File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Jun.96, message 140


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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