>Can the interplay of machines be said to constitute a totality? (What is a "peripheral totality"?)
>What exactly does Deleuze mean by:
- detachment - slicing off - residual break ?
RECCOMENDED SECONDARY READING
Pre-Deleuze: Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morals Bergson – Creative Evolution Antonin Artaud – The Theatre and Its Double James Gleick – Chaos: Making a New Science Whitehead
Deleuze: Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Nietzsche and Philosophy
>Reading a meaningless book that was published as a joke. Go outside or something
Nolan Martin
> joke book meme
Bourgeois propaganda.
Narrow it down a bit more, there's too much there to explain at once. It has to do with Lacanian signifying chains for starters.
Good to see someone else watched the videos I initially recommended. Both Sylvere Lotringer and Nathan Widder have some other useful videos on Youtube as well. There are many others of course, such as Ian Buchanan (not the actor) who even wrote a guide to reading Anti-Oedipus. Gonna repost the pasta.
There's probably a lot more, there are Vimeo videos as well which don't feature on Youtube.
Pirate Deleuze's Abecedaire (it should have English subtitles) as I can't find it streamed in full online anywhere.
For compilation books, start with the essay and interview collections (in no particular order): Dialogues, Negotiations, Desert Islands, Two Regimes of Madness, Essays Critical and Clinical. "Letter to a Harsh Critic" in Negotiations is short (about 7 pages) and tells you how to read his texts.
As for books written by Deleuze, start with Nietzsche and Philosophy (read the intro to the English translation by Michael Hardt even if you don't read the book in English). Deleuze's courses are also pretty accessible and translated in several languages: webdeleuze.com/
As for the questions, there's a bit much to talk about.
A desiring machine is something that goes on for infinity creating everything we experience through Kantian non-Aristotelian synthesis. That is to say, it puts stuff together, mostly stuff that doesn't go together (like dream content), making A and non-A coincide in a contradictory way (D&G insist that it is just as non-Hegelian as it is non-Aristotelian). It's important to mention that Deleuze is a pluralist from the get-go. There are always many desiring machines connected together that create experience. For example there are clinical cases of people who, after an injury to the back of the head, are constantly thirsty no matter how much water they drink. This is an example of a desiring machine going on forever and no longer being interrupted by another desiring machine with its own singular point (drinking water to get rid of thirst for the moment and get a feeling of satiation). It's like Leibniz and Spinoza's attempts to introduce the infinite into finite being, but for Deleuze difference is primordial and identity is a secondary after-effect. And desiring machines are connected to these primordial differences because for Deleuze (and D&G of course) time is Bergsonian not liniar, we carry the entire past with us and that makes the present possible, otherwise it would be a discontinuity of past-present-future. For Deleuze the past is thus different from the past present (the past isolated moment). Some desiring machines create energy (nutrition) and connect to others, such as if you get horny or sleepy after a good meal. Others create meaning: subjective states "like a good digestion" as Nietzsche often said, feeling good after a meal, etc. etc. It's important that machines, despite the name, are not mechanical, but vitalistic because they are non-deterministic and go on by themselves almost independently (unless interrupted, such as when they run out of energy through starvation or the relation is severed through death of course). Again, this is less weirder than it sounds because the Bergsonian approach is to think being before time so to speak, time as an effect of a more primordial simultaneity rather than a series of moments or facts A-B-C-D.. D&G are vitalists rather than structuralists, that is to say there is contingency to these machines. They are called assemblages in ATP because they are fluid and constantly connect and disconnect, connecting to "haecceities" (the this-ness of a thing: an hour, a day, a place, a gesture, a body part, a colour, etc.): if you wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning for a long time you'll have trouble doing otherwise, but eventually you'll be able to change your schedule. I know it's a very basic example, but it should suffice.
Perpetual totality probably refers to this constant shifting,as D&G aren't really totalizing except perhaps in a Russellian sense of a list of all the things in the world having to contain itself.
