Re: Refrain/Assault

> [from Melissa]
> 
> Andrew -
> 
> I don't agree that the territorialisation/deterritorialisation
> balance is the 'one' problem with many cases of resolution.

Yes, you're right, although a problematic might be different to a 
problem. Even then, you're right, it is more complex than that but...

 >Like
> I said before, it seems to me that there is more to the difference
> between a nomadic and hierarchical occupation than just a higher
> or lower 'coefficient' of deterritorialisation.
> I'm coming at the refrain stuff mainly through other writings of
> D&G on art and subjectivity...it seems to me that it is the nature
> of the relation to deterritorialisation that changes in the different
> kinds of distribution. Apart from anything else, what kind of
> distribution is implied by the statement that we should have a
> 'balance' between these two things (terr&deterr), by which I mean
> not that the idea of 'balance' is wrong, but WHO is it who weighs these
> things up? Doesn;t that imply the subject of the hierarchical
> distribution who surveys the field and apportions? I understand the
> subjectivity of the nomadic distribution and the refrain as in no
> way separate from the field it creates, and this eliding of the
> position of identity is what incorporates deterritorialisation into
> the process.

Whilst acknowledging the value of these questions, is it always a 
WHO? This is is exactly the problem with the whole notion of the 
avant-garde, the new, the old etc. These very notions, along with a 
whole set of "who" possibilities have to be given machinic 
considerations. One could just as easily ask new for who? 
Deterritorialized for who? And immediately one is returned to an 
ethics based on some kind of a priori acceptance of interactions 
between subjectivities, not between subject, socius and environment. 
It is only when one considers how all these factors are being 
produced that one gets somewhere ethically. 


> 
> Readig one of your more recent posts, I don't see how you can accept
> the inseparability of difference and repetition, but distinguish
> repetition from the production of the new: in D&R at least, the
> production of the new is the place of the highest connection between
> difference and repetition. If we see repetition as entailing some
> link to the past, and thus distinct from the future, the new, isn't
> this still understanding repetition as repetition of the same?

because difference and repetition are inseparable does not mean that 
they are the same - the whole point for me is that they have a 
relation and a non-relation. Again it's a question of where you 
situate the "new". How and by what is the "new" produced? And from 
what? If you take, for example, the production of concepts (and 
affects and percepts, etc) in _What is Philosophy?_ these are all 
created but are they ever original. The answer is of course, yes and 
no. What is original about a concept for example is that it is a 
specific sum of its components - but this does not mean that the 
components are "new". Deleuze and Guattari here specifically do away 
with beginnings, p15, implying to me at least that we can do away 
with the kind of drastic teleology that also leads us to both endings 
and the "new". Furthermore, even though a concept is created (in some 
sense "new") it "always has a history, even though this history 
zigzags" (p18). If you totally divide the new and tradition, sure its 
either one or the other, but maybe both are produced on the same 
plane by the same abstract machine and we'll have to go there for 
analysis before we get anywhere. Maybe I'm confused about this but it 
seems to me important to re-affirm that everything is produced - even 
anti-production. Tradition, for example, still "stands still" at a certain 
speed. Another way to look at this is in terms of speeds and the 
ratios between them. There are, as you rightly point out, and 
infinite  number of speeds, and therefore, an even greater possible 
number of interactions between speeds (I realise we've just exceeded 
infinity!). But for me, the production of tradition and the "new" are 
just one set of possibilities within a much vaster field of speeds 
and interactions between them.

There's even more trouble here about the new and tradition when you 
start asking what kind of time we're dealing with - the time of the 
body, of states of affairs, or the time of the event?

Any further argument welcome as I'm pretty fuzzy about all this.

andrew 
> 
> -Melissa.
> 
> 

Andrew Murphie

amurphie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Macquarie University, Sydney, 2109
fax: 850 8240, phone:(02)8508761


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