Sorry that it's taken me several days to get back to Reinhard
Duessel's comments on AND and OR and logical "preferences" in
Deleuze and Guattari. I was perhaps careless in my use of the
term "prefer," but I didn't mean to imply anything whimsical or
unreflective in the opposition of "a logic of OR" with "a logic
of AND." I take the point to be a critique of the preemptive
shearing-away of possibilities, desiring trajectories, and
multiplicities (you must be either this or that). So, when you
say,
>Whether we use a "logic of OR" or a "logic of AND" is a matter
>of the problems and questions we are dealing with. I cannot and
>should not be decided beforehand....
it seems to me that you are already working within the
provisional and multiple zone of "a logic of AND."
When I came to your postscript about our shared aversions to
certain definite articles, I was startled by "THE logic of the
or"--I hastily looked back at my original post and was relieved
to see that I hadn't said any such thing. The (admittedly very
brief) look back at D and G didn't turn it up either. Surely
there's no single way of constructing exclusionary or
inclusionary logics, because they belong to a continuum of
relations. The _Anti-Oedipe_'s discussion of desiring-production's
"three syntheses," for example, skews the clean OR/AND distinction
through its discussion of the paradoxical "disjunctive synthesis"
(soit... soit... soit...) that "remains disjunctive, and yet
affirms the disjoined terms, affirming them throughout all of
their distance, *without limiting one by the other or excluding
one from the other*" (my translation).
Last quick thought, on the relevance of this thread to the
ongoing discussion of identity on phil-lit, where I was struck by
Katya's comment a few days ago on identity construed in terms of
"both/and" rather than "either/or." I've found quite compelling
the analysis of the complicated and multiple trajectories that
can lead to the construction of identities and nations in
Benedict Anderson's _Imagined Communities_. Today's mail,
actually, brought in a new book I hope to get to soon, and which
is also certainly grist for our mill: Iain Chambers's _Migrancy,
Culture, Identity_. Thoughts on either of these, anyone?
Julie Hayes
Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures
Univ. Richmond, VA
jhayes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------
Duessel's comments on AND and OR and logical "preferences" in
Deleuze and Guattari. I was perhaps careless in my use of the
term "prefer," but I didn't mean to imply anything whimsical or
unreflective in the opposition of "a logic of OR" with "a logic
of AND." I take the point to be a critique of the preemptive
shearing-away of possibilities, desiring trajectories, and
multiplicities (you must be either this or that). So, when you
say,
>Whether we use a "logic of OR" or a "logic of AND" is a matter
>of the problems and questions we are dealing with. I cannot and
>should not be decided beforehand....
it seems to me that you are already working within the
provisional and multiple zone of "a logic of AND."
When I came to your postscript about our shared aversions to
certain definite articles, I was startled by "THE logic of the
or"--I hastily looked back at my original post and was relieved
to see that I hadn't said any such thing. The (admittedly very
brief) look back at D and G didn't turn it up either. Surely
there's no single way of constructing exclusionary or
inclusionary logics, because they belong to a continuum of
relations. The _Anti-Oedipe_'s discussion of desiring-production's
"three syntheses," for example, skews the clean OR/AND distinction
through its discussion of the paradoxical "disjunctive synthesis"
(soit... soit... soit...) that "remains disjunctive, and yet
affirms the disjoined terms, affirming them throughout all of
their distance, *without limiting one by the other or excluding
one from the other*" (my translation).
Last quick thought, on the relevance of this thread to the
ongoing discussion of identity on phil-lit, where I was struck by
Katya's comment a few days ago on identity construed in terms of
"both/and" rather than "either/or." I've found quite compelling
the analysis of the complicated and multiple trajectories that
can lead to the construction of identities and nations in
Benedict Anderson's _Imagined Communities_. Today's mail,
actually, brought in a new book I hope to get to soon, and which
is also certainly grist for our mill: Iain Chambers's _Migrancy,
Culture, Identity_. Thoughts on either of these, anyone?
Julie Hayes
Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures
Univ. Richmond, VA
jhayes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------