RasTheDestroyer
9th November 2010, 21:17
RasTheDestroyer
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 (more on 'contraction' and 'contemplation' later). Intensities are desirable and perceptible partial qualities - a hair color, high cheekbones, facial stubble - that through their connection 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, sound waves, particle waves, electromagnetic 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[I/], 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, [I]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 symbolic representatives 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. Deleuze says that all perception is an 'event' or 'encounter', a cause, as it were, that happens to us. Amor fati becomes the revolutionary doctrine of the proletariat:
Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth—to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event (Deleuze 1990)
It is not through the self-awareness of the working class as a subject that revolutions are fought, but through an 'Event' of which proletarian resistance is an offspring. We should here understand 'Event' as an external cause or stimulus to which something responds. An Event can be one of two sorts: one, a perceiver's response to an external cause, or two, the response of some perceived thing resulting from an external cause. Running through this immanence is Spinoza's treatise on the Nature of God as Substance which contain attributes of extension and thought as a material extension of extension. But this Event can have profound revolutionary consequences: "Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation [of wealth from capital] and selforganization [of the multitude] reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power. […] We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real." (Hardt, Michael; Antonio Negri (2000). Empire)
In a word, it is only through the multitude's 'practical experimentation' that a new social order is realized. For Deleuze, 'virtuality' is a real that awaits actualization by Event. In the plane of the multiplicity of different forms the management of society can express, all are real. However, many will remain virtual, awaiting actualization by an Event. Like DNA's intensive flow of genetic codes, all the codes are real, all exist, but some are actualized by some response to its environment while others remain virtual. Those that remain virtual are enclosed by a reterritorializing boundary. Those that are actualized are 'contemplated.' By 'contemplation' here I mean a deterritorialized 'broadening' or 'expansion' of the perception of difference's intensities.
Deleuze is forced to create a new form of grammar capable of apprehending the multiplicity of differences on this plane of immanence by speaking outside the traditional logical syntax of subject and predicate. For Deleuze admits of no distinction between what a thing is and what it does. This accounts for his new revolutionary politics without a self-conscious class 'subject' grounded in an axiom. We may say 'the sun rises' but we would be attaching a verb to a noun, and a thing is defined by the multitude of expressions it can possibly take. Instead, Deleuze uses infinitives like 'to rise' to demonstrate the immanent plane of Becoming that different perceptions and worlds each located on a different point of difference exist on (but not 'in' - more on this later). The concept of the immanent is centered mainly on the causal 'genesis' or the 'genetic condition of the possibility of the real' for which Deleuze's positive name is the 'virtual.' When asked to define 'immanent causality,' Deleuze wrote: "What do we mean by immanent cause? It is a cause which is realized, integrated and distinguished in its effect. Or rather the immanent cause is realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual presupposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages (it is for the latter that Foucault most often reserves the term ‘mechanisms’)." Further, Deleuze warns that "...the plane of immanence is vulnerable to the 'four great errors or illusions identified by Nietzsche: (1) the illusion of transcendence (a making immanence immanent ‘to’ something or discovering a transcendence within immanence itself); (2) the illusion of universals (when concepts are confused with the plane itself); (3) the illusion of the eternal (when it is forgotten that concepts must be created); and, (4) the illusion of discursiveness." His revolutionary contribution, then, was repudiating the 'two-worlds' system of 'thought' and 'reality' that pervaded Western philosophy for over two thousand centuries, and offering a new way of thinking about different forms of difference - art, politics, geography, genetic transmission, evolution, biochemistry, physics, etc.
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 (more on 'contraction' and 'contemplation' later). Intensities are desirable and perceptible partial qualities - a hair color, high cheekbones, facial stubble - that through their connection 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, sound waves, particle waves, electromagnetic 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[I/], 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, [I]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 symbolic representatives 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. Deleuze says that all perception is an 'event' or 'encounter', a cause, as it were, that happens to us. Amor fati becomes the revolutionary doctrine of the proletariat:
Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth—to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event (Deleuze 1990)
It is not through the self-awareness of the working class as a subject that revolutions are fought, but through an 'Event' of which proletarian resistance is an offspring. We should here understand 'Event' as an external cause or stimulus to which something responds. An Event can be one of two sorts: one, a perceiver's response to an external cause, or two, the response of some perceived thing resulting from an external cause. Running through this immanence is Spinoza's treatise on the Nature of God as Substance which contain attributes of extension and thought as a material extension of extension. But this Event can have profound revolutionary consequences: "Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation [of wealth from capital] and selforganization [of the multitude] reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power. […] We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real." (Hardt, Michael; Antonio Negri (2000). Empire)
In a word, it is only through the multitude's 'practical experimentation' that a new social order is realized. For Deleuze, 'virtuality' is a real that awaits actualization by Event. In the plane of the multiplicity of different forms the management of society can express, all are real. However, many will remain virtual, awaiting actualization by an Event. Like DNA's intensive flow of genetic codes, all the codes are real, all exist, but some are actualized by some response to its environment while others remain virtual. Those that remain virtual are enclosed by a reterritorializing boundary. Those that are actualized are 'contemplated.' By 'contemplation' here I mean a deterritorialized 'broadening' or 'expansion' of the perception of difference's intensities.
Deleuze is forced to create a new form of grammar capable of apprehending the multiplicity of differences on this plane of immanence by speaking outside the traditional logical syntax of subject and predicate. For Deleuze admits of no distinction between what a thing is and what it does. This accounts for his new revolutionary politics without a self-conscious class 'subject' grounded in an axiom. We may say 'the sun rises' but we would be attaching a verb to a noun, and a thing is defined by the multitude of expressions it can possibly take. Instead, Deleuze uses infinitives like 'to rise' to demonstrate the immanent plane of Becoming that different perceptions and worlds each located on a different point of difference exist on (but not 'in' - more on this later). The concept of the immanent is centered mainly on the causal 'genesis' or the 'genetic condition of the possibility of the real' for which Deleuze's positive name is the 'virtual.' When asked to define 'immanent causality,' Deleuze wrote: "What do we mean by immanent cause? It is a cause which is realized, integrated and distinguished in its effect. Or rather the immanent cause is realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual presupposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages (it is for the latter that Foucault most often reserves the term ‘mechanisms’)." Further, Deleuze warns that "...the plane of immanence is vulnerable to the 'four great errors or illusions identified by Nietzsche: (1) the illusion of transcendence (a making immanence immanent ‘to’ something or discovering a transcendence within immanence itself); (2) the illusion of universals (when concepts are confused with the plane itself); (3) the illusion of the eternal (when it is forgotten that concepts must be created); and, (4) the illusion of discursiveness." His revolutionary contribution, then, was repudiating the 'two-worlds' system of 'thought' and 'reality' that pervaded Western philosophy for over two thousand centuries, and offering a new way of thinking about different forms of difference - art, politics, geography, genetic transmission, evolution, biochemistry, physics, etc.