gilles deleuze
first intro’d to the name via MaryAnn.. rhizome.. line of flight..
Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as “buggery (enculage)”, as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.
In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his philosophical system. (But see above, Deleuze’s interpretations.) Deleuze’s writings on subjects such as calculus and quantum mechanics are, according to Sokal and Bricmont, vague, meaningless, or unjustified. However, by Sokal and Bricmont’s own admission, they suspend judgment about Deleuze’s philosophical theories and terminology.
Gilles Deleuze borrowed the doctrine of ontological univocity from Scotus. He claimed that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. “With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being.”
Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance,God or Nature. He claims that it is the organizing principle of the Dutchman’s philosophy, despite the absence of the term from any of Spinoza’s works. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula “pluralism = monism”
Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking
It may be practically impossible to attain a God’s-eye, neutral point of view, but that is the ideal to approximate:
perhaps..
Deleuze, who had suffered from respiratory ailments from a young age, developed tuberculosis in 1968 and underwent a thoracoplasty (lung removal). He suffered increasingly severe respiratory symptoms for the rest of his life. In the last years of his life, simple tasks such as handwriting required laborious effort. In 1995, he committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his apartment
Deleuze himself found little to no interest in the composition of an autobiography. When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: “Academics’ lives are seldom interesting.” When a critic seized upon Deleuze’s unusually long, uncut fingernails as a revealing eccentricity, he replied: “I haven’t got the normal protective whorls, so that touching anything, especially fabric, causes such irritation that I need long nails to protect them.” Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus:
- “What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? … If I stick where I am, if I don’t travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. … Arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.
- Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking.
- Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become—though we cannot know what that is in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. “Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?”
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via Dave – a paper (2004) by Sian Bayne
striated and smooth spaces – Deleuze & Guattari:
Movement happens differently within each of these spaces. Smooth space
is a space of becoming, of wandering (nomad space), where the movement is
more important than the arrival. In striated space, what is most important is
arrival at the point towards which one is oriented: ‘In striated space, lines or
trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to
another. In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the
trajectory’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 478).[..]
What is important about this conceptualisation of space is not so much
the way the two types of space are opposed to each other as their tendency to
pervade each other – for striation to appropriate the smooth, and for the smooth
to emerge from the striated (p. 500).
calculus ness of the ginormously small – where we can be private in public.. et al
Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle
is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts
new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that
a smooth space will suffice to save us. (p. 500)
the dance. the smooth within the striated and the striated within the smooth.. till we no longer need the words. perhaps.
The problem Ulmer poses to his students is the
issue of their own identity and its modes of formation. The reason for this
focus appears to be partly metaphorical – ‘the problem of one’s own identity is
a simulacrum of the unknowns of any field of knowledge’ – and partly
pedagogical – ‘it is difficult to remain indifferent or disengaged when the heart
of the inquiry is a vision of one’s own being’ (Ulmer, 2003b)
as well as – how to keep my freedom from interfering with yours and/or ours..
Much as ‘it is possible to live
striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth even in the
cities, to be an urban nomad’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 482).
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a thousand plateaus
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Adam Greenfield often refers to Deleuze’s any-space-whatever in against the smart city:
As Deleuze defines it, any-space-whatever is never important for any quality of its own but only for the connections it facilitates or brings into being.
cinema 1
Deleuze looks at the work of Bresson to explore how affect can be expressed in a face. Also, in the “any-space-whatever” (p. 110). This is done using color/saturation, lighting, choice, etc. Naturalist films are concerned with impulse.
http://deleuzecinemaproject1.blogspot.com/
http://www.anyspacewhatever.com/tag/gilles-deleuze/
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/biography
http://www.anyspacewhatever.com/about
About A-S-W
Space is no longer a particular determined space, it has become any-space-whatever [espace quelconque…] Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualization, all determination…
– Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-ImageAnd just as the image must attain the indefinite, while remaining completely determined, so space must always be an any-space-whatever, disused, unmodified, even though it is entirely determined geometrically (a square with these sides and diagonals, a circle with these zones, a cylinder “fifty metres round and sixteen high”). The any-space-whatever is populated and well-trodden, it is even that which we ourselves populate and traverse, but it is opposed to all our pseudoqualified extensions, and is defined as “neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away.” […] It is a matter of covering every possible direction, while nonetheless moving in a straight line. There is equality between the straight line and the plane, and between the plane and the volume: the consideration of space gives a new meaning and a new object to exhaustion—exhausting the potentialities of an any-space-whatever.
– Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” Essays Critical and Clinical
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in Hardt/Negri’s declaration p14:
the problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying. – Deleuze
never nothing going on and john cage silence/still ness
Instead of information and communication, Deleuze says, what we often need is the silence necessary for there to be thought
quiet enough to hear it ness – Pascal ness:
the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to be quiet in his room.
Mediatization is a major factor in the increasingly blurred divisions between work and life
so the need/search/craving for eudaimonia ness
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fb share by carol:
if the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode the entire educational system – gillies deleuze
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postscript on societies of control
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be you. 