guattari, ponders how people can desire fascism, and calls for a close examination of power in connection with desire, thus extending Marx’s work. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), while promoting nomadism as an ethical posture for the multitudes, he and Guattari also suggest that capitalism itself has operated as a nomad war machine that betrays and dominates society. In Anti-Oedipus, just before the extended quotation above with the reference to McLuhan, Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 240) point out: ‘Capitalism is profoundly illiterate’. Following a non-linear, acoustic, disor-ganized organizational pattern, capitalism has made of the world a smooth space for itself, a control society for the multitudes, and a miserable place for millions of people. In short, Deleuze is directly concerned with power and ethics, and this concern represents his final advance over McLuhan, one that is necessary to make any revived media ecological scholarship critical and relevant to the challenges facing our world. Deleuze’s concern with power is evident in the tonality of his concepts, such as striated space, smooth space and the control society, as distinguished from McLuhan’s descriptive, apolitical terms, such as visual space, acoustic space and the global village. McLuhan describes visual and acoustic spaces as products of media, whereas Deleuze understands them as elements of assemblages that can always break down or reverse into the opposite. While McLuhan says the phonetic alphabet and print media create visual space, Deleuze recognizes that ‘visual space’ can come in a wide variety of assemblages, or arrangements of power. This notion of McLuhan’s there-fore makes a ‘badly analysed composite’ since it is too homogenized, too inattentive to the multifaceted, heterogeneous assemblages of media and power. Thus Deleuze suggests that we use the analytically more rigorous ‘striated’ and ‘smooth’ spaces, the implication being that a visual space can be striated or smooth depending on the actual assemblage. For example, McLuhan would say that the cityscape of Manhattan, having been rationally laid out, makes a visual space, and that electronic media turn it into an acoustic space, an echo chamber, Time Square being an arch example. Deleuze would say that the grid-like cityscape of Manhattan enacts state power and makes a striated space typical of a disciplinary society, which is behind us. Disney World better represents the new spaces of control society, giving people the semblance of freedom within a framework in which space and time are regulated in a far more intricate way so it makes a striated space typical of a control society. In short, McLuhan tends to depict social changes as exclusively the prod-uct of media, leaving little influence for the changes that come with differ-ent power dynamics. Visual space does not necessarily create unawareness and oppression anymore than acoustic space creates community. Instead, for Deleuze, any becoming is always a risky operation. What promises to be a breakthrough may turn out to be a breakdown. A line of becoming may end up being a line of micro-fascism. These are concerns starkly missing in McLuhan. Although McLuhan recognizes, in Laws of Media, that media often reverse into their opposites, his inattention to the interaction of media and power leads him to downplay these possibilities. Likewise, McLuhan seems unconcerned with alternatives that might develop new ways of thinking or new tactics for resistance. If power is the result of changes in media, then attacking or resisting power is a misguided effort. Seeing power and media as a more complex assemblage, following Deleuze, entails a different scholarly and ethical task. Deleuze’s analytics of power encompasses and entails a poetics of active power, which is synonymous with the techné of life, or the practice of the self as an ego-less, non-organic, machinic assemblage. It inspires us to imagine resistance as none other than the affirmation of elan vital, the mapping of lines of flight, the invention of new possibilities of life – an active operation that betokens the innocence of becoming. As such, resistance precedes (reactive) power (which striates the life world and blocks becoming). It is self-defeating to imagine resistance as derivative of, as a reaction against, (reactive) power. The telos of resistance is the free spirit, one that inhabits striated spaces in an imperceptible, smooth mode, that accomplishes becomings regardless of control, that opens up conditions for different becomings. As a result, the (ethical) task for the scholar radically shifts in the move from McLuhan to Deleuze. McLuhan primarily envisions his role as providing a descriptive account of the media environment in order to raise awareness that might provide a better social map, a role he compares to that of the artist. For Deleuze, in contrast, the scholarly task does not end with mapping but must include a creative gesture, must seek to create new concepts for thinking new modes of existence. Basically, he asks: in a late capitalist or a control society, how do we make becoming otherwise possible? In contrast, McLuhan’s faith in awareness as solution smacks of a naïve humanism impossible to adopt in Deleuze’s interology and ironic given McLuhan’s simultaneous call for ecological thinking. The ethical and hence scholarly task remains not just to analyse media or machinic environments so that we have a better under-standing, since this very notion of understanding elides what mode of under-standing, what assemblage of knowledge this understanding finds uptake in. As Deleuze surely ascertained from Foucault, knowledge is only ever existent in an assemblage with power, power/knowledge. Thus following a Deleuzian ethology, the ethical and scholarly task becomes creative as well as descriptive – to invent new concepts fruitful for different modes and different assemblages. Much of McLuhan’s work contributes to this creative fruiting of concepts, yet by ending with the descriptive and downplaying the issues of power and ethics, McLuhan remains an insufficient precursor to Deleuze’s more robust and elaborated alternative. ConclusionAlthough scholarship on McLuhan and Deleuze has been proliferating, efforts to render visible the implicit resonances between the two are still scanty. This article has been called forth by this gap. We have suggested that Deleuze can be read as an heir of McLuhan, as likewise a theorist of media guided by ecological thinking. Yet our understanding is that Deleuze has been inspired by McLuhan but not constrained by him. Instead, Deleuze always transforms McLuhan’s insights even as he uses them. If McLuhan is poetic, provocative, and full of potentials, Deleuze allows those potentials to come to fruition with his rigorous theorizing. Among all the resonances that can possibly be articulated, we have foregrounded three closely interconnected ones that are restated below. First, McLuhan’s understanding of media as extensions of humans often treads near the trap of technological determinism, despite McLuhan’s more complex understanding of media as ground and formal cause. McLuhan’s suggestive, heuristic style of writing only aggravates the situation. Deleuze absorbs the thrust of McLuhan’s understanding but completely reverses the point of departure. His notion of machinic assemblage is no longer human or technologically centered, giving no determining priority to either. Rather, the assemblage comes first. Second, whereas McLuhan coaches us to attend to percept and affect and shifts in people’s taste by bringing into focus the human-technology interface, Deleuze enables us to home in on issues of desire since his machinic assemblage is also a desiring machine, a plane of immanence in which desire is produced and circulated. McLuhan lacks the rigorous theorizing of desire and affect developed in Deleuze, based in the uplifting Spinozan notion of affect as a matter of affecting and being affected. Third, Deleuze’s notion of assemblage also entails an ethics – one that is based on ethology and interology – and an understanding of and posture towards power. To be ethical means to care about what assemblages to enter into, to organize one’s encounters, to map out new possibilities of life, to enhance one’s capacity to affect and be affected. In McLuhan’s work, the concern with ethics is implicit and ambivalent, and issues of power are elided, as required by his pseudo-scientific and descriptive scholarly endeavour. In contrast, Deleuze calls the scholar to the creative task of creating new concepts for thinking new, healthy modes of life. Lastly, we’d like to reiterate that Deleuze’s ontology is an open ontology, an interology, one that befits the radically unfinished form of life known as humans. If the point of philosophizing is to contribute adequate concepts, then Deleuze has transformed a whole volley of McLuhan’s suggestive, ethically ambivalent probes into concepts and ethical precepts useful for understanding – and perhaps changing – the mediated environment in which we all float. Note: 1. In Anti Oedipus,Deleuze and Guattaricite favorablyMcLuhan’s insight thatthe content of anymedium is anothermedium (Deleuze andGuattari 1983: 240–41).For references toMumford, see Deleuzeand Guattari 1987: 428,457. For references toVirilio, see Deleuze andGuattari 1987: 231, 345,395–96, 480, 520–21 ReferencesCavell, R. (2003), McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press. —— (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, San Francisco: City Light Books. —— (1989), Cinema 2: The Time Image, Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress. —— (1990),The Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1995),Negotiations: 1972–1990, New York: Columbia University Press. —— (2005),Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983),Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (2002),Dialogues II , London: Continuum. Jamieson, K. H. (1990), Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking, New York: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, E. (2014), Special Affects: Cinema, Animation, and the Translation of Consumer Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massumi, B. (1992), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari , Cambridge: The MIT Press. —— (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham:Duke University Press. May, T. (2005), Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction , New York: Cambridge University Press. Suggested citationJenkins, E. and Zhang, P. (2016), ‘Deleuze the media ecologist? Extensions ofand advances on McLuhan’, Explorations in Media Ecology,15: 1, pp. 55–72,doi: 10.1386/eme.15.1.55_1 Contributor detailsEric S. Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Communication at the Universityof Cincinnati. He is author of Special Affects: Cinema, Animation, and theTranslation of Consumer Culture as well as numerous articles in national andinternational journals. His research focuses on the interaction of media andconsumerism. Contact: 144-A McMicken Hall, 2700 Campus Way, Cincinnati, OH 45219,USA E-mail: [email protected] Peter Zhang is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Grand ValleyState University. He is author of a series of articles on media ecology, rhetoric,Deleuze, Zen and interality. He has guest edited a special section of China Media Research and guest coedited two special sections of EME. Currently heis spearheading a second collective project on interality. Contact: LSH 290, 1 Campus Dr, Allendale, MI 49401, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Eric Jenkins and Peter Zhang have asserted their right under the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work inthe format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
by Steven Craig Hickman
Desiring machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all.
– Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
There comes a moment in their great work Anti-Oedipus (for that is what we must call this black book of riddles) when D&G – in an almost gnostic litany of negativity from one of the drifting echoes of Artaud’s process of ‘Unmaking / Unnaming’ (“No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus”) expose the body of death to the onslaught of expressive delineation: “The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate.(8) It’s as if the nanobots of our own late era had already infiltrated the discourse of this early dreamwork, as if the viral memes of our late capitalism had suddenly exited the stage, freed of their host to suddenly invigorate the dark contours of a deadly truth. But what is this body of death? “The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable (8)”. This is the dead body of capital after its robotic zombies have wandered free of its broken world. Without form and void: capital as the body of death, the body without organs as frozen labor, frozen time. Pure death instinct: “that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine.(8)”
The anti-productivity of the body-without-organs slips through the fissures, yet it itself is part of the connective synthesis of a specific moment and space of movement. Neither a “proof of nothingness”, nor a fragment from some “lost totality”, it is situated in the midst of a linear series of trifold processes, an imageless, non-representational glue that binds the productive and anti-productive forces together. In fact D&G see this almost like an atrophied body of Christ, Capital as the mystic body of labor in which labor itself arises within the womb of capital. “Capital becomes a very mystic being since all of labor’s social productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself.”(11) They provide an exegesis upon this strange body and its inscriptions:
What is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital as a full body to constitute the recording or inscribing surface. But some kind of full body, that of the earth or the despot, a recording surface, an apparent objective movement, a fetishistic, perverted, bewitched world are characteristic of all types of society as a constant of social reproduction. (11)
It’s as if the mystical body of capital had suddenly gone kitsch, avaunt garde, chic, decadent all rolled together in one moment: the Inked, tattooed body of capital whose smooth surface (earth or despot?) is inscribed with the history of its dark atrocities, the recordings of a thousand genocides, the broken bones of its dead litter its bloated flesh like a black plague upon which only the sewer rats feed. The carnival of capital is that this atrocity continues. That this body without organs, the dead body of capital, continues seems more like a farce recorded by a demon machine full of swarming viral agents out of control swarming. Zizek reminds us that capital continuously resurrects itself, through continuous self-revolutionizing, reversals, crises, reinventions, so that more and more it appears today as an exception.(213)2 How does one overthrow an order that is continuously overthrowing itself, reinventing itself, creating out of its own dead meat the cannibalistic and non-productive death machines of its oligarchic progeny?
The truth is that these elite, these oligarchs of capital thought they were building a time machine, a machine to escape death itself, or as Jean Baudrillard once said, they try to circumscribe their own body within a “destiny of instrumentality” so as no longer to receive death from the others, but there is nothing they can do about this – the same goes for death as for everything else: no longer willing to give or receive it, death encircles them in the biological simulacrum of their own perverted and bewitched body without organs. Wrapped in the cocoon of our metalloid dreams we wrap ourselves in the sarcophagi of unimaginable machines to stave off death, yet even the simplest machines around us constitute a “horizon of death”, a death that will never be resolved because it has crystallized beyond death: fixed capital as death’s emissary, who binds living labor in the sack-cloth of death’s shroud, bound within the marginal profits of an infernal force field, frozen and fixed in capital’s Zombieland. The theatre of capital is a zombie machine, a baroque funeral parlor where the unburied corpses swarm like hiveminds productive of nothing but the fruits of the accumulated force of death itself. This is a society that is capable of breaking down the barriers between death and its feast, of exhuming the dead, opening a route to them, half-way between intimacy and the spectacle, without fright or obscene curiosity, seriousness or sublimation, bringing the all into the arena of death where cruelty is still a sign of perverse fascination and gladiatorial heroics. Welcome to the death matches of 21st Century fascism where the priests of capital feed the masses what the truly want – the dead body of their own labor. Consumption as a full time sport: cannibals feasting on their own fleshly labor as they revitalize the earth with the dead dreams of millennial despair, where even the spectral horizon cannot escape its day of reckoning and the jubilant dead rise out of their own sewers like black angels ready to consume that last resources of planet earth.
We build a vast worldwide system of necropolises, and unlike ages past we no longer bury our dead in cemetaries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer indexed in the marginal sites of our memory, it is no longer a type of death – whether psychological, biological, or metaphysical, and don’t even call it murder; no, our societies true necropolises are the data banks of vast algorithms humming in the secure enclaves of underground bunkers, blank spaces where only the thrum of electrical vines penetrate the air-conditioned nightmare of the hive mind, or the secret realms of “glass coffins where the world’s sterilized memories are frozen”(185) like tears on a rainbow’s halo.3 In the dark halls of the filaments of global networks we bury ourselves in hopes that one day they will find us and resurrect us from the deep memories of a virtual plenum. We have learned at last the truth that Walter Benjamin taught us that the spectacles of death, the elaborate games we enact on this planet have come home to roost in which “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order”.4 This is the culture of death as a final anesthetization of fascism, an aesthetic perversion of politics that immerses itself in the video worlds of galactic death machines, of a delirious production and reproduction of the spectacles of horror in which the only immortality is within the prison house of our own migratory worlds: the metal hives of this horizon of death, the virtual paradise of an electric death head. Frozen in time we enact the horrors of an endless genocide, recreate hell as a virtual war machine without outlet. The labyrinth of this machine is a false infinity, a blind brain that can no longer envision its own origins, and we its keepers are now its victims and darkest progeny.
