Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997 22:14:15 -0500 (CDT)
From: Bryan Alexander <balexand-AT-beta.centenary.edu>
Subject: more notes, "Pleats of Matter"


What forms the organizations of folds?  Perhaps it is a question of a
version of interiority (often an enemy for Deleuze).  "The first fly
contains the seeds of all flies to come" (8).  Machines unfold their
natures from within but only by means of without, which leads to folding
as well as unfolding.  "The organism is defined by its ability to fold its
own parts and to unfold them... to a degree of development assigned to
each species" (8)  "...when an organism is called to unfold its own parts,
its animal or sensitive soul is opened onto an entire theater in which
it perceives or feels according to its unity..." (11)  Deleuze will even
go so far as to assign mediation to organic interiority, where its folds
are "mediated by an interior site" (9).  Yet these unfolding are also
mediated *externally*, as if in landscape paintings -
	"an exterior site is not a living being; rather, it is a lake,
	a pond, or a fish hatchery.  Here the figure of the lake or pond
	acquires a new meaning, since the pond - and the marble tile - no
	longer refer to elastic waves that swim through them like
	inorganic folds, but to fish that inhabit them like organic folds"
						(9)
	Scaling up and down, inside and out.  "Universality does not
exist, but living things are ubiquitous."  "Every fold originates from a
fold, plica ex plica" (10).   
	This leads to questions of preformation versus epigensis (9ff),
which I can't follow.


The question of levels:
	Folding up and folding down are not opposites ("non opposita sed
diversa") but scales without inherent contradictions.  These scales are
infinite, ultimately disappearing beyond clear observation.  Again
dialectics is set aside.  The upper and lower floors should not stir us to
automatic decisions of superiority/inferiority.
	Yet we can assign attributes to the levels.  The lower level is
organic, bodied, bodied.  Sensitive animals live here (4).  "Masses and 
organisms, masses and living things thus fill the lower level" (10).  The
upper is the soul, are the souls.  The lower is perforated with the
outside (like a Klein bottle?), the upper involuted and open to the
downstairs alone, "where there are no windows to allow entry from without"
(13).  Together, "in the Baroque the soul entertains a complex relation
with the body.  Forever indissociable from the body, it discovers a
vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter..."
(11)  And yet the soul supercedes this far, finding "also an organic or
cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up,
and that will make it ascend over all other folds" (11).  And then, and
yet again, it can fall back again (which Deleuze, i think, nicely
positions after a page break).  These are "vectors" within "the single and
same house."  The two are mutually involved, necessary - but not
dialectical: their involvement is not contradiction but association,
unfolding without aufhebung.



Bryan Alexander
Centenary College of Louisiana


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