Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 02:36:04 -0500 (EST)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: RE: relations (external/internal)



I am already drowsy (but that may be a good thing since this might
eventually curl around to Leibniz) or maybe it's drusy (if I can work an
angle toward a Kantian intensive spatium in here too then I will have
touched all the bases, though it could be a big swing and a miss): that
is, I have only the faintest grasp of these things, this whole notion of
relations (external/internal) -- though the idea that 'relations are
external to their terms' has generally been pretty clear to me.  But,
then, there are these 'internal relations' that Paul Bains sometimes likes
to bring up ...  that's the hat that I'm trying to wear on my head tonight
(it has three corners too -- the hat, I mean).  It dawned on me the other
day that the problem that I (and it's probably just me) have been having
with the notion of internal and external relations is that I'd been
thinking that these two kinds of relations were, themselves, somehow
'related' to each other: that internal was the mere obverse of external,
or, similarly, that internal was the flipped-over inside-in of the
outside-out that is external relations (but this hat isn't strictly
reversible...  something to do with its having three corners I'll bet). Of
course, this matter of obversity/reversability needn't be the case and
probably isn't; the kind of spatiality that follows from the externality
of relations to terms isn't there in internal relations [again, perfectly
obvious as a starting point I know -- but I am slow] which is instead
processual/duration-al [which is not to say temporal, or at least not
temporal in any kind of tidy linear fashion -- or, as Paul said to me,
Whitehead maintained internal relations are 'temporally asymetrical' ...
which might just verge on the whole notion of the virtual].  But, even
more than that, it would seem to me that rather than any of the more usual
standard-issue space/time distinctions & conjunctions & disjunctions
[etc], an internal relation is another way of talking about
'intensiveness' or, rather, intensity.  Or, better, not just intensity but
*passages* of intensity (relation as passage-*between*/the sheer
relatedness of the unmediated middle) -- which leads me, next, to think
about the distinction that Deleuze-Spinoza draws between affect as
'affection' or 'affectio' (an 'external encounter with other modes of
existence,' _Spinoza:Practical Philosophy_, p.50) and affect as 'affectus'
('an increase or decrease of the power of acting ... the passage from one
state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of the
affecting bodies' _S:PP_. p.49 or, to closely paraphrase Massumi from 'The
Autonomy of Affect': an impingement is conserved and carried onward [as
potential or tendency] but minus the impinging thing). And, to cut to the
chase, we then arrive at the impossibly zig-zagging pleat that runs toward
(and well beyond) the third corner of this particular hat: the Spinozan
'beatitude' which can send us right back into the mystic again (not quite
the same Jewish mysticism as Walter Benjamin perhaps but maybe close) ... 
though I can already tell that I'd be better off coming back to that one
later ... if the hat will stay on my head that long ...  (To plant one
quick signpost, because I know that I'll blink and forget, I will just
add: as Deleuze finds in Spinoza, it is not enough to feel that you're
wearing the hat entirely effectively when the corner unfolds, by grace or
chance, that reveals the 'idea' and, then, that you've tucked it along its
edges to compose the 'notion' because there is still something more: 
'essence' -- which is not at all the same as running the risk of
'essentialism' that Patrick Hayden said would be found in a certain
