Re: Refrain/Cosmos/Chaos

> Date:          Thu, 17 Aug 1995 19:42:17 +1000
> From:          SOC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:       Re: Refrain/Cosmos/Chaos
> To:            deleuze-guattari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Reply-to:      deleuze-guattari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> Thanks for your perspective on the chaos-cosmos distinction, but I'm
> confused, are you saying anything about the way the refrain organizes
> an interval between chaos and cosmos or just that they are very close
> to each other?

I may be more confused than you are but I guess what I was saying is 
that what the refrain organises anything, but always 
against the chaos outside of that organization. It may even use bits 
of the chaos to do so, but this chaos, on the first page of _The 
Refrain_, is must be brought into the organisation of the refrain, 
across the "sieve". It would no longer be chaos, strictly speaking. 
Cosmos - this this chapter - is different. It is still organized but 
it occurs at the point that one leaves all (territorial) assemblages 
behind. "The localization mechanisms are extremely precise, but the 
localization has become cosmic. These are no longer territorialized 
forces bundled together as forces of the earth; they are the 
liberated or regained forces of a deterritorialized Cosmos." (p326). 
This makes me think that the Cosmos has more to do with Music than 
with the refrain per se, as music deterritorializes whilst the 
refrain territorializes. Is there also a tie in here to the plane of 
organization (which territory heads towards), and the plane of 
consistency  (which seems to head more towards this meaning of Cosmos 
than to an understadning of territory)? Or do D and G's terms slide 
around - get put to different uses - precisely because they are, as 
CS has noted, tools? So. yes, I'm saying that the refrain can 
organise the interval between chaos and cosmos, but also that the 
refrain can organise any interval. This is because it is not just a 
question of the proximity between chaos and cosmos (and territory) 
but of the dynamics between them as they produce out of each other. 
In other words its not just a matter of space but of time, as we all 
know.

> 
> As you point out, Guattari draws them together with the term Chaosmosis.
> Deleuze also does this in earlier works, such as The Logic of Sense, with
> terms like Chaos-cosmos and Chaosmos.
> 
> I can see that chaos and cosmos have a certain proximity in D+G's work,
> but I'm reluctant to explain this in terms of some Heideggarian oscillation
> between organisation and non-organisation. The thing that I really like
> about Charlie Stivale's piece on the refrain and Cajun dancing is the
> way that he diagrams the dynamism of the refrain with a certain amount
> of rigour. I was hoping that we could discuss, with a bit of exactitude,
> the way that the conceptual components of the refrain are distributed in
> that chapter in _A Thousand Plateaus_.
> 
> Steve O'Connell.
> 

I really think that all these terms have to be seen as interactive - 
i.e. they do slightly different things depending on what they're 
interacting with. I agree that precision is, of course, helpful. I'm 
aware that I can be very imprecise at times. At the same time, it 
seems to me that this precision must include the way in which these 
terms change their meaning in order to operate in slightly different 
fields.

This debate is proving to be really useful to me. Thanks

andrew

Andrew Murphie

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


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