Wow. What a brilliant lecturer. I felt the clouds of humanity lifting as he spoke. Makes me reassess how I feel about DeLanda -- I've found his books rather dry. They only confirmed my view that all secondary writing on Deleuze & Guattari never matches the thrill of actually reading them. But that was a fine performance, I have to say.
Nietzsche and Philosophy meant a great deal to me when I first encountered it (some 16 years ago, I'm shocked to work out!). The whole 'existence is innocent' thing felt like a great weight lifting & I remember finding the concept of ressentiment seemed to explain so much. Also the idea of creative destruction, as well as the notion of active & reactive forces. Oddly enough, thinking about poetry & forces, I read something today that seemed to chime with that, though it comes from a book with a rather embarrassing title: Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. (I'm prepared to look everywhere for inspiration.) I rather liked this passage:
'Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take [up] arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. [If you did not write] the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.'
Sixteen years ago? ... I noticed on the flyleaf of my Thousand Plateaus I'd scribbled August 1989.
This sort of thing used to worry me - i.e. discovering how little I really understood and retained of what I (thought) I knew so well. Nowadays I see it as an inevitable part of aging, maturing, and encroaching senility ....
(Maturing? Like an old Camembert - wasn't that Mailer's retort?)
Anyway... more Deleuze. In the three quiet hours I squeezed out of today, I did a quick refresher on:
desiring machines & body w/out organs (Anti-Oedipus)
the first chapter and a half of What Is Philosophy?
I suppose what's clear to me now - more than 20 years ago - is how the writing embodies the ideas. I used to get so frustrated at not being able to conceptualize their 'machines' and the body w/out organs etc. - when, as I see it now, that is the point. First, in that these 'things' are essentially problematic in terms of their 'being'. Second, that D&G are more concerned with setting ideas in motion (and thus quite liable to rework and transform ideas as they go) rather than establish a petrified system. Sort of ongoing D-I-Y project. Third, that it's not a case of one = good, the other = bad. Much more the Nietzschean sense of forces working & 'difference'.
Basically, I'm reading D&G's texts more as poetry. You too?
Perhaps the smooth/striated chapter is of greatest relevance to Riddles of Form - maybe one could argue that poetry such as DiPalma's works on a kind of 'haptic' immanence rather than a conceptual 'distance' that is established in advance. (Does that make sense to you? Or is it sheer bollocks?). I think aspects of Olson's work connect here, too.
On the other hand, the rhizomatic concept of the book - a setting in motion and a schizzy flow of possible actions and interactions - and of the act of writing itself could be very useful as a way of rethinking established cultural assumptions about poetry. I very much like Deleuze's severe critique of 'culture' as a frozen edifice of received opion. (Also the scorn for the media's appropriation of a 'concept' and 'event'. Take that Saatchi!)
The geological aspect of DeLanda's talk is very interesting and I'm going to go back into 1000 Ps as well as look at DeL's texts (bought a couple of years ago but not opened). That said, my wife (a Professor of Chemistry) poured scorn on the idea of crystals 'expressing' themselves. I, however, really go for this & it relates - yes? - to aspects of Robert Duncan's thinking about organic form.
In the end - or, at least for today's reading - what really comes across to me is the exhilaration of D&G's writing and thinking and how closely allied it is to creativity. (And what they pick up and toss to one side in passing).
I know they differentiate between philosophic conceptualizing and artistic/poetic activity - but I'm not convinced. (And isn't Nietzsche, secretly, one of the great 19thC Romantic poets?).
Again and again I keep thinking of the Deleuzian reading of the Eternal Return as a perfect image of artistic-poetic creation: that roll of the dice that jeopardizes everything (that stroke of the brush, that word) yet simultaneously achieves it - and immediately leads to the next hazarding. By sheer coincidence I was rereading some interviews with Francis Bacon and I can see why Deleuze would be drawn to Bacon's work and 'method' - there's a gambler!
Go with the flow!
Cheers
The C.
