Subject: MP - On Approaching the Text, Part VI Date: Sat, 19 Mar 1994 22:46:37 -0600 (CST) From: "Michael J. Current" <mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net> Brian Massumi translated _Mille Plateaux_ into English as part of his doctoral dissertation at Yale. Massumi, now director of the Comparative Literature Department at McGill University in Montreal, is one of our finest translators of French post-structuralist texts, and a provocative commentator on Deleuze and Guattari. His book _A user's guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari_ [1] is one of the standard texts in this small but growing area of inquiry. His comments on reading these texts are worth quoting here. Deleuze recommends that you read _Capitalism and Schizophrenia as you would listen to a record. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. There are always cuts that leave you cold. So you skip them. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You may find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business. _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ is conceived as an open system. It does not pretend to have the final word. The authors' hope, however, is that elements of it will stay with a certain number of its readers, weaving new notes into the melodies of their everyday lives. .................................................................. The reader is invited to follow each section from the plateau that rises from the smooth space of its composition, and to move at pleasure from one plateau to the next. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a concept that is particularly of your liking and jump with it to its next appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call this repetitious. Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain. Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism _out_ of the book and incarnate it into a foreign medium, whether painting or politics. Deleuze and Guattari delight in stealing from other disciplines, and they are more than happy to return the favor. . . . [Deleuze] calls his kind of philosophy "pragmatics" because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of beliefs or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don't, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand evelopes an energy of prying. The best way of all to approach a book by Deleuze and Guattari is to read it as a challenge: to pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterimages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest number, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous. Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution. The question is not, Is it true? But does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? [1] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. [2] Ibid. Pp. 7, 8. [Footnotes omitted.] Michael -- ---------------------------Michael J. Current---------------------------- mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net -or- -AT-ins.infonet.net -or- -AT-nyx.cs.du.edu Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :) 737 - 18th Street, #9 * Des Moines, IA * 50314-1031 *** (515) 283-2142 "AN IMAGE OF THOUGHT CALLED PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN FORMED HISTORICALLY AND IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------
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