File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9806, message 279


Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1998 13:37:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: Re: dark precursor




On Sun, 28 Jun 1998, Paul Bains wrote:

> Hmm,
>         "intereresting". I wonder what 'semiotic' Brian is thinking of. It's
> interesting that he is still playing with the 'topological turn' and a kind
> of abstract descriptive language that invokes no 'logic'. I'm not sure that
> what he's writing about can happen without a semiotic of 'relations'. have
> to ask him about this in sydney in a couple of wks. (I wonder when he thinks
> 'experience' was 'in us'....

"Inter[er]esting" indeed.  And I guess I don't need to talk about what
Brian thinks 'when he thinks' cos he can do that perfectly well for
himself, except I would say that, as someone who teaches in a department
where the intersection of semiotics and phenomenology are the daily bread
and water/butter in some of my colleagues' theoretical approaches saying
something like 'experience' is outside us rather than 'in us' strikes them
as completely counterintuitive (believe me: almost this very discussion
occurred during a thesis defense last week).  The semiotics that Massumi
finds unsatisfactory is, of course, the 'signifying semiotics of
interpretation and decoding' -- no surprise there (kind of a red herring
or straw man, whatever) but, again, such approaches still make the world
go 'round in lots of places.  So, coming back to knock it around a bit
every once in a while can serve its purposes.  Re: On the subject of "an
abstract descriptive language that invokes no 'logic'" and cannot "happen
w/o a semiotic of 'relations'" -- have you seen Massumi's "The Political
Economy of Belonging and the Logic of Relation" in _Anybody_ (edited by
Cynthia Davidson, MIT Press, 1997), where he kicks around Serres' and
Latour's soccer ball?  It might answer some of your questions in advance. 
Maybe not. 

Well, enough about Massumi for now. There was a question about 'the fold'
from (un)leesh.  Deleuze remarks (somewhere in L'Abecedaire) that he had
received letters and other feedback from paper folders and surfers who
knew exactly what he meant when he talked about 'the fold.' So it doesn't
have to have a philosophical resonance only (in fact, Deleuze was probably
most delighted that the concept itself revealed a real porous-ness between
the philosophical and non-philosophical).  But, if it is the philosophical
import that you are wondering about, I like what Badiou (at least in this
instance) has said: "With the fold, Deleuze is searching for a figure of
interiority (or of the subject) that is *neither* reflection (or the
cogito), *nor* the relation-to, the focus (or intentionality), *nor* the
pure empty point (or eclipse).  Neither Descartes, nor Husserl, nor Lacan
... a subject *directly* articulating the classical closure of the
reflexive subject (but without reflexive clarity) and the baroque porosity
of the empirist subjectivity (but without mechanical passivity).  An
intimacy spread over the entire world, a mind folded everywhere within the
body: what a happy surprise" (p.61, _Deleuze and the Theatre of Phil_).
So, in part, the fold is a component in D's subterfuge of the usual ways
of rendering subjectivity (no emphasis is granted to anything close to
personological, egological, interiority, representational, reflective,
etc) -- but it can be more than just a running commentary on 'the subject'
(obvious implications/complications/perplications in architecture too, for
example -- which might be why the 'foldings' chapter in Rajchman's
_Constructions_ is perhaps the most interesting and enlightening chapter
in his otherwise fairly mundane book).  At its most basic (and I'm
wrapping fast here because I have to eat breakfast [er, lunch] and get to
other things), the fold admits much more into the equation without
reducing things (like 'experience') to 'points' or 'scenes' or 'memories'
or 'terms' (which, as Paul knows, relations are external to) but, rather,
the body infolds contexts/relations full of intermixings of sensations,
cognitions, volitions, intensities, etc (that are never as inseparable as
I've just named them -- here see Massumi's "Autonomy of Affect" which I'm
ventriloquilizing or, again, Daniel Stern on infant development).  

For an appropriately primitive visual representation, check out Deleuze's
funky drawing toward the end of _Foucault_.  I've known folks who have
read the picture from left to right but, of course, it is a cross-section
of a kind of geological view of subjectivation.  The #1 (line of the
outside), for instance, is not running across the page but is, instead, a
surface (an ontological surface) that cuts down through the book and also
rises up toward you (it helps if you are wearing 3-D glasses maybe).  And,
#4 (the fold -- which, if you look close, might also reveal the problem of
using the moebius strip as model) is the ripple running down through the
ontological surface (in Leibniz, we'd say viniculum) of the outside
membrane.  #3 (strata) are encrustations/accretions ('collected and
solidified visual dust and sonic echo') of active forgettings, the
residual excess of infolded contexts. #2 (strategic zone) is where lines
can be bent, crossed, endured, thought, altered -- bending lines so we can
live upon them, take hold, breathe ("A Portrait of Foucault," p.110).  The
unlabelled atmospheric particles are, I suppose, grace (and/)or chance
(the opposite of destiny but a wound that you were born to embody).  The
fold is, in a way, a means of bringing spatiality to becoming (which is
already obviously temporal).  There is always too this attraction to an
Leibnizian particulate and marbled/machinic unconscious whenever Deleuze
describes the fold and subjectivity (interesting that, as I was reading
the other day, Freud deletes a sentence from his manuscript of _Beyond the
Pleasure Principle_ where he is talking about the timelessness of the UnCs
and he writes in the next sentence (later deleted in blue pencil): "The
other abstraction which can be linked to the functioning of CS, however,
is not space but material, substance").  The fold is also bound up with
substance/material ('the interval is substance' -- a Peter Canning essay
beat that one into my head, but Clarice Lispector too), especially
inorganicity and incorporeality too.  Marbled matter, events and souls --
all of it and everything in between.  "A Leibnizian transcendental
philosophy, which bears on the event rather than the phenomenon, replaces
Kantian conditioning by means of a double operation of transcendental
actualization and realization (animism and materialism)"  (_The Fold_,
p.120).  Or, as Guattari puts it in _Chaosmosis_, "Thus it's not a
question of a causal infrastructure and of a superstructure representative
of the psyche, or of a world separated from sublimation.  The flesh of
sensation and the material of the sublime are inextricably interwoven"
(p.95).  So, that's all something to do with the fold.  And the best I can
do with my five-year old kid tugging at my sleeve for the last ten minutes
-- to the park, an infinitive, an event, an intermingling of souls and
sensations.  Experience: "the single French verb *experimenter* means at
once to experience and to experiment: I think the latter sense is here
opposed to "interpretation," and coupled with the former sense by the
insistence ... upon the deeply 'superficial' primacy of the skin" 
(translator's notes to _Negotiations_, p.197).  

there's nothing deeper than the skin(ned knee and elbows)

Greg







   

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