Yet, there is another way, for as D&G tell us there is a confusion between the two meanings of “process”: process as the metaphysical production of the demoniacal within nature, and process as social production of desiring-machines within history. Which path of the processual way shall we follow? We have seen the path of capital, its horizon of death and immortality, does the siren song of its fascism pull the cords of our nooses tighter? Or, is there another path, another more open world, a return to the livingness of history itself? Do I hear the echoes from another realm? Perhaps the Communist Idea? Does this Black Book of Riddles hold the key, can anyone untie the Gordian knot of its blackest secret?
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Penguin, 1977)
2. Slavoj Zizek. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. (Routledge, 2004). 3. Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange and Death. (1976 Gallimard).
The article is taken from:
by Terence Blake I think that Deleuze’s earliest essays are perhaps in best continuity with the writings after the encounter with Guattari. There was a freedom there in Deleuze’s early essays that later became over-coded by his grand synthesis in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and in LOGIC OF SENSE. It is this Deleuzian Synthesis that Laruelle is targeting when he groups Deleuze with Heidegger and Derrida in the “philosophies of difference” and with his critique of the principle of philosophical sufficiency. The encounter with Guattari helped Deleuze to jettison the Freudo-Lacanian overlay and move back closer to himself, and to his original pluralism. This is the Deleuze who was able to cite Jung unproblematically. This is why I emphasise the Deleuze of the psyche and subjectivation, of the image and imagination, of story and fabulation. Zizek takes the opposite tack to Laruelle. He valorises the middle Deleuze, and interprets the works of that period so as to highlight their “non-standard” features, those aspects which already operate outside the traditional sufficiency of philosophy. The non-All is the non-sufficient. Bachelard was already thinking and writing outside the Freudo-Lacanian hegemony, and was much closer to Jungian psychoanalysis. Post-Jungians like James Hillman appreciate Bachelard a lot. It is important to realise that “psychoanalysis” is more than what Freud and Lacan make of it. Bachelard represents a “turn” that was not taken, a failed opportunity, and much time was lost. The article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman Thought is like the Vampire, it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy. – Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, War-Machines Gilles Deleuze was always in search of a new image of thought, a creation that would displace the classical image founded by Plato and Aristotle. As they will tell us the classical image of thought, and the “striating mental space it effects, aspires to universality” (p. 48).1 Continuing to describe it they will tell us in “Nomadology: The War Machine” that it operates under the aegis of two “universals” – that of the Whole “as the final ground of being or all encompassing horizon,” and the Subject as the “principle that converts being into being-for-us” (p. 48). This image will ultimately come to its conclusion in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel’s theories of the State. As they explicate: Imperium and Republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place as a striated mental space, from the double point of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a “universal method”. (p. 48) Against this image of thought they would formulate a counter-image, a nomadic thought that no longer allies itself with a universal thinking subject (liberal Subject), but on the contrary with a “singular race” (not racialism); and it does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality, but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert or sea. What they mean by race is the minoritarian notion of all oppressed peoples whether of race, gender, or sex: in the name of the oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian, there is no dominant race, a race is not defined by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination (p. 49). Ultimately for Deleuze and Guattari all thought is a “becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and the representation of a Whole” (p. 49). As Rosi Braidotti, whose work would take much of these concepts and formulate a nomadic counter to theoretical critique tells us, the point of nomadic thought is to produce new subjectivities “to identify lines of flight, that is to say, a creative alternative space of becoming that would fall not between the mobile/immobile, the resident/the foreigner distinction, but within all these categories. The point is neither to dismiss nor to glorify the status of marginal, alien others, but to find a more accurate, complex location for a transformation of the very terms of their specification and of our political interaction”.2 Braidotti after Deleuze will conceive the conceptual persona as a theoretical navigational tool that evokes and mobilizes creative possibilities in order to change the dominant subject position. The dominate Subject is defined as coinciding with the image of thought that equates subjectivity with consciousness, rationality, and liberal individualism. Against this dominant image of thought: Processes of becoming-minoritarian are the affirmative alternative to this phallologocentric vision of the subject, which the poststructuralists, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, have criticized. The processes of becoming-other get expressed through suitable figurations—like my nomadic subject. As such, they are no metaphors, but rather critical tools to account for the materially embedded and embodied locations and power relations. They are also creative expressions for the intensity, i.e., the rate of change, transformation or affirmation, the potentia (positive power) one inhabits. Following Deleuze’s Spinozist formula we simply must assume that we do not know what a body can do, what our embodied selves are capable of. Life as the exploration of this affirmative capacity or potentia is the core of Spinozist politics. Nomadic subjects are transformative tools that enact progressive metamorphoses of the subject away from the program set up in the phallologocentric format. (Braidotti KL 328-337) For Braidotti this move toward a nomadic thought entails a new nomadic subject, a performative image, a political myth that allows her to weave together different levels of experience: it reflects a postmetaphysical vision of subjectivity. Last, but not least, it allows her to conjugate a feminist politics with a variety of other powerful political and theoretical concerns and locations. This figurative approach to nomadism will allow her to play on the associative quality of the nomadic state and therefore tap on its metaphorical richness. (ibid.) There are other paths that nomadic thought can take as well. One will discover in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative efforts many of that possibilities and lines of flight open for a new politics of non-oppression, or what they liked to term the “non-fascist” way of life. A liberatory politics of desire that seeks to release the affective relations that have been captured by the dominant machines of capital in our daily lives. Nomadic thought allows us to find “lines of escape” out of the current malaise of official thought based as it is in State and Corporate controlled academic universities, sciences, corporate and commercial worlds. Nomadic thought is singular and mobile, it falls outside the acceptable perimeters of the elite thought police who would bind us to their oppressive regimes of figural and representative theory and praxis. It gives us heuristical devices, pragmatic machines, workable tools that through intensification of those potentials that are our desires we can liberate into the world, an opening toward a future where singularity and togetherness become our real hope of a livable co-existence with each other and the natural world that is our home and habitat. 1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Nomadology: The War Machine (Semiotext(e) 1986) 2. Braidotti, Rosi (2011-05-31). Nomadic Subjects (Kindle Locations 242-245). Perseus Academic. Kindle Edition. The article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman In this essay “Semiotic Pluralism” and the New Government of Signs Homage to Félix Guattari Maurizio Lazzarato (trans. Mary O’Neill) develops and extends Guattari’s a-signifying semiotics as part of his ongoing elaboration of financial capitalism. As he’ll remind us capitalism for Guattari is a “semiotic category that affects all levels of production and all levels of the stratification of power”. Yet, Guattari’s use of semiotics had a duo aspect to it: 1) an signifying semiotics of representationalism; and, an a-signifying semiotics of infrastructural and empirical elements of material relations, a mapping rather than a tracing of these ubiquitous aspects of capital. Read his essay, definitely opens up Guattari’s thought in ways few have so far. His books of course deal with both debt and his incorporation of Guattari’s thought: see MIT Press. One short quote on a-signifying semiotics: The machinic register of the semiotic production of Capital operates on the basis of a-signifying semiotics that tune in directly to the body (to its affects, its desires, its emotions and perceptions) by means of signs. Instead of producing signification, these signs trigger an action, a reaction, a behaviour, an attitude, a posture. These semiotics have no meaning, but set things in motion, activate them. Money, television, science, music, etc. can function as sign production machines, which have a direct, unmediated impact on the real and on the body without being routed through a signification or a representation. The cycle of fear, anxiety or panic penetrating the atmosphere and tonality in which our “surveillance societies” are steeped are triggered by sign machines; these machines appeal not to the consciousness, but to the nervous system, the affects, the emotions. The symbolic semiotics of the body, instead of being centred on language, are as such activity routed through the industrial, machinic, non-human production of images, sounds, words, intensities, movements, rhythms, etc. One needs to remember that for Deleuze and Guattari these a-signifying systems of signs were very much material notions of productivity, not to be confused with the abstract representationalism of the signifying semiotics. His main point is that the Left for the most part since the 60’s has missed the boat and dealt with the representationalism dynamics of capital rather than its base materialist a-signifying semiotics: The importance of a-signifying semiotics (money, machinic devices for the production of images, sounds, words, signs, equations, scientific formulae, music, etc.) and the role they play needs to be emphasized. They are ignored by most linguistic and political theories even though they constitute the pivotal point of new forms of capitalist government. In fact he has no qualms of saying that most Leftist thought in the “contemporary political and linguistic theories that refer either directly or indirectly to the polis and/or to the theatre, place us in a pre-capitalist situation”. In other words most Leftist thought is retrograde rather than innovative, it situates us in a dead world of representationalist mirrors that have nothing to say to the ongoing dilemmas of financial capitalism. As he suggests the technologies that we use and encompass every waking and sleeping moment of our lives are reformatting our subjectivations continuously, controlling and dominating our affective and representational systems: what many term the InfoSphere of Capital as an alien entity that surrounds us on all sides as a ubiquitous and invisible network of relations that have captured our physical, emotional, and mental existence. He asks: “how do we escape these relationships of domination and how do we develop practices of freedom and processes of individual and collective subjectivation using these same technologies?” What’s always interesting in such thinkers is that they can see the issue, describe it, and raise the questions, but never offer any resolution or thought as to answering this question. Rather like Zizek Lazzarato has many more questions and analysis than answers to our dilemmas. I keep wondering when the answers might be forthcoming? Is there an answer? Is this again a great critique without a way out? A new spin on our old predicaments? Just a rehash of Deleuze and Guattari under a new reformatting of their project? It’s as if that last question is a sign that he is himself at a loss as to how to answer it, or that the question itself may have no answer; that indeed, we may be following a course of subjectivation that is remapping our actual and potential becomings in ways we may find both disturbing and strange, but will have no clue as to how to develop further into a new form of freedom. Let’s hope he will have more to say on this matter.
