Chris:
In response to your response:
On Fri, 7 Oct 1994 CND7750@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> in replay to Erik.
>
> there is a lot on habit in Deleuze adn D&G. I don't think i am prepared
> to summarize its potential for an enacted nomadology though. Followig, Hume
...
> restraints either. I'm sorry if this is vague and doesn't answer your
> question (i know it does not), but i don't know how to relate it to the
> lived when Deleuze himself breaks down the notion of natural difference
> between organic and inorganic.
...
> Does anyone have an answer they feel might better answer Erik's question?
> I was objecting to reducing ideology to habit, as i understtod Jon's
> description of Bourdie's concept of immanent ideology. Why should ideology and
> habit be equated unless one wants some kind thought-energy distinction
> to remain latently present? i know i'm picking, but it seems important
> to D&G's rejection of ideology. Again, i'm sorry Erik, i just can't answer
> your question without a good deal of time to work it out.
A couple things. One is that I don't think you or anyone
else on this list should worry about whehter or not you are "prepared" to
respond about a question about Deleuze. Just go ahead and express those
flows that are bubbling around your neurons. Which is just another way of
saying that if you responded "off the cuff," without necessarily being
able to quote chapter and verse, I'm sure it would prove of great value,
and that it's such a "spontaneous organization" of Deleuze-inspired
notions that this list allows us to produce, a petri-dish as yet
striated with rules and regs. I wasn't looking for an explanation of
D&G, even less an answer. One thing about nomads: they can't carry a lot
of shit with them, especially books.
Anyway, the reason I ask about habit is that a lot of this ideology debate
seems to be dancing around trickier and more difficult questions about
subjectivity. As Chris points out, "ideology" is a useful term in certain
contexts, complicated in others, pointless in still others. What seems to
me to be running through this debate is a question about how to treat
subjectivity (how conditioned am I by ideology? what has conditioned me to
think in terms of "conditioning" when the reality may have more to do with
rivulets of rain and the nocturnal pulse of crickets? And how do I reach
that reality? (without dragging the I with me)).
OFten theory-types are warry of discussions that hover around the question
of subjectivity and lived experience, but for myself the MORE your
philosophy displaces the subject, or considers ordinary consciousness as
reified effect, or dissolves "mind" into chaotic becomings of a brain
(without biologism, but a nondualism of body/mind), then the MORE we have
to address that problem in terms of this constant overcoding of day-to-day
subjectivity. Whether or not we consider subjectivity as "conditioned
by ideology" or as already constituting ideology is a less critical
matter.
(Uh oh, I'm showing my Buddhist hand--hear it clap!)
D's use of habit seems a key entry into these questions, as long as we
remember that rocks and trees have habits too. The nut/genius Rupert
Sheldrake likes to say that there are no "laws of nature" only habits. I
like that very much. That's why its silly to equate habits with
ideology--we do not pass through forests grumbling at the hegemony of
photosynthesis. (ok, ok, I'm oversimplifying). But the question begs, and
its not a question of origins (a la: where do my habits arise? body? mind?
the hegemonic state? mommydaddy?) but of ethics: how to dissolve without
total disorganization/death/black holes? That's where counter-hegemony
begins, for me anyway, and if that approach hazards hippy shit and a fall
into a deeper more pernicious subjectivism, then I say that approaches
which avoid these questions fall into the hazard of abstraction and the
illusion that thought can figger it out without passing through what WIP?
calls the witches flight.
Sometimes it seems as if ATP is a jungle, or some irridescent Riemann
cube, and all the while I'm trying to "figure it out"--tracing terms,
establishing correspondences of planes, digging out weapons to defeat the
boring ideas I find elsewhere--that something else, some terrifying
mercurial jaguar is flitting through the shadows, teasing me to plunge in
in a mad dash, don Juan's "running in the dark." But I don't, because it's
not my habit to do so. It's easier to think. I stay cloistered in the
habits of the subject, restraining the devils of becoming--it's not even
"me" or "my" subject, for the "I" is the always-already abstract
cookie-cutter of the One, the most inescapable panopticon, the most
inertial game.