PS - can you make any sense out of 'The Fold'? I know it's meant to be so important - but I find it utterly impenetrable. It seems to me you have to know your Leibniz first (and that's pretty intimidating).
I think I was always very receptive to the poetry in Deleuze & Guattari's work -- and perhaps a poetic mood in much Continental theory -- which is totally at odds with our homegrown analytic tradition. Also, in answer to your wife (and the Sokal hoax, etc.), in my view D&G are using science as poets might, borrowing what they need & distorting it all in the process. It's a very much more creative use of the facts than is permitted (quite rightly) to scientists.
I would love to find a way to use D&G to write poetry, but I haven't yet -- I have found the American postwar avant-garde a lot more inspiring. In contemporary poetry Deleuze champions Ghérasim Luca, who is amazing (there's no good translation around, but I have a handsome Gallimard pbk of Héros-Limite, suivi de Le Chant de la carpe et de Paralipomenes -- my French is halting, too, but it's well worth a look). His most famous poem is “Passionnément”. The poet is trying to say “Je t’aime passionnément” (“I love you passionately”), but the language constantly breaks down, making the poem well-nigh untranslatable:
“Passionné nez passionnem je je t’ai je t’aime je je je jet je t’ai jetez je t’aime passionnem t’aime . . .
“If Ghérasim Luca’s speech is eminently poetic,” said Deleuze, “it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry.”
Luca was Romanian, born in Bucharest, but the son of a Jewish tailor. And he wrote in a foreign language, French (he also spoke Yiddish, Romanian and German), so his relationship to the words he writes is so much more exotic than my own! (He was good friends with Celan, and followed his eg by committing suicide...)
But I digress. Re: DiPalma -- I think you're right but it's closer to that exploration in Cinema 1 of "the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things" (p.81) and therefore perception escapes from the organised realm of human perception and enters upon the plane of immanence. I'm not sure that's entirely clear, but I hope you know what I mean. It's about bypassing the critic, the Eye, and difference in itself: "Things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them..." (p.60). One could go on.
3 comments:
Wow. What a brilliant lecturer. I felt the clouds of humanity lifting as he spoke. Makes me reassess how I feel about DeLanda -- I've found his books rather dry. They only confirmed my view that all secondary writing on Deleuze & Guattari never matches the thrill of actually reading them. But that was a fine performance, I have to say.
Nietzsche and Philosophy meant a great deal to me when I first encountered it (some 16 years ago, I'm shocked to work out!). The whole 'existence is innocent' thing felt like a great weight lifting & I remember finding the concept of ressentiment seemed to explain so much. Also the idea of creative destruction, as well as the notion of active & reactive forces. Oddly enough, thinking about poetry & forces, I read something today that seemed to chime with that, though it comes from a book with a rather embarrassing title: Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. (I'm prepared to look everywhere for inspiration.) I rather liked this passage:
'Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take [up] arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. [If you did not write] the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.'
Walrus
Hi
Sixteen years ago? ... I noticed on the flyleaf of my Thousand Plateaus I'd scribbled August 1989.
This sort of thing used to worry me - i.e. discovering how little I really understood and retained of what I (thought) I knew so well. Nowadays I see it as an inevitable part of aging, maturing, and encroaching senility ....
(Maturing? Like an old Camembert - wasn't that Mailer's retort?)
Anyway... more Deleuze. In the three quiet hours I squeezed out of today, I did a quick refresher on:
desiring machines & body w/out organs (Anti-Oedipus)
rhizomes; smooth & striated spaces (1,000 Plateaus)
the first chapter and a half of What Is Philosophy?
I suppose what's clear to me now - more than 20 years ago - is how the writing embodies the ideas. I used to get so frustrated at not being able to conceptualize their 'machines' and the body w/out organs etc. - when, as I see it now, that is the point. First, in that these 'things' are essentially problematic in terms of their 'being'. Second, that D&G are more concerned with setting ideas in motion (and thus quite liable to rework and transform ideas as they go) rather than establish a petrified system. Sort of ongoing D-I-Y project. Third, that it's not a case of one = good, the other = bad. Much more the Nietzschean sense of forces working & 'difference'.