Parker Nguyen
(continued) Detachment, slicing off and residual break probably describe the way desiring machines interact. It's been a while since I've read AO, but that's probably it. In their fluidity they couple and recouple, connect and disconnect leaving residues and sometimes being sliced off (not literally, but Spinoza has a model of universal poison liked by Deleuze: life is an internal relation, if that relation is severed it is always by an external source - cancer and AIDS make internal relations act like external ones and thus sever each other until the internal relations that constitute "life" are no longer possible).
Not gonna join the Discord as I have a lot of reading to do, but I hope these posts helped.
Dylan Clark
h
Zachary Hernandez
The value of language always surpasses whatever attempts are made to explain or abstract it. This applies to all analyses of language, whether it's that of linguistics or political attempts to control language or the psychoanalyst's interpretation of a patient's words. So, for instance, a linguist might attempt to formulate a theoretical grounding of language by saying that there is an essential distinction between signifier and signified, but D&G would argue that it's not the word itself that does the signification but the context of the word itself that gives rise to a signification (this is what they call the "pragmatics of language" in A Thousand Plateaus). So, e.g., you have a word like "totem": if you look in the dictionary there is a specific definition, but when we're actually using the word, its function as a signifier accounts only partially for the meaning we derive from it. They bring up the example of the schizophrenic as the extreme illustration of this. To them, the word "totem" might sound like "titty" while also retaining its denotation of "totem" so that now it is pointing to a titty totem used in ancient rituals to mother earth as a literal tittied goddess whose milk is secreted out of the tittied holy water font passed down to us from the Virgin Mary who is also the Oedipal mother mentioned by Freud in "Totem and Taboo." So, as you can see, a whole chain of associations springs from the "accidental" features of the word "totem" and leads to a whole desiring-machine ("assemblage" in A Thousand Plateaus) outside of what any firm definition of "totem" would describe. The "average" speaker never goes as far as the schizophrenic (since the "average" speaker is territorialized to the point that they have a cultural reference point that directs them to stop the chain at some point), but D&G bring up the schizophrenic to serve as an exaggerated illustration of what is occurring inside all of us.
All in all, language functions because it ALWAYS overflows whatever meanings we ascribe to it. Every codification leaves something out.
Check out the introduction of A Thousand Plateaus for a clearer and more succinct explanation. "Our criticism of these linguistic models [Chomsky's in particular] is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micorpolitics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles...A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence."--A Thousand Plateaus p 7-8
Lincoln Bell
Nice to see someone else on here explaining this stuff at length. I would add that context here (or, to be precise, "circumstance" as D&G say) means the entire assemblage along with its haecceities. So for example the same word or phrase can be used not just to mean different things based on how it shifts and slips from one assemblage to another (from totem to titty), but also while keeping its form from one assemblage to another, not just because of polysemy, but rather because the meaning is determined by the assemblage and not by the list of meanings in the dictionary. So the same word or phrase can be used seriously or as a joke, as mockery or as a friendly happy joke (laughing with someone rather than at them, etc.) bringing about different and differenciating intensities each time. As such overflowing does not result just from the rhizomatic endless perpetuity of often unlikely connections, but also from sense (a better word than meaning since it also indicated direction in French) being beyond the signifier and signified (or rather between them as Deleuze says in the Logic of Sense).
The particular passages from AO have to do with Lacanian signifying chains and how they are, for D&G at least, constantly broken up by the fluxes of assemblages rather than being a pure matter of linguistic or imaginary connections (penis looks like a cow udder which reminds one of mom's breast therefore the improperly breastfed child gets obsessed with oral sex, as one Freudian explanation goes which is mocked by D&G). Of course Lacan himself, in 73 (one year after AO) shifts from "pure" language to the body and jouissance. I wonder why :^)
> Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough.
