March 22, 1994
Having only begun receiving Michael C's & the D-List's posts in the
last week to ten days, I've had some catch-up to do. I have just
read through Michael's extensive situating documentation and am very
grateful. It all helps me "faire rhizome"/engage in rhizome-making
via this List.
I want to reproduce a number of quotes from his comments and from
the documentation he provided by way 1) of emphasizing my agreement/
support and 2) of clarifying a few points that might be of interest
to list readers. In what follows, my references to the "original
French" are in no way meant to show off, just as fine-tuning and
more data for further reflection. I might add that in my work on
D&G, all translations have been of great utility in returning to the
"original French" and developing my reflections on D&G's works.
In his Post #3, Michael said:
"If you are feeling intimidated, please note three things: a.) I'm
intimidated, too. b.) This book intimidates *everyone*, including
seasoned Deleuze scholars. c.) We are going to view this
book the way Deleuze makes it quite clear he intended - as an "open"
text containing something for everyone. This is not a list for
"Deleuze experts," but rather for anyone who is committed enough to
read the text.
****If you do the reading, you are "expert" enough to post questions
and reactions. Indeed, thoughts from those approaching the text for
the first time are likely to be the most fresh and fruitful.***
We will count on the "experts" to help us along, but any
condescension to other posters will be discouraged most harshly by
me."
I have broken up MC's paragraph to emphasize what resonates most
strongly for me therein, and to juxtapose it to a citation from
Deleuze that MC reproduces in a later post, from Deleuze's response
to Cressole:
"But I am struck by the this: most of the people who find this book
difficult are the better educated, notably in the psychoanalytic
field. They say: What is this, the body without organs? What do
you really mean by desiring machines? In contrast, those who know
just a little bit, those who are not spoiled by psychoanalysis, have
fewer problems and do not mind, leaving aside what they don't
understand. Such is the reason for our saying that those who should
be concerned with this book, theoretically at least, are *types*
(colloquial, generally referring to males [e.g. dude, guy] but *not*
necessarily precluding the more generic sense of person) between
fifteen and twenty.
To this, I want to add MC's commentary in his part VII commentary:
"By opening up new spaces of thought and affect, by prodding us to
think differently, to feel differently, to experience ourselves --
our very embodiment -- differently, confronting the text, in my
view, can yield great rewards."
I really resonate with this: any understanding of D&Gs texts that I
have arrived at have come through a process (to use a DG term) of
_plissement_, of enfolding lived experience into/through the
concepts proposed in their works, leaving aside (temporarily) those
that have no or too obscure applicability/comprehensibility, taking
up those that have immediacy and clarity for me. One line in
Deleuze's response to Cressole could serve as a blason of my own
readings of D&G, and even as a "user's" key: "The depth of what we
don't know, the deepness of one's own underdevelopment [in relation
to oneself (*sous-developpement `a soi*)] where we talk from."
By the way, in MC's next paragraph, he suggests that D&G's book
(_Mille pl_, I assume) may be a "failure at one level," that of not
yet being the "pop philosophy" that D&G had dreamed of. However, it
is not clear to me that they retained this dream at all for _Mille
pl_; the reference to this "dream" is to _AO_, to what D&G had
projected as a goal while composing vol. 1 of _Capitalism and
Schizophrenia_. I wonder if the "failure" of _Mille pl_ can yet be
judged if we understand its goal(s) in terms of the "tool box", of
how it makes other "machine" function. In any case, as Deleuze says
in the same letter to Cressole, their follow-up "won't be a sequel
at all. With the help of the outside, we'll do something so
different in both language and thought that those who are
anticipating our work will have to say to themselves: they've gone
completely crazy, or they're a couple of bastards, or they've
obviously been unable to continue. *De'cevoir est un plaisir* - To
disappoint/to deceive is a pleasure."
A general commentary on this letter to Cressole: early on in it,
Deleuze is peeved by Cressole's assertion that he (Deleuze) is
looking for "stardom" from _AO_, e.g. with reference to Deleuze's
idiosyncrasies (worker's _blouson_, long finger nails). This
complaint returns in an aside that Michael elided in his citation
from this letter:
"We've become a bundle of loosened singularities, names, first
names, nails, things, animals, minute events: [_the opposite of a
star_]. So I began to work on two books in this immediate
direction: _Difference et Repetition_ and _Logique du sens_. ..."
(my emphasis)
Then, in the final lines of his letter, Deleuze returns to this, but
what precedes it might be of use to the "line" that I have gleaned
from reading Michael's commentaries (I don't have the _Semiotext(e)_
here at home, so will do my best to translate quite literally on the
seat of my pants):
"And my relations with gay men, alcoholics, or junkies, how are they
relevant here, if I reach for myself effects similar to theirs by
other means? The point of interest is not that of knowing if I
benefit from this or that experience, but if there are people who
experience one thing or another off in their corner, me in mine, and
if there are some possible points of encounters, some chance
meetings, some accidents, and not fixed/pre-determined positions
(*alignements*), not rallying points, all this shit in which
everyone is supposed to be somebody else's bad conscience and
corrector.
