#deleuez

[lichenthrope9]

Artist’s statement: Ys, or, Borrowed from the Sea

A shortcut to mushrooms

My interest in alternate worlds was piqued when I first read The Hobbit, and the first two volumes of Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. The maps, the histories, the biographical information and allusions to genealogies, the languages and cultures and very real, lived-in countries, the sense of geography in that the story took place as much between points of interest as it did within points of interest, simulating the time it took to travel between cities – all of these factors hooked me as much as the story had. It is from the world of Middle Earth and the history and accidents of its construction that I derived much of my inspiration for this project.

However, as we must with all our favorite creators, I returned to the Lord of the Rings with a more critical eye years later. After coming out as transgender, going through a long health crisis, beginning to critique my own whiteness, and reading a lot more about philosophy and social science theories, I had more tools and lenses through which to critique the premises on which Tolkien wrote the darling of English fantasy literature.

It seemed Middle Earth was a project born out of Tolkien’s devout Catholicism, and the cosmology of Middle Earth heavily reflected Tolkien’s own interpretation of Catholic teachings. There were angels and fallen angels, and a battle between them on the physical world that took it off track from the plans of the all-knowing Eru Ilúvatar (Tolkien‘s analogy for the Father). This would all be well and good in theory, if Tolkien hadn‘t taken a step further and made ”Good“ and ”Evil“ sentient races, created by individual angels with certain aesthetics and moral philosophies in mind that would irrevocably be tied to the bloodline of each of these races. This already has problematic implications for Tolkien‘s racial frame, but to make matters worse, he based certain fantasy races on certain groups of humans on Earth.

So, with these pitfalls in mind, I put my initial worldbuilding efforts not into creating languages and cultures, but rather creating a planet that they could live on, that could feasibly exist in our galaxy. I didn‘t include magic in its formation, I didn‘t use a mythic structure at first. I didn‘t even know if I wanted to populate my world until I had an entire solar system. I knew things like the luminosity, age, and mass of the star, the distance between the star and planet, the length of the year and day, the axial tilt of the habitable planet, how all of that would affect the seasons and climate, and how far away the moon was and what it would look like from sea level on my planet. I knew how deep the oceans were and I even had some speculative biology plotted out for how life would come to be on this planet. My idea was, I wanted to make a hard scifi world (within reason – I‘m not Andy Weir) and then drape a cloak of high fantasy on it, almost a bit more like Dune by Frank Herbert than Lord of the Rings.

My readiness to populate my planet with peoples and histories neatly coincided with the beginning of my Purchase career. I was no geologist, geographer, meteorologist or astronomer. Though I was certainly interested in how ores were distributed in my planet‘s crust, how coastlines and climates developed, and how the sky would appear from the surface from my world, the central focus had always been and would always be how these things would all affect my fictional societies and their growth. What would it be like to grow up on a world where the moon appears so much larger than the sun? A world where the solar year is just a bit over 639 Earth days? Would it be possible, given different historical circumstances, to achieve a Type 1 or 2 Kardashev civilization? How would such a civilization come about politically?

Worldbuilding as anthropological exploration

After learning of my passion for worldbuilding, a professor suggested I take a look at the 2015 presidential address to the AAA by Monica Heller, called ”Dr. Esperanto, or Anthropology as Alternative Worlds.“ In it, Heller outlines the history of perhaps the most famous constructed international auxiliary language, Esperanto, and maps its positionalities, along with those of its creator, L. L. Zamenhof, within the scope of highly anthropological inquiry. Zamenhof was situated at the precipice of many different identities; he was a Jew from Bialystok, a multilingual city which in his lifetime lived under Russian and Polish-Russian rule. His interest in creating an international auxiliary language was one of diplomacy and peacemaking in the years preceding World War I, a time where international tensions and the influences of global industrialization and capitalism were all growing ever stronger and more binding. Esperanto‘s goals have since changed slightly; on a sticker on the back of a Paris street sign in 2013, it was hailed as ”La langue internationale équitable,” marking Esperanto as the “equitable” opponent to the specifically capitalist problem of income inequality. One can only conclude that not only the language itself, but also the act of its creation by Zamenhof, was a highly political project. Heller then touches upon other forms of constructed language, ones whose purposes lie in artistic expression and exploration such as Dothraki and Sindarin. The article taught me that “the act of transportation [to an alternative world] might have unexpected consequences. But the whole endeavor will be transformative, teaching us things we would never have learned otherwise” (Heller 2015: 21).