My favorite formula of theirs. Maybe on par with "We will never find the sense of something (of a human, a biological or even a physical phenomenon) if we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it. [...] The same object, the same phenomenon, changes sense depending on the force which appropriates it." from Nietzsche and Philosophy. The latter is less catchy though.
Zachary Hernandez
bump
Wyatt Hall
kys nobody here gives a shit about contys. what the fuck does a rhizome have to do with language?
Jose Williams
Rhizomes connect all over the place so they are opposed to trees which are genealogical and hierarchical and have a set direction of connections. When language becomes creative, it often does so through these unconventional connections. Rimbaud's "I is another" isn't just a reversal or refusal of grammatical norms, but a creative act, because the sense is made at a different level than at the merely propositional one (it being a philosophical statement).
Your own two sentences (that nobody cares about contys and then asking, rhetorically or not, about rhizomes and language) can form such a connection as well since in one sense, in one possible reading (but not in every sense), they are contradicting statements.
Grayson Allen
I understand how when >10565639 talks about normal linguistical models not being abstract enough, they're saying that language really works on more tangled, complicated levels of connection and association, but because you sound like you know what you're talking about, what exactly is D&G's project with all this?
Camden Cooper
Isn't Deleuze that fag who doesn't like the feeling of a cat rubbing up against him?
Asher Parker
Their project works on several different levels. Basically, they were materialists who criticized Freud and Lacan for not being truly materialist (Lacan probably never cared much about it, but Freud constantly considered that he was after some kind of scientific objective truth). The reason for their idealism was that they gave too much credit to images and language and none to matter, treating matter as inert rather than as having singular points (which are its forms, so that the matter-form duality no longer stands) which allow for complex interactions. Jung is included in these criticisms even though D&G are closer to him than to Freud (Deleuze being the only French citizen to think that Jung is more profound than Freud, as Derrida joked).
Their linguistic theory is related to their criticism of psychoanalysis even though it has its own targets and logic (Hjelmslev against Saussure, Labov against Chomsky, etc.), their aim being to show that when language is self-contained in a system it is starting from a set point and treating it as the rule rather than the enforced exception. Language is creative and we must stutter in our own language, which amounts to finding the right assemblages for us, the key point being that an assemblage connects things from very different domains (the orchid and the wasp interact despite being materially different and evolving separately initially, as Proust says): it connects words or phrases to affects (not just feelings, but every type of capacity to affect and be affected) to environments to times to spaces to gestures to images to anything else you can think of. Thus language as such cannot be thought isolated except by discarding the things that give it sense to begin with. Like DeLanda says: if someone says that their life has no meaning and that they're depressed about it there's no point in showing them the dictionary definition.
Anthony Powell
Oh nice I'll be back tommorow
Easton Cooper
>liking to be raped by a cat
platonist philosophy is helluva demon
Christian Evans
Cat fags are just the worst.
Anthony Phillips
Good shit. Language is an important issue for them not just for its place in their metaphysical and psychological systems, but also serves a crucial political role. This is their distinction between arborescent and rhizomatic schemas in the first chapter of ATP. The arborescent model always points to a centralized authority, subsuming all the polyvalence of becoming to a standard by which everything is judged in its being. This is Chomsky's model, as well as most of those in linguistics. A firm definition of "sense" is set (e.g. distinction between signifier and signified) which serves as the demarcation between language and nonsense. See Chomsky's famous example of nonsense: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," a sentence which is syntactically correct but "meaningless" in Chomsky's system because it does not refer to any idea that can be re-presented. But D&G argue that it can only be called meaningless in a system that automatically excludes any usage of language not confined to a rigid distinction between signifier and signified. To them, it has sense because to can be USED for any number of functional ends. In a very Wittgensteinian passage, they give examples of senses for "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously": it could be a password, surreal song lyrics, the punchline of a carefully built-up joke, the expressionistic description of synesthesia, etc. Its sense comes from its place in the assemblage. This is the rhizomatic model of language: if it connects, it has sense.
