RasTheDestroyer
8th November 2010, 10:07
We cannot see the true face of Mount Lu because we are standing on top of it.
I want to contribute to how thought reduces (contracts) some forms of difference while contemplating others. Intensities are desirable and perceptible partial objects - a hair color, high cheekbones, flat abs - that through their connectivity and association produce a 'sign.' the 'sign' for man is a connection or assemblage of these desirable qualities of 'masculinity.' differences and desire, against the Hegelian and structuralist negativity of difference and desire based on lack, exist positively and productively in nature and society. the color spectrum, wavelengths, and genetic variation are all forms of difference. indeed, each form of difference is different. human life is also difference, containing partial qualities, such as both male and female traits, or various colors and textures. differences produce meaning not by imposing it on a pure or meaningless nature, but through the contraction and contemplation of the flow of pre-existing differences in nature into socially 'coded' binary 'signs.' all life and essence is difference. the 'male'/'female' or 'black'/white' binaries which 'images' precede are the 'coding' of this difference, the coding of its 'being-imperceptible' complex data into 'becoming-perception', its classification of hierarchies into organized, recognizable bodies. for these 'images', such as color, texture, shape, curve and other forms, are meaningless, producing only their meaning and identity in their presence behind the signifier (much as C.G. Wallis believed of Jean Cocteau's Sang d'un počte (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKiUTObvcvk&feature=related)of 1930 that the idea of the film lie behind its allegorical plot from which its configuration of ideas weren't deducible). Form does not impose itself on formlessness, nor differentiation on sameness. By contrast , difference is the essence of everything. Difference imposes itself on difference. In capitalism extended beyond its limits, the difference between labor and money are reduced to a general law of equivalency exchange, and "...all the flows of desire, and all the intensities of life, become grounded on one single flow: the quantifiable medium of capital and exchange. On the other hand, capitalism also opens up new possibilities for thinking if we extend its power of decoding" (Colebrook, 2002):
Capitalism makes universal history possible, yet at the same time hinders its realization by recoding and reterritorializing for the sake of private surplus accumulation. Realizing universal history, according to Deleuze and Guattari, requires bringing both psychoanalysis and bourgeois political economy to the point of auto-critique, targeting asceticism and axiomatisation in theory, and eliminating them in practice (Holland 1999, p. 109).
Capital, then, attempts to turn every Becoming - an open, plane of inclusive difference - into Being - a fixed and motionless object, the Orphic statue of Cocteau's film. Indeed, when the statue remarks: "Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images," she is referring to the 'soul.' For the soul is "not just a transparent opening or window onto the world; it has its own world. Think of the way the mind does not just respond to stimulus (is not fully open to the world) but considers, images or thinks of its world. Matter, by contrast, does not represent or enfold its world; it has no memory or ‘contraction’ of the world into its own point of view." (Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, 2002). The soul is perception, but not just representation or 're-presentation' of the world. The world, too, reflects the mirror of perception. This means then that all life exists on a plane of perceptions, not bodies. Perception contemplates, curves, folds, pleats and inflects matter into Becomings at different points of difference from which this infinity can be perceived, but could never be "given once and for all in an all encompassing God's-eye view." (Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, 2002). It also means the binary of 'perceiver' and 'perceived' is removed, for perception is sensation, a response to the world. A perception is an event that happens to something, an encounter between events. Even rocks and plants have perception, as they too respond to their external world. If all life and nature is a plane of worlds of perception, then the 'world'/thought' dualism and its associated neo-Kantian 'correspondence theory of truth' dominating the classicism of Western philosophy and culture has been overcome and sublated by the 'conscious extension' of a Spinozan substance, by a self-reflexive epistemology of positive dialectic, by an enfolded form and unenclosed matter on the same plane of perception. This is a horizontal plane of thought and world without a grounding axiom. Indeed, Deleuze uses his concept of 'deterritorialization' to describe hyper-capitalism as a network economy that is "breaking down traditional boundaries" (Don Tapscott, 2002), or what Marx said of fixed relations becoming "antiquated" before they can "ossify." (Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, 1848). As post-Marxists and icons of the alter-globalization movement Hardt and Negri point out that the 'multitude' is a polymorphous 'plane of singularities, a multiplicity, an open and inclusive relation bearing an indistinct resemblance to those outside it.' All capitalism regimes, they say, must transform the multitude into a 'people,' a closed relation excluding those that exist outside of it, generally another 'people' from another nation-state.