The article is taken from: by Terence Blake “Deleuze’s fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One…We can therefore first state that one must carefully identify a metaphysics of the One in the work of Deleuze”. (Alain Badiou, DELEUZE, 11). DELEUZE, THE CLAMOR OF BEING was published in 1997. In this book Badiou isolates what he calls a “metaphysics of the One” subtending Deleuze’s work, without referencing, and seemingly unaware of, Laruelle’s critique of the philosophies of difference, begun in 1981 in his THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY. As we have seen, Laruelle advances a similar critique to that elaborated by Badiou, diagnosing Deleuze’s continued adhesion to a metaphysics of the One as being the source of his failure to break with Representation. Laruelle’s solution is to produce a new concept of the One that is not bound by Badiou’s opposition between “liberating the multiple” or “submitting to a renewed concept of the One”. He proposes to explore the consequences of a renewed concept of the One, that would not be metaphysical, with the explicit goal of liberating the multiple. In the preface to THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY Laruelle declares that this is the driving intellectual and emotional force behind his concept of “the One without unity”. This concept of multiplicities without difference is reiterated and expounded more clearly in the next book that Laruelle published, A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ORDINARY MAN. This came out in 1985, and it is the second book in what Laruelle began to call his Philosophy II. It is a more systematic work than the PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY, and is written in the form of a “manual” containing a series of 140 concise “theorems”, each accompanied by a more lengthy commentary. The first theorem is There are two sources, two paths of minoritary experience and thought. Minorities as “difference”, implanted on the body of the State and of Authorities in general. And minorities which are real beneath difference: individuals as such or without qualities, “ordinary men” whose concept is no longer that of difference and who precede the State. Deleuze’s LETTER TO A SEVERE CRITIC (1973) contains a very useful description of the impasse that a representational philosophy of difference leads to, and of the need to break with the mere representation of multiplicity in favour of a performative enunciation and enactment of free multiplicities. Most of Badiou’s (and of Laruelle’s) critique applies not to Deleuze himself, but rather to a Deleuzian doxa, a “Deleuzist” misunderstanding of Deleuze. However, Badiou has located something important concerning the system of thought of the pre-Guattari Deleuze, even if he is unable to recognise or accept the transformation that Deleuze effectuated thanks to his encounter Guattari. At least Badiou sees that there was something that had to be transformed. Deleuze’s fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One…We can therefore first state that one must carefully identify a metaphysics of the One in the work of Deleuze (Badiou, DELEUZE, 11). One should read Deleuze’s “Letter to a Severe Critic” (1973) not only as a defence against criticism, but also as an auto-critique. Deleuze feared that his concepts were sedimenting into an academic doxa, and that they conceded too much to the domain of representation. It is important to note that after DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and LOGIC OF SENSE Deleuze let drop the problematic of difference, to turn to a theory and practice of free multiplicities. The point of encounter of Badiou with Deleuze came when Badiou suddenly realised that they had similar analyses of the contemporary doxa, and therefore that they could be allies in a common ideological struggle. The prefaces to LOGICS OF WORLDS and to DELEUZE THE CLAMOR OF BEING, and also the first chapter, on Opinion”, in Badiou’s SECOND MANIFESTO FOR PHILOSOPHY, are quite illuminating in that respect, especially if we keep in mind that Badiou later declares, in METAPHYSICS OF REAL HAPPINESS (2015, untranslated), that he has come to see that what he calls “truths” has much in common with what Deleuze calls “sense”. At the end of that book, Badiou compares his concept of “truth” to Deleuze’s concept of “sense”: Philosophy proposes a triage in the confusion of experience, from which it draws an orientation. This elevation from confusion to orientation is the philosophical operation par excellence and its specific didactics. That supposes a concept of truth. This “truth” can very well be given another name. Thus, in a large part of Deleuze’s work, what we are here calling “truth” is called “sense” (Métaphysique du bonheur réel, 83-84). Badiou does not use the same terminology as Deleuze, he has his own conceptual creations and terminological choices. Nor does he follow the same path, juxtaposing his process of immanentising Plato to Deleuze’s process of overturning Plato. His work, however, is in explicit dialogue with Deleuze’s thought, and has been so for over twent-five years. This is what being “post-deleuzian” means: ”What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?” (WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, 28). Badiou hit Deleuze hard with his review of THE FOLD, finding it to be the symptom of a failure of pluralism. Viewed from the perspective of pluralism THE FOLD is not a good book, embodying a return to Deleuze’s pre-Guattari style. Strategically, Badiou was adroit in choosing this book to launch his polemic with Deleuze, as it is more classical in style and more totalising in content than his collaborations with Guattari, and so constituted a weaker target. The concept of the “fold” plays only a minor role in in Deleuze’s earlier books, and in his later collaboration with Guattari: WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? Taken as a concept, the “fold” is too synchronic, it should rather be the diachronic: “to fold”, but that would perhaps not be a good title for a book. For Badiou THE FOLD embodies all that he finds wrong with Deleuze’s philosophy: it is both too descriptive (phenomenological critique: it privileges interiority) and too unified (ontological criitique: it privileges organicity), valorising unity, presence, continuity, life. Contrary to Badiou’s conceptual portrait, Deleuze effectuated a pluralist rupture with his own previous thought in his collaboration with Guattari, in the light of which he saw his earlier philosophy as insufficiently pluralist. According to Deleuze he had been confined up till then to saying the multiple instead of doing or making the multiple. Thus Badiou’s critique of Deleuze as still being mired in a metaphysics of the One is a watered down and distorted version of Deleuze’s own auto-critique. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake François Laruelle’s explicit critique of Deleuze was published in French in 1995, in the same year as his THEORIE DES ETRANGERS, which is the book that Laruelle tells us inaugurates the third phase of his research, “Philosophy III”, where he has supposedly abandonned the scientism that vitiates much of his earlier work. (Note: it was published under the title “I, the Philosopher, Am Lying: A Response to Deleuze”, in English in THE NON-PHILOSOPHY PROJECT in 2012). However, this “response” bears all the signs of philosophical enclosure. It is noteworthy that WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY is not just a work by Deleuze, as Laruelle’s “A Reply to Deleuze” would seem to imply. It was written in collaboration with Guattari, a non-philosopher, whose encounter with Deleuze allowed both of them to move outside the codes of standard philosophy, and to “practice immanence” as opposed to merely “saying immanence”. Laruelle produces a one-sided “philosophical” reading of the book, ignoring everything that Deleuze said over the preceding fourteen years about his own break with standard philosophy, and comes to the predictable conclusion that Deleuze is still doing philosophy, i.e. “philosophy” in his Laruelle’s sense, which has next to nothing to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s sense as expounded in the book Laruelle is replying to. Yet Deleuze had already replied to this critique of talking about an outside of philosophy while remaining firmly ensconced within its confines, in the role of a conformist spectator profiting from the experiences of those experimenting the real. In LETTER TO A SEVERE CRITIC, first published in French in 1973, Deleuze discusses his own non-philosophical production of philosophy. He talks about how he lived a depersonalisation of love and not of submission in his encounter with Nietzsche, and how going further he was multiplied and singularised in his encounter with Guattari. The whole text is relevant because it is in the LETTER that he replies most clearly to the accusation that he is blocked inside philosophy, recuperating the marginals for his own academic profit without taking any risks himself. Thus, Deleuze’s LETTER recounts the transformations produced by his reading of Nietzsche outside of philosophy, and by his encounter with Guattari whom he met in 1969, when he was 44 and Guattari was 39. They published A THOUSAND PLATEAUS IN 1981, after KAFKA and RHIZOME, when Deleuze was 56, Guattari 51. These are not the works of old age and fatigue, but are an explosion of vitality. Deleuze went on to revolutionise the approach to the cinema with his two cinema books. Their last book written together was WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? published in 1991, Deleuze 66 and Guattari 61. It is essential to bear in mind that it is a collaborative work, and both voices together (the philosopher and the non-philosopher) reply to the question “what is it that I have been doing all my life?” The affect in this book is not that of fatigue, nor does it incarnate a sort of after-time of the zombie-like “survival” of philosophical abstraction. The affect is “sobriety” and the time is ripe for them to “speak concretely”, the mood is not one of exhaustion but of “grace”. The book is not centered on a reflection on limits, these limits are assigned to the history of philosophy, but on a new creation of concepts outside the limits of standard philosophy (=the history of philosophy). Deleuze and Guattari have already, when this book is published, analysed for over 20 years the different régimes of signs, and shown how signification is just one régime amongst many. They have shown how the standard philosophical book is based on the codification of fluxes, and have written together several books outside this philosophical codification, where a-signifying particles are connected to the outside. Philosophy is performance and transformation for them, before it is codified into signification. Like Laruelle, Deleuze remarks that there are two possible readings of his texts and of his life. The malevolent reading, based on resentment, that judges him forever locked inside philosophy, and the benevolent or “amorous” reading, based on intensity, and machinic function that he is producing in relation to the immanent outside. For Deleuze there is no dualism where philosophy “observes” and “recuperates” while non-philosophy “lives” and “performs”, this is precisely the malevolent reading that is rejected in the LETTER, and at the beginning of RHIZOME, where the experimentation is inassignable. Strangely, Zizek and Laruelle converge on a similar reading of Deleuze’s evolution that simply dismisses the twenty year long collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze explicitly demands that his texts be read not as composing a system of philosophy, but as assemblages of philosophical material to be used in relation to an outside. Whatever one may think of the degree of rupture with “standard” philosophy in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and LOGIC OF SENSE, it is clear that ANTI-OEDIPUS (1972) goes much further outside, and comes far closer to the plane of immanence, than Laruelle’s THÉORIE DES ÉTRANGERS (published over twenty years later), just as A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (1980) goes further in the expression of non-standard philosophy than Laruelle’s own book PHILOSOPHIE NON-STANDARD (2010, i.e. thirty years later). There is neither standard philosophy nor anti-philosophy in Deleuze’s work, but the cry of ANTI-OEDIPUS “everything is to be interpreted in terms of intensity” is precisely a call for the disorganization of all systems, for their reduction to transcendental material to be used in non-standard ways, and for the reversion to immanence that Laruelle invokes. Laruelle is a good non-philosopher but he is not the first, nor does he go the closest to immanence. To sum up this part of the argument, Laruelle and Deleuze both talk about going outside the bounds of traditional philosophy, and both use the term “non-philosophy” . However, the two conceptions are quite different, but Laruelle does not help us to get a clear view as he consistently imposes onto the discussion a definition of philosophy that is not pertinent to Deleuze’s text and thus caricatures it. Laruelle’s diagnostic that Deleuze’s text is “still philosophy” is thus tautologous, the predictable result of this Procrustean procedure. Laruelle ‘s critique of the system of difference, as found in the work of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, repeats belatedly Deleuze’s own self-criticism (as expressed in the LETTER TO A SEVERE CRITIC) of his pre-Guattari phase as being still entangled in the domain of representation. More generally, Laruelle, despite his considerable merits, is systematically wrong when he assigns Deleuze to the realm of philosophical sufficiency (“representation”, in Deleuze’s terms). Despite his own deep and intense nonphilosophical voyage, Laruelle is incapable of reading Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborated works, up to and including WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, in terms of non-standard thought and of their relation with the non-philosophical outside, because he has not measured what their long collaboration brought to both of them. If we approach the two philosophers in a non-partisan spirit we can see many similarities: (1) the emphasis on pure immanence (2) the critique of transcendent philosophy, called by Deleuze the “dogmatic image of thought”, called by Laruelle “philosophy” (or later, “standard philosophy”. (3) the break with a philosophy of difference, Deleuze moved from difference to pure multiplicities in 1972 in ANTI-OEDIPUS with his encounter with Guattari, Laruelle 14 years later in PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE (4) the edification of a “quantum” thought, effectuated in Deleuze and Guattari’s THOUSAND PLATEAUS (1980) and 30 years later in Laruelle’s NON-STANDARD PHILOSOPHY. In WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? Deleuze and Guattari mention Laruelle twice explicitly. “The non-philosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well” (41). Followed by note 5: “5. François Laruelle is engaged in one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy. He invokes a One-All that he qualifies as “non-philosophical” and, oddly, as “scientific,” on which the “philosophical decision” takes root. This One-All seems to be close to Spinoza” (220). “The plane of philosophy is prephilosophical insofar as we consider it in itself independently of the concepts that come to occupy it, but non-philosophy is found where the plane confronts chaos. Philosophy needs a non-philosophy that comprehends it; it needs a non-philosophical comprehension just as art needs non-art and science needs non-science” (218). Followed by note 16: “16. Francçois Laruelle proposes a comprehension of non-philosophy as the “real (of) science,” beyond the object of knowledge: Philosophie et non-philosophie (Liege: Mardaga, 1989). But we do not see why this real of science is not non-science as well” (234). Two observations: 1) WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? was first published in French in 1991, i.e. well within Laruelle’s PHILOSOPHY II, which lasted from 1981 to 1995. Deleuze and Guattari pose the question of Laruelle’s scientism, that is to say of his continuing imprisonment in the presuppositions of the authority of science that characterise both State philosophy and Royal Science. In PRINCIPLES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY, published in French in 1995, Laruelle seems to accept this criticism as he declares that during Philosophy II he had been still under the sway of the principle of sufficient philosophy in the form of a scientistic submission to the “authority” of science. 2) Their second criticism is not so much of the “authority” of science but of the privileged relationship of philosophy with science, where they advocate a similar relationship with art too. In PRINCIPLES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Laruelle analyses his PHILOSOPHY II phase as being based on two axioms that were supposed to be complementary, but that he later found to be conflicting in their loyalties: 1) The One is immanent vision in-One. 2) There is a special affinity between the vision-in-One and the phenomenal experience of “scientific thought” (34) Axiom 1 is faithful to non-philosophy. Axiom 2, with its “special affinity” between the vision-in-One and science, is faithful ultimately to the ruses of philosophy. It was not until Philosophy V that Laruelle, in his published works (most notably in his magnum opus NON-STANDARD PHILOSOPHY), was liberated from the persistent “special affinity” with science in his actual practice of non-standard philosophy (works on non-photography and non-religion). Laruelle indicates that anything can be given a reading that reduces and encloses it in philosophy, even his own texts. But he asserts that there is also a non-philosophical or democratic reading of these same texts: “Do I practice terror? There are obviously two readings of my text. There is a philosophical reading, one in which I do practice terror. And there is a non-philosophical reading, which is obviously my reading” (here). Insofar as Laruelle gives only a philosophical reading of Deleuze’s texts he is practicing terror (as Deleuze does when he talks of Hegel). Democracy would mean not only giving a non-philosophical reading of Deleuze, but acknowledging that he Laruelle is not the first non-philosopher and that his philosophical readings do not capture all. Some may even have gone farther than he has on many points. This is what I think is the case with Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake This is a reply to Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Deleuze in his book “ORGANS WITHOUT BODIES On Deleuze and Consequences”. 