Since finishing this article, I have embarked on a journey to ground my project in social theory. My goal began as less utopic and more experimental. It was not yet apparent to me how my politics would manifest in the work, but I still wanted to play the game: with a number of minor changes to a habitable world from Earth, and a number of restrictions in how I depict the cultures, can I keep my civilizations alive and, more importantly, ”breathing“ (that is, relatably and realistically complex enough to feel lived-in), until they reach Kardashev Type 2 status? (That is, until they can technologically harness as much energy from their home star for use as they like.) What would stories look like set in this universe, perhaps stories set in the same star system but separated by hundreds or thousands of years? And how do I responsibly depict these people without falling prey to the same ideological traps that Tolkien and Herbert did?

This new phase of my project also coincided with my renewed interest in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. A:tLA stood out as a shining example of how to write a complex, colonially-charged political history between societies without directly making any one society analogous to Western Europe or Euro-American whiteness. I devoured Le Guin‘s The Left Hand of Darkness, which taught me that even tiny changes to human cultural frameworks (such as, what if there were no gender as such, and what if everybody on a planet were asexual except for a predictable period of sexual arousal and attraction?) can have vast implications for that society‘s history (Le Guin theorized that on such a planet, there would be no concept of war); and The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics (Le Guin‘s own term for the supposed study of animal language) which taught me that the lenses of imagination can be focused just as strongly on our nearest neighbors in the dirt as they can be on the distant stars.

I therefore decided to take a hybridized Tolkien / Le Guin – ian approach to writing the stories. I committed to ”translating“ every character‘s pronouns into the English feminine, and only gendering them at all as feminine when necessary. I also committed to writing a world history where no one ethnic group was directly analogous to Euro-American whiteness, à la AtLA. I would of course need to loosely base groups located in geoclimatic zones on similarly-located groups on Earth, or else have altogether too much work to do (deciding how much of the culture‘s development might be affected by the geography and climate; deciding on a model of anthropology on which to base my analysis of each culture, be it structural, evolutionist, structural-functional, etc.; building each cultural good, artifact, and practice in relation to every other; conducting a simulated ethnography of each of my major ethnic groups).

So, I decided to base some of my cultures on recent ethnographies and archaeological studies of geoclimatically analogous Earth ethnicities. The first of these was a master‘s thesis by Meghan Walley, ”Examining precontact Inuit gender complexity and its discursive potential for LGBTQ2S+ and decolonization movements.“ In it, Walley complicates the gendered narratives of pre-contact Inuit history by critically analyzing remains and gender-specific tool usage, and conducting interviews with living queer Inuit and their families. Walley found that Inuit-specific definitions of Two-spirit gender and sexual nonconformity had existed since long before contact with Europeans, and that queer archaeological practices were necessary if the living traditions of extant Two-spirit and queer Inuit were to be given their appropriate ontological priority over colonial narratives. I decided to use this thesis as a springboard for reading more current histories of the Inuit and other people of the far North, to embark on my project of constructing plausible cultures for the people living near my planet‘s South Pole.

The magic of semiotics

Then: a type of breakthough. Last summer I found myself reading book after book, including Tao Te Ching, the foundational text for Taoism, and How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Eduardo Kohn‘s posthuman ethnography of a Runa group located near Ávila in Ecuador. In it, Kohn tries to apply the semiotic theories of Charles Sanders Peirce to human groups living in rainforest settings to construct and analyze a broader, more current, postcolonial cosmology for this Runa group and its implications for other groups’ cosmologies. It was my first encounter with Peircean semiotics. Oddly, How Forests Think referred in passing to the very chapter of Tao Te Ching that had resonated with me strongest: Chapter 11, in which Laozi talks about constitutive absence, the anti-structures that permeate structure and make structure functional (the examples he gives include the empty hub of a wheel, the space inside a clay pot, and the emptiness enclosed by a room’s four walls). Kohn applies this anti-structure model to the semiotic, saying that Peirce’s types of signs can only signify when they represent things that are not present. A child buzzing their lips to imitate an airplane will only remind you of an airplane if you forget the differences between the child’s imitation and the sound it is meant to represent.