Erik
------------------
In response to your response:
On Fri, 7 Oct 1994 CND7750@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> in replay to Erik.
>
> there is a lot on habit in Deleuze adn D&G. I don't think i am prepared
> to summarize its potential for an enacted nomadology though. Followig, Hume
...
> restraints either. I'm sorry if this is vague and doesn't answer your
> question (i know it does not), but i don't know how to relate it to the
> lived when Deleuze himself breaks down the notion of natural difference
> between organic and inorganic.
...
> Does anyone have an answer they feel might better answer Erik's question?
> I was objecting to reducing ideology to habit, as i understtod Jon's
> description of Bourdie's concept of immanent ideology. Why should ideology and
> habit be equated unless one wants some kind thought-energy distinction
> to remain latently present? i know i'm picking, but it seems important
> to D&G's rejection of ideology. Again, i'm sorry Erik, i just can't answer
> your question without a good deal of time to work it out.
A couple things. One is that I don't think you or anyone
else on this list should worry about whehter or not you are "prepared" to
respond about a question about Deleuze. Just go ahead and express those
flows that are bubbling around your neurons. Which is just another way of
saying that if you responded "off the cuff," without necessarily being
able to quote chapter and verse, I'm sure it would prove of great value,
and that it's such a "spontaneous organization" of Deleuze-inspired
notions that this list allows us to produce, a petri-dish as yet
striated with rules and regs. I wasn't looking for an explanation of
D&G, even less an answer. One thing about nomads: they can't carry a lot
of shit with them, especially books.
Anyway, the reason I ask about habit is that a lot of this ideology debate
seems to be dancing around trickier and more difficult questions about
subjectivity. As Chris points out, "ideology" is a useful term in certain
contexts, complicated in others, pointless in still others. What seems to
me to be running through this debate is a question about how to treat
subjectivity (how conditioned am I by ideology? what has conditioned me to
think in terms of "conditioning" when the reality may have more to do with
rivulets of rain and the nocturnal pulse of crickets? And how do I reach
that reality? (without dragging the I with me)).
OFten theory-types are warry of discussions that hover around the question
of subjectivity and lived experience, but for myself the MORE your
philosophy displaces the subject, or considers ordinary consciousness as
reified effect, or dissolves "mind" into chaotic becomings of a brain
(without biologism, but a nondualism of body/mind), then the MORE we have
to address that problem in terms of this constant overcoding of day-to-day
subjectivity. Whether or not we consider subjectivity as "conditioned
by ideology" or as already constituting ideology is a less critical
matter.
(Uh oh, I'm showing my Buddhist hand--hear it clap!)
D's use of habit seems a key entry into these questions, as long as we
remember that rocks and trees have habits too. The nut/genius Rupert
Sheldrake likes to say that there are no "laws of nature" only habits. I
like that very much. That's why its silly to equate habits with
ideology--we do not pass through forests grumbling at the hegemony of
photosynthesis. (ok, ok, I'm oversimplifying). But the question begs, and
its not a question of origins (a la: where do my habits arise? body? mind?
the hegemonic state? mommydaddy?) but of ethics: how to dissolve without
total disorganization/death/black holes? That's where counter-hegemony
begins, for me anyway, and if that approach hazards hippy shit and a fall
into a deeper more pernicious subjectivism, then I say that approaches
which avoid these questions fall into the hazard of abstraction and the
illusion that thought can figger it out without passing through what WIP?
calls the witches flight.
Sometimes it seems as if ATP is a jungle, or some irridescent Riemann
cube, and all the while I'm trying to "figure it out"--tracing terms,
establishing correspondences of planes, digging out weapons to defeat the
boring ideas I find elsewhere--that something else, some terrifying
mercurial jaguar is flitting through the shadows, teasing me to plunge in
in a mad dash, don Juan's "running in the dark." But I don't, because it's
not my habit to do so. It's easier to think. I stay cloistered in the
habits of the subject, restraining the devils of becoming--it's not even
"me" or "my" subject, for the "I" is the always-already abstract
cookie-cutter of the One, the most inescapable panopticon, the most
inertial game.
Erik
------------------