Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 00:19:18 GMT
From: destanley-AT-teaser.fr (douglas edric stanley)
Subject: Re: effort/intentions/NOW


Howie wrote,

>It's interesting that Douglas seems to agree with me that intentions are
>about self-presence, and that Karinne and I seem to agree that effort
>involves an element of self-presence. At least I can't be totally off the
>wall in claiming that both terms are associated with a subjective agency in
>common parlance (whereas "spasm" is not).

To begin with, I am not one to follow what "common" parlance wants me to
understand in a concept. But at the same time, I do not believe in the
arbitrary use of any-old word with any-old definition I chose. If I use the
word "effort" - and if it is only THROUGH this word that I can work out
what I'm trying to work out - obviously I am basing an awfully large part
of my definition on definitions exterior to my own. If I insist on working,
even re-working, the word "effort", it is because I see a virtual force, a
"puissance" interior to it that I'm trying to actualize, emphasize, bring
out... And to simply be caught up in the generally accepted definition
(generally accepted by who?) is to more or less be forced to invent a whole
new dictionary in order to even begin inventing new uses for the world.
Which is quite the opposite of what I think we should be doing here. If we
are to think "around", "after", "in light of", or even "against" Deleuze
and Guattari, it is not without interest to use their terminology. I repeat
: "l'effort", "la chute", "l'intensite", etc are all word that I have taken
from Deleuze and simply given new or even obvious usages to... But even
with Deleuze and Guattari you have to take these terms out of their
original context even to understand them! Give them new uses, new examples,
new actualizations even to understand for the first time : when Deleuze and
Guattari write "the coupling that takes place within the partial
object-flow connective synthesis also has another form: product/producing.
Producing is always something 'grafted onto' the product; and for that
reason desiring-production is production of production..." how else can we
understand this phrase without actualizing it in our own way, a notre
manniere? Who reads a philosopher without coming up with his own personal
understandings of the concepts presented? How could we do otherwise?

In Anti-oedipus and in the Logic of Sensation (chapter 8 on hysteria, p.33)
Deleuze talks about the egg, about how an egg represents a series of
forces, of intensities, of semi-organizations, or lines, tendencies,
pre-strata - all fundamentally BEFORE any representation of an organism.
The egg is not an organism in waiting - it is a force, it is waiting its
actualisation and this actualization will take a whole series of parallel
forces to bring it out... I was reading Ambroise Pare's medical writings
(16th century) a few months ago and I ran across a series of drawings of
little men, their bodies perfectly formed, anatomically perfected only
tiny, miniscule and contained in the sperm. It was believed that the whole
human organism was already actualized even before conception: hence
monsters were a devine intervention. (It was an extremely revelatory image
and represents for me the apotheosis of american fundamentalist beliefs on
pre-natal identity. In a sense every sperm is sacred because man is already
finished in his sperm itself and it just waiting to reach the day). Such a
conception of conception, I should say, is in total opposition to Deleuze
and Guattari: it sees the egg or sperm as a totalized ogansim
(organisation) waiting its growing-up; whereas Deleuze and Guattari see the
egg as a force awaiting the impossible, awataiting chaos, the unknown. It
only knows that it has certain necessities and not exactly what to do with
them...

If I make reference to this idea of the egg as a pre-organism
(pre-totality) force, it is because for me the word, the concept, the
phrase, the term, etc., is just such an example of the egg. The concept,
the "word" effort is just an egg, and if I didn't read Deleuze and
Guattari's text as an egg I can't imagine how else I would... If I read
everything they wrote in the light of common sense then I'd learn nothing.
This does not mean that one needs to go AGAINST common sense (that would
assume a pre-organized meaning to the text), it simply means that I will be
forced to understand even common sense only by actualizing it, by giving it
a value, by understanding it as something unknown to begin with. I think
this step of not understanding even the most commonly understood word is
"incontournable" and defines the process of reading itself.

In this way, the mere idea of understanding anything in its "common
parlance" is to understand nothing at all of the newness or particularity
of this thing, and to stop at its first stages the necessary becoming of
any term. You allow no time to germinate. You want everything to stick to
acceptable thought, or at least your warning would force me to, because if
I'm to stick to common usage of a term then I'm to take it's egg-ness out.