rendering of 'internal relations' that involved merely wearing the hat
inside out [or, rather, backwards], but that's not what happens here since
this is essence as singularity and pure intensity (and, for that matter,
eternity ... but not one that was there at the start: not preserving
eternity with 'essence' but inventing it in a relation of affectual
reciprocity: an empiricism that says 'experience' and 'experiment' in the
same voice). See Deleuze's 1/24/78 Spinoza seminar where he says: "That
this third kind of knowledge would on the one hand appeal to a whole
tradition of Jewish mysticism and on the other imply a kind of mystical
atheist experience proper to Spinoza.  I believe the only way of
comprehending this third kind is to seize the fact that, beyond the order
of encounters and mixtures, there is this other stage of notions which
refer to characteristic relations.  But beyond the characteristic
relations, there's still the world of singular essences.") Or, as D+G
write together in _WiP?_, "affect goes beyond affections [and, then,
beyond] the passage from one lived state to another [to] man's non-human
becoming" (p.173). And, thus, by the time you scale up [strip down] [cycle
about] [zig-zag tranversely] from 'affectio' to 'affectus' to beatitude
with its non-human becoming, you can again get a sense of why Spinoza's
plane of immanence makes him the Christ of philosophers for D+G.  And
there are some very interesting pages on 'abstraction,' essence, and the
'eternal object' from Whitehead's _Science and the Modern World_ that
would be worth (re)visiting [since it has been two or three years since I
looked at it last and, even then, pretty hopscotch] ... Take, for example,
the potential resonances here [and obviously with 'the event' chapter in
_The Fold_ as well]: "To be abstract is to transcend particular concrete
occasions of actual happening.  But to transcend an actual occasion does
not mean being disconnected from it.  On the contrary, I hold that each
eternal object has its own proper connection with each other such
occasion, which I term its mode of ingression into that occasion.  Thus an
eternal object is to be comprehended by acquaintance with (i) its
particular individuality, (ii) its general relationships to other eternal
objects as apt for realisation in actual occasions, and (iii) the general
principle which expresses its ingression in particular actual occasions"
(p.159).  And also briefly, one might consider Martin Joughin's
translator's notes to _Expressionism in Philosophy_ and the discussion he
has with Deleuze about how to translate Spinoza's Latin 'beatitudo'
(usually as 'blessedness') and Joughin reports that "Deleuze wondered if
one could render *beatitudo* by Whitehead's 'enjoyment': 'for doesn't
enjoyment sometimes rise to mystical heights?' (p.412).  [Check
Whitehead's "past, present, future"  chapter, and elsewhere, from
_Adventures of Ideas_.]. And look, too, at 'enjoyment' and
'self-enjoyment' rendered in English in the last chapter of D+G's _WiP?_
(p.212) and, as well, pp.78-79 of _The Fold_.  All of this might go some
distance toward discovering that perhaps Michael Rooney isn't entirely
correct in his assertion that Deleuze has no interest at all in mysticism
(though granted again, it is a mysticism of a fairly particular/peculiar
sort [Spinoza's Latin stuttered in an off-kilter Hebrew]: or we might
decide to call it what Foucault did -- 'incorporeal materialism') beyond
the non-rule proving exception of the conclusion of _Bergsonism_ ... and,
if he doesn't agree, I am calling out for M.Cordial's street address and
then punching him in the face [ha!], or, rather pulling this hat down over
his eyes and planting a big sloppy kiss on him, and unleesh, and orpheus,
and whoever else desires, or -- that is -- I mean, deserves it. 

