Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:00:54 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [postanarchism] Deleuze & Guattari: Smooth & Striated


A Thousand Plateaus, p. 474

""No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space
than we must indicate a much more complex difference byvirtue of which the
successive terms of the opposition fail to coincide entirely. And no
sooner have we done this that we must remind ourselves thatthe two spaces
in fact exist only in mixture:...."

and p. 500.

"What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely
the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space
continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops
other forces and emits new smooth spaces. Even the most striated city
gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave
dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to
reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves
liveratory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life
reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces,
switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to
save us."

These statements bookend the section on the smooth and the striated.

It's interesting that smooth space is "nomad space" and striated space is
"sedentary space," without apparently loosing connection to the
physiological distinction, where striated muscles are connected to
"voluntary" movement and smooth muscles to the "involuntary." (I notice on
a slightly more in-depth site that cardiac muscle is of the "striated
involuntary" sort - but perhaps the heart always involves some
exception...) What you makes of the possible articulations here probably
depends on whether you're a physiologist or a mystic - or a Bergsonian -
at heart...

-shawn