Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 17:57:37 -0500 (CDT)
From: Bryan Alexander <balexand-AT-beta.centenary.edu>
Subject: first notes, "Pleats of Matter" (fwd)


Since demand was so widespread, here are my initial comments on ch1 of THE
FOLD.  

Bryan Alexander
Centenary College of Louisiana

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997 21:44:17 -0500 (CDT)
From: Bryan Alexander <balexand-AT-beta.centenary.edu>
To: seminar-11-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Cc: "Fold Reading Group -- \"Charles J. Stivale\""
     <CSTIVAL-AT-cms.cc.wayne.edu>,
    "Alexander, Bryan" <balexand-AT-beta.centenary.edu>,
    Caille Stephane <cailles-AT-ERE.UMontreal.CA>,
    J Poxon <poxon-AT-saclink.csus.edu>,
    John Morss <john.morss-AT-stonebow.otago.ac.nz>,
    Richard Scott <richard.scott-AT-umist.ac.uk>, shyam-AT-lava.net,
    Texte-AT-aol.com, scolas-AT-umich.edu
Subject: first notes, "Pleats of Matter"

I'd like to set some balls rolling - or folds billowing:
	Deleuze begins THE FOLD with a series of typically honed
statements marking out territories to be staked then reterritorialized.
We begin with the Baroque, but not Leibniz, who only sneaks in at th end
of the long opener: and this Baroque-machine is clearly a Deleuzian
version, a machine of effects ("not to an essence but an operative
function"), not the outcome of state philosophy but another set of
intensities among others ("Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic" tossed about
with careful casualness), a "trait" we cannot nail down but only feel and
consider.  Compacted neatly we see its areas of operation: music,
architecture, state philosophy (the beautiful cruel dig at Descartes),
painting, theology.  There is no ordering here but a passing through, a
rearranging.  Math and physics will accrue, be arranged within.  Leibniz
finally appears, but to arrange the two levels.  Deleuze's descriptions of
the split level world seem (to me) gnomic and sketchy here; I find them
elaborated in every subsequent chapter.  For now, Leibniz is the double
articulator (cf A THOUSAND PLATEAUX, god as lobster) across these stages.
	Curves and fluids: the chapter luxuriates through the
Baroque-machine's morphology.  Its matter is "infinitely porous, spongy,"
as opposed to Descartes' separated-out systems of order.  Butterfly effect
avant la lettre, Deleuze writes about always interconnected, always
intertwined forces and fields, collecting into vortices (4-5), forming
into utter hardness for moments (6), collapsing.  The labyrinth is not a
series of points apart, he tells us, but folds scaling up and/or down.
This omnidirectional cascading potential leads to Deleuze's striking and
sudden ambition, echoed rarely but precisely throughout the book down to
its last formula: here, "the unit of matter, the smallest element of the
labyrinth, is the fold."  
	This assertion can become installed in the background: the mystery
of the egg "becomes increasingly probable and natural when an infinity of
indeterminate states is given (alrady folded over each other), each of
which includes a cohesion at its level" (7).  Here I think of autopoesis
(and perhaps a movement in Deleuze: from the self-organizing level in
Nietzsche and Spinoza to more of a discussion of what it is that is
organized?).  Deleuze ruminates on spirit(s) in matter, a conception *in*
matter.



Bryan Alexander
Centenary College of Louisiana



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