hi mark, apologies for long delay -i thought i would try going out to play
in the Nietzsche-list next door but its a horrible place, full of bullies
and despots. anyhow back to your post...
>>> Mark Crosby <Crosby_M@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 09/11 10:21 pm >>>
Thanks Ruth: When you wrote about "the virtual
'shadow' that bothers me in the relation between the
two series" and how "confusion arises, i think, with
the concept of the total virtual past and the partial
deduction (subtraction) of virtuals in the passing of
the total virtual. the partial deduction is a
different kind of (here mechanical) multiplicity
necessary to an assymetric synthesis", you put your
finger right on the confusion I was having!
yes, well i've got my finger on it too which does not make me any the less
confused about it!
And then you said "why this passing is structured
first by the elementary dualism of the passive
synthesis, i have never really quite understood. why
not an aggregation of a three thing of a four thing
first?" Yes! I'm very slow in working thru this stuff
but I'm always trying to contrast this triadicity in
Deleuze with that in CS Peirce, who starts with
Firstness as the force of thought and ends with
Thirdness as Habit? Well, maybe back to Bergson and
the Cinema books after this excursion thru _Difference
& Repetition_ and _Logic of Sense_..
i'm extremely weak on Peirce so please correct me where necessary. would P
also argue that some signs were indexical ( directly causal) some iconic (
representation based on resemblance), some symbolic ( based on shared
agreement). do these three qualites align to the schema above? if so, then
the confusion might be better explained by a symbolic element within the
indexical. i.e a habitual concept of cause ( symbolically shared) standing
for indexical nature of firstness. the interventions of the cinema texts
thus make sense as a new semiotics within this triadic structure but which
replaces the 'dark precursor' of DR with multiple sheets of time?
But maybe this is Deleuze's answer: "If we consider
all three serial kinds - the connective synthesis on a
single series, the conjunctive synthesis of
convergence, and the disjunctive synthesis of
resonance, we see that the third proves to be the
truth and the destination of the others, to the degree
that the disjunctive attains its positive and
affirmative use" (LoS 229).
yes, but as you point out below, D will aslo go on argue that each kind of
repetition is linked to sexual development, moreorless, within Lacan's
sexual schema. if your argument for P's schema is correct then the
disjunctive might be thought of, instead, as the moment of resonance (
dissonance?) between firstness and thirdness. a resonance which breaks both
the force of habit and the agreements on which symbolic meanings are
predicated.. Zarathustra's affirmation of the third repeition means that he
has to become equal to the inequal and to do this his phantasmic identity,
presumeably built up in the first two syntheses, has to die. the position of
the fiancee throughout assumes a fourth term in play as the difference
between god and man. as has been highlighted by Irigaray's readings the
sleight of hand between the two kinds of imaginary converge here-hence the
later importance of becoming woman as a special case in relation to the
other becomings.
The possible "sleight of hand in DR between a
Bergsonian repetition as action before reflection (96)
and repetition as imaginary and founded on the virtual
mother as condition of displacement" that you mention
certainly had me confused since the psychoanalytic
terms are so unfamilar to me. It wasn't until I read
"The 32nd Series on the Different Kinds of Series" in
_Logic of Sense_ that the concept of the 'phallus' in
connection with the syntheses of D&R began to have any
sense at all for me:
"The serial form is founded in the erogenous zone of
the surface ... a series of images is projected over
the zone ... capable of assuring for the zone an
auto-erotic satisfaction... But second, it is clear
that the problem of the phallic coordination of the
erogeneous zones comes to complicate the serial form
... it gives rise to a synthesis of coexistence and
coordination and constitutes a conjunction of the
subsumed series" (LoS 225). "Third, we know that the
phallic coordination of surfaces is necessarily
accompanied by oedipal affairs which in turn emphasize
parental images... In any case, it is the resonance of
the two independent and temporally disjointed series
that is essential. Here we find ourselves before a
third figure of the serial form. For the series now
under consideration are indeed heterogeneous ... they
constitute ramified disjunctions and give rise to a
disjunctive synthesis" (226).
i think what D gives here is a very good account of how sense and language
emerge in an oedipalised framework. D also connects the syntheses to the
singularities which cluster round orifices with membranes, not necessarily
the genitals but a definite topology of organs to go with the emergence of
sense from non-sense. this is the basis, i think for bobo's case for
'amourings' although, just to continue some anal free play, i think bobo
gets repression and repetiton arse about face here re D's observations
thatwe do not repeat because we repress, we repress because we repeat.
anyhow it would seem to me that the later case made for constructing for
oneslef a body without organs necessitates fracturung undoing dissolving
(indeed any by means) the chess board of symbolic sense within which Alice
does not exist.