From How Forests Think and Tao Te Ching, I derived six major tenets that I would literally incorporate into my text’s lore as an ancient religion. But more than that, it got me thinking about how language and signification was a type of magic, in many ways. So, I re-incorporated magic into my story. I based the initial rules of my magic system on the postulate that this universe was not ours, in fact, but had grown out of a knowable Universal Field that could be at least partially described with a type of grammar. This Syntaxelium (designated as such both to distance it from concepts like Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and innateness hypothesis, and also to connect it more closely to ideas of networking and fungal semiosis) could be harnessed in languages that contained its features to “negotiate” with the universe. That is, if you speak a language that uses a lot of features of the Syntaxelium in a short amount of time, you are “persuading” the universe to change some of its rules, at least for enough time to grant you a wish. I decided to make this language too complex to be conservative; that is, it would evolve and diverge very quickly from any one set of rules as people used it and streamlined it. There was a constructed language I knew of that might serve perfectly: the language Ithkuil, completed by John Quijada in 2011 and so complex that nobody, not even Quijada himself, is yet fluent in it as of this writing.

Ithkuil is a philosophical-engineered language whose design goals are to be as semantically condensed and specific as possible. There is a single “formant,” or word, in Ithkuil that can be translated as “...being hard to believe, after allegedly trying to go back to repeatedly inspiring fear using rag-tag groups of suspicious-looking clowns, despite resistance” (the word itself is /qhûl-lyai’svukšei���arpîptó’ks). Quijada has offered that Ithkuil is too complex to be a natural spoken language – rather, that it is a useful tool to think about how quickly and reliably information can be condensed into linguistic frameworks. Its philosophy of meaning is (as the author himself admits) relatively Enlightenment-based – that is, there is a one-to-one correspondence of conceptual representation to some Platonic prototype of what an Ithkuil formant might mean, which is not exactly in line with the language’s design goals – but Quijada here threw up his hands: “A more careful and rigourous construction for Ithkuil’s lexico-semantics, given the author’s stated design goals…would not assume such a theory of meaning, but would rather incorporate more recent findings of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to reflect embodied meaning and metaphor-based conceptualization. However, pursuing such a foundation for the lexico-semantics of the language would, in the author’s opinion, be extremely time-consuming (on the order of many additional years, perhaps decades, to construct)” (2011: 270-271).

I found this thoughtfully constructed masterpiece of a language perfect for my purposes and set about creating daughter languages that may have evolved from its natural use in my world. I imagined that a group of priests of the Moon Queen had created Ithkuil in-world as an attempt to access the power of the Syntaxelium and communicate with the Goddesses. These priests partially succeeded, in that their new language granted them magical powers. They did not become all-powerful, however. These new Wizard-Queens attempted to conquer the world with their magic, and largely succeeded – but once they had spread out, Ithkuil almost immediately diverged into daughter languages due to its complexity, each of these languages preserving different features of the Syntaxelium. After a few generations, the language with the most expansionist, imperial-minded speakers would conquer the world once again and spread their language into every corner of the globe. The language would diverge again, and the cycle of colonization and genocide would continue until a group of marginalized people led a revolution against their contemporary empire and broke the chain.

The politics of translation

But, at this point I was too invested in this project to continue in my experimental, non-utopic design philosophy. I needed to introduce my polemic into the work, or else it might carry messages contrary to my values (it may regardless, but at least I can try and make my intent as clear as possible). I needed my writing to reflect a strong opposition to, or at least complication of, Enlightenment ideals. I would also paint a picture of the post-revolutionary society I dreamed for my characters, which meant I needed to refine my anarchist sensibilities with a deep dive into ethics and anarchist theory.