Okay, I'm taking off the hat (because it makes my head itchy): though, not
so curiously, its shape remains.  [Hat-head].

Anyway <breath> ... back to internal relations as intensity [if anyone is
with me], I still think that Massumi has the most succinct line on it in
his lengthy footnote #44 (pp.167-170) in the _User's Guide_, especially at
the end when he mentions the D+G move to a more Blanchotian position.  He
says, "Terms like 'far,' 'deep,' 'distant,' would in fact lose all meaning
in relation to the virtual, and 'level' would have to be conceived
nonspatially (as a degree of immanent vibratory intensity).  If the
virtual is a space of pure exteriority, then every point in it is adjacent
to every point in the actual world, regardless of whether those points are
adjacent to each other (otherwise some actual points would separate the
virtual from other actual points, and the virtual would be outside their
outside -- in other words relative to it and mediated by it)" (p.170). So,
that's where I always tend to return when I want to remind myself of the
unique a-/non-spatio-temporality of the ceaseless churning-over-itself of
internal relation. And it is integral to sooo much in Deleuze that it's
always there even when it's not.  Despite some slightly less than nuanced
word-choice, you'll find this same kind of a-/non- spatio-temporal dynamic
played out in his first book, _Empiricism and Subjectivity_, and not
surprisingly it arrives at the very moment where Deleuze transitions from
extension to intensity, so that when an extensive schematism turns to "an
intensive one.  The activity of the mind no longer consists in going from
one part to another, from known to unknown relations, or from known to
unknown circumstances.  The activity of the mind consists now in reacting
to the supposed totality of known circumstances and relations"
(pp130-131).  And, thus, you get the same kind of affiliation to 'the
given' (in regard to Hume) that Deleuze also locates in Spinoza's
"beatitude" -- writing here in the last page of his text, "Not only does
the subject anticipate, but it conserves itself, that is, it reacts,
whether by instinct or invention, to every part of the given.  Here again,
the fact is that the given never joins together its separate elements into
a whole.  In short, as we believe and invent, we turn the given itself
into a nature" (p.133).  And, in his translator's intro, Constantin
Boundas makes very clear how the Hume book sets up the key Deleuzian
relations between 'extension of contemplation and the intensity of
practice' and that 'intensity and extension as world-making forces are not
opposite poles in a field of exclusive disjunctions' and how it is the
elaboration on Humean time that allows Deleuze to conceive of 'time as the
constitutive force of subjectivity, responsible for the bending and
folding of the given, and the formation of interiority [that] is indeed
intensive' (p.16). (For further elaboration on these points, there is
always the last chapter of of D's _Foucault_ book.)  However, it is the
Leibniz book where so much of this is further explored: I'd argue
especially in 'the event,' 'perception in the folds,' and 'two floors'
chapters.  Ah, but drowsiness has indeed struck -- but not giddiness, no. 
So, maybe another time, though there is that very nice quote on God and
time on p.73 -- "To state that God has already passed through, by virtue
of his prescience, means nothing since eternity consists, much less in
forging ahead or in going backwards, than in coinciding each time with all
the passages that follow in the order of time, with all the present living
beings that make up the world."  There is a whole another world (no, not
really 'another' world: it's this one in all its insistence/subsistence)
in the hiatus or interval of passages-between.  It billows out of that
impossible gap, flowing in all directions, coinciding with all moments and
all points (Deleuze's 'any-space-whatever' -- "the white space of
conjunctions, meetings, and divisions; the part of the event which is not
reducible to the state of things, the mystery of the begun-again present" 
[p.108, _Cinema 1_] and his 'un entre temps' -- the between moment that
"neither takes place nor follows, but presents the immensity of the empty
time where the event can be seen that is still to come and yet has already
passed" ['Immanence: A Life"].  Viniculum [i.e., that non-localizable link
of terms and external relations *and* the intensity of their own internal
relatedness], the monads, and thus a giant [that is, infinite] undulation
moving in all directions at once.  At infinite speed (cos, remember, in
the a-spatio-temporality of this ceaselessly moving and eternal interval
[pssst!: btw, "the interval is substance'], each point is adjacent to
every other point regardless of their locale in the 'actual' world -- thus
traversing the points on this undulating plane takes no time at all and
speed becomes immeasurable literally). And, so, when Deleuze talks about
these things in his "Spinoza and the Three 'Ethics'" in _Essays Critical
and Clinical_, the immense black backdrop of Leibniz is traded for the
light of Spinoza ("the light in itself and for itself"), he'll again speak
of the 'third element of Spinoza's logic" -- Essences or Singularities.
Remarking here: "The common notions refer to relations of movement and
rest that constitute relative speeds; essences on the contrary are
absolute speeds that do not compose space by projection, but occupy it all
at once, in a single stroke.... There are nonetheless the two
characteristics of essences: absolute and no longer relative speeds,
figures of light and no longer geometric figures revealed by light.
Relative speed is the speed of affections and the affects [or, as I tried
to show above: affectio and affectus respectively]: the speed of an action
of one body upon another in space, the speed of the passage from one state
to another in duration.  What the notions grasp are the relations between
relative speeds. But absolute speed is the manner in which an essence
surveys [survole] its affects and affections in eternity (speed of power)"
(pp.148-149).  {If that last little bit doesn't send Paul Bains' little
Ruyer-esque heart aflutter, I'll eat my hat.} 

<Yawn!> Sleep calls. Sending this to the list without double-checking
anything.  Sorry to have rattled on so, but Paul has been talking about
internal relations for so long now I thought it might be worth letting a
feeble thought drift out toward them to see what came drifting back
(cobbled together as it is). Oh well. No doubt I've omitted or seriously
botched something.  Let me know: because, really, I have only the faintest
sense here ...

Greg