Henry Martin
So what's the political implication of this? As I mentioned in my last post, since language is constantly overflowing, language is constantly BECOMING in all directions. Not only are the formal rules of language changing in ways that counteract the arborescent schema imposed on them by grammatical linguistics, but language is used in new ways to plug into new assemblages. This is the "minor language" that D&G talk about in their book on Kafka and in ATP. To take an obvious example, when a black man says "nigger" it doesn't mean the same thing as when a white guy does, even though the referent of "nigger" in both cases is a black person. This is because black people found a way to plug "nigger" into a new assemblage separate from the racist one that originally created it. When a black person says "nigga," now it's part of a sort of ironic yet sincere assemblage in direct opposition to the assemblages where "nigger" is used to demean people of color. This is the function of a "minor language": to take the words created by systems of power and reappropriate them to say something entirely different. To SPEAK the language of power but to SAY something underneath it.
Language is important because it's one of the most visible reflections of political assemblages. "Correctness" of language is always a certain imposition of power using arbitrary divisions to designate one population's way of speaking as being the standard for the rest. When language is "wrong" but still has sense, it shows that a new assemblage is being formed. New slang indicates new forms of self-identification are being formed, a new "style" shows that literature has picked up on a new intensive experience of the world.
HE HAD A SKIN CONDITION
Asher Hall
I agree with what you said and it's important that you brought politics up since that's a crucial part of their project which wasn't mentioned so far itt. But "when a black man says "nigger" it doesn't mean the same thing as when a white guy does" might be a bit misleading on how it's phrased. If a "wigger" tries to fit in with his rap idols by using the word it doesn't mean that his meaning is the same as a slaver's because they both happen to be white. I know it should be obvious, but these days I don't take that for granted. Sadly Deleuze was translated rather late in English compared to Foucault and Derrida, maybe students would've understood a bit better that majoritarian and minoritarian do not depend merely on population number nor, at the very least, on skin color.
Benjamin Baker
Bump to keep the thread up as I'd like to contriboot some stuff shortly.
Christian Fisher
All right, I'm ready.
ITT (it's as good a place as any) I'm going to reproduce every image and diagram which appears throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, adding my own comments on same. Full disclosure: I have not read (either volume of) CaS, but I have the print copies of both books handy. My reasons for doing this are that it seems like a fairly simple way to start thinking about the books and getting a sense for what they're about, and to invite further discussion from anons who have read (any or all) parts of the books, especially as it relates to the images. Secondly, several of the images are just plain funny or interesting and so warrant some discussion in and of themselves. But I do seriously want to hear from anons about how the images relate to the text (just by flipping through, the text, esp. ATP explicitly refers to the content of the images regularly). The first few posts I make ITT will just reproduce stuff I wrote in a recent thread, then I'll keep going and finish my little exercise. Unless otherwise specified, numbers leading a post text denote page number where the pic may be found.
AOE contains just two graphical figures (or three depending on how you count), of which the very first, the book's frontispiece, "Boy With Machine", is presented here in an okay-quality resolution (the B/W reproductions in print copies of the book are quite bad and don't really capture the image, this is the best I could find). The painting is by Richard Lindner, a Jewish German-American pop-art painter who later did rather gaudy, kinky pop-art pictures of ugly ungainly people in biker gear and such during the 60s and 70s-think the catlady scene in a Clockwork Orange, which is a film which was released right around the same time that Anti-Oedipus was originally published (although the pictures in the link are more explicitly pornographic than Lindner's paintings normally are):
Some things come out, really looking at the painting and thinking about how it relates to AOE. I already came up with the contemporaneous Clockwork Orange pop-art comparison on my own. The boy's cheeky, shitty-ugly grin goes well with Alex's toying, just posted. Alex himself literally sets a machine going (the dick sculpture), just as the boy threatens to do. What is the stuff behind him? A concatenation of machines, threatening to be actuated Rube-Goldberg style, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Breakfast Machine. The painting itself with its fat subject and its flat, matte colors is of a piece both with Botero and Leger (a later figure is literally a Leger piece; D&G clearly like this art-style). Also this pice is from the 50s, a younger phase before Lindner gets his signature style going.