I decided to illustrate the conflicts between more Enlightenment, classical logic-based arguments and more post-Enlightenment, posthuman arguments in a contest between two translators trying to render the same text into English. I therefore refined the six tenets of my constructed religion, translated them into Ithkuil, then rendered them back into English in two competing and slightly different ways:

1.       tʼal-lrëikțatf orêtfiáss arkʼarț

[tʼal.lɾəɪkθatf ɔˌɾeːtfɪ.ˈas.s ˌaɾkʼˈaɾθ]

 similarity.p1s3.IFL-MLT.N-MNF-HAB-EPI thought.p2s1.FML-MLT.N-v2ss/9-GEN source.p1s1.FML-AGG.N

 “It is known: some reminder is the source of any thought.” – Eloquences

“So it is that all thought’s source is a likeness.” – Violet

 2.       okleomdh âkláʼdh tʼal-lriočʰaț atvufq oráʼtf

[ɔklɛ.ɔmð ˌakˈlăð tʼal.lɾɪ.ɔt͡ʃʰaθ atvʊfq ˌɔˈɾătf]

 river.p2s1.IFL-COH.N.PRX-ASI river.p3s1.FML-N.PRX-MED organize.p3s3.IFL-DYN-HAB-EPI.N self.p1s1.IFL-MLT.A-IND thought.p2s1.FML-MLT.N-MED

 “It is known: as a current from the channel, so selfhood organizes itself out of any thought.” – Eloquences

“So it is that as the whirlpool from the stream, selfhood knits itself from strands of thought.” – Violet

 3.       ôcneoț îcnêț atvațoaxiarň tʼal-lrëigadhoaqʼ

[ot͡snɛɔθ iːt͡sneːθ atvaθɔ.axɪ.aɾŋ tʼal.lɾəɪgaðɔ.aqʼ]

 spore.p3s3.IFL-N-ASI fungus.p2s3.IFL-N-GEN self.p1s1-IFL-N-v2x/2-v2rň/9 component.p1s3.IFL.MNF-HAB-EPI-N-v2q’/2

 “It is known: as the fruiting body of the fungus, the crucial, tiny self is the visible component.” – Eloquences

“So it is: the smallest self is the most crucial visible component, as the spore of the fungus.” – Violet

 4.       tʼal-lreijjaçoak ekraxiuk amvouț tʼal-lrükrațíukiss

[tʼal-lɾɛ.ɪʒ.ʒaçɔ.ak ɛkɾaxɪ.ʊk amvɔ.ʊθ tʼal.ˌlɾuːkraˈθɪ.ʊkɪs.s]

 motion-in-situ.p1s3.IFL-v2k/2-ASO.N.PRX-DYN.EPI.HAB tool.p1s2.IFL-ASO.N-v2k/1 center.p11.IFL-N.NAV tool.p1s2.IFL-N-v2k/1-v2ss/1-MNF.HAB.EPI-framed

 “It is known: a good wheel spins right about the hub, where there is no wheel.” – Eloquences

“So all wheels spin ever toward their wheel-less centers.” – Violet

 5.       öpatf uizát tʼal-lripšasúemzeoj ékëuʼady tʼal-lreisásiull

[øpatf ʊ.ˌɪˈzaθ tʼal.ˌlɾɪpʃaˈsʊ.ɛmzɛ.ɔʒ ˈɛkəʊ̆ʔadʲ tʼal.ˌlɾɛ.ɪˈsasɪ.ʊl.l]

 carrier.p22.IFL-MLT.N mind.p1s1.FML-N-MNF happen.p1s1.FML.DYN.HAB.EPI-PRX-framed-v3mz/9-v2j/6 path.p1s2.FML-A.PRX.PRV-ABL-framed deviate.p1s3.IFL-DYN.HAB.EPI-framed-v2ll/1

 “It is known: a ‘thing’ is a self which acts automatically as expected, and never deviates from its predetermined path.” – Eloquences

 “So inanimate is the self which obeys only habit, and never strays from destiny.” – Violet

 6.       tʼal-lriokápps oratfiáss âkțîʼatf

[tʼal.ˌlɾɪ.ɔˈkap.ps ɔɾatfɪ.ˈas.s ɑkθiːʔatf]

 path-oriented translative motion.p3s3.FML-A.TRM-DYN.HAB.EPI thought.p2s1.FML-N.MLT-v2ss/9 similarity.p1s3.IFL-ALL-MLT.N

 “It is known: finishes, arrives, any and all thought at a type of reminder.” – Eloquences

