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From: Melissa McMahon <mmcmahon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sun, 9 Apr 1995 18:25:42 +1000
chris writes 8/4/95"
>As Bergson
>pointed to, and as Deleuze remarks in his book on Bergson and in
>the volumes on Cinema, information is stored in brain-like networks
>in the global pattern of their force.
whoa! Maybe I am misreading you here, but it is one of the most central and
repeated assertions in Bergson's _Matter and Memory_ that information (such
as memory) is nowhere stored in the brain (neither is it stored in anything
that is 'analogous' to the brain, ie 'brain-like'), the body and the brain
together being only transmitters and receivers of movement ('habitual'
responses may be programmed in muscles, nerves etc., but no 'information'
as such).
Bergson is a good person to bring up here because it is his explicit
project to _surmount_ the opposition between materialism and idealism.
Deleuze writes in C1, ch4, in relation to Bergson: "What seemed to form an
impasse, finally, was the confrontation of materialism and idealism, the
one wishing to reconstitute the order of consciousness with pure material
movements, the other, the order of the universe with pure images of
consciousness. It was necessary at all cost to surmount this duality of the
image and movement, of consciousness and the thing."
But perhaps what would be most useful here would be some sort of reading of
_What is Philosophy?_, so that we can consider how D&G 'render unto'
science, what belongs to it, and what belongs to philosophy, and the
conditions of the passages between the two.
the resemblance thing again: In D&R it is said that being affirms
resemblance, but it affirms it only of that which is _dissimilar_ (cf.
Deleuze's slogan: "only differences resemble each other"). Resemblance is
not so much illusory but of the order of the 'simulacrum', which is to say,
constructed on a fundamental disparity, that is, on an _internal_
difference (and not just difference from soemthing else). I agree that this
is very hard to think (and I don't pretend to have a thorough grasp of it),
but I think that it is a crucial formula (because it characterises the
'groundlessness' of being), and cannot be done away with without ripping
the heart out of Deleuze's thought.
- Melissa
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