Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 23:50:11 +0100
From: destanley-AT-teaser.fr (douglas edric stanley)
Subject: The desert is growing


Grayson,

You wrote: "I haven't really gone anywhere. I have however played the drums
a fair bit and in so doing have entered into numerous becomings with my
drums and whatever it is we create together - and in that sense, I have
travelled a great deal without ever leaving home."

Don't have a complex. You don't need me or anyone else to tell you this but
that is exactly the point of D & G. If The War Machine, Nomadology, and
Smooth Space all refer to the desert this is because they speak of a
desertification happening to ourselves. A deterritorialisation to speak the
speak... Deleuze himself said in an article in the Magazine Littéraire on
=46oucault (I don't have the exact reference on me), that real nomads are the
ones that stay in the same place. He himself if you ever have the chance to
listen to him will tell you that he never goes anywhere. He hates
conferences and insists that his deterritorializations happened in his
petit coin =E0 lui - in his private little corner - as he says on Kafka...

In relation to this, Deleuze has been speaking every other Sunday on the
"cultural" channel here in France named Arte. For those that don't know of
Arte, it's one of the few attempts in the world to make interesting
nationally-broadcast television. It's actually a state co-production with
Germany (and soon with Spain) so you Germans can get dubbed Deleuze every
other week (only on cable though) - But I don't think there are any Germans
on this forum... Anyway in the beginning the whole station was like a sort
of implosion of possible thought systems with whole nights devoted to
themes like Catastrophe, John Cage, Bob Wilson, Nomads, Phoney-TV... Now
two or so years latter things have slowed down. You know, conservative
government. Show lots of Opera. About the closest you get to televisual
exteriority is an Ozu film on TV or some obscure Hungarian film. All this
late at night of course, when the politicians are sleeping... But whatever
the case, there still seem to be a few revolutionaries hanging around the
station because every other week the French end of a Sunday cultural show
called "Metropolis" has been playing at around 20:00 little 5 minute
snippets of an ongoing "abecedaire" Deleuze did with Clare Parnet. My
dictionary translates abecedaire as an "alphabet primer" but that's too
offical sounding. An abecedaire is just a counting down of the alphabet: a
is for antagonism, b is for blasphemy, c is for consciousness, etc... So
Deleuze has been making his abecedaire on French TV for about three months
now. I've only recently bought a VCR, so I can't transcribe for you all the
texts but I have two or three on tape and I have to admit that they are
damn inspiring. There is a small group of us here in France who talk
amongst ourselves as if it were an event in itself (sign that the times are
really slow!): "did you see Deleuze last week, well, look at it this
way..." It's as if it were something to refer your personal life to...
That's what's interresting about these fragments. Deleuze is so
straight-forward, that he's like a spiritual teacher. Total lack of
pretention or academicism. And yet nothing is wasted. No false gesture, nor
is he simplifying his discourse for television. He's simply finding a
discourse that works on T.V. The letter B was for "Boire" (drinking) and
Deleuze went on talking how one can think drinking. He showed quite clearly
that he couldn't give a fuck if people knew he'd been a heavy drinker
before. Because I'm sure he couldn't. Anyway his letter "C" was for
"Culture" and was quite wonderful. A huge breath of fresh air into
conventional French wisdom. Basically he said that intellectuals and
philosophy coferences always annoyed the shit out of him (me faisaient
tellement chier) when he was young because they were indicative of a
culture-imperative. Intellectuals can't just go somewhere, he said, they
have to go somewhere to talk about something. They always have to have
something to say. About this, about that, blah, blah, blah. Whereas he
likened himself to a flea that only had the necessary functions (it needs
to understand light to climb up the branch, heat to fall onto a
warm-blooded animal, and so on): he claimed to have no intellectual
"reserve". He works on a project, when its done he moves on. And then he
repeated the same idea as expressed in Magaine Litteraire: the real nomads
are the ones that stay in the same place.

Douglas Edric Stanley
Paris. 2 Septembre, 1995



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