“So the destination of a thought is a likeness.” – Violet

 As I mentioned, these six tenets were adapted from the Tao Te Ching as interpreted through Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic philosophy. They have to do with the origins and ecologies of the self, the necessity and inevitability of communication, and the structure of thought. Why did I create two different translations of the same text in-world? I wanted to show how political of a project translation can be. For example, the less rigorous Violet Text translates the epistemic-habitual modal affixes of the main verbs as “so it is,” whereas Eloquences uses “it is known;” I did this because though they might not seem such different phrases,  “so it is” distances the knowledge from a knower – it poses the knowledge as an immutable state of reality, rather than an interpretation derived by an observer. As I learned from readings of Victor Turner, Antonin Artaud and Roland Barthes, such mythologizations are processes of naturalizing the events of a narrative until they lose their historicity, and seem to follow simply from common sense. Mythology transmutes history into a string of isolated, politically vacuous events that could never have happened any other way.

Further examples of the differences between these hermeneutic exercises are in the translation of “similarity.p1s3” in Tenets 1 and 6. Eloquences renders this as “reminder;” the Violet Text, as “likeness.” Why is “reminder” any more nuanced? Why might “likeness” lead the reader astray? To me, “likeness” implies literal similarity; a sort of facsimile relationship between an “original” and “copy.” I took these tenets from Kohn and Peirce directly: Kohn says that all thought begins and ends with an “icon.” “…[A]ll semiosis ultimately relies on the transformation of more complex signs into icons” (Peirce CP 2.278 cited in Kohn 2013: 51). By an icon, Kohn and Peirce mean a type of sign that stands in representationally for another in a very literal sense, like an onomatopoeic sound-image or a drawing of a smiley face. These icons aren’t supposed to be technical, detailed imitations, but rather empty stand-ins to quickly communicate a desired connotation. Therefore, a “reminder” suffices as a translation of “similarity.p1s3,” because the relationship between the sign and the referent is not always one of literal similarity.

The limitations of magic

Or, other magics that do just as much

If we take from Mauss that magic is highly grammatical, that it follows closely to linguistic processes, then my equally linguistic magic system’s limitations must lie in the exclusive capabilities of non-linguistic systems, or perhaps even non-semiotic systems. We must turn to the affect theorists. Is the magical self truly nothing more than a set of interpretants, signaling to each other through eternity? What would the implications of this be for free will and the power of the individual vs. the community? This takes me to my current readings of Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, and Massumi’s own Movement, Affect, Sensation: Parables for the Virtual. These books challenge the idea that the self can be reduced to its linguistic processes, and posit that the “emptiness” at the hub of Laozi’s wheel, the constitutive absence at the heart of these semiotics, can actually be filled with direction, with velocity – a sort of perpetual growth into excess meaning that’s difficult to pin down in definition or interpretation.

Massumi takes from Bergson that any space, including the political geography upon which poststructuralism maps identities in their “positionalities,” is formed retrospectively from the completion or frustration of dynamic, unmediated processes of movement and sensation in the body. For Massumi, there is an incorporeal element of The Body – its movement through spacetime – that is ontologically privileged before the formation of The Discursive Subject. “Another way of putting it is that positionality is an emergent quality of movement,” says Massumi (2002: 8).

Emergence is another effect that I address in my Tenets; Tenet 2 deals with selfhood as an emergent property of interacting thoughts, as per Kohn and Peirce. Peirce’s semiotic often grapples with the problem of continuity vs. description, creating almost a Heisenberg paradox of its own wherein a thought can only be described precisely as a positional snapshot, or as a “nondecomposable…dynamic unity” (Massumi 2002: 6). Peirce formulated his three types of signs as emergent properties of each other; indices are emergent properties of the relationships between icons, and symbols are emergent from analogous interactions between indices, or indices and icons. So selfhood, language, and magic all organize themselves from the simplest signs, which is why Peirce and Kohn say all thought begins and ends with an icon. It seems there are parallels within these genealogies of thought, between the Deleuzian affect theorist Massumi and the semiotic of Peirce as it applies to posthumanism. Can the analogy be drawn further to say that if space is an emergent property of movement as selfhood is of thought, then movement and affect is its own kind of non-semiotic magic that must have an effect on spacetime?

