File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Jan.96, message 77


Date: Mon, 15 Jan 1996 15:46:03 GMT
From: destanley-AT-teaser.fr (douglas edric stanley)
Subject: RE: effort (reply, reply, ...)


Howard,

How can a mouth be any more "open" than it already is?

"...I wanted to laugh like the others, but found this strange imitation
impossible. I took a pocketknife with a bitterly sharpened blade and cut my
flesh there where the lips come together. For a moment I thought I had
achieved my goal. I looked in the mirror at this mouth assasinated by my
own will!  What a mistake! The blood flowed abundantly and anyway the two
wounds made it impossible to see whether the smile was really like that of
the others..." (Lautreamont).

Just a small diversion to say that I do not see where this idea of
intention comes from. How is it related to effort? For me, as far as I can
tell - and I have to disagree with Karinne - the two could not be more
irrelated.

>When the question comes up whether or not a spasm is an "effort", it
>inevitably calls up the spectre of intentionality. The only way to claim
>that a spasm is not an effort, or so it seems, is to claim that it was not
>produced intentionally.

I did not read Deleuze's "spasm" as an expression of the will. Again, let's
be careful. If you want to say that the spasm is something that is
attributed to the subject after the fact, go ahead, but I don't see the
point. It is a bit like saying after the fact why Deleuze jumped from the
window - it doesn't seem to me to be all that revelatory. So perhaps you're
finally trying to say that the after-the-fact nature of intention is a
structural function, that the body puts itself into a process knowing that
it is only after the fact that it's intention will be determined. A bit
like a sky-diver who lands on the ground to find Freud waiting for him,
"Nice jump. Now let's talk about masturbation..." Personally I cannot see
much in this either, although it is obviously a sneakier move.

But to be as clear as possible: "spasm" is merely another activity and does
not need an "intentionality" to make it such. What distinguishes things
from other things, events from other events, efforts from other efforts -
is not the name that we give to them after the fact. That would be a theory
of language as naming, whereas I see language, writing (to pick up on your
Derridian wording), choreography, etc., to be constitutive of the act. The
act inscribes itself in its act. If there is any "intention", before or
after the fact, I don't really see where it is related to the spasm,
effort, or mouvement in its activity - except of course as "after the
fact". There is a spasm - for example a body - and it is only afterwards
that the doctors try to define it as SOMETHING ELSE by naming it :
hysteria, mourning, transferance, etc. This is after the fact but has
nothing to do with the spasm which was just a accumulation or passage of
intensity. Whatever connected itself to it is another story, no matter how
relevant or important such a story could be.

So this is where I cannot understand Karinne's rapprochement, although I
agree it is often instructive to find in disputes common points. Only here,
the two temporalities you point out are totally different. Yes, there is no
self-presence to effort, it spreads itself over the act. But neither is it
a recuperation of a past-time imagined in some soon-to-be future. I'm being
so abstract but I don't have much to work with...

I'll leave it there. When I get Howard's explanation, perhaps I can explain
better.

Douglas Edric Stanley
Paris. 15 jan. 1996



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