"I owe you nothing, nothing more than you owe me. No reason for me
to enter your ghettos, since I have my own. The problem has never
consisted of the nature of one exclusive group or another, but of
transversal relation in which the effects produced by one thing or
another (homosexuality, drugs, etc.) _can always be produced by
other means_, [Deleuze's emphasis] Against those who think "I am
this, I am that," and who thus still think in a _psychoanalytic_
manner (with reference to their childhood or their fate), one must
think in uncertain, improbable terms: I don't know what I am, so
many necessary non-narcissistic, non-Oedipal investigations or
attempts -- no gay can ever say with certain "I am gay."
"The problem is not one of being this or that in a human [*dans
l'homme*], but rather one of an inhuman becoming, of an universal
animal becoming: not taking oneself for an animal [*bete*], but
undoing the human organization of the body, crossing one zone or
another of the body, each person discovering the zones that are
his/hers, and the groups, the populations, the species that inhabit
them. Why wouldn't I have the right to speak about medicine without
being a doctor, if I talk about it like a dog? Why can't I speak
about drugs without being a junkie, if I talk about it as a little
bird? And why wouldn't I invent a discourse/a speech about any
subject even if this discourse/speech is completely unreel and
artificial, without being asked to display my qualifications for
doing so? Sometimes drugs make you delirious, why can't I be
delirious without drugs? What do you make of your own particular
"reality"? Yours is bland realism. And so why do you read me? The
argument of reserved experience is a bad reactionary argument. The
sentence in _Anti-Oedipus_ that I prefer is: no, we've never seen
any schizophrenics.
"Finally what is there in your letter? Nothing of yourself except
the fine passage [to which Deleuze referred earlier]. A bunch of
rumors, gossip, that you present skillfully as coming from others or
from yourself. And it's possible that this is how you wanted it, a
kind of pastiche of limited rumors (*bruits en vase clos*). It's a
rather snobbish, society letter. You ask an "unpublished" text
(*ine'dit*) from me, then you write about me in this nasty manner.
That's no exaggeration. You're not an Arab, you're a jackal. You do
everything such that I'll become what you criticize me of becoming,
a little star, star, star. Me, I ask nothing of you, but I still
love you -- to bring these rumors to an end."
I have some further thoughts on the Dana Polan text cited in the
part VIII, especially in terms of the critical mission of this list
and its discussions: the warning about "American literary
criticism"'s possible "dangerous" treatment of D&G: "not as a
theorist of the ties of collective enunciation and minor literature
but as aesthetes of a high-culture avant-garde closed in on its own
fetish of interiority." But this danger is always present, no matter
what the field, what Polan correctly points to as the "fine line
between territorializing and deterritorializing processes." So what
are we do, constantly be looking over our shoulder, back at our
"lines of flight", wondering if maybe we out to retrace our steps,
start all over, or not have started at all? Polan is right to
suggest that we "question" while we "use" these texts, and even to
ask what D&G "disenable" as well as enable. But in our period of the
ever-so-PC (and Polan's reference to Jardine smacks of this a bit,
especially in begging the question of the specific articulation of
Jardine's analysis), I hate to see any field of inquiry cordoned off
_a priori_ behind territorialized lines, e.g. how the processes of
"devenirs" proposed by D&G *necessarily* obstruct women's
"becoming".
Clearly, the citation from Polan struck a chord/nerve with Erik
Davis in his post of 3/20. His points are very well taken, and his
reference to the interior/exterior overlap is the very "fold"
itself. Citing Deleuze from a 1986 interview with Claire Parnet (in
_Pourparlers_), referring to Foucault "ultimate line" into which he
entered in his work:
"I think that we straddle such lines each time we think with
sufficient dizziness or live with enough force. These are lines that
are beyond knowledge (how would they be 'known'?), and our
relationship with these lines are beyond power relations (as
Nietzsche said, who would want to call that '[a] will to dominate
[*vouloir dominer*]?). You say that these lines already appear
throughout Foucault's works? It's true, it's the line of the
Outside/Exteriority. The Outside, in Foucault's work as in
Blanchot's from whom he borrowed the word, is what is farther away
than any exterior world. As such, it's certainly also that which is
closer than any interior world. Thus the perpetual reversal of
near and far-off. Thought does not come from inside, but no more
than it extends an opportunity from the exterior world. Thought
comes from this Outside, and returns there, and consists in
confronting it. (149-150)
Davis hits the mark in saying: "D&G's deterritorialized rhizomatics
can just as easily be used to dscribe certain elements of global
capitalism as an anarcho-collectivism or a politics of minor social
aggregates and their literatures". And I think he is wrong to assume
that "the Deleuze that I assemble out of resonances, fragmentary
readings, acid trips, online shamanism and the broad nomadism of
eclectic nonacademic intellectual lines of flight has already been
coded out of the picture here." Maybe "coded out of the picture" of
certain types of academic discussion sites, but certainly not coded
out "here", on the contrary. For he pursues this affirmation quite
precisely with evoking the Net/Rhizome overlaps, or _plissement_/
enfolding.
This attempt at "faire rhizome" has not really dealt with
"Introduction: Rhizome" per se, but it is very much on mind agenda.
In any event, I've reached a temporary (spatio-temporal) juncture (I
have to fix some lunch, go to the office... other "lines" call) on
this "flow". I look forward to pursuing others further.
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