blake 3:17
13th July 2010, 02:59
Hello all,
May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state. It's fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin.4 They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.
I've recently become interested in Gilles Deleuze and the what his thinking means for an emancipatory socialist/anarchist praxis. I'd previously dismissed him as fairly irrelevant if intriguing. I'd been more interested in his frequent collaborator Felix Guattari who seemed a bit more on the practical side of things.
From Guattari:
The Italians of Radio Alice have a beautiful saying: when they are asked what has to be built, they answer that the forces capable of destroying this society surely are capable of building something else, yet that will happen on the way. I have no idea what the future model of society or of relationships will be. I think it's a false problem, the kind of false problem that Marx and Engels tried to avoid. We can only do one thing, and that's to acknowledge the end of a society. The revolutionary process won't stem from a rational, Hegelian, or dialectical framework. Instead it will be a generalized revolution, a conjunction of sexual, relational, esthetic, and scientific revolutions, all making cross-overs, markings, and currents of deterritorialization.
His other peer I've had the most time for is Foucault, who Deleuze did admire and write on. Their fall out was over Israel -- Deleuze stood for the Palestinian struggle, while Foucault fell for Zionism. An amusing piece by Edward Said: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/edward-said/diary I'd read this some time ago and accepted the criticism of Foucault and Sartre but neglected Deleuze.
A strange piece on D & G and Israeli military strategy: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/
And some cartoony art and poetry inspired by Deleuze and the Tupamoros: http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/03/o_bailan_todos_.html
And some weird diagrams: http://www.factoryschool.com/backlight/diagrammatica/index.html
Negri: A Thousand Plateaus, which I regard as a major philosophical work, seems to me at the same time a catalogue of unsolved problems, most particularly in the field of political philosophy. Its pairs of contrasting terms—process and project, singularity and subject, composition and organization, lines of flight and apparatuses/strategies, micro and macro, and so on—all this not only remains forever open but it's constantly being reopened, through an amazing will to theorize, and with a violence reminiscent of heretical proclamations. I've nothing against such subversion, quite the reverse . . . But I seem sometimes to hear a tragic note, at points where it's not clear where the "war-machine" is going.
Deleuze: I'm moved by what you say. I think Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself. A Thousand Plateaus sets out in many different directions, but these are the three main ones: first, we think any society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it flees all over the place, and it's very interesting to try and follow the lines of flight taking shape at some particular moment or other. Look at Europe now, for instance: western politicians have spent a great deal of effort setting it all up, the technocrats have spent a lot of effort getting uniform administration and rules, but then on the one hand there may be surprises in store in the form of upsurges of young people, of women, that become possible simply because certain restrictions are removed (with "untechnocratizable" consequences); and on the other hand it's rather comic when one considers that this Europe has already been completely superseded before being inaugurated, superseded by movements coming from the East. These are major lines of flight. There's another direction in A Thousand Plateaus, which amounts to considering not just lines of flight rather than contradictions, but minorities rather than classes. Then finally, a third direction, which amounts to finding a characterization of "war machines" that's nothing to do with war but to do with a particular way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times: revolutionary movements (people don't take enough account, for instance, of how the PLO has had to invent a space-time in the Arab world), but artistic movements too, are war-machines in this sense.
First quote and last quote from http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm
Perhaps the occasional pieces, bits of protest and insight add up to something bigger and bolder than I'd thought.
What does this lead to? It is way more interesting than Wittgenstein.
Edited to add: This is a link to fairly long translation/interpretation/summary of an exhaustive interview with Deleuze done in the late 80s. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~wrankin/deleuzeABC.html
May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state. It's fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin.4 They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.
I've recently become interested in Gilles Deleuze and the what his thinking means for an emancipatory socialist/anarchist praxis. I'd previously dismissed him as fairly irrelevant if intriguing. I'd been more interested in his frequent collaborator Felix Guattari who seemed a bit more on the practical side of things.
From Guattari:
The Italians of Radio Alice have a beautiful saying: when they are asked what has to be built, they answer that the forces capable of destroying this society surely are capable of building something else, yet that will happen on the way. I have no idea what the future model of society or of relationships will be. I think it's a false problem, the kind of false problem that Marx and Engels tried to avoid. We can only do one thing, and that's to acknowledge the end of a society. The revolutionary process won't stem from a rational, Hegelian, or dialectical framework. Instead it will be a generalized revolution, a conjunction of sexual, relational, esthetic, and scientific revolutions, all making cross-overs, markings, and currents of deterritorialization.
His other peer I've had the most time for is Foucault, who Deleuze did admire and write on. Their fall out was over Israel -- Deleuze stood for the Palestinian struggle, while Foucault fell for Zionism. An amusing piece by Edward Said: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/edward-said/diary I'd read this some time ago and accepted the criticism of Foucault and Sartre but neglected Deleuze.
A strange piece on D & G and Israeli military strategy: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/
And some cartoony art and poetry inspired by Deleuze and the Tupamoros: http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2006/03/o_bailan_todos_.html
And some weird diagrams: http://www.factoryschool.com/backlight/diagrammatica/index.html
Negri: A Thousand Plateaus, which I regard as a major philosophical work, seems to me at the same time a catalogue of unsolved problems, most particularly in the field of political philosophy. Its pairs of contrasting terms—process and project, singularity and subject, composition and organization, lines of flight and apparatuses/strategies, micro and macro, and so on—all this not only remains forever open but it's constantly being reopened, through an amazing will to theorize, and with a violence reminiscent of heretical proclamations. I've nothing against such subversion, quite the reverse . . . But I seem sometimes to hear a tragic note, at points where it's not clear where the "war-machine" is going.
Deleuze: I'm moved by what you say. I think Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself. A Thousand Plateaus sets out in many different directions, but these are the three main ones: first, we think any society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it flees all over the place, and it's very interesting to try and follow the lines of flight taking shape at some particular moment or other. Look at Europe now, for instance: western politicians have spent a great deal of effort setting it all up, the technocrats have spent a lot of effort getting uniform administration and rules, but then on the one hand there may be surprises in store in the form of upsurges of young people, of women, that become possible simply because certain restrictions are removed (with "untechnocratizable" consequences); and on the other hand it's rather comic when one considers that this Europe has already been completely superseded before being inaugurated, superseded by movements coming from the East. These are major lines of flight. There's another direction in A Thousand Plateaus, which amounts to considering not just lines of flight rather than contradictions, but minorities rather than classes. Then finally, a third direction, which amounts to finding a characterization of "war machines" that's nothing to do with war but to do with a particular way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times: revolutionary movements (people don't take enough account, for instance, of how the PLO has had to invent a space-time in the Arab world), but artistic movements too, are war-machines in this sense.
First quote and last quote from http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm
Perhaps the occasional pieces, bits of protest and insight add up to something bigger and bolder than I'd thought.
What does this lead to? It is way more interesting than Wittgenstein.
Edited to add: This is a link to fairly long translation/interpretation/summary of an exhaustive interview with Deleuze done in the late 80s. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~wrankin/deleuzeABC.html