It's amusing that an element of my response to Tom Blancato was
deemed, somewhat pejoritively I assume, as "magical." I was making the
point that ATP is an "enacting" text, in that it <does> as much as it
<shows>, and that the movements it intitiates or that we enter into as
readers extend rather than reflect or express D&G's ethical--ie,
practiced--thought. Though I'm curious what kind of magic this is
conceived to be (sympathetic, natural, daemonic, chaotic?), I really was
making a
simple point: that by reading ATP in a somewhat literary manner, which
includes
reading how it reads other (principally literary) sources, we set
ourselves into a certain relationship to it which, far from overcoding it
with the ossified masterings of "interpretation," inserts us into the
reading so that we extend its lines of flight.
If that is a kind of magic, then I suspect that it initiates the modes of
becoming we find in Castenada, or in the occult perignations to the "Outide"
that D&G so love in HP Lovecraft. For, here in the start of chapter 10,
we are thrust into the mutant demands of sorcery, or at least the
"memories" of such demonic becomings. (why "memories" here? Does the
answer involve the narrative elements of becoming and the chapter's
expression of becoming (all these stories)? And hence something
about time and becoming? Something Bergson this way comes...)
Memories of a Reading: Why in the chapter on becomings to we begin with a B
movie from the 70s,
with a pack of rats ("a" pack-rat?), with animals and the sorcerers who
plum the Outside through their becomings-animal? We begin with an eruption
of images, but images that we know are not "representations," for D&G
mark the way that animals are sucked into representational or "analogic"
systems which quiet their power of deterritorialization: the imaginative
series of totemism and Jungian archetypes, and the subsequent
structuralist set-up of symbols of a state form (the LA Rams?).
So what are these animals: the rats, the wolves, and what do they have to
do with vampires? "Becomings-animal are neither dreasm nor phantasies.
They are perfectly real. But what reality is at issue here? For if
becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an
animal, it is clear that the human being does not "really" become an
animal any more than the animal "really" becomes something else...This is
the point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from
itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only
as taken up in another becoming of which it is the subject, and which
coexists, forms a block with the first. This is the prinicple according
to which there is a reality specific to becoming" [238] But if the
reality of becomings is a specific reality tied presumably to a kind of
time or duration, does this eradicate its need for forms to pass through?
And why these forms: rats, wolves, and the "dark" becomings of wolfmen
and vampires?
If there is an animal that passes through the three kinds of animals D&G
address on p240, then the mouse would have to be one of them. 1st kind:
the Oedipal animal, my pet mouse, Mousey; 2nd kind: mouse as type, "quiet
as," passive but also passive-agressive (imperalist Mickey, archetype of
American cultural imperialism); 3rd kind: mouse as multiplicity, not
quite demonic but certainly a pack. Pack rats.
So there was a mouse in my house, relatively bold, scurrying about as I
watched TV. But already the question: one or many mice? Everyone said
that the one mouse was always already many mice, and that I would have to
do something about it. But I do not enjoy killing things unless they are
seriously decomposing my mileau (or I benefit from other people's
killings when I am hungry--no purity here). Buddhists I know don't kill
mice or cockroaches, and grappling with this possibility introduced all
sorts of curiousities into a relationship that before was simply
mechanical: end their adventures with an elegant powerful neck-snapping
machine. Who's space was it anyway? Was I lord and master of it? No
unauthorized flows! Who's walls and burrows? So I did not kill them.
But nothing is easy. In order to squelch the lingering fear of mice (which
is not a fear of a mouse, but of a multiplicity), I made the mice "a
mouse". Oh, look, the mouse is out searching. This did not last long, for
there was more than one mouse, so I slipped into an Oedipal mode: There is
a family of mice in my house. A family, how sweet. Then came the day when
a mouse ran between me and the wall when I was sitting half a foot away.
Suddently a new word: "infested," and the terror of multiplicity was upon
me. A pack, not a family, that infested/infected the borders of my
territory: lived in the walls, passed through membranes I falsely imagined
were impermeable. The warm Warner Bros "cubbyhole" of the family become a
demonic, subterranean labyrinth of a seething chaos of beings too crazed
for filiation, and who were going to destroy the stability of my molar
Euclidian "home" through the invisible, pervasive action of multiplicity.
Contagion. They would contaminate my food, infect me. Where did I derive
this notion? "Common sense?" That an animal of the first kind
(domesticated pet) could simultaneously become and animal of the third
kind (contaminant) said more about my resistence to an animal
multiplicity than about intrinsic characteristics of the beasts. I
yearned for an alliance: "I don't want to kill you. Let's make a deal:
you come out at night when I'm sleeping and don't piss on the rice, and
everything's OK." Ha! I had forgotten how terrifying Lovecraft was, how
much the Outside eats away at the territories we defend out of fear of
the multiplicities we already are.
I'll hold off on the rest of the story and its absurd culmination
because, as you might suspect,
I just go molar, and we are all much to familiar with all the blood and
fascism that entails.
Any other brushes with animal multiplicities out there? (I'll get into
sorcery in a later post)
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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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