ME:> > Just don't read it like "theory" or "philosophy," with the attitude of
> > suspicious critique at the forefront.
>
GOOFUS:> if i demur here it's only because i believe suspicious enthusiasm is
> possible, is perhaps what d&g call into being *as* "theory" and
> "philosophy"
>
Hear hear. I overstated my case--as everyone here must now recognize is a
favored attack--becuase I believe the reception of D&G (why D&G? why not
DxG, or D*G or D^G?) operates differently than the vast majority of
philosophy/theory. Along with the inevitable chipping away of analysis
("what does this mean?" "does this follow?" "which of these terms are
central?"), I've always found a certain awakened passivity did
wonders--like finding faces in rocks, or seeing the 3D images in those new
weird pictures you see everywhere. Sometimes you just have to stare.
> we live in a world where every burble of a baby, where every fart & every
> striation in the earth, meaningless twitch of the mentally ill, cough of
> the president, where the order of songs in a band's set, collage of objects
> in a pile of animal shit, where every sound & sensible object, invisible as
> a wave of light or monumental as a cascade of stones, can be read, is text.
> & this has nothing to do with the so-called postmodern condition. it's as
> ancient as divination by birds.
And don't think that just because we are techno-postmoderns we must refuse
the "superstition" of nature divination. As with all of D*G's
"becomings-x," becoming-sorceror is a mutation of the reading eye, a
doorway into a different regime of signs. What is nature divination--birds
entrails, cracked bones, the curves of the land--if not a materialist
semiology that makes room for the virtual in all its fantastic intensity?
>
> curious we learn along the way to read as dogs & cats. some few of us can
> also read as other, more exotic animals, and as other kinds of humans do.
>
from D's "I Have Nothing to Admit": "Why shouldn't I speak of medicine
without being a doctor if I speak of it as a dog? Why shouldn't I speak of
drug without being drugged, if about it as a little bird?"
(& i would note, or perhaps suggest, that the appeal of books like *iron
> john* and of movies like *dances with wolves* is not so different than that
> of *a thousand plateau*. the desire to become ourselves by becoming
> something else, to perceive the world according to a new logic, a new
> system of meaning.)
>
Hear hear. Some of the most intense Deleuzians I know take the weak
"becoming-animal/becoming-sorceror" of those text to the extreme extent of
pagan ritual. Their experiments (they're lurking here, I believe) are not
trivial. The problem with those texts is only that those texts do not go
far enough--they do not dissolve the human enough (the classical shaman is
torn limb from libm before she gets her visions)--like Costner, they wear
the skin of animals, but their face remains pretty. What else is Castenada
doing in ATP?
> by the way, thinking of that classmate of yours who attacked d&g for being
>
> > Orientalist
>
> maybe he wasn't wrong. because if i had to name d&g's spiritual ancestors i
> would have to include herman hesse, & i would fit anti-o & thou plateau
> within as well as without the great & problematic tradition of german
> orientalism. isn't it richard wilhelm as much as king wen to whom we
> (americans) owe the i ching? the scoffing of your classmate aside, it's
> worth asking precisely how d&g escape the limitations of their many
> antecedents.
>
You're right, and remind me of an aside I meant to make: his critique was
valid, and D*G are, er, "problematic" on occasion--becoming-woman,
becoming-other. That's a can of worms. But his instinctive critique
blinded him to their point, to their entirely different operation, that
had nothing to do with an Oriental "essence." And I'd aggree that this
"problematic" tradition of reading the other occurs in ITP. But to my
mind, it's not that they're simply blowing it, but that our critique
of Western discourses of the other has thrown out a lot of mutant babies
along with the undeniably bloody bathwater.
On the I Ching--I might direct you to Deleuze's discussion of the
dicethrow in Nietzsche & Philosophy, p.25-27. Briefly, D wants to affirm
both chance and necessity, both the infinite potential of an indeterminate
becoming that creates into a void (the dice-throw), AND the immanent
necessity of the specific being, the specific determined unity of forces
that results (the actual throw). When I first read his discussion, my
severely I Ching-damaged brain went Bingo! The I Ching is a MUCH better
example that a die--it is Go to the dice's chess. We have a boring notion
of the model of "synchronicity," which Jung/Wilhelm use to explain the I
Ching's (in my experience) undeniable efficacy. In this view, the chance
mechanism of the penny toss or the yarrow sticks is an "illusion," that
the wholistic power of the synchronous connection of everything "uses"
this illusion of chance to describe the exact nature of the moment of the
throw. I'd like to suggest that something more subtle, and in some ways
more terrifying magical, is occuring, more along the lines of D's
dicethrow discussion. That the penny toss is no-shit indeterminancy,
"realk" chance, but that the will that throws wills the necessary unity of
the hexagram that results (the unity of the hexagram with the moment), which
then appears as a "fate" we must embrace.
It might even work with bird guts.
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