Finally, the Boy With Machine (BwM) is clearly attended by several machines, or organs. This is an irresistable antonymic-acronym-comparison with the so-called Body Without Organs (BwO) meme, which I understand goes through the books.
Gabriel Baker
282
Next are two figures occupying the same page (282) of Anti-Oedipus, toward the back. The two figures seem to relate capitalism (in Marxist terms) and spectra of psychological disorders (just like the work's title promised to do!) in particular ways, with the two graphics seeming to be roughly "inverse" to each other. In the midst of all this seems to be the idea of a Body without Organs (BwO) as a cultic-ideal for something to want, something which one should become. Far out, baby.
This image (both figures on one page) specifically occurs in the book's fourth chapter, "Introduction to Schizoanalysis", and that chapter's first section, "The Social Field".
After this point, all other pictorial elements (the large majority) are found in A Thousand Plateaus, the second book (hence my image numbering scheme which will go 1 2 3 from here on). Overall we're talking about-around 30 images, "plates", figures, what-have-you.
Also for the record my ATP pics are screengrabs from the first pdf which pops up, and which is a pretty-good transcription of the book but which botches a few figures in the pdf-i-fication. You can almost-always get the gist of an image, even when botched:
Before getting into the ATP pics though, I first reproduce the /very/ helpful Illustrations list at the very back of the book. Because several of the plates are notable artworks, much better-resolution, full-color images will be available for several of them which I'll pepper in. I still want to present them in their b/w reproduction context in the book though.
Brody Harris
And here we go.
the first pictorial element of many in A Thousand Plateaus is this funny meme-image of a crazy music score (there are several others along these lines). Notwithstanding Thousand Plateaus' claim to be composed of such-and-such plateaus, the book really is organized into 15 well-defined chapters, doing various things throughout, like any book.
This image is the leading graphic for the first chapter, which is titled "1. Introduciton: Rhizome", which is that whole business I guess where D&G like rhizomes from biology because they're not hierarchial and putter along organically and other hippie stuff. Anyway as for the picture itself, you can clearly see that it is "Piano Piece for David Tudor 4", a conceit by one Sylvano Bussoti, a living avant garde composer. Once you drill in a bit, the idea of the image is part of a series of conceptual musical art instructions which involve La Monte Young and others from the middle of the century (I assume that Bussoti was riffing off the initial Young ideas):
Shortly after, this picture opens up chapter 2, perhaps suggesting lines of flight and/or the later furry "becoming-animal" meme of a later chapter. (an user chided me about the furry-thing in the old abortive thread but actually flipping through becoming-intense etc seems to slightly vindicate me in this cute read on things).
Nathaniel Harris
Chapter 3 is headed by a simple picture of a lobster, and the chapter's name puns on Nietzsche.
Nathaniel Wright
This picture starts chapter 4 and is said to derive from the film "Testament of Dr. Mabuse", a Fritz Lang film which makes an early foray into the talkies. I don't know exactly where the still comes from in the film but presumably one who watches the entire film, here, will find it:
If nothing else, this little exercise is putting me onto some interesting fucking art. That movie looks good, for one.
Oliver Nguyen
Here we have figures bearing the ark of the covenant.
Nicholas Bell
135
one of several-intra-chapter drawings, which commonly depict psycho-social flow processes of some kind, like the two figures in AOE.
Cooper Butler
137
shortly thereafter, a similar spiral drawing.
Ryan Rodriguez
146
a bit later, a simple circle diagram.
Elijah Williams
Now, the Dogon egg heads a chapter. The pdf's version was so badly botched that I just kludged together a paste-job to give a better sense of what the page actually looks like.
