From: Unleesh-AT-aol.com
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1999 21:50:06 EST
Subject: destratify


I take myself apart
because I am put back together again
so quickly.
It's such a delicate operation.
The repetition keeps accumulating.
every moment more and more of the same
added.
I'm overdetermined.
I must make slices in the intervals ;
deconstruct
to make an open space.
Everything is building, building, building ;
Development is the rule.
Layer after layer after layer presses down
forming sheets of rock with no breathing room.
My body without organs requires tearing down
so my spinozist body may be a difference of speeds,
not a bloated massification ;
so it may subsist across comings and goings
rather than just hoardings and hoardings and hoardings.
The more accumulates, 
the more of a junkyard I become.
The more necessary to clear some of the piles
so the contents might get played with
rather than being buried
in the strata
and pressed, oppressed, depressed
down into the sheets of rock.

"Ohmigod!" some cry in fear. "What if you were to deaccumulate too quickly?
Then what???"

This question amongst primitives might be relevant? But here, in the midst of
industrial and information accumulation central? Right here in the heart of
the Empire? Where the weight is so heavy one can hardly breathe?

Unless by "destratify" we mean to take apart a geological lode in order to
turn it into raw material for production, to search for various minerals, oil,
metals to plug into our production process? Then one might ask, who are you
taking yourself apart for? Are you merely helping the manufacturing processes
by making yourself more accessible to reconfiguration??

Is it proper then to call deforestation "destratifying"? Is it proper to call
the unravelling and dispersement of tradition "destratifying"? Was primitive
tradition truly "stratifying"? Or maybe it was something else?

Could it be that the "undoing" practices of the world were developed because
people took note of this accumulation or hoarding principle establishing
itself and wanted to establish a counter principle to maintain at least some
minimal balance?

To get to the body without organs doesn't mean we have to literally rip our
organs out of our body Aztec-style. After all, those organs were developed to
serve certain purposes. But they are also actualizations of virtualities that
envelope multiple states, and the BwO desires those multiple states, so by
undoing and redoing actualizations constantly, the BwO has an opportunity to
subsist in the intervals, in the cuts, in the schizzes.

Destratification is relative and not absolute, simply because there is a
counterforce, stratification at work these days.

Still, we can be cautious. Deleuze and Guattari use a few proper names to name
particular effects or limit-points we might be careful of :

					Fitzgerald
					Artaud
					Celine
					Nietszche

	These names mark points to be very careful about. Why? Because the
deleuzeguattarian project is deeply spinozist, and therefore concerned with
joy ... and these people mark the boundary where joy degenerates into sadness,
where misery begins to take over ... something has gone wrong in the taking-
apart process, and it's no longer a joyful, affirmative one, but one which is
leading towards burnout, suicide, fascism, insanity, illness. But that means
it's important to study these proper names, these effects, to determine what
went wrong. Did they not have enough of a support network? Was it too fast?
What botched?

Also, a la Adorno, perhaps it is also necessary to take apart normal ways of
thinking about things, and perhaps it is necessary to construct new thought if
such experiments are to succeed, for thought provides feedback loops for our
actions ; the way we construe activity shapes that very activity. I think D&G
noticed a certain tendency towards absolutist, black and white thinking when
one is on intensity-runs, and these must be deconstructed towards
multiplicities instead. The Situationists, for example, for all their wonder,
often speak in all-or-nothing statements, making the something seem like it is
nothing because it is not everything. So we must be ever so delicate and
reconfigure even the feedback systems for our actions.

I'm sure we all know experimenters, and even botched experiments. We could
compare notes ...

(un)leash