1) DELEUZE AND NEGATIVITYPreliminary note: I have translated the title “Lettre à un critique sévère” as “Letter To A Severe Critique” to keep the word “severe” with its Latin etymology visible in its literal form “severus” from “verus” – truth, and “se” – refexive pronoun. On this reading, the severe one imposes his truth first on himself and only then on others., which is a good summary of Deleuze’s reproach to Michel Cressole in the body of the letter. Deleuze’s “Letter To A Severe Critic” is one of his richest and most beautiful texts. It can be seen as a treatise on alterity, so it is only fitting that Zizek in his ORGANS WITHOUT BODIES misreads it, and Deleuze’s work generally, as avoiding any encounter with Hegel, who he (Zizek) claims represents “absolute Alterity”. In fact, Deleuze’s constant complaint about Hegel is that he constantly gesticulates in the direction of alterity but that he misses it entirely. Deleuze condenses his critique of Hegel into the rejection of Hegel’s “triads and negativity”. However, this critique is more subtle than Zizek is prepared to admit or even recognize, as, contrary to a popular opinion, Deleuze’s work itself is full of “triads and negativity”, and even death, but in a sense that Zizek is not equipped to perceive or understand. As it plays a crucial role in his imagination of his “refutation” of Deleuze, I would like to retranslate the famous buggery quote to bring out some neglected aspects: “But, above all, my way of coping at that time was, I am inclined to believe, to conceive of the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or, which amounts to the same thing, a sort of immaculate conception. I imagined myself as arriving in the back of an author and giving him a child, which would be his and which nevertheless would be monstruous. That it really be his is very important, because the author had to really say everything that I made him say. But it was also necessary that the child be monstruous, because it was necessary to go through all sorts of decenterings, slippage, breakage [NB: the slang meaning of burglary, breaking and entering, is also relevant], secret emissions that gave me a lot of pleasure”. (NEGOTIATIONS, page 6, retranslated by me). Zizek ignores all the attenuating, modalising, or de-realising that go on in this excerpt: the subjunctives, the conditionals, the impersonal obligations, the uncertain “I am inclined to believe” (je crois bien) instead of the more certain “I believe” (je crois), the fact that Deleuze does not say “buggery”, but “a sort of buggery” that requires a definition and explication that he then proceeds to give. The uncertainty is left out. The movement is left out: where the text says “arriver dans le dos d’un auteur – arriving in the back of an author, Zizek retains the erroneous translation of “taking the author from behind”. We know that for Deleuze everything important happens behind the thinker’s back: “The movement is always made behind the thinker’s back”. (Note: I would qualify this: The real events happen behind the back of the thinker, in the sense of the reflective thinker. But they happen in front of the lover, the revolutionary, the artist, and the creator of concepts). The imagination is left out: the text says “Je m’imaginais arriver dans le dos d’un auteur”, Zizek retains “I saw myself as taking an author from behind”. Decentering is left out, Zizek retains the more anodyne “shifting”. Yet attenuation, modalisation, uncertainty, derealisation, movement, imagination and decentering are all important in the rest of the text – they are in fact basic operations of alterity, and contain far more negativity than Hegel’s triadic and sublimating operations, which remain at the level of formal negativity. Deleuze’s negativity, which can be seen in the abundance of negative prefixes (de-, as in decoding, a-, as in asignifying, in-, as in informal, non-, as in non-formed), is radically deterritorialising where Zizek always tries to return and reduce Deleuze to familiar territory. 2) THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION IS NOT THE VIRGIN BIRTHIn “Letter To A Severe Critic” Deleuze explains how he imagined his incursions into the history of philosophy as a “sort of buggery”, coming up from behind and giving a thinker a baby in his own likeness yet monstruous. A deterritorialised baby in sum. The baby, which is in fact the philosopher himself, is a paradoxical unity of likeness and monstruosity, a union of opposites. The identity of the philosopher must be subtracted, leaving the pure intensive alterity that subtended this identity. Deleuze adds that this “sort of buggery” (i.e. arriving in the back and engendering a baby, a monstruous similitude of the thinker’s system) was also imagined by him to be a “sort of immaculate conception”. Zizek here makes the common mistake of confounding the Immaculate conception with the Virgin Birth and affects to understand this equivalence between buggery and immaculate conception in a simplistic way: the buggered philosopher gives birth virginally to his deformed yet similitudinous baby. But being buggered does not leave you a virgin, something which Zizek conveniently forgets. [Note: Zizek confuses the two phenomena not just here, but despite his “religious turn” in the rest of his work too] A more fecund approach would be to take Deleuze at his word (he is after all more erudite and much funnier than our Slovenian Super-Star). The immaculate conception is in no way virginal. Mary, the Mother of God, was conceived in the normal way (i.e. via the heterosexual genital intercourse of her mother and father) but without Original Sin. So Zizek’s elucubrations on his own fantasies of what Deleuze said are undermined by reading Deleuze’s actual words. The Original Sin is a thought based on identity, and so founded on representing difference, alterity, movement, becoming, multiplicity, rather than implementing and performing them. The Original Sin is Identity, and The Immaculate Conception is the subtraction of that identity and the engendering of thought in and as pure alterity. Further, the Immaculate Conception embodies a strange temporality in which Mary is pre-redeemed by the future coming of the saviour. This fusion of the anticipatory and of the retrospective is an apposite description of Deleuze’s experiments in alterity begun in his treatment of the history of philosophy and extended in his encounters with Nietzsche and later Guattari. What Deleuze reveals is somehow already there (“the author had to really say everything that I made him say”) and yet a new birth because re-thought and re-imagined in terms of a new Image of Thought (“it was necessary to traverse all sorts of decenterings, slippage, breakage, and secret emissions”). Zizek’s method is quite simple: wherever there is a heterogeneous assemblage of elements he “retains” the oedipal structures. I put the quotation marks around “retains” because in practice he often has to invent these oedipal structures and forcibly impose them on the text, before retaining them as the key. Deleuze makes only passing reference to Hegel and dismisses his triads and negativity as coarse and clumsy representations of real movement and becoming. Zizek has to inflate this into a total repression of Hegel (“the absolute exception”) to then “discover” the oedipal drama in Deleuze’s philosophical practice. He has to maculate everything with Oedipus, losing the text and henceforth only dealing with his own misconceptions. 3) AGAINST FREUDIAN FUNDAMENTALISMWe have seen that Zizek imposes an oedipal schema onto Deleuze’s “Letter To A Severe Critic” to make it conform to a structure that he can easily understand and criticise. Despite his neo-lacanian sophistication when he talks theory, Zizek’s default position in his interpretative practice is naïve Freudian fundamentalism. He even espouses this explicitly at various places in his work, a good example being chapter 2 of IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES. In commenting on the prevalence of familialist ideology in popular culture, Zizek feels the need to pretend that familialism is the real content of in particular various popular science-fiction novels and films. This is rather interesting as he complains that Deleuze is incapable of perceiving or supporting alterity, symbolised in Zizek’s case by “Hegel”. Of course, “Lacan” in Zizek’s work is in fact “Lacan-Z”, a conceptual persona that permits Zizek to think and to validate his ideas retroactively and to project them backwards onto Lacan’s texts (this is where Zizek’s own “buggery” takes place, in the retroactive maculation of Lacan). Thus, Zizek’s Hegel is a similar chimaera (Hegel-Z) preventing him from seeing anything other in Deleuze’s treatment of Hegel than the repression of alterity. Zizek gives us “the key” to his own repression of alterity explicitly in his discussion of the recent remake of The War of the Worlds, where Zizek subtracts the aliens and retains only the oedipal drama: “One can easily imagine the film without the bloodthirsty aliens so that what remains is in a way “what it is really about,” the story of a divorced working-class father who strives to regain the respect of his two children”.(p57) Here Zizek is careful to qualify his oedipal reduction by using attenuations: expressions like “One can easily imagine” and “in a way”; quotation marks around his main thesis. But only a few lines down the attenuations disappear: “No wonder, then, that the same key discloses the underlying motif of the greatest cinema hit of all times”, James Cameron’s Titanic. In fact the key is not at all the same, and contrary to the simplicity of his treatment of The War of the Worlds (“I’ll just subtract the aliens”), Zizek has to go through some complicated slippage and breakage (but alas as usual no decentering) to “bugger” the film into saying what he wants it to. Zizek goes on to generalise and dogmatise his oedipal key throughout the rest of the chapter. On page 59 he states blithely: “The same interpretive key fits science-fiction catastrophe films”. Darko Suvin famously defined science-fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”, but for all his talk of alterity Zizek cannot endure the minimal doses of otherness that are contained in popular SF films. So it is no surprise that he was so vehemently critical of AVATAR, which confronted us with a whole new world, or STALKER which contains a “Zone” of alien production escaping from the basic laws of physics as we know them. Zizek occupies the same discursive position as Michel Cressole, his critique of Deleuze is regressively identitarian. Zizek cannot stand alterity or estrangement, and imposes identity as forcefully as he can whenever he encounters it. The greater the dose of alterity, the more vehement is his reaction. Deleuze’s conclusion applies to Zizek as well: “You are doing everything in your power to make me become what you criticise me for having become”. 4) INTENSIVE CONNECTIONS VERSUS SIGNIFYING CUTS “How far away is the “other”? If we can no longer be sure that we remember who we are, where do we make the cut between “me” and “not-me”?” (James Hillman, A Psyche the Size of the Earth) I have been discussing Zizek’s critique of Deleuze in terms of the inability of his Hegelian and Freudian theorising to come to grips with, or even perceive, Deleuze’s espousal of alterity. Zizek has no idea of the trajectory of Deleuze’s “Letter To A Severe Critic” from identity to post-identity, from certainty to uncertainty, from literal reality to the power of the false. I argue that Zizek’s psychoanalytic tools prevent him from understanding what is happening in the “Letter” and more generally in the works arising from the Deleuze-Guattari encounter. Zizek can’t help imagining (i.e. mesuring and judging) Deleuze against a freudian-lacanian background and so renders himself incapable of comprehending even the simplest arguments in Deleuze’s post-encounter (with Guattari) texts. Hillman’s post-jungian psychology, in contrast, abounds in ideas and formulations that converge with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical texts and with their movement towards an ecosophy. To recap, Michel Cressole tries to get Deleuze either to come out as gay or to admit that he is a parasite feeding on the life-blood of the true marginals (schizos, homos, drug addicts, alcoholics). He wants to extort a confession. Deleuze’s response can only be understood as a letter that is not written by the identity “Deleuze”, the civil servant (profession: professor of philosophy, conjugal status: married with two children, bibliography: author of over 20 books), but rather by a post-identitarian assemblage. In his preface to the American edition of DIALOGUES Deleuze situates all his work from ANTI-OEDIPUS to A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (and, we can imagine, beyond) as happening “between” Guattari and himself. This is why Zizek’s claim that ANTI-OEDIPUS is “arguably Deleuze’s worst book”, is doubly erroneous. The problem is not so much in the use of “arguably” (Zizek does not argue against Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments, and is incapable of doing so) but in the expression “Deleuze’s worst book”. He wilfully blinds himself to the fact that ANTI-OEDIPUS was not written by Deleuze, but by Deleuze and Guattari, in the full sense of the Deleuzian “and”: the book, like the letter, is the embodiment of a multiplicity of becomings that happened between Deleuze and Guattari and many others, themselves multiplicities in a world of becoming. All this talk of multiplicities and becomings is beyond Zizek. Deleuze’s letter traces a path from identity to post-identity, from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis, from vengeance to love. He uses the image of “buggery” to induct, if possible, Cressole into a rhizomatic exchange, deterritorialising his vocabulary to help him escape the marginal trap: an identity founded on transgression is still an identity, “coming out” is no substitute for going outside, invoking multiplicity and becoming is not the same as creating them in an individuation that is not based on identity. Deleuze indicates that this “depersonalisation through love” initiated in his encounter with Nietzsche came to full incarnation when he began to work with Guattari, insisting on “how each understood and completed the other, depersonalised himself in the other, singularised himself by the other, in sum loved the other”. Deleuze refuses the opposition between the impersonal observations of a professor, the paranoiac “frigid doctor of distances”, and the personal confessions of a transgressor, the hysterical “simulator of identifications” (DIALOGUES, p53-54). Both are only too happy to find the “dirty little secret” that they can propose as the key to a work. The alterity of the work is neutralised, its power voided, its love of the world travestied. The whole process of de-subjectivation, of individuation away from and outside of the egoic subject and of literal realities is re-translated into a dogmatic reductive grid. Deleuze is justified in exclaiming: “There is thus no risk of seeing the power of life which runs through a work”. Zizek remains within the confines of oedipal decoding and interpreting, totally falsifying the text he interprets. Deleuze talks of leaving the history of philosophy behind and of speaking in one’s own name; Zizek retains: repression of an incestuous desire for Hegel. Deleuze speaks of love traversing the multiplicities and zones of intensity of another’s body and one’s own, discovering “its groups, its populations, its species”; Zizek retains: sublimated buggery and repressed incest. But there is no sublimation and no repression here. We must reply with James Hillman: “Nothing is repressed, in fact, nothing can be repressed” (RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY, ix). Zizek’s biggest mistake is literalism, a malady that Hillman attributes to, amongst many others, Freud and his followers. Deleuze likewise condemns “a deplorable belief in exactitude and truth”, and revendicates the right to express his individuation with its immobile voyages in oblique and circuitous ways. This indirect expression, or “power of the false”, is a type of language that eschews the “unidimensional literal report by and about a fiction called “me”” (RVP, xi), or indeed about any dogmatically imposed interpretation treated as self-evident “reality”. “What’s so great about your version of “reality”?, asks Deleuze, Your realism is unimaginative.” This unimaginative realism confines itself to a world divided into stereotyped categories by “signifying cuts”. This is the realm of the great divide between self and world. Deleuze’s pluralism evokes on the contrary a metaphysical “rupture” where you are no longer a conforming or transgressive identity (in fact, all identities are transgressive, one cannot really conform to the Norm), but where “You have become like everyone, but in fact you have turned “everyone” [and we must add “everything”] into a becoming”. (DIALOGUES, p127, translation slightly modified). So it is that Deleuze can join with Hillman in crying “no cuts”! (Hillman, A Psyche the Size of the Earth). The “interior” is coextensive with the external world, and so innerness gets redefined as no longer signifying spatial confinement but as synonymous with an all-pervading dimension of depth and intensity. