File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9810, message 318


Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 21:50:40 +0000
From: Chris <christopher.mcmahon-AT-jcu.edu.au>
Subject: Re: boundaries in flow


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Dear Kalapyshe,

Boundaries are thresholds. Take the doorstep. It's a semiotic space.
Boundaries are to be respected or subverted or stormed. Thresholds are
to be crossed by those with enough force, or those who hold the key, or
carry the mark. Its a real fold in the semiotic regime which is modelled
upon real spacetime.

The essential thing unleesh is saying, I think, is that he would replace
the idea of a bounded segment (say a chapter) with the idea of a segment
marked off by a transformational zone. He is not replacing thresholds
with boundaries, quite the opposite, he is emphasising the idea of
energy level, becoming, intensity and modulation.

Now what is at stake in this making metaphor forget itself, forget it's
metaphoricity in order to use itself? would it not be a desire to remain
in a operable system of metaphor, where metaphors (semes) remain
operable, seem real, in short, a signifying semiotic regime. We have to
keep Oedipus from knowing his metaphoricity otherwise he would
deconstruct himself, become inoperable? And isn't Oedipus already
becoming inoperable, newly operational, when it becomes real and leads
one across the threshold into a passional postsignifying line of flight,
an escape from boundaries? And isn't Oedipus yet to be bron in a
presignifying semiosis - Oedipus can only be born as metaphor, within a
signifying semiosis in which he must know his proper segments, and
forget the metaphoricity of that segmentation, the nonidentity of real
threshold and semiotic threshold? And does not the countersignifying
regime attack Oedipus primarily via number, via a desegmenting
noncountability that is at once concrete and real and demetaphorising
and asignifying, that stoms thresholds not wanting the password, the
postpresignifying incantation where Mother Earth's truename is now the
Name of the Father, the proper name, bounded, privatised, forced down in
the face of metaphor, made to humble itself - not before the Earth - but
before writing? And is it not the ambition of every Priest to formulate
a tracery on which the pass-keys are labelled, to find the utter
pass-key, the logos that will open all doors, cross every threshold so
designed. It would be a diagram of the proper segments, this map, a
vision of the proper metaphorical links, enacted every day and twice on
Holy Days, a dramatic simulation of the proper text. And all the while
the Earth is becoming this text, and they - now together for eternity -
like a good married couple are forgetting the metaphoricity of this
textual achievement, which is, in the end, the insane service due to the
despot, and necessary for him to attach the Earth and all the people in
it to his tail, like a peacock whose eyes are emblems, heralds, omens,
metaphors. And as the despot makes the Earth be born again, makes us
each transform ourself in his image, we are always forgetting the
metahoricity of this rebirth, the reality of this semiotic fold, as
though it were merely a pair of glasses we could remove, or a book we
could close at any time, we forget the murder of this thing, the Earth,
we relinquish the finitude of debt.

- Chris

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