File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Mar.96, message 80


Date:        Tue, 12 Mar 1996 13:33:34 EST
From: Karen Ocana <CXKO-AT-musica.mcgill.ca>
Subject: Re: Stardust & spiders & sub-jects &


>
>PS Could you give me a page number for the quote from WiP: "le cerveau est
>l'esprit meme."?

"The brain is the *mind* itself."  page 211, lines 6-7 of WIP?
from Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-subject dance or tra-ject-ory
performance, i.e. a very refined permutation or stuttering of
sub-ject-i-vit-y, a little like what they do elsewhere with
 *plic*, implicating, perplicating and complicating, only here it
is superjecting, injecting and ejecting, but they stop short of
abjecting (that sort of buggering comes up elsewhere).

But really what it comes down to is rethinking thinking (and thinking
subjects) so that it's not brains that do the thinking or men but
rather that thinking takes place wherever something creates itself,
wherever sensations erupt, or concepts, or functions, but then
Deleuze comes up with the notion of *soul* or force to explain
this (but machine might be another term) or rather to put the
creativity or arts, science and philosophy on the same plane of
consistency and absoluteness and autopoetics.  Soul being anima.

Deleuze and Guattari's is a peculiar vitalism.  Following Plotinus
they allow for thought (and art and chance) in flowers and rocks,
for whatever contracts a habit and preserves itself ... and contem-
plates itself.  "The plant contemplates by contracting elements from
which it originates--light, carbon, and the sales--and it fills
itself with colors and odors [ ... ] It is as if flowers smell them
selves by smelling wht composes them, first attempts of vision or of
sense of smell, before being perceived or even smelled by an agent
with a nervous system and a brain." (WIP? 212)

Guattari once wrote an essay called "Subjectless action", about
the intransitive subject as an 'it rains', 'it sings', 'it shits',
'it spits'--  agency!  which isn't exactly subjectless, but simply
jectfullness: such that it jects, it jects in, it jects actorss,
um, across, it jects around, flowers do it, rocks do it and you don't
need a brain exactly altho D&G do talk about inorganic life as having
microbrains (WIP? 213).  But in any case it all comes round to
the business of concepts and What is A concept?

Then there is that exciting troubling bit at the end with respect
to a people to come and nonconceptual concepts for unphilosophical
philosophers and it starts to smack of some sort of nondialectical
dialectics with a big place for the NO and the Shadow.  And you
start to wonder about these double affirmations again and just
what is this Shadow Dance really.

over and ouch,  Karen

>It seems to me that, if the quote is not in a special context, that D&G must
>have  been wearing the lenses bequeathed to them by our friend the glass
>polisher from The Hague. The quote seems somehow incomplete.  There's
>somehow a missing AND (or ET), leaving us to think that the brain and spirit
>are only internal to each other.
>How Undeleuzian! How Spinozist!
>
>
>>where did the spiders come from! I must have nodded off.
>>Can you tell me a bit more about these external relations (hume/d)? The
>>concept in WIP is 'Ruyerian' and its consistency is that of _internal
>>relations_. External relations belong to Whiteheads fallacy of simple
>>location and to Ruyer's simple aggregates. The internal relations are what
>>holds something together in absolute overwiew as a 'primary true form'
>>rather than as a simple mosaic, pattern or gestalt. The internal relations
>>are also what gives the concept its endo-consistency, its autopoiesis or
>>self-actualization.....
><A little birdie just told me that deleuze almost twists hume around to this
><but I'll have to check.
>>If the mind (subjectivity) is external relations it wouldn't be very smooth
>>- on the contrary it would be v. lumpy? It would be partes extra partes -
>>bits side by side with no internal relations. In fact the unity in
>>multiplicity or smoothness comes from the nature of autosurvol-without
>>distance or proximity, in a non-dimensional volume. Transpatial,
>>transversal. the co-presence of 'spirit and matter'.  "Le cerveau est
>>l'esprit m=EAme" wip. And of course these true forms in autosurvol don't>>need dasein. In fact there better off without it.
>
>

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