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake “How far away is the “other”? If we can no longer be sure that we remember who we are, where do we make the cut between “me” and “not-me”?” James Hillman, A Psyche the Size of the Earth I have been discussing Zizek’s critique of Deleuze in terms of the inability of his Hegelian and Freudian theorising to come to grips with, or even to perceive, Deleuze’s espousal of alterity. Zizek has no idea of the trajectory of Deleuze’s “Letter To A Severe Critic” from identity to post-identity, from certainty to uncertainty, from literal reality to the power of the false. I argue that Zizek’s psychoanalytic tools prevent him from understanding what is happening in the “Letter” and more generally in the works arising from the Deleuze-Guattari encounter. Zizek can’t help imagining (and thus mesuring and judging) Deleuze against a Freudian-Lacanian conceptual background and so renders himself incapable of comprehending even the simplest arguments in Deleuze’s post-Nietzschean, post-encounter (with Guattari) texts. Hillman’s post-jungian psychology, in contrast, abounds in ideas and formulations that converge with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical texts and with their movement towards an ecosophy. To recap, Michel Cressole tries to get Deleuze either to come out as gay or to admit that he is a parasite feeding on the life-blood of the true marginals (schizos, homos, drug addicts, alcoholics). He wants to extort a confession. Deleuze’s response can only be understood as a letter that is not written by the identity “Deleuze”, the civil servant (profession: professor of philosophy, conjugal status: married with two children, author of over 20 books), but rather by a post-identitarian assemblage. In his preface to the American edition of DIALOGUES Deleuze situates all his work from ANTI-OEDIPUS to A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (and, we can imagine, beyond) as happening “between” Guattari and himself. This is why Zizek’s claim that ANTI-OEDIPUS is “arguably Deleuze’s worst book”, is doubly erroneous. The problem is not so much in the use of “arguably” (Zizek does not argue against Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments, and is incapable of doing so) but in the expression “Deleuze’s worst book”. He wilfully blinds himself to the fact that ANTI-OEDIPUS was not written by Deleuze, but by Deleuze and Guattari, in the full sense of the Deleuzian “and”: the book, like the letter, is a multiplicity of becomings that happened between Deleuze and Guattari and many others, themselves multiplicities in a world of becoming. All this talk of multiplicities and becomings is beyond Zizek. Deleuze’s letter traces a path from identity to post-identity, from psychoanalysis, from vengeance to love. He uses the image of “buggery” to induct, if possible, Cressole into a rhizomatic exchange, deterritorialising his vocabulary to help him escape the marginal trap: an identity founded on transgression is still an identity, coming out is no substitute for going outside, invoking multiplicity and becoming is not the same as creating them in an individuation that is not based on identity. Deleuze indicates that this “depersonalisation through love” initiated in his encounter with Nietzsche came to full incarnation when he began to work with Guattari, insisting on “how each understood and completed the other, depersonalised himself in the other, singularised himself by the other, in sum loved the other”. Deleuze refuses the opposition between the impersonal observations of a professor, the paranoiac “frigid doctor of distances”, and the personal confessions of a transgressor, the hysterical “simulator of identifications” (DIALOGUES, p53-54). Both are only too happy to find the “dirty little secret” that they can propose as the key to a work. The alterity of the work is neutralised, its power voided, its love of the world travestied. The whole process of de-subjectivation, of individuation away from and outside of the egoic subject and of literal realities is re-translated into a dogmatic reductive grid. Deleuze is justified in exclaiming: “There is thus no risk of seeing the power of life which runs through a work”. Naxos is right to denounce “Žižek’s Intensive Masturbatory Reading of Deleuze“, as Zizek remains within the confines of oedipal decoding and interpreting. “Psychoanalysis is exactly a masturbation, a generalized, organized and coded narcissism” (DIALOGUES, p102). Deleuze talks of leaving the history of philosophy behind and of speaking in one’s own name; Zizek retains Deleuze’s repression of an incestuous desire for Hegel. Deleuze speaks of love traversing the multiplicities and zones of intensity of another’s body and one’s own, discovering “its groups, its populations, its species”; Zizek retains sublimated buggery and repressed incest. But there is no sublimation and no repression here. We must reply with James Hillman: “Nothing is repressed, in fact, nothing can be repressed” (RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY, ix). Zizek’s biggest mistake is literalism, a malady that Hillman attributes to, amongst many others, Freud and his followers. Deleuze likewise condemns “a deplorable belief in exactitude and truth”, and revendicates the right to express his individuation with its immobile voyages in oblique and circuitous ways. This indirect expression, or “power of the false”, is a type of language that eschews the “unidimensional literal report by and about a fiction called “me”” (RVP, xi), or indeed about any dogmatically imposed interpretation treated as self-evident “reality”. “What’s so great about your version of “reality”?, asks Deleuze, Your realism is unimaginative.” This unimaginative realism confines itself to a world divided into stereotyped categories by “signifying cuts”. This is the realm of the great divide between self and world. Deleuze’s pluralism evokes on the contrary a metaphysical “rupture” where you are no longer a conforming or transgressive identity (let’s face it, all identities are transgressive, you don’t and can’t really conform to the Norm), but where “You have become like everyone, but in fact you have turned “everyone” [and we must add “everything”] into a becoming“. (DIALOGUES, p127, translation slightly modified). So it is that Deleuze can join with Hillman in crying “no cuts“! (Hillman, A Psyche the Size of the Earth). The “interior” is coextensive with the external world, and so innerness gets redefined as no longer signifying spatial confinement but as synonymous with an all-pervading dimension of depth and intensity. Postscript:Matthew Segall at footnotes2plato has posted some interesting reflections on Hillman (here and here). In particular, one can cite Segall’s thesis: “The Cartesian ego’s paranoid search for absolute certainty and formulaic Truth leads to the repression of the ambiguities and paradoxes of soul-making in the valleys of the world”. Deleuze and Guattari are equally against “The Cartesian ego’s paranoid search for absolute certainty and formulaic Truth” and “the repression of the ambiguities and paradoxes of soul-making”, although they prefer the term “desiring-production”. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake Alain Aptekman recounts an interesting anecdote about Deleuze’s attitude to “schizos”: “One day, Félix, Arlette Donati, Gilles, and I were eating at Dhuizon and we got a call from La Borde saying that a guy had set fire to the chateau chapel and run off into the woods. Gilles blanched, I froze, and Félix called for help to find the guy. At that point, Gilles said to me, ‘How can you stand those schizos’? He couldn’t bear the sight of crazy people” (François Dosse, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives). I see nothing negative or self-contradictory in this anecdote. Unless being afraid of psychotics and of their unpredictable and sometimes dramatic behaviour is to be deemed contemptible. To each his or her preferences and commitments. Being in an establishment, as Guattari was, where one had to be constantly ready to drop everything to deal with disturbing or dangerous behaviour is not everyone’s vocation. In this anecdote there is no mention of fear, nor even of the intolerance of unpredictable behaviour. Rather it is a matter of endurance, capacity and responsibility. Deleuze is concerned about the capacity to “stand” being responsible for people capable of dangerous acts that require immediate intervention, and thus to stand having to be ready to abandon whatever one is doing, at any moment. Schizoanalysisis not chaos, nor does it mean being perpetually submitted to the pathological manifestations of those in whom the schizo-process has been interrupted, resulting in clinical illness. Deleuze has adequately theorised the difference between sympathy and (Christian) charity in DIALOGUES. He remarks that “sympathy” may sometimes take the form of deciding that one wants nothing to do with a certain person. La Borde was a very special assemblage and being part of it was very important for Guattari’s individuation. That does not make it the model of individuation for everyone else. Deleuze does not judge the La Borde assemblage, he does not advise Guattari or Aptekman to get away, he expresses his astonishment and by implication a pragmatic evaluation: being a member of such an assemblage would be unbearable for him, as it would decompose his own laboriously constructed relations. This is not a judgement from above, but an ethological observation: he is not the same sort of animal as Guattari. To countereffectuate the event, to extract the becoming from the model, to attain the process behind the result, requires a subtle balance between physical incarnation and spiritual sublimation. Deleuze uses sublimation, or “counter-effectuation”, as a way of maintaining fidelity to the wild, the schizo, the nomad, to the uncoded singularity, but not necessarily to their literal physical exemplars. Sublimation in that sense can be found everywhere in Deleuze, de-literalising the models to extract the event, the process, the becoming. Perhaps it was Guattari who was caught in a performative contradiction as he needed to live in close physical proximity to the literal schizophrenic to get in contact with his own schizo process. Literal schizophrenia provides no guarantee against forming Oedipal (or other) subjugated relations, just as the literal voyage provides no guarantee either. The relative dosage of sublimation and of literal acting out necessary to one’s becoming is a pragmatic question, to be decided heuristically according to each case and not absolutely according to rules. In every utterance we must evaluate it’s pragmatic valences, and Deleuze indicates that the valences of ethics and politics, and of humour, are essential to understanding the “meaning” of the utterance. Seen as an ethical question “How can you stand those schizos?” would seem to be a question about the addressee’s, Aptekman’s, individuation. What makes positive the composition of his relations with those of that type of schizo (the type that can set fire to the chapel and then go hide in the woods, putting at risk not just lives and property, but the continued legal existence of the clinic). As an ethical exclamation this question expresses, as we have seen above, Deleuze’s own incapacity or unwillingness to compose with that sort of assemblage and his positive capacity to relate to creative schizo processes without literal involvement with clinical schizophrenics. As a humorous remark, it acqires all its power of provocation from the context of his collaboration on ANTI-OEDIPUS in which it was proferred. Deleuze and Guattari in their KAFKA tell us that the utterance as singularity has both ethical (they say political, but in a very general sense of political) and humorous dimensions at the same time. Humour is equated with joy. This is at the end of chapter 4 in a long footnote. “It’s the same thing: the politics of the utterance and the joy of desire” (my translation). Lastly, this anecdote was recounted by Aptekman, who does not seem to have been a philosophically reliable observer or narrator. Perhaps Deleuze wanted to provoke a new awareness in Aptekman that he was caught in a mimetic relation with Guattari or in a literal relation with schizophrenics. As Aptekman tells the story, Deleuze paled (power of being affected) and Guattari leaps into action (power of affecting) whereas Aptekman “froze” (catatonia). Perhaps Deleuze was calling attention to both an insensitivity and a passivity as components in Aptekman’s own particular capacity to “stand” schizos. The article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman “Bergson invokes metaphysics to show how a memory is not constituted after present perception, but is strictly contemporaneous with it, since at each instant duration divides into two simultaneous tendencies, one of which goes toward the future and the others falls back into the past.” – Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism In my continuing reading of Joshua Ramey’s interesting hermetic turn in Deleuzean thought he comes to a point where he takes up Deleuze’s Bergsonism. Here he sees Bergson’s figure of the mystic as a legislator, as “a leader who enables the life of the society to grow into a more vital expression” (KL 2409).1 He goes on to say, In Bergsonian terms, the mystic’s intense spirituality is in fact a kind of “innate science of matter,” a deep connection between unconscious mind and material depth that enables an extreme degree of freedom, even up to the capacity to re-create the instincts. (Pico della Mirandola’s vision of humanity as free because excessive, displaced, and neither finite nor infinite anticipates this dimension of Bergsonism.) Mysticism is thus, for Bergson-and one might add, retrospectively, for Renaissance hermeticism-not so much an ability to distance oneself from time and circumstance through identification with God, but an intensification of cosmic memory, an involution in the past of a universe become a “machine for the making of gods.”” What is important for Deleuze is that the mystic is not an exception to but rather an ideal type of human life. (Kindle Locations 2410-2414). The conception of the universe as a ‘machine for the making of the gods’, and of the enfoldings of cosmic memory through intensification and creative expressiveness as active and participatory agency rather than as some hybrid mystical identification through contemplation is key to Deleuze’s involvement in Bergsonism. Yet, I have problems with this last sentence where Ramey sees Deleuze’s use of the mystic figure as an ideal type. Why? Well Deleuze in his Bergsonism was not seeking some ideal type but the pragmatic figuration of a very earthly incarnation or materialization of the Vita Activa principle rather than the Vita Contemplativa of the god fearing Mystic type of the Christian variety. A radical immanence mystic of the earth, rather than an objectalist mystic of some contemplative world of God or Platonic realm of Ideas. The mystic as artist and co-creator of the real through active participation in its material judgments in which Deleuze divines the finite or mortal god in sense-datum is closer to the truth. Deleuze inverts our ideal type of the Mystic, reversing its contemplation of an objective Other, and instead shows the deus in the mud of existence; yet, this is no deus absconditus of Thomas Aquinas, this is the active principle of emergence and of that indefinable elan vital that is the creative movement of the ‘intenstive spatium’ itself. Is this Vitalism? Doesn’t Deleuze ultimately go beyond vitalism? Isn’t this the point of the event? As Deleuze said in the Logic of Sense wherein the “univocity of sense grasps language in its complete system, as the total expression of a unique expressed – the event” (LS, 248). The elan vital is that unique event, the movement of the finite god in the mud of our earthly lives, a material movement that is at once Univocity of the logic of sense, or as Deleuze so eloquently puts it the “poem without figures” (LS, 248). Isn’t the elan vital non other than the virtual incarnated? The movement of death, the temporal datum of the third sense of time? The replicative difference that inverts the Platonic realism of Ideas and returns them from the eternal realm of contemplation, and to the material world of the senses and actuality as both disjunctive and conjunctive elements within the individuation process is the problematique quest and solution to the non-representational figure that Deleuze sees as the strange stranger (Timothy Morton) we call the Mystic. This mystic divines out of the intensive spatium, out of the chaos of the noumenal continuum, the Ideas in the material sense-datum of existence. This Platonic inversion brings about what Ray Brassier in Nihil Unbound calls the “empirical correspondence between identity in representation and differenciation in actual experience” that is the “absolute correlation between intensive thinking and noumenal nature in the transcendent exercise of the faculties” (NU, 191). This return our earthy mystic to the ‘groundless ground that is ungrounded’ wherein the three movements of individuation, the phases the three synthesis: 1) the establishment of the conditions for the sub-representation experience of actuality; 2) the establishment of the conditions for the representation of actuality; and, finally, 3) the release of experience from the yoke of representation in the conjunction between the caesura of thinking and the ungrounding of extensity (NH, 191). As Brassier continues: “…the third synthesis brings about a fusion of the psychic and physical beyond the adjudications of representation and the legislatures of explication” (NU, 191). Through a cut or hole, the psyche escapes the temporal movement of that form that is both death and the empty form of time thereby escaping “from the entropic domain of physical death through an experience of dying whereby it becomes a medium for pre-individual singularities in the Idea and impersonal individuations of intensity” (NU, 192). And, as Deleuze tells us: “Such is the world of the ‘ONE’ or the ‘they’; a world which cannot be assimilated to that of everyday banality, but on the contrary, one wherein encounters and resonances unfold; the ultimate face of Dionysus and the true nature of the depth and groundlessness which overflows representation and brings forth simulacra” (Deleuze 1968: 355: 1994: 277 tm) Is this not our world as it is without the impositions of habit and the millennia long training in reason that has shaped our minds to filter out the strangeness of the real? Our minds