[queerchangeling]

the scp foundation is not immune to deleueze and guitarri

[porcileorg]

Sad Mondays #6b

Author: Magda Wisniowska – February, 2021.

Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. (‘Memories of a Molecule,’ A Thousand Plateaus, 272)

When we first encounter Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of nature in A Thousand Plateaus, it has a distinctly Spinozian character. ‘Substantial’ or ‘essential’ forms have no place here; we learn that Spinoza’s approach is far more radical (254). Spinozian elements  have no form or function, but instead are distinguished only by ‘movement and rest, slowness and speed’(ibid.). Or in French, ‘le mouvement und le repos, la lenteur und la vitesse.’ These elements are infinitely small, but they are not atoms (for those too would still be in possession of a form). We cannot count these elements for they have no number. They are infinite — infinitely numerous — yet Deleueze and Guattari also argue that depending on their speed, movement, slowness and rest, they make up an individual, that in turn can be part of another individual so that each individual consists of a multiplicity of individuated multiplicities. This makes up the ‘immense Abstract Machine’(ibid.).

How Deleueze and Guattari define the consistency of the plane of nature is important to our ongoing discussion of becoming-molecular, because it makes clear that the molecular has less to do with actual molecules (which possess both form and function, even if these, as in the case of Louis Wolfson or Penthesilea are somehow disrupted (see Sad Mondays 11 and 12) and more with these relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, that are closest to what one is becoming (ibid., 272). 

How then, can this description of a moving multiplicity making up an infinite number of individuals be reconciled with Arjen Kleinherenbrink’s critique of interiority (see Sad Mondays 13)? Kleinherenbrink could not be more clear: Spinoza’s philosophy does not support the externality thesis (Against Continuity, 53). According to Kleinherenbrink’s interpretation —which admittedly focuses on Deleuze’s reading of  Hume’s empiricism — for Deleuze, relations are always external to terms. This means that the relations formed between all entities whatsoever, and any relation I may have with them, are not dictated by any of the terms in this relation. In externalist philosophies, entities are in possession of their own private, internal reality. In contrast, interiority always reduces the entity into a representation of something else, thus internalising the entities’ being to the relation with what is beyond them. Because in Spinoza’s philosophy, individual modes are the expression of the one substance, here relations are reducible to the one term: God. So in Kleinherenbrink’s eyes, Spinoza’s is a philosophy of interiority, unable to account for the ‘full individuality of things’ (ibid.). Which is why, according to Kleinherenbrink, Deleuze also ends up breaking with his philosophical hero (ibid.).

If indeed in our description of the plane of nature, individuals are made up of an infinite number of elements in different states of movement, however infinitely small these elements may be, it would seem that, at least at this Spinozian point of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari intentionally or not, are pursuing a kind of interiority. It would also indicate that Arjen Kleinherenbrink is mistaken, that despite Deleuze’s professed hatred of interiority (Against Continuity, 52), something of the interior always creeps in. Or there is an alternative. Perhaps instead, Kleinherenbrink rejects Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza too quickly, dismissing Spinozism for its interiority where perhaps none is to be found. This may be  precisely what Deleuze and Guattari identify as the ‘radical’ aspect of Spinoza’s approach: that there is no substance or essence in which Spinozian elements would participate in, that there is no substance or essence that they represent. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe Spinoza’s elements, distinguished by their different states of movement, as ‘belonging’ to an individual (254). They say less however about how these elements relate to the individual or how one individual relates to another. For them, individuality seems to be key and not relationality.  

What needs to follow is an examination of two diagrams, two ways in which Spinoza’s world can be drawn. This is Kleinherenbrink’s four-fold as a square, or the open sphere of Spinoza’s every expanding universe.

(To be continued…) 

[jewishphilosophyplace]

Resurrection (Deleuze)

These comments about seed, life, the rational soul, death, animal soul, and resurrection caught my attention while reading Deleuze reading Leibniz. For the sake of clarity, I broke up what is a single paragraph into 2 parts. What catches the eye is the way life is figured as a lit flame, death as a folding in of the self. Death is one thing. I know that Deleuze is writing about Leibniz, but except in those parts where Deleuze makes a deliberate swerve away from Lebniz, it is not always clear if Deleuze, when he invokes Leibniz, conjuring his presence before us, is not speaking “in a voice of his own,” if not necessarily “in his own voice.” Is it possible to think of “life” without “resurrection” as the next statement in a series?

