From: amd <A.M.Dib-AT-lboro.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Notes on Relations
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 12:06:13 +0000


Steve,

I am re-posting a previous email to the list, as it does consist with the
ideas you are concerned with. However, your distinctions and comparisons
with Whitehead are more specific than what I have already done. What I am
realising is that the status of relations propagated by Deleuze- Guattari
cannot be grasped in their specificity and functionality except from within
certain baggage of new physics. This is important to mention it. I reckon,
it can clarify many notions which the whole French scene rely upon in
fifties, sixties and seventies. The empty square, external/internal
relations, bwo, fold and others are in many respect concepts
deterritorialised from the new physics diagrams. The more one get familiar
with these diagrams, the more one can make them singular to the discipline
one is involved into. What comes to my mind now, is that the paradoxical
ontology that deleuze rely upon derives from the reconciliation made; finite
infinity. I do believe the new physics explanation of reality as quanta
(quantom mechanics) and a topology can give an image of how the necessity
and contingency (the internal and external relations) are articulated.
Yesterday, I read a chapter in a book about Foucault and modern physics,
where there is a mapping of the French scene's articulation of the new
physics in the early fifties and sixties.  

The previous email posted to the list is: 
      
I guess that the character of the relations as articulated by Deleuze
sustains the paradoxical ontology. This has to do with the fact of
reconciliating the idea of univocity of being and of the immanence. This
relation maintains the "problem" as an objective criterion which acts as a
passage for the articulation of both external and internal relations.
Apparently, there is a difficulty in attaining a 'clear distinction' of such
idea for a moment due to our habitual way of thinking and due to very nature
of the "inbetweeness" that intervene. The confusion that arises now and then
lies in the linguistic demarcation of external and internal. I reckon, it is
best to displace both by the term "mesoternal". (Anyway, I am crude to the
english language here!!). I believe that Deleuze's usage of external
relation is a displacing strategy (an inexact term for an exact
referentiality). Why such strategy is important for deleuze? This is because
he has to make the difference in itself active and positive. It is that
positivity in itself that restores mulitiplicity as an essential aspect of
Deleuze's ontology. Without it, difference collapse to the same and monism
becomes an origin or an end. Relations are external because it is a
necessity for restoring an excess; something is added and always adding to
nth power. The trick here is that the connotation of externality brings back
the idea of mind- dependent and independent through the back door. This is
where the dilemma lies. However, externality go beyond this trick if it is
located as part of an efficient causality, that is an internal relations. It
is the immanence itself that situates; complicates, involves, participates
all relations on its plane. In the following excerpt, Deleuze clearly states
the principle of heterogeneity embodied in external relations to the terms
in the background of internal relations (which is not an interiority but the
event of immanence itself; nexus of relations that interweave to the moment
of intensity which in a sense becomes a passage way for external relations
to come forward again; a fold):(I highlighted the words indicative of the
nexus of external/internal relations) 
>
>" And even if there are only two terms, there is an **AND** between two ,
which is neither the one nor the other, nor the one which becomes the other,
but which constitutes the multiplicity. (*here is the external relations*)
This is why it is always possible to undo dualisms from the inside (*here is
the internal relations*), by tracing the line of flight which passes between
the two terms or the two sets, the narrow stream which belongs to neither to
one nor the other, but draws both into a non- parallel evolution, inot
heterochronus becoming" ( Dialogues, p 34-5).
>
>
>Anyway, I might be wrong, but this quotation very beautifully interweaves
both external and internal relations in a complementary way.  
>
>
amd