act as defense systems against the truth, rather than revealing its Dionysian splendor. We know that for Brassier Deleuze ultimately falls under the sign of Vitalism, just another inheritor of Parmenides, one who brings thinking and being together in an idealist gesture of expressiveness: “[f]or Deleuze then, being is nothing apart from its expression in thought; indeed, it simply is this expression” (NU, 203). But is this true? As Brassier would have it Deleuze’s vitalism comes down to one conviction: “time makes a difference that cannot be erased” (NU, 203). Again, is this what Deleuze is saying? To answer that question would lead me far afield ( of interest to this is James Wilson’s work, Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide). Instead I’ll hold off on that and return to Josua Ramey and the Hermetic turn… One might think that Deleuze’s diviner is closer to a Sorceror, or a Heretic such as Giordano Bruno than to a Mystic. As Ramey tells us that for Deleuze “what the mystic represents is not a humanity in which the intellect is repudiated, but one in whom instinct and intelligence have become symbiotically united”. Then he quotes a key passage from Deleuze’s Bergsonism to prove his point: And what is this creative emotion, if not precisely a cosmic Memory, that actualizes all the levels at the same time, that liberates man from plane or the level that is proper to him, in order to make him a creator adequate to the whole movement of creation? This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls. It leaps from one soul to another, “every now and then,” crossing closed deserts. But to each member of a closed society, if he opens himself to it, it communicates a kind of reminiscence, an excitement that allows him to follow. (B, 111) What is interesting is not what he quotes here but what he leaves out of the quote. Just after that last sentence, Deleuze continues with a statement that juxtaposes a closed society (as quoted above) with an open society: “And from soul to soul, it traces the design of an open society, a society of creators, where we pass from one genius to another, through the intermediary of disciples or spectators or hearers” (B, 111). So what is happening here is the movement within a closed society of a new design, a blueprint for the future that is a sort of reminiscence – not of the past, but of futurity; a cosmic memory of what is coming toward us of a utopia of an active society of creators. Now just after these two passages in the next paragraph this all comes home as Deleuze brings this back to his own actual philosophical notions. Just here he tells us that what these disciples or spectators or hearers are passing around is the genesis of an intuition within the intellect: “It is the genesis of intuition in intelligence. If man accedes to the open creative totality, it is therefore by acting, by creating rather than by contemplating. In philosophy itself there is still way to much contemplation: Everything happens as if intelligence were already imbued with emotion, thus with intuition, but not sufficiently so for creating in conformity to the emotion” (B, 111-112). In the above what is important is that Deleuze is describing an Order of Things both open and creative, and that one participates in this order not through contemplation of its structure, but through an active participation as an agent whose intelligence imbued with emotive intuition participates in its ongoing creation. Deleuze qualifies all this saying, "Undoubtedly philosophy can only consider the mystical soul from the outside and from the point of view of its lines of probability. But it is precisely the existence of mysticism that gives a higher probability to this final transmutation into certainty, and also gives, as it were, an envelope or a limit to all the aspects of this method” (B, 112). What is this method? Deleuze uses the figure of the Mystic as an Artist of creation, one whose intuition penetrates into the extreme limit of the real, “who plays with the whole of creation, who invents an expression of it whose adequacy increases with its dynamism” (B, 112). He goes on to describe this artistic and creative mystic as a servant “of an open and finite God (such are the characteristic of the Élan Vital), the mystical soul actively plays the whole of the universe, and reproduces the opening in the Whole in which there is nothing to see or to contemplate” (B, 112). This active cut in the temporal order of things that is a repetition and creative reproduction, an artistic act and ongoing creation that is an event, a movement, a happening rather than an artistic object to contemplate is the central insight of Deleuze’s involvement in Bergsonism. At the end of this particular chapter he reminds us that what is significant about the three Bergsonian concepts of Duration, Memory, and the Élan Vital is this: “…Duration essentially defines a virtual multiplicity (what differs in nature). Memory then appears as the coexistence of all the degrees of difference in this multiplicity, in this virtuality. The Élan Vital, finally, designates the actualization of this virtual according to the lines of differentiation that correspond to the degrees – up to this precise line of man where the Élan Vital gains self-consciousness” (B, 112-113). What is fascinating in this is all the threads that would follow into such works as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense in one form or another flow out of this early work of 1966. But the more amazing thing is that Deleuze as Hermetic Philosopher or shall we say mortal god, a man who activates the creative incarnation of a finite god as Élan Vital emerging out of the virtual multiplicity through an active and creative act of intuition and intelligence. What a strange philosophy is this? Yet, this is not your objective God of the theologians, but rather the mortal god of the Lucretian swerve of expression and the ‘intensities’. Halward is wrong when he said that “Life lives and creation creates on a virtual plane that leads forever out of this world” (OW, 164).2 The virtual plane is our world which the philosopher as active artist actively participates in as an ongoing process of actualization that seeks not a way out of our world but a deeper and more dramatic interpenetration in its becomings, its processes. The trajectories of these lines of flight follow the path into this endless maze of the actual where being is movement and process, and creation is the active enfoldment of intuition in intelligence. Viva Vita Activa! If anything Deleuze is closer to the figure of Magus or Alchemist: “Even in his dreams he rediscovers or prepares matter. And durations that are inferior to him are still internal to him. Man therefore creates a differentiation that is valid for the Whole, and he alone traces out an open direction that is able to express a whole that is itself open. Whereas the other directions are closed and go round in circles … man is capable of scrambling the planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order finally to express naturing Nature." (B, 1o6) Interpreter or Diviner of the dreams of matter, an artist that expresses the naturing Nature that is neither static nor closed, but is a self-renewing open system of which intuition and intelligence are adequate to the very transcension of the limits of finitude by which we realize freedom. Like a Magus he scrambles the codes that bind our mind, that lock us down into common sense reality, and releases us to move freely beyond the planes of our conditioning and habits in order to finally envision the processes at the heart of things. Is this some mystical process? No. This is a very material process that effectuates a translation into philosophical language of a codified system of derangement of the senses that allows us to know things not as they are, but as they express themselves in and of themselves. Addendum: Virgilio Rivas has an interesting take on Joshua Ramey’s The Hermetic Deleuze on his blog: The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos. He also points out a Morgan Freeman program cited by footnotes2plato asking “Is the Universe Alive?” http://footnotes2plato.com/2013/01/20/is-the-universe-alive/ which brings together several scientists discussing the levels of reality and how the universe could itself be a living thing in process. 1. Joshua Ramey. The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal. (Kindle Edition 2012). The article is taken from: by Himanshu Damle In classical evolutionary biology the fitness landscape for possible strategies is considered static. Therefore optimization theory is the usual tool in order to analyze the evolution of strategies that consequently tend to climb the peaks of the static landscape. However in more realistic scenarios the evolution of populations modifies the environment so that the fitness landscape becomes dynamic. In other words, the maxima of the fitness landscape depend on the number of specimens that adopt every strategy (frequency-dependent landscape). In this case, when the evolution depends on agents’ actions, game theory is the adequate mathematical tool to describe the process. But this is precisely the scheme in that the evolving physical laws (i.e. algorithms or strategies) are generated from the agent-agent interactions (bottom-up process) submitted to natural selection. The concept of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is central to evolutionary game theory. An ESS is defined as that strategy that cannot be displaced by any alternative strategy when being followed by the great majority – almost all of systems in a population. In general, an ESS is not necessarily optimal; however it might be assumed that in the last stages of evolution — before achieving the quantum equilibrium — the fitness landscape of possible strategies could be considered static or at least slow varying. In this simplified case an ESS would be one with the highest payoff therefore satisfying an optimizing criterion. Different ESSs could exist in other regions of the fitness landscape. In the information-theoretic Darwinian approach it seems plausible to assume as optimization criterion the optimization of information flows for the system. A set of three regulating principles could be: Structure: The complexity of the system is optimized (maximized).. The definition that is adopted for complexity is Bennett’s logical depth that for a binary string is the time needed to execute the minimal program that generates such string. There is no a general acceptance of the definition of complexity, neither is there a consensus on the relation between the increase of complexity – for a certain definition – and Darwinian evolution. However, it seems that there is some agreement on the fact that, in the long term, Darwinian evolution should drive to an increase in complexity in the biological realm for an adequate natural definition of this concept. Then the complexity of a system at time in this theory would be the Bennett’s logical depth of the program stored at time in its Turing machine. The increase of complexity is a characteristic of Lamarckian evolution, and it is also admitted that the trend of evolution in the Darwinian theory is in the direction in which complexity grows, although whether this tendency depends on the timescale – or some other factors – is still not very clear. Dynamics: The information outflow of the system is optimized (minimized). The information is the Fisher information measure for the probability density function of the position of the system. According to S. A. Frank, natural selection acts maximizing the Fisher information within a Darwinian system. As a consequence, assuming that the flow of information between a system and its surroundings can be modeled as a zero-sum game, Darwinian systems would follow dynamics. Interaction: The interaction between two subsystems optimizes (maximizes) the complexity of the total system. The complexity is again equated to the Bennett’s logical depth. The role of Interaction is central in the generation of composite systems, therefore in the structure for the information processor of composite systems resulting from the logical interconnections among the processors of the constituents. There is an enticing option of defining the complexity of a system in contextual terms as the capacity of a system for anticipating the behavior at t + ∆t of the surrounding systems included in the sphere of radius r centered in the position X(t) occupied by the system. This definition would directly drive to the maximization of the predictive power for the systems that maximized their complexity. However, this magnitude would definitely be very difficult to even estimate, in principle much more than the usual definitions for complexity. Quantum behavior of microscopic systems should now emerge from the ESS. In other terms, the postulates of quantum mechanics should be deduced from the application of the three regulating principles on our physical systems endowed with an information processor. Let us apply Structure. It is reasonable to consider that the maximization of the complexity of a system would in turn maximize the predictive power of such system. And this optimal statistical inference capacity would plausibly induce the complex Hilbert space structure for the system’s space of states. Let us now consider Dynamics. This is basically the application of the principle of minimum Fisher information or maximum Cramer-Rao bound on the probability distribution function for the position of the system. The concept of entanglement seems to be determinant to study the generation of composite systems, in particular in this theory through applying Interaction. The theory admits a simple model that characterizes the entanglement between two subsystems as the mutual exchange of randomizers (R1, R2), programs (P1, P2) – with their respective anticipation modules (A1, A2) – and wave functions (Ψ1, Ψ2). In this way, both subsystems can anticipate not only the behavior of their corresponding surrounding systems, but also that of the environment of its partner entangled subsystem. In addition, entanglement can be considered a natural phenomenon in this theory, a consequence of the tendency to increase the complexity, and therefore, in a certain sense, an experimental support to the theory. In addition, the information-theoretic Darwinian approach is a minimalist realist theory – every system follows a continuous trajectory in time, as in Bohmian mechanics, a local theory in physical space – in this theory apparent nonlocality, as in Bell’s inequality violations, would be an artifact of the anticipation module in the information space, although randomness would necessarily be intrinsic to nature through the random number generator methodologically associated with every fundamental system at t = 0, and as essential ingredient to start and fuel – through variation – Darwinian evolution. As time increases, random events determined by the random number generators would progressively be replaced by causal events determined by the evolving programs that gradually take control of the elementary systems. Randomness would be displaced by causality as physical Darwinian evolution gave rise to the quantum equilibrium regime, but not completely, since randomness would play a crucial role in the optimization of strategies – thus, of information flows – as game theory states. The article is taken from: by Himanshu Damle A natural extension of the information-theoretic Darwinian approach for biological systems is obtained taking into account that biological systems are constituted in their fundamental level by physical systems. Therefore it is through the interaction among physical elementary systems that the biological level is reached after increasing several orders of magnitude the size of the system and only for certain associations of molecules – biochemistry. In particular, this viewpoint lies in the foundation of the “quantum brain” project established by Hameroff and Penrose (Shadows of the Mind). They tried to lift quantum physical processes associated with microsystems composing the brain to the level of consciousness. Microtubulas were considered as the basic quantum information processors. This project as well the general project of reduction of biology to quantum physics has its strong and weak sides. One of the main problems is that decoherence should quickly wash out the quantum features such as superposition and entanglement. (Hameroff and Penrose would disagree with this statement. They try to develop models of hot and macroscopic brain preserving quantum features of its elementary micro-components.) However, even if we assume that microscopic quantum physical behavior disappears with increasing size and number of atoms due to decoherence, it seems that the basic quantum features of information processing can survive in macroscopic biological systems (operating on temporal and spatial scales which are essentially different from the scales of the quantum micro-world). The associated information processor for the mesoscopic or macroscopic biological system would be a network of increasing complexity formed by the elementary probabilistic classical Turing machines of the constituents. Such composed network of processors can exhibit special behavioral signatures which are similar to quantum ones. We call such biological systems quantum-like. In the series of works Asano and others (Quantum Adaptivity in Biology From Genetics to Cognition), there was developed an advanced formalism for modeling of behavior of quantum-like systems based on theory of open quantum systems and more general theory of adaptive quantum systems. This formalism is known as quantum bioinformatics. The present quantum-like model of biological behavior is of the operational type (as well as the standard quantum mechanical model endowed with the Copenhagen interpretation). It cannot explain physical and biological processes behind the quantum-like information processing. Clarification of the origin of quantum-like biological behavior is related, in particular, to understanding of the nature of entanglement and its role in the process of interaction and cooperation in physical and biological systems. Qualitatively the information-theoretic Darwinian approach supplies an interesting possibility of explaining the generation of quantum-like information processors in biological systems. Hence, it can serve as the bio-physical background for quantum bioinformatics. There is an intriguing point in the fact that if the information-theoretic Darwinian approach is right, then it would be possible to produce quantum information from optimal flows of past, present and anticipated classical information in any classical information processor endowed with a complex enough program. Thus the unified evolutionary theory would supply a physical basis to Quantum Information Biology. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake AS: What do you think of Alexander Galloway’s comments on forgetting Deleuze? TB: I can only sympathise with him. Galloway seems to regret having wasted much of his time reading a lot of media theorists, no doubt for professional reasons, who make very uninformed use of Deleuze. His head seems to be in a mess at present: he can’t decide whether he is against “Deleuzianism”, or against 1972 Deleuze and in favour of 1990 Deleuze, or in favour of a paltry cluster of Deleuzian values that Laruelle rather than Deleuze gives us the means to think through. Maybe a close reading of Laruelle’s CHRISTO-FICTION would get rid of his confusion. AS: Are you calling Alexander Galloway, one of the founding members, along with Eugene Thacker, of the New Clarity, “confused”? TB: There is quite a lot of confusion in Galloway’s discussion of Deleuze. As I have already mentioned, he confuses Deleuzianism, Deleuze, and salvageable Deleuzian values. He also confuses the periodisation of various readings and receptions of Deleuze’s texts with the periodisation of Deleuze’s ideas themselves. Yet concerning the basic concepts of event, pluralism, multiplicity, and assemblage there is continuity between ANTI-OEDIPUS and the last writings. We must remember Deleuze. To go forward we need anamnesis, a return to texts whose pluralist deconstructive power is richer, more abundant, and more multiple than the Deleuzianism and the anti-Deleuzianism that have followed. First, we must forget the Badiousian Deleuze, the vitalist philosopher of “life” equated with an organic Totality. The primary concept is assemblage, not life. Deleuze describes himself as a “vitalist”, but the whole movement of his thought is in the construction of the concept of a non-organic, or unliving, life. There is no essence of life in Deleuze. The fold of life is unfolded to expose it to non-living forces of the outside (such as silicon) and recompose other folds of “life”. This is the source of Laruelle’s later, derivative concept of the “lived-without-life”. Secondly, we must forget the Laruellean Deleuze, the so-called “philosopher of difference”. Laruelle’s version of Deleuze should be added to Galloway’s list of misunderstandings of Deleuze, as his ideas on Deleuze have nothing to do with any of Deleuze’s texts (except for surreptitiously borrowing major ideas from them). Deleuze is primarily a pluralist, not a differentialist. AS: But Galloway does not reject Deleuze outright, he also wants to remember Deleuze. TB: Galloway wishes to remember Deleuze for a few core values: antifascism, materialism, communism, and immanence, yet he has a one-sided politicist vision of these concepts. But the concepts he cites as worthy of remembrance cannot be separated from those of assemblages, multiplicities, and events. AS: But just as he did with Harman’s OOO, Galloway shows that there is a formal homology between Deleuze’s anti-foundationalism and capitalism. Isn’t this alarming? TB: The formal homology Galloway notes between Deleuzian ontology and capitalism is no discovery, as Deleuze himself draws our attention to it as a positive feature of his anaysis, as long as we understand that it permits us to see not just the progessive potential but the limit of capitalism as well. AS: But Deleuze has been used to justify the facile spontaneism and relativism of the hippies and the post-moderns. TB: Lyotard, the only one to propose a coherent philosophical concept of the post-modern, included Deleuze under the label not for any wild-eyed postmodern relativism (anything goes, everything is equivalent), but for his notions of sense from nomadic encounter, of incommensurability and of heterogeneity. All the concepts that Galloway attributes to Deleuze are travesties, because he homogenises them. On the confusion between Deleuze’s constructivism, or assemblage theory of desire, and the Woodstock hippyism of free love and free desire, Deleuze is not at all in favour of pure expressive unfolding or decompression. He constantly emphasised the necessity of the fold and compression. Any examples he gave (drugs, schizos, nomads, networks, folds) had to be deterritorialised, or they were in danger of establishing new territories. Note: this is a fictitious dialogue between Agent Swarm and Terence Blake. I am grateful to a real dialogue on facebook with Adrian Martin, Bradley Kaye, and Gil Morejón for helping me to clarify my ideas. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake Guattari’s move from “schizoanalysis” to the “ecosophy” of his later years does not constitute a change in paradigm or the proposition of a new theoretical model. In both cases his concern is not with the elaboration of any particular theory or model, but with facilitating a process of “meta-modelization”. Far from propounding a system, his works are interventions, containing a series of reflections, lines of reference, and reminders on the multiple aspects that any particular model will have to take into account. A fundamental consideration is the need to think outside the isolated subject confronting an external object, and the need to take into account our directly collective subjectivity and our constitutive supplementation by technical or “machinic” inscription, interface and embedding. We are ecological subjectivities embedded in multiple networks, and not cut-off Cartesian subjects. Seen from this ecosophical perspective, however interesting an eliminative materialism such as R.Scott Bakker’s BBT model may be in analysing certain atomised contexts, its meta-modelization is totally impoverished, and is quite unable to accomodate technical equipment and instrumentation, inscriptions and reticulations, cognitive institutions and communities with their collective procedures of examination,validation and rectification. Despite the materialist-sounding talk about “brains” Bakker’s BBT is to that extent idealist in form, if not in content. Following an indication from nonmanifestation here, it is interesting to compare Bakker’s eliminativism with Michel Foucault’s earlier post-Althusserian dallying with structuralism and his later reintroduction of subjectivity, only outside the subject/object bifurcation. Foucault’s early work (BIRTH OF THE CLINIC, THE ORDER OF THINGS, ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE) was very much under the influence of the structuralist dissolution of the phenomenological subject, even if he maintained a certain distance from the programmatic aspects of structuralism. Bakker’s eliminativism takes us back to the 50s and 60s, and constitutes a sort of neuro-structuralism, at least in intention. However, the form of cognitive science that he borrows from reproduces the Cartesian paradigm at a materialised level, the solitary brain face to face with an external world, caught in the aporia of cognitive incompetence dictated by this scenario. The epistemological aporia is in fact dictated by an inadequate ontology. On Deleuze’s reading, Foucault’s final work generates a new ontology, based on the fold, that allows for processes of subjectivation that do not reintroduce a cut-off subject. This “fold” subjectivity has much in common with Johnston’s “gap” formative of subjectivity. In both cases we see a concept of subjectivity that precisely is not reducible to the cut-off subject, nor to “intentionality”, which is a secondary formation. Paradoxically, the cognitive anomalies that Bakker ceaselessly signals are the signs, as seen from within his paradigm, that this paradigm is radically insufficient. Our cognitive biases and general theoretical incompetence are already instantiations of Johnston’s constitutive gap, only seen negatively by means of Cartesian spectacles. This bias and incompetence of the individual brain is no sign of the inevitable failure of cognition, but rather the mark of our necessary inscription in the social and technical networks of what Bernard Stiegler calls transindividuation. The article is taken from: GUATTARI’S LINES OF FLIGHT (2): transversal vs transferential approaches to the reading contract9/19/2017 by Terence Blake Liveblogging reading Felix Guattari’s book LINES OF FLIGHT, translated by Andrew Goffey. My approach in reading LINES OF FLIGHT is non-professional. It is that of a marginalised non-academic philosopher. This state of affairs constitutes my transferential relation to Guattari’s text. I am not personally involved in the practicalities of analysis or of the institutional treatment of psychosis, but I think that Guattari’s concepts can be applied to my own situation and to that of many others. This is my transversal relation to the text. We need some small degree of transference to get hooked onto by a text, and a great degree of transversality to apply it elsewhere than in its own territory. Guattari’s contribution to Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative philosophy has mostly been downplayed or ignored, not only by academics faithful to the institutional vision, but also by those who are critical of the academic approach: Badiou, Zizek, Laruelle, Latour. Andrew Goffney begins his very interesting preface to Guattari’s LINES OF FLIGHT by regretting this state of affairs: Félix Guattari has not been well-served by the academic machine. He was marginalised almost from the start of his joint work with Gilles Deleuze, who was generally seen as the brains behind Anti-Oedipus. Latour’s “empirical metaphysics” reprises Guattari’s earlier existential and experiential approach to theorising. His recent emphasis on the need to “strengthen” institutions before criticising them, and on the current “fragility” of institutions, is an ambiguous reminder of Guattari’s call for institutional analysis. Yet there was always an institutional – and experiential – challenge embodied in their double-headed writing machine that all too easily falls by the wayside when Guattari’s role is downplayed. A passion for theory need not be “scholarly”, and academic reinscription need not be the model that all theorising must aim for. Deleuze valued Guattari for his “philosopher-becoming”, and not for his institutional credentials. what is preferred is an inscription of their thinking within canonised scholarly problematics (that Deleuze for one was always quick to repudiate). Guattari’s philosophical becoming was itself complex, a multiplicity of transversally interconnected becomings, a rhizome with multiple points of entry. Delirium was one starting point. Another was fiction. Their book on Kafka and the writer’s confrontation with the “diabolic powers” of the future can be read as a theorisation of what Laruelle would later call “philo-fiction”. schizophrenic delirium, with its ‘world historical, political, and racial’ content serving for them as something of a starting point for understanding both the ‘diabolic powers’ knocking on the door, as well as the compromises established with those powers by psychoanalysis. Academic philosophy, like psychoanalysis, is guilty of the contradiction of a seeming methodological individualism embedded in a collective, itself embedded in an institution. Guattari’s concern for acknowledging and for dealing with the madness inside the dialogical partners of philosophical training reveals an implicit hierarchical and monological substrate that is overt in the university setting. Philosophical dialogue composes explicitly with this madness. This engagement is rare in the academic setting. Guattari evinced a desire to escape from what he saw as the ‘methodological individualism’ of psychoanalysis, its reliance on one-on-one dialogue and its lack of engagement in the difficult, ongoing task of treating psychosis in the institution. Delirium is not the only way into Guattari’s thought (an exploration of delirium as philosophical method in Deleeuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? can be found here). Other starting points for Guattari were non-Euclidean geometries, as well as relativistic and quantum physics. “Non-philosopher” François Laruelle should have hailed Guattari as a precursor. If he had done so perhaps we would have been spared the doxic corporatism of the Anglophone Laruelleans. We would have had none of the regressive appeals to Lacanian theory, a simplified Badiou repackaged in non-philosophical terminology. Laruelle himself is close to Badiou on this point, regressing to pre-Guattari problematics. the transindividual processes that are put into play in and by an unconscious that is somewhat refractory to apprehension within the enunciative space-time of ‘ordinary’ analysis. Deleuze has given interesting analyses of the alienated relation between author and reader that is implicit in the contractual approach to the book, with its subjacent hierarchies. There is more to this pseudo- contract than an exchange between two individuals, the author and to be a buyer, assigned to the role of passive consumer. The phony ‘contractualism’ of the analytic relationship, with its ostensible exclusion of third parties and focus on the individual, Guattari’s concept of “transversality” democratises the transference , by freeing it from the sufficiency of psychoanalytic theory and the individual experience of analysis. Transversality is the intensive complex encounter, transference is its contractual simplification. Reading a book can be either transferential or transversal. The academic transference is the backward-looking activation of the repression of past traumas, paving them over with stereotyped concepts. Guattari’s conceptual displacement/relativisation of analytic ‘transference’ by institutional ‘transversality’ is one particularly fruitful outcome of the complex encounter between politics, therapy, psychoanalysis and the psychiatric hospital The neo-liberal contract of the book conceals a tacit hierarchy in which the institution (the academy, philosophy itself) figures as third partner. A fourth partner is the “unconscious”, a machinic production of intensity and singularity caught up in processes of subjectivation, in what Badiou calls truth processes. it sustained a rethinking of the unconscious in a social direction, breaking down the tacit hierarchy – inside and outside the institution – on which the ‘contract’ rested. Note: transversality means that there is no “correct” point. The academy is not to be excluded, and there is no automatic glory in the non-academy. Both can be bases of transferential identities, just as both can be nodes of transversal deconstruction. Here is Laruelle’s dyadic retranscription of the Deleuze-Guattari rhizome: (Source: https://linguisticcapital.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/laruelles-fragments-of-an-anti-guattari/.) Anyone with even a smattering of acquaintance with Guattari knows that this diagram is radically erroneous. Guattari begins with the rupture of the transferential dyad, of the Two. There is always a third involved – the institution, and a fourth – the transversal unconscious. Laruelle in his non-philosophy phase was incapable of seeing the rupture with dyadism that Guattari effectuated (by means of his concept, and practice, of transversality). Now that he has moved into a new phase, that of “quantum” or non-standard philosophy he should retract his earlier critiques of Deleuze and of Guattari. I say all this to widen the context, and to make it clear that Guattari’s texts are by no means irrelevant to current debates or theoretically antiquated. Recent transferential schools such as OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology), SR (Speculative Realism) and NP (Laruellean non-philosophy) rely on a public of readers who have forgotten, or who are too young to have known, the free play of speculation that was prevalent in the Continental philosophy of the sixties and the seventies. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake Just as Deleuze became more Nietzschean after his encounter with Guattari, one could argue that he became more “Lacanian” too. The lesson of Deleuze’s retrospective “Letter to a severe critic” is that although he took Nietzsche as an object of study in the 60s he was speaking from the point of view of the history of philosophy. It was only with the collaboration with Guattari that he was able to philosophise in his own name, a desire that working on Nietzsche had both stimulated and blocked. Deleuze’s statements about his philosophical development confirm an impression that we can have when reading DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and LOGIC OF SENSE of a struggle or agon, an underlying antagonism between two types of thought. Several commentators, including Badiou and Zizek, have echoed Deleuze’s auto-analysis and presented a vision of the “two Deleuzes”. This insight is usually expressed in the simplistic chronological terms of Deleuze-before-Guattari and Deleuze-after-Guattari. We are called on to choose one over the other, or to embrace a synthesis of the two. This splitting of Deleuze can lead to the picture of a luminous affirmative later Deleuze as against a more austere darker earlier Deleuze, leading to the necessity to return to (or to resuscitate) the sombre earlier Deleuze or to “darken” our vision of the later Deleuze. It would be more in line with Deleuze’s own thinking to maintain this divergent conjunction in his thought without reducing it to an absolute split. To begin to do justice to this internal antagonism within Deleuze’s thinking we can turn to a similar agon within Lacan’s own work. At a decisive moment Lacan felt obliged to choose between normalisation (Jacques-Alain Miller) or schizophrenisation (Guattari). Lacan chose the former and Deleuze chose the latter. However, in each case fragments of the rejected alternative persist in the choice actually taken. Yet this persistence of virtual fragments does not have equal weight, it is not a symmetric survival. After the rupture produced by ANTI-OEDIPUS there is no naive ignoring or going back. Lacan decided to ignore the rupture, to repress it. This repression is antinomic for a psychoanalyst. The “return” of the repressed came in the form of an increasing presence of Deleuzo-Guattarian themes in the later Lacan: demotion of the oedipal model, turn to the real, passage from linguistics to toplogy. A similar movement can be seen in Zizek’s work. Zizek highlights diverse Deleuzo-Guattarian themes (immanence, incompletude, disparity) that are to be found “already” in Lacan. But this retrospective movement proves too much. Zizek is only able to find in Lacan what he is looking for, and it is thanks to Deleuze that he knows what he is looking for. These Deleuzo-Guattarian themes are present in the earlier Lacan, but antagonistically: he is already repressing them before Deleuze and Guattari came to give them greater salience and valorisation. Lacan was repressing himself and the more radical consequences of his ideas, which is what made the Deleuzo-Guattarian rupture both possible and traumatic. