Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 00:25:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: Re: What is a materialist analysis?




On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, Paul Bains wrote:

> why use this term? D/g write about diagrammatic thought, rhizomes, abstract
> machines, desiring production, absolute surfaces, schizoanalysis..... Where
> is the 'materialist/ism' in this - perhaps i need an example of what you
> think a materialist analysis might be...If you've ever got the time.

<snipped a F.Guattari quote here>

> "In all my books I have sought the nature of the event..." (Deleuze,
> Pourparlers, p194).
> 
> The term 'materialist' is so overloaded/overcoded that it hardly seems worth
> using it - which is perhaps why d/g rarely, if ever(?), use the term.
> 
> Catatonically writing it just seems like a non-problem - why not dump the
> term (invent/create a new one) and think of a _'particular problematic
> context'_ (event?) and why it would be worth 'analysing.' What would the
> analysis do? 

Well, I haven't got the time either (and I'd never call Paul inane -- no
matter his temporary repose -- though I was about to point to the same
section of A-O, as Lambda C). So, just a hit and run or quote and run, as
it were.  Lambda C made note earlier, if I'm remembering right, of the
Reichian brand of materialism (there are other sources/directions too)
that finds its way to the inorganic, etc; this is DeLanda's gig too of
course.  There is also the 'incorporeal materialism' of D+G--as Foucault
tentatively ventured it (not sure whether or not Deleuze would accept such
a characterization). Your (Paul's) remark on the 'event' made me look it
up for the precise details and here Foucault says, in his review of D's
_Logic of Sense_ and _Difference and Repetition_ (p.231). 

"Of course, an event is neither substance, nor accident, nor quality nor
process, events are not corporeal.  And yet, an event is certainly not
immaterial; it takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of
materiality.  Events have their place; they consist in relation to,
coexistence with, dispersion of, the cross-checking accumulation and
selection of material elements, it occurs as an effect of, and in,
material dispersion.  Let us say that the philosophy of the event should
advance in the direction, at first sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal
materialism."

So, as long as the 'materialism' has its paradoxical incorporeality (which
might, for instance, put Goodchild more over on this side, rather than on
DeLanda's, with his swing through the 'spirit' and attention to the plane
of immanence -- in fact in a letter to Phil Goodchild, relayed by Phil in
the notes to his first book, Deleuze calls himself a "materialist" as
opposed to Phil's spiritualist) AND its vitalistic inorganicity, it pretty
much works for me.  But this materialism has to be located (like, say, a
fiery third line), always, between these two, and not more one than the
other: otherwise, you end up sounding like DeLanda or Goodchild (ha!). Or,
as Courtney Love once put it:  "I'm the one with no soul / One above and
one below." 

awaiting celebrity skin or obilivion,

Greg

p.s. In _The Fold_, Deleuze says "souls can be said to be material ... not
because they act upon matter, but inasmuch as they belong to it.  Matter
is what continues to make syntheses in accord with its laws of
exteriority, while souls make up units of synthesis ... in the flash of an
instant" (p.120).