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[] Erik Davis (oo) Cernunnos sez (cribbing the Fall): The only []
[] erikd@xxxxxxxxx __ thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes. []
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On Mon, 25 Apr 1994, Jonathan Beasley Murray wrote:
(snip)
> You could easily make a case for the first volume being far more "radical"
> (problematic term though that is). Indeed, Nick Land seems to suggest that
> _1000P_ is a cop-out from its radical possibilities. In the first place,
> this would seem to mark it as producing more of a "shock"--the theoretical
> equivalent of '68 as Jameson suggested?--for those who were around at the
> time. On the other hand, it may also seem surprising that (and I know I'm
> pulling out the stereotypes here, but that's inevitable with generational
> thinking, useful hermeneutic though it may be too) those with "less to lose"
> are more prepared to embrace the more easily institutionalized _1000P_.
Are you suggesting that AO is more radical because it is somehow more
revolutionary/antagonistic to the state, and that therefore this
explains why it has not been as "institutionalized" as 1000P? I find the
assumptions beneath this notion almost amusing--that the academy is afraid
of institutionalizing "radical" thought. What are you talking about? How
is 1000P more easily institutionalized? AO is more of a "critique," a
response to
existing ideologies in the acadmeny, existing modes of interpreting Freud
and MArx. Even if one does not like the criticism, or finds it boring, it
is certainly not difficult to "institionalize" it as a legitimate response
to concerns everyone recognizes (in this sense, I'm using
"institutionalized" not to indicate whether or not the arguments have been
canonized, just whether or not they arise: "In response to this, D&G
wrote..." "In the 70s, this moment of French intellectual history was
challenged by D&G...").
On the other hand, even if the lion's share of work on D or D&G centers on
1000P, that does not mean that the text has been sucessfully
institutionalized. I would suggest on the other hand that we still don't
know what to do with it, that they're project is <so> radical as put forth
in that book that we lack the tools and the sufficient self-overcomings to
successfully engage that book, let alone pick up where they left off.
What do you mean by radical? That it can be translated into a
recipe for "action."? That it confronts the oppressor, while 1000P is a
cop-out because they suggest caution, or because it is no longer clear who
the enemy is? I take it from your rather dull dismissal of the western
metaphysical tradition--as woozy as that tradition may be--as merely a
national/local/raced/gendered disciplinary tradition that you are perhaps
of the opinion that radicalism consists in identity-based institutional
critique ("how dare they use the word 'we'"!), in which case D certainly
fails, with his great love of high brow music and art, all those white
males he likes to read (even Henry Miller! (but there is Castenada). On
the other hand, if you think this "radicalism" hasnt been
institutionalized, I remain thoroughly puzzled. If I am misreading your
sense of radicalism, forgive me--you didn't explain that much.
To me D and D&G are radical the way that the discovery/invention of the
calculus or non-linear dissipative structures are radical. The way "out"
is not the way we came in, it lies in a fundamental reorganization of what
it means to think and unfold thought in the collective body of the world.
1000P is some tangled slice of that chaotic attractor, one which lies on
the other side of distinctions like radical/cop-out, that old progressive
talk, that itch to erect enemies we already know how to critique so that
the nature of our critique never changes, like a broken record.
>
> Are D&G institutionalized? Did _1000P_ enable them to become so? I think
> the answer is yes to both questions, plus the convenient amnesia of the "G"
> in D&G--after all, although this is a "Deleuze" group, we have for the vast
> majority of the time been discussing _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ (and
> even _Molecular Revolution_!) here.
>
> Deleuze on his own was only ever a sad scholastic philospher obsessed with a
> particular (and national/local/raced/gendered) disciplinary tradition.
I am confused here. The "forgetting" of G is what has allowed D&G to be
institutionalized? But then everyone reads the work they wrote together?
We "forget" G so we can talk about Proust and movies (but people arent
talking about the Proust and Cinema books, which are some of Deleuze's
most remarkable works, and are difficult to assimilate into the sad sack
tradition of western philosophy unless one is ready to argue that Spinoza
was actually describing the psychedelic finish of <2001> and that Duns
Scotus is really Albertine in disguise)?
A funny thing about schizos is that they can never be fully
institutionalized, because they always leak. Even if they're locked in their
canonized cells in
the most vilified wing of the sanitarium (white European males; lingering
metaphysics block B), they're also out in the moonlight, oozing through
the soil, seeping into zones so far away from the academy and from nice
and angry political groups that they might as well be another world,
untimely turf swirling in the fractal mist.
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