"What the hell is a dogon egg?" short of oh, I don't know, reading the damn book, the wiki seems to be the next-best gloss at the moment:
Very similar to Giotto, it should be said. Looks like they were about-contemporaries.
Gavin Watson
183
Eye diagram thingy (more inspiration from Africa). Playing with forms to give different morphologies with different senses.
I don't see Wittgenstein in the index at a glance, but I do wonder if they didn't have Witty's duckrabbit in mind while picking this one. Both philosopher(s) were fond of putting pictures and figures in their work it seems.
Brody Johnson
185
intra-chapter beam-comet thingies. The little faces embedded in the curling streams remind me of an element of the book of Kells (and by extension, of Joyce).
Ethan Clark
Now a cartoon to head a chapter. speaking of Joyce, such use of images throughout a text reminds me also of Marshall McLuhan (a Joyce fan), who was wont to do the same thing (with help from graphic designers).
Nolan Anderson
208
Now a Leger reproduction. I was very gratified when I quickly identified this pic as being "leger-esque" in my notes and sure as shit, it was a Leger.
This is significant for a few reasons. First I was pleased with myself for recognizing a pic of course, but the /art style of Lindner's earlier painting is clearly of a piece with (if not directly influenced by the younger) Botero, but also being directly influenced by Leger/. The tendency is flatt-ish planes of color cut up and mixed together (or at least that's what the images of Leger look like, typically. Also it says something about the authors' taste: they like this machinic art style as a vehicle to get their ideas across. better reproduction to follow immediately.
Matthew Smith
Fernand Leger, Men in the Cities. it's at the NYC guggenheim apparently.
Anthony Flores
218
a pdf-botched intra-chapter diagram. It's basically another loop-spiral schema though.
Parker Sanders
you guys should read the city of god instead
Jacob Parker
232
Starting a long chapter, a pair of Etruscan/Greek-ish pottery/artworks showing anthropomorphized animals go with the title. Looks like one is held in the Louvre (Paris) and the other in Rome.
Gavin Lopez
310
Reproduction of Paul Klee's famous Twittering Machine. decent reproduction to follow immediately.
Ayden Ortiz
Twittering Machine, Paul Klee.
Oliver Hall
I went to a Paul Klee display once. Utter shit.
Blake Rodriguez
351
Altai Chariot, war machines, etc. The whole business about the war machine (just by flipping through) would appear to get serious around this point, with lots of axioms (Spinoza influence?) and props, etc.
I would like to make a few simple comments on the general circumstances of page 351. First, the stuff about nomads together with the given date, 1227, immediately calls to mind Genghis Khan. Sure enough, 1227 is the Khan's offical death date, so that's the significance of that one date at least (the only such significance I've been able to correctly guess on my own thus far).
Next, for those of you who may not be aware, "Altai" is a region of central Asia, now part of Russia, so it'd be nearby Mongolia (right next door as it turns out now that I check). Presumably similar lifeways held for the 1600-ish year interval which the caption and the Khan's death suggest. Cute drawing of a chariot.
Cooper Martinez
414
Tntra-chapter pic: "holey space". Whatever's going on here, they suggest WWI foxholes, and again this one pic for some reason, with its translated pun, reminds me of McLuhan.
I wonder whether the "holey", used in translation (or even potentially originally intended in translation or not) relates to the holy family (Jesus Mary and Joseph, also the title of a Marx work), referred to in AOE. The Freudian stuff about (English) holes vs. this HOLY nuclear family is pretty irresistable for an English speaker to compare.
Wyatt Richardson
416
A table comparing a few sociological/psychological forms. This table is the only one of its kind in the book.