Falling past Alice to the "34th Series of Primary
Order and Secondary Organization", I have to ask,
though: a) why must this primary order of desire
necessarily be sexual (Eros -- that is, linked to the
genitals); and, b) why is the secondary organization
related to a 'death instinct' (Thanatos); c) perhaps
these two figures are simply the absolute limits of
these two orders rather than their origin or driving
force?
i'll come back to these qs, i'm not sure if the later work would insist
that eros has to be genitally determined, a broader definition that also
features in LOS is sonorous but this is still pitted against the asexual.f
I tend to see the 'sexual' as just a limit case
of a *more general* surface tension contraction and
relief; 'death' as a limit case of assault and
deconstruction? And, if I follow it, reducing the
fractal fold to 'castration' still seems bizarre to me
(I guess I still see this term medically rather than
psychoanalytically..) Anyway, still muggled but now
have some primitive sense of what terms like this are
supposed to mean when mixed with philosophy..
yes but you are being a bit unfair to somoene who had not written The Fold
at this point, the later texts do make it easier to view castration as a
little relative pleat in matter rather than the line of the event but this
distinction is already there in LOS.
You ask "i wonder what happens to Klein's good and bad
object for bottlefed babies?" Yeah, and what happens
where the mother as well as the father is absent (and,
perhaps, the babysitter is an older brother? ;)
perhaps, it is now plausible to posit lots of different kinds of primary
care relationships which 'our loves will resemble less and less'?
You point out that "AO and ATP go on to break the
fixation on one molarity but as said above all
virtualities are partial as far as humans can eerience
them. as argued before, the flow of desire is still
talked about very much in these terms in AO". Yes..
should have checked under those covers.. Have no
problem with desiring-machines as such, but do wonder
if everything is *reducible* to these, or to the
energetic descriptions -- we are not merely plasma
balls of "explosions, rotations, vibrations" (AO 44)!
again, i'll come back on this.
Rethinking my irritation with this idea that
"historical actors or agents can create only on
condition that they identify themselves with figures
from the past" (D&R 91) after rereading what the witch
says to Florinda in _Being-in-Dreaming_: "We belong to
power. My companions and I are the inheritors of an
ancient tradition. We are part of a myth... We are all
dreaming the same dream" (33).
I was in a fiery arc (early last week when this
started), becoming-Sagittarius, shooting things down
-- "The molecular microperceptions are overlaid in
advance [by] paranoid outbursts [that] restore forms
and subjects ... like so many phantoms or doubles"
(ATP 285) -- if only for target practice ("the bowman
must reach the point where the aim is not the aim" LoS
146)..
this is D's zen self talking-when this happens the force of the mark draws
the bow-this is not as daft as it sounds and links well to Bergson's account
of furure active perception. one takes aim from the standpoint of a thrower
before the throw.
When I said I have never seen an "inauthentic
creation", you caught me by suggesting: "how about
Blanchot's 'if there is one word which is inauthentic
its authentic' (The Writing of the Disaster)". Ha!
Just like there's nothing more unnatural than 'the
natural' ?
if i love any text than it is this one. i urge you to try it-you won't come
out for weeks-its beautiful.
But, when you ask "how could one see a man without a
name?"
the remark related to interpollation or the power to hail into being that
which is called (or named) you might not have the proper names for the
poeple you speak to but you probably do have broad names with which their
relevance is made sensical to you, the newspaper vendor, the waitress. could
your father continue to know who you are if he did not have a whole layer of
sedimented habits connected to once speaking proper names? proper names
contract someones singularities into a memory of them. i think they are
indispensible.
I'm not sure about this proper-names thing: I
see and speak to lots of people regularly whose names
I do not know. My father has aphasia from a stroke and
can no longer speak proper names; but, he does still
know who we are..
When I mentioned "becoming-imperceptible, as we watch
the new children?" you asked "how could a 'we' become
-imperceptible?" Well, as D&G say:
"Becoming-imperceptible means many things. What is the
relation between the (anorganic) imperceptible, the
(asignifying) indiscernible, and the (asubjective)
impersonal? A first response would be to be like
everyone else. To go unnoticed is by no means easy...
This requires much asceticism, much sobriety, much
creative involution" (ATP 279). "For
everybody/everything is the molar aggregate, but
becoming everybody / everything is another affair, one
that brings into play the cosmos with its molecular
components... It is by conjugating, by continuing with
other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that
can overlay the first one, like a transparency" (280).
yes i like this- i was just being a little cantakerous, you know where i
satnd on 'we', yet you still use it with me. like i always sign myself
Ruth.C ( short for Ruth-Claire) but everyone assumes for some starnge reason
that my signature is not what i want to be called.
That last sentence seems overlain upon an earlier
statement by Deleuze: "the mystery lies ... in what
the first surface becomes, skirted over by the second"
(LoS 238).
Continuing across A Thousand Plateaus: "One is then
like grass ... one has made a necessarily
communicating world, because one has suppressed in
oneself everything that prevents us from slipping
between things and growing in the midst of things. One
has combined 'everything': the indefinite article, the
infinitive-becoming , and the proper name to which one
is reduced, saturate, eliminate, put everything in"
(280). They do say 'one' instead of 'we'..
this is what i was trying to say.
- mark (proper name still under construction ;)
Not yet someone who "makes the sexual energy pass into
the pure asexual ... replaced with the problem of a
work of art yet to come" and "a brief instant for a
poem without figures" (LoS 248).
yes well try not to arrive too soon, i don't think the pure asexual is
actually liveable for anything other than the briefest of instants!
best wishes
Ruth.C
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