Re: intentionality

On Fri, 27 Jun 1997, Paul Bains wrote:

> For whitehead events have internal
> relations _and are 'internally related to other events, and have external
> relations! There is an intrinsic and extrinsic reality of an event, namely
> the event in its own prehension, and the event as in the prehension of other
> events.

> " Deleuze's external relations are [the same as] Whiteheads
> internal relations?"

--by this I meant only that the real issue is the centrality of the event 
as opposed to substance, something true in different ways for Whitehead 
and Hume, upon both of whom Deleuze draws.  The Body without Organs in 
ATP, for example, is analyzed into differential relations or speeds and 
intensities, the latter being identified with 'prehensions'.  It's 
interesting that D (or D+G) doesn't emphasize the relation to other 
'events', but the use of the term prehension implies such a relation; 
nonetheless, 'internal' because one is addressing only the singularity of 
a unique process of becoming.  Also 'internal' to the BwO because it is 
due to the uniqueness of the event that its elements are prehended in 
just the way they are.  'Internal' would refer, then, to the analysis of 
an event in its uniqueness or singularity, its becoming in a way 
ungraspable through the universal/particular dichotomy, a concreteness 
escaping all categories of instantiation or generic exemplification.
	We find this same emphasis on the uniqueness of formative 
processes as early as the book of Hume, where Deleuze writes, "Whether as 
relations of ideas or as relations of objects, relations are always 
external to their terms.  What Hume means is this: principles of human 
nature produce in the mind relations of ideas as they [the principles] 
act 'on their own' on the ideas" (66, E&S).  To make a bit of a 
terminological leap:  the relations among asignifying signs are 
determined by the specific character of the process into which they 
enter; extrinsically related among themselves, they become internally 
related as they get entrained into the singularity of a becoming.
	Thus THE Body without Organs (in ATP) would be the entire 
(virtual) field of (externally related) asignifying signs, potentially 
available for recombination into ever-new syntheses of elements, made 
internally related by their inclusion in a novel becoming.
	Hope this helps; criticisms welcome.
						Kelly