From: Jesse Cohn <jessecohn-AT-verizon.net>
Subject: Re: Re: [postanarchism] Deleuze on "representation"
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 15:29:35 -0500


Hi Fred --

     what if "play" is more representational than "violence" is? Three thoughts that make this plausible for me:

1.) Play and pretense is all about "simulation," models (dolls, toys), imagination (in its root sense of "image-making"), imitation, mimesis, mimicry, even mockery, which are all synonyms (with variations) for "representation."

2.) Violence is what we resort to with those who will not be moved by words -- in this sense, it is often an attempt to "transcend" or short-circuit representation, to substitute brute motion (forces impacting on other forces) for symbolic persuasion.

3.) Gregory Bateson: "Now, this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of meta-communication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message 'this is play' . . . [i.e.,] 'These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions _for which they stand_ would denote.'" For instance, "The playful nip denotes
the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite." <-- So once again, play-combat (play as a kind of agonism or contest) differentiates itself from real combat (violence) precisely by the substitution of
representations ("signals" such as "the playful nip") for "actions" (such as "the bite"). (Note also that Batesonian "play," while it can be found in non-
human nature (among monkeys or cats, for instance, as in his "playful nip" example) opens the way to a realm of human potentialities for choice and freedom, since the play-signal is an ancestor of the counterfactual statement (the kind of statement that posits an "if," a possibility).

     But I'm not sure you'll accept any of these arguments, coming from your Deleuzian position, since it seems that the answer to my last question (Does Deleuze define "representation" more narrowly than I do?) is "yes." Which means that we'd either have to accept that when you attack "representation" per se
and I defend some varieties of "representation," each of us is talking about a different thing, or else we'd have to argue about the definition of the term itself . . .


--Jesse.

> Jesse,
> Violence looks to me like an attempt to simulate thought by representing its
> movements, while play, with its mutual agreement of pretend, seems to offer a
> way to actually think, something like the way Deleuze describes in his cinema
> books, except through actual movements of our interacting bodies rather than
> by watching movements on screen.
> Fred
>
>

to love is to battle, if two kiss
the world changes, desires take flesh,
thoughts take flesh, wings sprout
on the backs of the slave . . .

amar es combatir, si dos se besan
el mundo cambia, encarnan los deseos,
el pensamiento encarna, brotan alas
en las espaldas del esclavo . . .

--Octavio Paz, _Piedra de Sol_ (_Sunstone_, trans. Eliot Weinberger)