Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 09:37:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: BwO & bKO



It is too early in the morning for this but what the hell ...

On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Thomas Wall wrote:

> Karen Ocana's postings are quite brilliant as always.  

Ahhh ... the bKO's head is, no doubt, swelling.  But, beware, she's 
publicly disdainful of this kind of public flattery.

> I am struggling with
> the notion of the BwO myself and I'm now trying to work out the temporality
> of it.  It's a "pure past" isn't it?  That is, a past that was never
> present and that is nevertheless simultaneously always still
> possible--always still to come.  The BwO is the fact that the body *with*
> organs has a past that it still must be.  

I'm not sure that it has a temporality.  Or, maybe, it has a-temporality. 
D+G, of course, talk about the BwO in terms of space though even here they
are careful to add that it "is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter
that occupies space to a given degree--to the degree corresponding to the
intensities produced" (ATP, 153).  Aden describes the BwO as a limit and,
yeah, of course--he's right (the brilliant AE).  But I tend to think of
the BwO more as a suspension.  Which--at least for me--allows one to maybe
think of the (a-)temporality of it, a bit more easily.  "Pure past" is
problematic for a variety of reasons (and Massumi makes a great correction
to its conceptualization in his _Users' Guide_ [the brilliant BM]--moving
it off of the entropic path [p.168-170]).  Pure past: as a past never
present--yes ... but crucially I always try to add "to conscious
perception."  This is one of the ways that Deleuze introduces Bergson's
'virtual' into his reading of Proust: "It is true that we do not apprehend
something as past at the very moment when we experience it as present ...
But this is because the joint demands of conscious perception and of
voluntary memory establish a real succession where, more profoundly, there
is a virtual coexistence" (_P&S_, 57).  Pure past (and, in this particular
case, the 'virtual') is more the infolding and co-resonance of contexts of
lived / living experience [for temporary lack of a better term] that never
present themselves to consciousness in such a way as to be remembered or
forgotten but still, nonetheless, act upon the body with an undeniable
amount of force and intensity.  "A flux of intensities existing only as
expressions," reversing the bKO, "on the level of pure sensation [not yet
folded a second time by conscious thought], but sensation in search of a
concept."  The bKO's return message to the none-too-bDHJ says, "I was just
being silly."  But--what's so silly?--I think that it was her most
'brilliant' hour, half-minute, whatever. A final thing here, from D's _The
Fold_, which I'll just leave suspended: 

"Leibniz often insists on this point: God does not endow the soul with a
body without furnishing the given body with organs.  Now what makes an
organic, specific, or generic body?  It is probably made of infinities of
present material parts, in conformity with infinite division, in
conformity with the nature of masses or collections.  But these infinities
in turn would not comprise organs if they were not inseperable from crowds
of little monads, monads of heart, liver, knee, of eyes, hands (according
to their special zone that corresponds to one infinity or another): animal
monads that themselves belong to material parts of 'my' body and that are
not confused with the monad to which my body belongs.  These are merely
the requisites of my organic, specific, or generic body; and there is no
cause to ask if matter thinks or perceives, but only whether it is
separable from these little souls of perception"  (108). 

> So I try to understand it in the
> way that Blanchot talks of the "sick" hand in his essay *The Essential
> Solitude*--the hand that cannot not write. Such a hand is not really a hand
> therefore and it is not really writing.  But that's as far as I go.  I'm
> hung up on that "past that still must be"--inexhaustible--the very notion
> of the inexhaustible--that I can't quite express properly.  

Okay, maybe I won't let the Leibniz moment hang.  Especially since D
mentions hands.  A hand that cannot not write (boy, I wish that this was
_my_ problem!) is like a spasmatic hand: a sensational hand in search of a
concept, an imaginative hand (no doubt) but unreasonable (literally).  It
is a hand going through the infinite variations and postures that a
writing hand can engage: no longer in conformity with the nature of masses
or collections (the hand as molecule).  Not conceiving these postures as
an infinity of 'possibles' but performing them as 'ideals.' Abstract
perhaps (because a hand detached from thought doesn't know what it's
saying) but real all the same.  Inexhaustible because the hand doesn't
just inhabit all of the up and down and across strokes of the writing but
all of the states of transition between them too.  The hand as BwO.
Writing liking conducting an orchestra that won't stop. Schumann. 

Oh, but I can stop.

Greg


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