Date: Wed, 12 Jun 1996 22:20:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Mani Salem-Haghighi <msalemha-AT-uoguelph.ca> Subject: Re: Codes On Thu, 13 Jun 1996 SOC-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au wrote: > Sometimes I think cultural studies is full of frustrated interior > decorators. *shrug* > stephen o > Ah, I often feel the same way. Thank you Stephen, for once again crystallizing a vague sense. As for codes: (the clauses about terms having different meanings in different contexts notwithstanding) the best Deleuze text that comes to mind on codes is "Nomad Thought" in _The New Nietzsche_. As I understand it, you codify something when you take a singular abstract flow (pre-personal) and give it a contractual meaning (societal). A good example from Nomad Thought is Freud noticing that the discourse of the insane falls outside the bourgeois contract, and saying: you give me your dreams, and I give you a neurosis back, and creating a _particular_ system for pulling this transaction off. Allegedly, Nietzsche is the only modern thinker who takes your singular flows, refuses to codify them, and instead gives them back to you in a more heightened form (intensity). Freud and Marx, the other peaks of the "dawn of modernity," are said to be guilty of recodification. (I don't have the text handy, otherwise I would've quoted something fun. Lots of fabulous quotables in that piece.) mani ------------------
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