My comment: ATP dropped in 1980. This particular table SMACKS of the things used incessantly by Jurgen Habermas in his big difficult two-volume Continental Marx-influenced meme work, "The Theory of Communicative Action." Just as D&G use drawings and artworks to help illustrate their ideas, Habermas in his own two-volume continental work leans heavily on these little spreadsheets, having like ~40 throughout his own books (I intend to autistically go over those figures at some future point as well, for roughly the same reason that I'm doing the present exercise). In Habermas' tables, he typically compares and contrasts features of language and/or of various cultures to build up bits of a sociological system.
Carson Bell
A state chart triad thingy from some old 17th-18th c. text I bet. The illustration list gives a hint but I haven't run it down.
Cameron Garcia
A quilt suggests both heterogeneity and probably some decentralized rhizome-stuff...
Carson Anderson
487
...and toward the end we get a fun math page that I can comment on a bit more meaningfully. The picture speaks for itself, giving a side of the Koch curve (or Koch snowflake) and the Menger sponge, with Sierpinski's carpet added in:
The pdf-derived pic is a bit botched but you get the idea. Since Mandelbrot is also a (Polish)-Frenchie and fractals were the dead sexy new hotness idea at the time, D&G just had to shoehorn it into their work, I bet. That's how it feels, having this bit so late in the work.
Mandelbrot's authoritative 1977-1982-ish /The Fractal Geometry of Nature/, a text which went through various iterations apparently, sets up the now well-known fractal stuff in addition to using then-newly available computer-graphics techniques to visually communicate the ideas. Page 145 is a good larger print of the Menger sponge which is all fucked up in pic related.
All this also reminds of me Lyotard name-dropping the Bourbaki group just that one time in his Postmodern condition, just to give himself that little bit of French namedroppy math cred. There, Lyotard also does predict that computers will be really really important, so he is going along similar theoretical lines to be fair.
Benjamin Ramirez
Follows right on the heels. This pic really situates us in time: a dot matrix printout of Einstein is some new hotness.
Ian Parker
a somewhat-botched figure in the notes (the real thing has the star-thingy on the left hand side as well).
Joshua Ross
some pentagram holy-family stuff in the notes...
Gavin Martinez
And finally, another botched note-page (the top bit, it's really a small triangle diagram and one other thingy). that completes a basic collection in one place of images from Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which will be archived for easy retrieval now, also recording my own thoughts at the time. Pity I didn't get any meaningful (You)s.
Brandon Rogers
I'm interested for you to expand on that. I get that Klee is weird stick figures and other abstracts, but my sense has been that he isn't /as hated/ as other modern artists, as perfect examples of shit modern art, if that makes any sense. Like if someone wants to be "that's shit modern art" they'd usually point at Rothko or Pollock or such, whereas with Klee you get simple childlike/primitive compositions which actually have some immediate relation to humanity, culture etc which normies actually like half the time. One of the most hated modern artists I've noticed over a history of browing Veeky Forums is Andy Warhol.
Eli White
Is there any absolutely essential pre-reading to understand this? It is on sale on the kindle store for $7 right now, but I fear it may be over my head.
Logan Watson
and closing out my own initial observations on skimming Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I'd like to also observe that Lautreamont is cited at least once in each volume, in the indices. Since I've taken an interest in Lautreamont (which has stalled out for the past few months), I will use the occasion to relate this to D&G. The relevant AOE passage (371):
And in contrast to Lautreamont's song that rises up around the paranoiac-Oedipal-narcissistic pole—"O rigorous mathematics... Arithmetic! algebra! geometry! imposing trinity! luminous triangle!"—there is another song: O schizophrenic mathematics, uncontrollable and mad desiring-machines!
And now, ATP (236):
Bachelard wrote a fine Jungian book when he elaborated the ramified series of Lautreamont, taking into account the speed coefficient of the metamorphoses and the degree of perfection of each term in relation to a pure aggressiveness as the principle of the series: the serpent's fang, the horn of the rhinoceros, the dog's tooth, the owl's beak; and higher up, the claw of the eagle or the vulture, the pincer of the crab, the legs of the louse, the suckers of the octopus. Throughout Jung's work a process of mimesis brings nature and culture together in its net, by means of analogies of pro-portion in which the series and their terms, and above all the animals occu-pying a middle position, assure cycles of conversion nature-culture-nature: archetypes as "analogical representations."