I know you didn't quite mean all this, but the implications of what you've
said do. Just to be clear - yes, I understand, you mean to say that a word
has its common meaning and just applying any-old meaning to this word is
going to do no one any good. Why not just another word? Well, this is
precisely my point. You could always tell me that everything's already been
said already but then you'd be totally in opposition to Deleuze and
Guattari and anyway it'd mean you're a total cynic - but I don't think this
is the case and it is for this reason that I insist so much on this point:
you have on two occasions pointed out that I'm using effort in a sense
contrary to its common understanding. Perhaps. Perhaps. I'll give you that
much - how could I possibly know? And you're example with the spasm (I'll
get to that) was very instructive :  I think you're right, spasm does not
imply a subject that spasms. However, this is precisely my point: effort
takes place in light of a subject, there is forceably a subject, or at
least a "force" or some intending force involved. In that sense you are
right, intention is there, at least in the first stages. As to how
important such an intending force is, we differ greatly - but the point
remains : I absolutely NEEDED the "common parlance" to even say the half of
what I said about effort. I needed this subject, or at least this
"prevaling usage" which tends to see effort as something making an effort
over something else, and I absolutely needed just such an existance of two
counteracting forces to work out what I was trying to work out. You say
that you are unsure of the wisdom in working so delicate a manoeuver, I say
it's worth the effort. Because there's an egg-ness at work. This is
essential for me. I was absolutely aware of the common usage of effort and
counted on it 100%. So in that sense you prove me all the more witty than I
thought I was. But you don't give me the benefit of the doubt: you dont't
allow me the right to germinate my thought and your very odd personal
attack on me a few messages back attests to this:

>This "little fascist," as you so eloquently labeled me, just wanted to thank
>you for working out all of the implications.  Oh how sad we would be without
>you amid"st" and among"st" us.  By the way, what are the theoretical
>implications of one whose subjective position is so (self) absorbant that
>nothing else escapes -- Welcome to the Great Dying Red Star -- could such a
>theory be a praxis of consumption.  On which ground should you feed next?

Of course if I called you a fascist it was with all the affection in the
world. If you don't accept this, fine, I can't really remember the context
so I won't get into it - just realize that I use words like this with all
the humour and love one can imagine. Such an insult or label is not really
all that insulting for me (and certainly if it doesn't apply, as it seems
not to do in your case). Even that little prick with all his jism on the
screen a few months ago made me laugh....

But as concerns my self-absorbtion (what am I, a sponge?), again what can I
say but that I stick to it. It takes me a lot of time to work things out
and on this list I've always tried to go as far into a concept as I thought
I could go. If I continue to disagree with you or others on something, this
isn't because I'm stubborn, it's just because I personally cannot go in
that direction. When I'm helping to hatch an egg, and especially in a
collective think-tank such as this one, I cannot help pushing in the
elements I see as necessary for just such a hatching. This list is for me
an incubator and we should all be battling like married couples on what the
best termperature is for our little egg! In this sense, I'm just trying to
give the egg its time to germinate and if this means pummeling it a million
times with the same questions I'm ready to do so...


-------------

Pfew...

That said, let me move on to my second response to your comment. Again, you said

>It's interesting that Douglas seems to agree with me that intentions are
>about self-presence, and that Karinne and I seem to agree that effort
>involves an element of self-presence. At least I can't be totally off the
>wall in claiming that both terms are associated with a subjective agency in
>common parlance (whereas "spasm" is not).

It would, by definition, be impossible for effort to be a self-presence.
Effort is, even in its most "prevailing usage," a relation of some-"thing"
to some other force or object EXTERIOR to it. This is probably what makes
effort APPEAR to be a waste of energy rather than an accumulation of
experience : there is an exterior force working on a subject (for example)
and even in its prevailing usage effort is considered to be a subject "on"
something (although this seems to me to be more the definition of "labour"
- ed.) - this "on" something requires something else than the subject,
something outside of its field of presence, something in the context of
which one works, etc... Again, I think it is important to distinguish
effort from labour and I'm suprised taht we're arguing on this point,
certainly given Deleuze and Guattari's insistance on process over goal...
But remember, such a process is NOT, for Deleuze and Guattari, a
presence-in-itself, or a presence-for-itself. It is just a process in which
terms work themselves and each other...