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake Badiou, despite being radically mistaken and wrong-headed on important points in his interpretation of Deleuze as expressed in his book DELEUZE: THE CLAMOR OF BEING, highlights certain aspects of Deleuze that go against euphoric neoliberal interpretations and already point towards the need to include a “dark” Deleuze in our comprehensive, pluralist understanding of Deleuze’s philosophy. The only way I can make sense of the popularity of the Dark Deleuze theme is as an answer to the recent reductive interpretation of Deleuze as proposing the pure affirmation of the beautiful soul, Nietzche’s ass. I have never seen Deleuze in this way. Right from the beginning of my reading, in 1978, I saw him through Nietzschean eyes. Badiou’s book infuriated me when it came out in 1997, but twenty years later the details have faded in importance and the image of Deleuze as critical of neoliberal “artistic” capitalism remains. Badiou himself has continued to evolve and his most recent ideas on the “immanence of truths” reflects his own becoming-deleuzian. Time changes all things, which should be a banality for those who love Deleuze’s philosophy. I maintain that the darkness was there from the beginning, and this is what attracted me to Deleuze so many years ago. Laruelle on Badiou is clearly wrong, as he is on many other points. His readers would do well to judge Laruelle by his own criteria, and they would find him just as rigid, abstract, dogmatic and full of stereotypes as he claims Badiou to be, with some justification. Badiou himself is not always like this, and he often uses his theoretical vocabulary with pluralist openness and metaphorical fluidity. I am always surprised that people are willing to take a philosopher’s self-descriptions and self-presentations at face value. Cioran is a good example, people hail his “lucidity”, but in fact they are just repeating what he said about himself. I never found him particularly lucid and was not surprised when later it was found that he had romanced his life to fit his myth of himself and had had proto-fascist leanings in his youth. This is why I have never been on the side of those who edify a cult to Cioran, who paints the world grey on grey and then proclaims this monochrome vision “lucidity”. So when some Laruellians talk about Laruelle’s fluidity, his democracy of thought, and his inventivity I remain very sceptical. Despite its failings Laruelle’s ANTI-BADIOU is a very interesting book, and PHILOSOPHIE NON-STANDARD even more so. Yet I am convinced that Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou, and Zizek are far more “non-standard” than Laruelle is. I would never have thought of Deleuze as purely bright, just as I would never have thought of Cioran as particularly “lucid”. The difference is that the “bright” Deleuze is the public image that ideologists apply to cover over Deleuze, whereas the “lucid” Cioran is the self-publicity that Cioran applies to himself, to cover over his dark past and obscurantist delusions and his one-sided greyness of vision. For me, pluralist light trumps monochromatic vision, of Deleuze, of Badiou, of Laruelle, or of Cioran (including his own self-vision or self presentation), any day. Note: I am indebted to a discussion with Nicolas Cours-Barracq for helping me clarify my ideas on this question. The article is taken from: by Himanshu Damle There are many misleading metaphors obtained from naively identifying geometry with localization. One which is very close to that of String Theory is the idea that one can embed a lower dimensional Quantum Field Theory (QFT) into a higher dimensional one. This is not possible, but what one can do is restrict a QFT on a spacetime manifold to a submanifold. However if the submanifold contains the time axis (a ”brane”), the restricted theory has too many degrees of freedom in order to merit the name ”physical”, namely it contains as many as the unrestricted; the naive idea that by using a subspace one only gets a fraction of phase space degrees of freedom is a delusion, this can only happen if the subspace does not contain a timelike line as for a null-surface (holographic projection onto a horizon). The geometric picture of a string in terms of a multi-component conformal field theory is that of an embedding of an n-component chiral theory into its n-dimensional component space (referred to as a target space), which is certainly a string. But this is not what modular localization reveals, rather those oscillatory degrees of freedom of the multicomponent chiral current go into an infinite dimensional Hilbert space over one localization point and do not arrange themselves according according to the geometric source-target idea. A theory of this kind is of course consistent but String Theory is certainly a very misleading terminology for this state of affairs. Any attempt to imitate Feynman rules by replacing word lines by word sheets (of strings) may produce prescriptions for cooking up some mathematically interesting functions, but those results can not be brought into the only form which counts in a quantum theory, namely a perturbative approach in terms of operators and states. String Theory is by no means the only area in particle theory where geometry and modular localization are at loggerheads. Closely related is the interpretation of the Riemann surfaces, which result from the analytic continuation of chiral theories on the lightray/circle, as the ”living space” in the sense of localization. The mathematical theory of Riemann surfaces does not specify how it should be realized; if its refers to surfaces in an ambient space, a distinguished subgroup of Fuchsian group or any other of the many possible realizations is of no concern for a mathematician. But in the context of chiral models it is important not to confuse the living space of a QFT with its analytic continuation. Whereas geometry as a mathematical discipline does not care about how it is concretely realized the geometrical aspects of modular localization in spacetime has a very specific geometric content namely that which can be encoded in subspaces (Reeh-Schlieder spaces) generated by operator subalgebras acting onto the vacuum reference state. In other words the physically relevant spacetime geometry and the symmetry group of the vacuum is contained in the abstract positioning of certain subalgebras in a common Hilbert space and not that which comes with classical theories. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake The unconscious, for Guattari, is “structured” like a multiplicity of modes of semiotisation. This hypothesis contains in germ Bruno Latour ‘s multiple modes of existence, which are also modes of semiotisation: If it was still necessary to talk about structure with regard to the unconscious – which is not self-evident, a point we will come back to – we would say instead that it is structured like a multiplicity of modes of semiotisation, of which linguistic enunciation is perhaps not the most important (LINES OF FLIGHT). This implies no abandon of the Real for a facile relativism. The real is not linguistic but material, for Guattari. That explains why multiple modes of semiotisation, and not just the linguistic mode, are possible. Lacan is no materialist, and he does not argue very much in terms of the posited materiality of the signifier. A few explicitly materialist slogans do not compensate for the linguistic idealism of the rest. Nor are Freud and Lacan paragons of scientificity. The most that they show is that language is important, and itself material, they do not show that the psyche is totally, or even predominantly linguistic – that is a separate question. Lacan has rightly corrected a naive empiricist neglect of language in favour of a fictive “raw experience”. But he himself has exaggerated in the opposite sense, of a language-laden absorption of experience. Guattari’s bold conjecture is that there are many modes of semiotisation, which while making use of language, are not reducible to it. Science, the arts, religion, the economy, etc. Freud’s theory is mired in scientistic primitivism, which is why it needed Lacan’s linguistic structural re-interpretation to make it bearable. The “causality” of the signifier is a magical idealism expressed in quasi-scientific terminology. Lacan represents a half-way house between Freud and Jung, who recognised the power and the materiality of the signifier with his word-association test, before and independently of Freud. Our shared language is both collective and unconscious in its semiotic structures. This is another case where Lacan’s concentration on the signifier constitutes a half-way house between Freud and Jung. All of Freud’s thought is a case of magical thinking from a materialist point of view, in that he can give no real material status to the unconscious, nor can any material substrate be given to “psychic causality”. Hand-waving is not explication. Freudism is a promising but unfinished project, if evaluated in materialist terms. Personal analysis is no scientific proof. It demonstrates psychic causality but not material causality, which is an ontological supplement provided by the nostalgic scientistic faithful. Analysis varies from one practitioner to another, and mobilises multiple semiotic régimes. Guattari’s hypothesis of multiple modes of semiotisation is both more descriptively adequate and more speculatively plausible than any scientistic or linguistic idealist reductionism. Note: I wish to thank a facebook discussion with Doug Weichbrodt for helping me clarify these points. The article is taken from: by Himanshu Damle It is not the fact that we are living in a ten-dimensional world which forces string theory to a ten-dimensional description. It is that perturbative string theories are only anomaly-free in ten dimensions; and they contain gravitons only in a ten-dimensional formulation. The resulting question, how the four-dimensional spacetime of phenomenology comes off from ten-dimensional perturbative string theories (or its eleven-dimensional non-perturbative extension: the mysterious M theory), led to the compactification idea and to the braneworld scenarios. It is not the fact that empirical indications for supersymmetry were found, that forces consistent string theories to include supersymmetry. Without supersymmetry, string theory has no fermions and no chirality, but there are tachyons which make the vacuum instable; and supersymmetry has certain conceptual advantages: it leads very probably to the finiteness of the perturbation series, thereby avoiding the problem of non-renormalizability which haunted all former attempts at a quantization of gravity; and there is a close relation between supersymmetry and Poincaré invariance which seems reasonable for quantum gravity. But it is clear that not all conceptual advantages are necessarily part of nature – as the example of the elegant, but unsuccessful Grand Unified Theories demonstrates. Apart from its ten (or eleven) dimensions and the inclusion of supersymmetry – both have more or less the character of only conceptually, but not empirically motivated ad-hoc assumptions – string theory consists of a rather careful adaptation of the mathematical and model-theoretical apparatus of perturbative quantum field theory to the quantized, one-dimensionally extended, oscillating string (and, finally, of a minimal extension of its methods into the non-perturbative regime for which the declarations of intent exceed by far the conceptual successes). Without any empirical data transcending the context of our established theories, there remains for string theory only the minimal conceptual integration of basic parts of the phenomenology already reproduced by these established theories. And a significant component of this phenomenology, namely the phenomenology of gravitation, was already used up in the selection of string theory as an interesting approach to quantum gravity. Only, because string theory – containing gravitons as string states – reproduces in a certain way the phenomenology of gravitation, it is taken seriously. But consistency requirements, the minimal inclusion of basic phenomenological constraints, and the careful extension of the model-theoretical basis of quantum field theory are not sufficient to establish an adequate theory of quantum gravity. Shouldn’t the landscape scenario of string theory be understood as a clear indication, not only of fundamental problems with the reproduction of the gauge invariances of the standard model of quantum field theory (and the corresponding phenomenology), but of much more severe conceptual problems? Almost all attempts at a solution of the immanent and transcendental problems of string theory seem to end in the ambiguity and contingency of the multitude of scenarios of the string landscape. That no physically motivated basic principle is known for string theory and its model-theoretical procedures might be seen as a problem which possibly could be overcome in future developments. But, what about the use of a static background spacetime in string theory which falls short of the fundamental insights of general relativity and which therefore seems to be completely unacceptable for a theory of quantum gravity? At least since the change of context (and strategy) from hadron physics to quantum gravity, the development of string theory was dominated by immanent problems which led with their attempted solutions deeper. The result of this successively increasing self- referentiality is a more and more enhanced decoupling from phenomenological boundary conditions and necessities. The contact with the empirical does not increase, but gets weaker and weaker. The result of this process is a labyrinthic mathematical structure with a completely unclear physical relevance. The article is taken from: by Terence Blake Deleuze effectuated a pluralist rupture with his own previous thought in his collaboration with Guattari, in the light of which he saw his ealier philosophy as insufficiently pluralist. According to Deleuze he had been confined up til then to saying the multiple instead of doing or making the multiple. Badiou’s critique is a watered down and distorted version of Deleuze’s own auto-critique. Most of Badiou’s critique applies not to Deleuze himself, but rather to a Deleuzian doxa, a “Deleuzist” misunderstanding of Deleuze. However, Badiou is on to something concerning the pre-Guattari Deleuze, even if he is unable to recognise or accept the transformation in his thought that Deleuze effectuated thanks to his encounter Guattari. At least Badiou can see that there was something that had to be transformed. Deleuze’s fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One…We can therefore first state that one must carefully identify a metaphysics of the One in the work of Deleuze (Badiou, DELEUZE, 11). Alain Badiou’s DELEUZE, THE CLAMOR OF BEING was published in French in 1997. He isolates what he calls a “metaphysics of the One” in Deleuze’s work, without referencing, and seemingly being unaware of, François Laruelle’s related critique of the philosophies of difference, begun in 1981 in his THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY. Laruelle advances a similar critique to that elaborated by Badiou, diagnosing a monist residue, a continued adhesion to a metaphysics of the One, as being the source of Deleuze’s failure to break through Representation. Laruelle’s solution is to produce a new concept of the One that is not bound by Badiou’s opposition between “liberating the multiple” outside metaphysics or “submitting to a renewed concept of the One” inside metaphysics. His solution is to propose and explore the consequences of a renewed concept of the One that is not metaphysical, with the explicit goal of liberating the multiple. In the preface to THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY Laruelle declares that this is the driving intellectual and emotional force behind his concept of “the One without unity”. One should re-read Deleuze’s “Letter to a Severe Critic” (1973) not only as a defence against criticism, but also from the point of view of its being an auto-critique, that his previous concepts were sedimenting into an academic doxa, and as conceding too much to the domain of representation. It is important to note that after DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and LOGIC OF SENSE Deleuze let drop the problematic of difference, to turn to a theory and practice of free multiplicities. Laruelle’s non-metaphysical concept of the “One without unity” is a far more adequate description of Deleuze’s position than Badiou’s reading of it as embodying a metaphysics of the One as opposed to a problematic of non-unitary multiplicities. Deleuze’s LETTER TO A SEVERE CRITIC (1973) contains a very useful description of the impasse that a representational philosophy of difference leads to, and of the need to break with the mere representation of multiplicity in favour of a performative enunciation and enactment of free multiplicities. The article is taken from: |
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