“However, this possibility for progress or expansion of the soul seems to run up against the total quantity of progress in the world, this quantity being defined by the convergence of all regions that correspond to compossible monads. And this would be true if time did not pertain, that is, if all existing monads were simultaneously summoned to the altitude that makes them reasonable. But things do not work that way: souls fated to become reasonable wait for their time in the world, and are first of all only sensitive souls who sleep in Adam’s seed, bearing only an ‘official act’ that marks the hour of their future elevation as on to a birth certificate. This birth certificate or act is a flame lit within the dark monad.

And inversely, when we die, we fold infinitely upon ourselves; we return to the state of an animal until the bodily resurrection brings us to a second and final elevation. But further, the soul, which has for some time become sensitive again, will bring with it a new and official act, now akin to an act or certification of death, which is its last reasonable thought prior to death. More precisely, the damned are those whose last thought is a scorn of God because, when their soul vomits all and can no longer enclose clearly anything other than this hate or this rage, it is the maximum of all possible hate or the smallest amplitude of reason. Resurrection still brings them to this thought from which they forge their new present.  This order of time must be considered in all questions of progress: a whole dramaturgy of souls, which makes them rise, descend, and rise again.”

–Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, (Continuum), p.84

http://ift.tt/2q6jJ3R

[marxismo-revolucionario]

Los sepultureros terminaron siendo sepultados

Los sepultureros terminaron siendo los sepultados.

La clase obrera, como producto del capitalismo, no pudo sobrevivir a la revolución tecnológica por medio de la cual, a partir de la robotización y automatización, la tasa de producción de plusvalía relativa llevó a una rápida caída de trabajadores industriales hasta el límite asintótico de su desaparición.

Entonces la lucha de clases —antagonismo inherente a toda formación social capitalista— tuvo que ser repensada, pero no lo fue.

A propósito de la lucha de clases: si uno retoma las observaciones de Deleueze respecto a pronunciar un cambio cualitativo en la sociedad capitlaista respecto a toda otra formación anterior (cercana a la tesis de Wallerstein), ¿no habría que cuestionar la tesis del Manifiesto Comunista según la cual «la historia de la humanidad es la historia de la lucha de clases»?

Hipótesis: el papel revolucionario del proletariado es una idea a la que Marx suscribe en 1848, en medio del fervor social en Europa occidental y central. Aquí todavía no desarrolla los conceptos fundamentales de El Capital (1857, es decir, casi una década más tarde), especialmente el de «plusvalor relativo», con el cual se cancela todo resto de determinismo respecto al papel histórico de la clase obrera industrial (lo que Engels calificó de prometariado), planteando en cambio que 1) ni la revolución es necesaria; 2) que la clase obrera bien puede ser un producto a reintegrar, un síntoma (como enfatiza Žižek siguiendo a Lacan) que puede ser resignificado tras una crisis, en este caso una crisis como paso a una economía que hace declinar la fuerza de trabajo no calificada.

Esto sirve para apreciar en qué medida sí se puede hablar de un Marx que rompe con su concepción anterior en lo que respecta a su relación con el movimiento sociopolítico, y que debe ubicarse en el momento en que se confina a la redacción —que le llevará el resto de su vida— de su obra capital. No le llamemos un «Marx maduro», o algo por el estilo. Hay enormes continuidades en los presupuestos éticos del judío de Tréveriz (como Enrique Dussel se dedicó a mostrar con tanto detenimiento y sofisticación), desde su periodo en Alemania hasta su exilio en Londres. Lo que cambia es en realidad que, podemos decir, deja atrás el fervor organizativo (que sin embargo es esenial) y se entrega a una elaboración teórica magnífica que aún hoy no ha sido agotada. Al contrario: es sólo ahora, tras la debacle del régimen soviético y del «marxismo realmente existente», que una lectura absolutamente novedosa se nos abre en el horizonte, lectura que mostrará la plena vigencia, la actualidad total, de la obra de este autor.