I suspect that Howie is working in the same vein as Derrida's critique of
self-presence, and this is important as well: in a sense labour attempts a
sort of self-presence between the subject and its goal - self-presence as a
temporal and spatial unification of the worker and her work, the artist and
her art, the thinker and her thought - self-presence would take the
constitutive difference and meld the two terms into a big One. This is the
writer's "intention" as concerns her text, the artist's "intention" or
"message" as concerns her art... But such conceptions attempt to ignore the
exterior force acting on the subject AS an exterior force and not as
something produced by him. In a recent discussion with dancers I stumbled
on Deleuze and Guattari's qssessment of Kleist's "On the marionette
theatre" where they write the following: "Kleist offers a wonderful
explanation of how forms and persons are only appearances produced by the
displacement of a center of gravity on an abstract line, and by the
conjunction of these lines on a plane of immanence. He is fascinated by
bears; they are impossible to fool because their cruel little eyes see
through appearances to the true "soul of mouvement", the Gemut or
nonsubjective affect: the becoming-bear of Kleist" (ATP, p.268). This idea
of invisible forces or nonsubjective affect is important for effort. There
is something that depases the subject, works at it from the outside and yet
nevertheless IN THE CONTEXT OF WHICH, in the FORCE or PULL of which the
subject is trapped, even formed. This is my activity of writing, my
difficulty with working out concepts, etc., etc.  In this activity I am not
self-present, nor is my activity. My activity is working ON me as much as I
on it, or in it.

Self-presence, for me, is an extremely disagreeable way of looking at the
world, and even inhibits us from understanding certain creative processes -
"en acte" I should say... There is something so simple in the way in which
Maine de Biran says it : it is through the effort I must PUT INTO engaging
myself with an object, any object, no matter how factual or "real", that
allows me to have any understanding of that object at all. It is almost as
if I had to spiritually bend myself (my ownmost self) TOWARDS that object
and this bending process is a temporal one and does not just measure out in
the time it takes me to discover it. And as we all know, time is anything
but self-present.

All this happens in the NOW as Karinne has put it, and I too have given a
stict importance to just such a NOW in my own life. But in no way is such a
NOW a self-presence, a real, a possessible object, a truth, a
thing-in-itself. "If someone comes to you with nothing, throw it away,"
goes the Buddhist teaching, and so too the NOW: in no way must we
understand this NOW as something present to itself. It is just NOW-ing and
"IS" not. The NOW, for me, is a becoming, and a becoming is always an
in-between. We do not need to banish the goal, after all we all have
"things to do", "tasks", "chores", and so on. We all have to do the dishes.
The difficulty is in integrating that goal into the process, rather than
subbordinating the process to the goal. I came across this problem when
speaking with some dance and theatre students at Paris 8 (where Deleuze
taught), and, oddly enough, there is a theatre-class called "Chaosmose"
which is the orginial title of Guattari's book which I think in english is
called "Chaosmosis". Well, some of the students don't seem to have fully
caught the importance or even elementary ideas of their professor, but
others made it quite clear to me that what they were working on was how to
work out an ever-becoming NOW, an ever-improvising SITUATION in which the
actor works which would liberate her from the constraints of the goal. They
work very closely, apparently, in technique but this technique is not a
structure or a overall plan. It is more like a fisher's fishing-kit: he
goes out there with a series of flies and weights, etc., not wuite knowing
what he's going to be up against... So too the actor who even has lines and
scenes and ordered sequences to fill-out. Hence an ever-working NOW,
unpresent to itself, in the becoming of process.

This question of integrating the goal into the process, into the NOW is I
think very important to a dancer, for example, who needs to perform the
"same" piece night after night. You have to take all the elements of the
piece and consider them an egg... A bit like what I said when I talked
about doing the dishes: you know that the goal is getting them clean but
even more important is the activity itself (which I insist takes place over
time not space). Don't rush it, let it take its time. So too a dance-piece:
don't rush it, let it take its own time, even if just such a time is
perfectly organized. You know, Bob Wilson is re-performing his Hamlet at
Bobigny in February and when I saw it last time it was timed out to the
minute! But never would you have the impression that he was rushing it:
why? because the duree, the time of the play was just part of the process
of the play and Wilson just inhabited that duree, let it become him. I
don't know if anyone else has seen this play but I know that there's five
or six people on this list in Paris and you shouldn't miss it! Wilson
himself performing as well is a rare event... But the point I was getting
at is that even in a timed-out performance Wilson was able to let that NOW
take over, that even in a duree you can inhabit a NOW....



You will excuse me, or not, but I'm violently opposed to this idea of a
self-presence to effort. Otherwise what I was saying makes no sense. Effort
is always a question of "becoming". I tried not to use this word because I
like to avoid the typical Deleuze and Guattarisms which I think are too
easily used here on this list (the proof being that when I introduced this
very Deleuzian idea of effort, I didn't see anyone catch the element of
"becoming" inherent in it - this I attribute to the too-comfortable nature
of this word). So we have to be a little more rigorous. Either effort is
not self-present or there is absolutely no interest in it.


Douglas Edric
Paris. 21 Jan. 1996



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