Basically, I'm reading D&G's texts more as poetry. You too?
Perhaps the smooth/striated chapter is of greatest relevance to Riddles of Form - maybe one could argue that poetry such as DiPalma's works on a kind of 'haptic' immanence rather than a conceptual 'distance' that is established in advance. (Does that make sense to you? Or is it sheer bollocks?). I think aspects of Olson's work connect here, too.
On the other hand, the rhizomatic concept of the book - a setting in motion and a schizzy flow of possible actions and interactions - and of the act of writing itself could be very useful as a way of rethinking established cultural assumptions about poetry. I very much like Deleuze's severe critique of 'culture' as a frozen edifice of received opion. (Also the scorn for the media's appropriation of a 'concept' and 'event'. Take that Saatchi!)
The geological aspect of DeLanda's talk is very interesting and I'm going to go back into 1000 Ps as well as look at DeL's texts (bought a couple of years ago but not opened). That said, my wife (a Professor of Chemistry) poured scorn on the idea of crystals 'expressing' themselves. I, however, really go for this & it relates - yes? - to aspects of Robert Duncan's thinking about organic form.
In the end - or, at least for today's reading - what really comes across to me is the exhilaration of D&G's writing and thinking and how closely allied it is to creativity. (And what they pick up and toss to one side in passing).
I know they differentiate between philosophic conceptualizing and artistic/poetic activity - but I'm not convinced. (And isn't Nietzsche, secretly, one of the great 19thC Romantic poets?).
Again and again I keep thinking of the Deleuzian reading of the Eternal Return as a perfect image of artistic-poetic creation: that roll of the dice that jeopardizes everything (that stroke of the brush, that word) yet simultaneously achieves it - and immediately leads to the next hazarding. By sheer coincidence I was rereading some interviews with Francis Bacon and I can see why Deleuze would be drawn to Bacon's work and 'method' - there's a gambler!
Go with the flow!
Cheers
The C.
PS - can you make any sense out of 'The Fold'? I know it's meant to be so important - but I find it utterly impenetrable. It seems to me you have to know your Leibniz first (and that's pretty intimidating).
I think I was always very receptive to the poetry in Deleuze & Guattari's work -- and perhaps a poetic mood in much Continental theory -- which is totally at odds with our homegrown analytic tradition. Also, in answer to your wife (and the Sokal hoax, etc.), in my view D&G are using science as poets might, borrowing what they need & distorting it all in the process. It's a very much more creative use of the facts than is permitted (quite rightly) to scientists.
I would love to find a way to use D&G to write poetry, but I haven't yet -- I have found the American postwar avant-garde a lot more inspiring. In contemporary poetry Deleuze champions Ghérasim Luca, who is amazing (there's no good translation around, but I have a handsome Gallimard pbk of Héros-Limite, suivi de Le Chant de la carpe et de Paralipomenes -- my French is halting, too, but it's well worth a look). His most famous poem is “Passionnément”. The poet is trying to say “Je t’aime passionnément” (“I love you passionately”), but the language constantly breaks down, making the poem well-nigh untranslatable:
“Passionné nez passionnem je
je t’ai je t’aime je
je je jet je t’ai jetez
je t’aime passionnem t’aime . . .
“If Ghérasim Luca’s speech is eminently poetic,” said Deleuze, “it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry.”
Luca was Romanian, born in Bucharest, but the son of a Jewish tailor. And he wrote in a foreign language, French (he also spoke Yiddish, Romanian and German), so his relationship to the words he writes is so much more exotic than my own! (He was good friends with Celan, and followed his eg by committing suicide...)
But I digress. Re: DiPalma -- I think you're right but it's closer to that exploration in Cinema 1 of "the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things" (p.81) and therefore perception escapes from the organised realm of human perception and enters upon the plane of immanence. I'm not sure that's entirely clear, but I hope you know what I mean. It's about bypassing the critic, the Eye, and difference in itself: "Things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them..." (p.60). One could go on.
All the best,
Walrus
Post a Comment