[porcileorg]

Sad Mondays #10

Author: Magda Wisniowska - November, 2020.

I want to focus the next series of Sad Mondays on one small section from A Thousand Plateaus, section 12 of the chapter “1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal,” entitled, “Memories of a Molecule.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari begin this section in the following way,

Becoming-animal is only one becoming among others. A kind of order or apparent progression can be established for the segments of becoming in which we find ourselves; becoming-woman, becoming-child; becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral; becomings- molecular of all kinds, becomings-particles. Fibers lead us from one to the other, transform one into the other as they pass through doors and across thresholds. Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim: to unleash these becomings. (Thousand Plateaus, 272)

In the above, Deleuze and Guattari list a number of different becomings, and we can see for the most part, how these might function — how there might be a becoming-animal or becoming-woman, or even, at a push, a becoming-vegetable. All the more so, as Deleuze and Guattari are quite vivid in their examples. Becoming-animal is, for instance, a performance by Vladimir Slepian in which, like a dog would, he ties his shoes to his hands using his mouth-muzzle. It is the way in which Robert de Niro walks “like a crab” in the film, Taxi Driver (ibid., 274). But just as in the last Sad Mondays I wrote, there is the difficulty of the molecule. The molecule, as it were, despite its unprepossessing size is that over which thought always stumbles. Previously it was the difficulty of accounting for the molecule that thinks, now it is the activity or process of becoming-molecule. For what do Deleuze and Guattari mean by “becoming-molecule”? How does one become molecular? Or what is even the molecule here? It seems to me an especially pertinent question, as art — or specifically, “singing or composing, painting, writing” — are deemed not to have any other aim. As we can see above, according to Deleuze and Guattari, art aims to unleash becomings, becomings-molecular. 

Art unleashes becomings-molecular, because, as careful reading shows, all becoming is molecular. In our quote, Deleueze and Guattari first list becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-child etc., but then summarises these as “becomings-molecular of all kinds.” A little further on in this section, he acknowledges, “all becomings are already molecular.” At this point Deleuze and Guattari resume an argument from the beginning of the chapter, in which they claim our relation to nature takes two forms, best seen in the field of natural history (see Sad Mondays #4b). According to Deleuze and Guattari, natural history thinks only in terms of the relation between animals, which it conceives in two ways: either as a series or as a structure (234). In the first case, that of the series, the question is of resemblance, to what extent does one animal resemble another, and then grouped accordingly, as genus, species, subspecies. This Deleuze and Guattari call the “analogy of proportion” (ibid.). In the second case, natural history considers the structural characteristics that make up the species or genus, and compares those. So, for instance in fish, gills have the same respiratory function as lungs do in birds and mammals. This is the “analogy of proportionality” (ibid.). In both cases, the relationships between animals are considered mimetically,  either a chain of beings with one imitating the other, or more abstractly, in terms of a model relation. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this kind of mimetic thinking of “series-structure” is not limited to science, but is widespread, equally present in our “dreams, symbolism, art, and poetry” (ibid., 235). In thought, it is present as psychoanalysis and structuralism.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, if art can fulfil its aim as the becoming-molecular, it is because it can somehow extract itself from the series-structure bind of mimetic thought. Becoming is, by definition, non-analogous. He writes, 

Becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. (Ibid., 272)

In other words, it is neither a question of resemblance nor of structure. Instead, it has to do with what Deleuze calls a “principle of proximity” and again I quote,

…becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. (ibid.)

So our next question has to be put this non-analogous relation of proximity. What does it mean to “extract particles” in this case? And to “establish relations of movement and rest”? What kind of relation is this, if indeed it is a relation at all, for how can we have a relation without analogy? It is movement but not movement defined geometrically, as the displacement of a body in space; it is speed, but not speed defined through the formula of distance over time.  Instead, movements and speeds belong to that which one is becoming: Slepian’s dog, Robert de Niro’s crab and, as we shall see, Louis Wolfson’s schizophrenic’s language. Slepian ties his hands to his shoes as a dog might, but in actual fact, never would. De Niro walks like a crab, but does not actually imitate any specific crab walk. And Wolfson’s language is not one we can translate.