File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Jan.96, message 56


Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 03:31:01 GMT
From: destanley-AT-teaser.fr (douglas edric stanley)
Subject: Re: effort


Howard,

Help! I didn't get a word of what you said! Please simplify things for me,
or find me more example, or use less new terminology. Or give me working
definitions for all your new terms or, yikes. I feel so lost. Not falling,
just kind of dopey, mouth open. Huh?

Nevertheless you said something at the end which seemed essential to me :
"...Ideas are powerful only through the effort of bodies. This effort gives
rise to further reflection and allows bodies to keep on keepin on."

I'm not so sure what you mean exactly by this, but the clause "allows
bodies to keep on keeping on" seemed to me appropriate.

Let me give everyone here (where "here"?) a little report on a book I
stumbled on in the library the other day. It is a collection of all of
Maine de Biran's writings (1794-1824) around the concept of effort, and
it's quite suprising.

At first when you read it, you have the impression that he's understanding
effort in a negative sense, as was suggested on this list: effort as
labour, loss of energy, etc. And when you read his diary it's loaded with
how oppressive the weather was to him, how the morning skies cleared up for
just a few lovely seconds and then closed again to weight down on him like
a huge weight and so on and so on until you too are ready to go out the
window.

But then, when you look at it again, suddenly something comes out.

(I won't get into the "sensation", "intuition", etc., and if someone else
wants to I would complain a bit because it's interesting only difficult.
But what is fairly graspable, is this idea of "effort" which he describes
in the following...)

Maine de Biran writes:

"Effort necessarily carries with it the perception of a relationship
between the being which moves or wants to move, and any object which
opposes itself to this mouvement. Without a subject or a will to determine
the mouvement, without a resisting term, there is no EFFORT. And without
effort, there is no knowledge and no perception of any kind.

"If an individual did not want to, or was simply not determined enough to
begin to move (se mouvoir), he wouldn't know anything. As well, if nothing
resisted him, he wouldn't know anything either, he wouldn't suspect the
slightest existence and wouldn't even have the slightest idea of his own.

"Once a mouvement has begun, if it stops at the first sign of resistance
the individual would simply know that the obstacle existed. But he would
not know if it was absolutely impenetrable, solid, hard or soft, etc. These
properties of matter can show themselves to him only if he WANTS to
continue the mouvement and it's the intensity of his effort which will be
determinant. If in pushing the obstacle with all his strength he meets a
fixed term, it will allow him to know the impenetrability of it, its
hardness, etc. If the obstacle gives way more or less easily, he will know
the extent to which it is soft, mobile, etc...

"When he begins to move, the individual only perceives the first
relationship to existence. It is when he wants to continue the mouvement
that the others become apparent....

Then he concludes that :

"Effort is dependant on will, but when resistance diminishes and
dissapears, effort and will dissapear with it." (Habitude, p.17-19)


(All this comes from the collection "L'Effort", Maine de Biran, PUF, 1996.
I'm just too depressed seeing the mangled or accent-less french on this
list so I quickly translated w/o posting the original. As always, excuse my
clumsiness, it's not a serious translation.)


Now, if we were to think this through from first impressions, we might say
: you see, Douglas, effort has to be understood in light of the obstacle.
I.e. effort is always effort against some THING and not (as I've suggested)
effort captured, taken, trapped, held IN a "situation".

And you could, more or less, say this. And I would agree. Effort is in fact
effort AGAINST something.

But, there's a catch, and it's a bit of the same catch as the fall which
swept its landing into it's mouvement rather than reducing its mouvement to
the landing: what effort produces, is the experience of difference. It
affirms, or even constructs the difference between two objects. That
difference is in a sense constituted by effort - and, in that effort sticks
to the mouvement, inhabits a mouvement and can feasably work against an
obstacle infinately, one cannot say that there is a specific measure to
effort, a particular space to it, or that this effort actually can be
determined at all (at least not as an end). Effort is lived, inhabited. It
is the activity that determines the understanding of difference between the
acting subject and the obstacle. It is only when the subject sticks to the
mouvement against the obstacle, that the subject actually learns something
about that object, that the subject experiences the obstacle : it's weight,
it's height, it's solidity, etc.

So, yes, effort is a mouvement moving against something, but it is part of
a greater mouvement which is that of difference and the understanding, or
experiencing of difference.

Effort constructs an experience which is not measureable in space. And now
we can see that it is in fact POSITIVE, and not simply negative. That it is
a mode of UNDERSTANDING and EXPERIENCING the world, rather than being
hindered by it. So that, when someone here said that effort bugged him
because it suggested that it was AGAINST something, well, he was simply
missing the slippage where that effort "against" something transformed
itself into an "affirmation" and "experiencing" of that obstacle.

Effort, for Maine de Biran at least, is an apriora, or at least the
zero-degree of experience before "obstacle" and "will" can even be
separated. Will exists, as does the obstacle - of course, they both do, but
at what level? I've never stopped saying this. With Seppuku I made this
quite clear: Seppuku is not the "expression" of will because the will has
to stick to it until the end. There is not some "THING" expressed, not even
itself because the will is only there because the effort is there (life) -
just as the obstacle was only understood as an obstacle as long as the
effort was there. The effort is what is bringing all this together, making
an event out of what seemed like a negative, passive, or difficult
situation.

Think of it this way: when you start doing something, and you stick to it,
there might be an objective involved but this objective has almost nothing
to do with the actual effort you put into achieving that goal. To such an
extent that you can say that the activity was the production of effort, and
not the loss of energy in trying to reach a goal.

This is why I said that effort was radically different than labour.


Douglas Edric
Paris. 10 Jan, 1996





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