Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 14:26:41 +1100
From: P.Bains-AT-uws.edu.au (Paul Bains)
Subject: RE: effort/intentions/NOW


Douglas writes,
> This is why Yoga is
>not just exercise and requires a certain spritual becoming: there is a real
>becoming-mountain, becoming-river, becoming-arc, that is not just a simple
>unification (self-presence) of the mountain and the subject which would
>simply be conclusive to anthropomorphising the mountain, the river, etc.
>This is important to me, and I mention it because I'm suprised to hear a
>dancer talking about self-presence... Where is the becoming-animal in your
>dance? If you have not yet read it, absolutely read this chapter in A
>Thousand Plateaus. It has everything to do with dance...

Yes, of course, but why be so 'surprised, isn't there always going to be an
endless oscillation btwn these becomings (including the human) and some
"minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages?
(1000P, p270, english ed.)? Or to put it another way - "of course, conscious
thoughts and intentions play a part in the process, but only as one line of
causality among the many proliferating in the fractal void." (Massumi, a
user's guide, p.28). There's never any end to this chaosmose. Or as Pierre
Levy puts it "the psyche transforms the external into the interior and vice
versa, since the perceived world is always already plunged in the element of
affect....Like Leibnizian monads or Whitehead's actual occasions, each
person embodies a selection, a version, a particular vision of the common
world or global psyche."
In a way this conversation about intention.. is about articulating the
nature of the fold - the psychism is open to the exterior (that's where it
arises) but 'a transubstanciated exterior, animated by affectivity.'
what would be inter-esting would be to look at the work of someone like
Humberto Maturana who provides 'to my mind' one of the most amazing accounts
of the fold thru an understanding of the coupling of the domain of the
organism which is relational- with the closed dynamics of the nervous system
which becomes recursive in this coupling with the relational domain of
coexistence. A Leibnizian biology. And of course deleuze characterises
Ruyer's work as a leibnizian 'biological philosophy' that profoundly
analyses the virtual and the actual. But such an exploration would be
difficult to say the least. 
Paul, becoming quoting,
By the swindle of meditation freedom is not found (Saraha)
"where motility and intentionality are not operative
 And where neither sun nor moon appear,
 There you fools let mind relax restfully." (Karma-Phrin-las-pa). 


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