I want to contribute to how thought reduces (contracts) some forms of difference while contemplating others. Intensities are desirable and perceptible partial objects - a hair color, high cheekbones, flat abs - that through their connectivity and association produce a 'sign.' the 'sign' for man is a connection or assemblage of these desirable qualities of 'masculinity.' differences and desire, against the Hegelian and structuralist negativity of difference and desire based on lack, exist positively and productively in nature and society. the color spectrum, wavelengths, and genetic variation are all forms of difference. indeed, each form of difference is different. human life is also difference, containing partial qualities, such as both male and female traits, or various colors and textures. differences produce meaning not by imposing it on a pure or meaningless nature, but through the contraction and contemplation of the flow of pre-existing differences in nature into socially 'coded' binary 'signs.' all life and essence is difference. the 'male'/'female' or 'black'/white' binaries which 'images' precede are the 'coding' of this difference, the coding of its 'being-imperceptible' complex data into 'becoming-perception', its classification of hierarchies into organized, recognizable bodies. for these 'images', such as color, texture, shape, curve and other forms, are meaningless, producing only their meaning and identity in their presence behind the signifier (much as C.G. Wallis believed of Jean Cocteau's Sang d'un počte (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKiUTObvcvk&feature=related)of 1930 that the idea of the film lie behind its allegorical plot from which its configuration of ideas weren't deducible). Form does not impose itself on formlessness, nor differentiation on sameness. By contrast , difference is the essence of everything. Difference imposes itself on difference. In capitalism extended beyond its limits, the difference between labor and money are reduced to a general law of equivalency exchange, and "...all the flows of desire, and all the intensities of life, become grounded on one single flow: the quantifiable medium of capital and exchange. On the other hand, capitalism also opens up new possibilities for thinking if we extend its power of decoding" (Colebrook, 2002):
Capitalism makes universal history possible, yet at the same time hinders its realization by recoding and reterritorializing for the sake of private surplus accumulation. Realizing universal history, according to Deleuze and Guattari, requires bringing both psychoanalysis and bourgeois political economy to the point of auto-critique, targeting asceticism and axiomatisation in theory, and eliminating them in practice (Holland 1999, p. 109).
Capital, then, attempts to turn every Becoming - an open, plane of inclusive difference - into Being - a fixed and motionless object, the Orphic statue of Cocteau's film. Indeed, when the statue remarks: "Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images," she is referring to the 'soul.' For the soul is "not just a transparent opening or window onto the world; it has its own world. Think of the way the mind does not just respond to stimulus (is not fully open to the world) but considers, images or thinks of its world. Matter, by contrast, does not represent or enfold its world; it has no memory or ‘contraction’ of the world into its own point of view." (Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, 2002). The soul is perception, but not just representation or 're-presentation' of the world. The world, too, reflects the mirror of perception. This means then that all life exists on a plane of perceptions, not bodies. Perception contemplates, curves, folds, pleats and inflects matter into Becomings at different points of difference from which this infinity can be perceived, but could never be "given once and for all in an all encompassing God's-eye view." (Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze, 2002). It also means the binary of 'perceiver' and 'perceived' is removed, for perception is sensation, a response to the world. A perception is an event that happens to something, an encounter between events. Even rocks and plants have perception, as they too respond to their external world. If all life and nature is a plane of worlds of perception, then the 'world'/thought' dualism and its associated neo-Kantian 'correspondence theory of truth' dominating the classicism of Western philosophy and culture has been overcome and sublated by the 'conscious extension' of a Spinozan substance, by a self-reflexive epistemology of positive dialectic, by an enfolded form and unenclosed matter on the same plane of perception. This is a horizontal plane of thought and world without a grounding axiom. Indeed, Deleuze uses his concept of 'deterritorialization' to describe hyper-capitalism as a network economy that is "breaking down traditional boundaries" (Don Tapscott, 2002), or what Marx said of fixed relations becoming "antiquated" before they can "ossify." (Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, 1848). As post-Marxists and icons of the alter-globalization movement Hardt and Negri point out that the 'multitude' is a polymorphous 'plane of singularities, a multiplicity, an open and inclusive relation bearing an indistinct resemblance to those outside it.' All capitalism regimes, they say, must transform the multitude into a 'people,' a closed relation excluding those that exist outside of it, generally another 'people' from another nation-state.