it's not so yin-and-yang a matter, Shin: some of the best chess-players have been more nomadic players (take Bobby Fischer), and yes, Go - like every other war game - potentially succumbs to statist tracings. D&G are not saying Go is cool and Chess sucks - it's more naunced a passage which points out the essential royal and nomadic tendencies inherent in both games.
seeing this, even though Go does require a sweeping, 'majoritarian' movement across the board, it's often a single Go-piece which makes the difference in this continuous process of capture. (as i responded in that list-serv thread i cited, Go could theorhetically continue on forever if one kept increasing the size of the board during play, it'd only get more fun as i tried to encircle all your previously-made territories - Chess, however, must have a uniform board-size and would definitely lose it's appeal if the board were infinite since the King could just run in the opposite direction.) in fact, because Chess is coded explains why it must create space for such weird decodings - the 5th-rank 'en-passent' and the 8th-rank 'promoting' moves of the pawn, for example. as D&G write (paraphrasing): how could a radical particle be created anywhere but a giant superconducter? (or whatever those centrifugal thingys are called)
lastly, let's be very clear: there's nothing wrong with desiring to increase one's territory - Nietzsche's Will to Power demands nothing less of his children (gay neo-barbarians). likewise, D&G's slogan: 'make a rhizome' and 'make a war machine' - grow offshots everywhere, amplify intensity, infect strata and turn them against the State, be all over the fuckin place, deterritorialize and explode.
and yes, there's always the danger of micro-fascisms, of annihilation and all-too-sudden destructions, which is precisely why hyper-active resistance will always be a must - as Foucault said, 'there's always something to do' which means there's always some circle of influence yet to be determined.
we gotta play hard.
:k
--
On Mon, 28 Oct 2002 09:36:49 Shin hee wrote:
>You know this particular passage has me scratching my head and wrinkling my >nose a little... the latter because it smells a little Orientalist and the >former because I have a hunch that really this is a very productive passage >that not only works in the register of analogy but also as a template for >strategization in general--but also engenders more problems than provides >solutions. Case in point: the nature of Go is very tricky. Go requires >defeat of an opponent made possible through sweeping, total, majoritarian >movement across the board, yes? So.... sure, go strikes me as very >molecluar, very much in the spirit of the undifferentiated BwO, but Go also >strikes me as flirting with a totalitarian energy. OK, the state modeled >after monarchical/familial organization (chess) oviously sucks. However, >the state modeled after a mode of deploying pieces across bounded space in >order to territorialize and doing so by completely resisting the >singularity of the piece itself (in order to gain maximum mobility)... >well...
>
>This passage also sticks out to me because I think that even within chess >there is a quality of immanence that may go unrecognized but makes an >awfully cute tassle in an otherwise dreary hat... the en passant move that >the pawn can make in the 5th rank strikes me as a nice little gesture >towards traversability. That is, a diagonal movement that happens in a >moment of direct confrontation but ends up in capturing the opponent's >piece precisely because it resists a predictably onward march? It's good >to chew on.
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