The former refers to a part of lautreamont where he autistically praises the beauty of math (a great chapter), and the latter bit builds up its own language to APE lautreamont: Maldoror is riddled with animal metaphors and long winding passages about animal behavior, so the point here is that for a person who's read lautreamont, you "get the reference" to the animal-bits at this point.
Jose Hughes
Most of it.
David Martinez
>Our criticism of these linguistic models [Chomsky's in particular] is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements,
Please show me this so I can laugh at it.
Jose Gutierrez
"The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who wpuld chop off his limbs in order to have artifical ones which will give him no pain or trouble" No pain, no trouble - this is the neurotic's dream of a tranqualized and conflict-free existence.
Landon Miller
Becoming-intensive is a bit closer to furries than becoming-animal, but only due to the fact that assemblages tend to relate their intensive side to images. One cannot connect to an intensity without all kinds of other connections being activated which are related to it, often time animalic images for example (courageous like a lion, cunning like a fox, etc.)
Nolan Brown
It's pretty much all that was described itt. Or do you expect someone to post an entire chapter or maybe even several?
Bentley Rodriguez
One last thing for the moment: in the course of posting the chapter-heading images, I became curious about the dates heading each chapter (I've only figured out the significance of one). If any anons can mention the significance of the other 14 before I go looking them up for myself it'd be appreciated.
Nathan Harris
They just seemed like obvious dates so I never bothered to check, but now that you mention it something interesting might come from this.
> 1914 > Pankejeff and Freud met with each other many times between February 1910 and July 1914
Maybe that's when the patient had the dream. Freud wrote about the case that same year, but only published it in 1918.
Noah Peterson
The Body without Organs one is obvious as well:
> [Artaud] recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu [To Have Done With the Judgment of God] between 22 and 29 November 1947.
Cameron Gomez
Also the year zero thing should be rather obvious: thr calendar is based on Christ's personhood. His One-ness, kept together by face and faciality, starting with his date of birth. Nobody would argue that child Christ was different from adult Christ for example.
Gavin Brown
Just came across this passage in a book on Outsider Art published 1972, and it's essentially the main thesis of AO
Henry Bell
It's pretty much Deleuze in a nutshell, but even Deleuze wasn't as radical as to claim thst there's no difference except in degree between a "normal" person and a schizophrenic. The Logic of Sense is an important book in this sense because it talks about how and why schizophrenics are often stuck in literal bodily meanings (about their own body and thr bodies of others) to the point of becoming violent about it if for example someone invades their personal space (stepping on their foot by accident for example) or if they become obsessed with a bodily expression ("an eye for an eye", etc.). Still, D&G do quote very influential psychiatrists who say that psychosis isn't as well ordered and classified (schizophrenia, paranoia, perversion, etc.) as many psychoanalysts like to think.
Levi Rogers
Yes, you're right, that one is dead-obvious with the accompanying Jesus picture. Also I mis-wrote earlier: the opening chapter "Introduction: Rhizome" and the closing chapter "Conclusion..." do not involve dates in their own language. This leaves us with THIRTEEN dates/ranges which I'll reiterate with helps:
2 1914 (beginning of WWI in view of the later war machine or else Freud's life as another user suggested?) 3 10,000 BC (I presume that this generic date is meant to refer to literal pre-history, which together with "geology" predate surviving human writing, unless there's something more specific about it) 4 November 20, 1923 (this one is tantalizing as an exact date that I don't immediately understand) 5 587BC-AD70 (clearly refers to the interval of the second temple of the jews now that I check. The pic being the ark of the covenant helps) 6 November 28, 1947 (refers to the interval of the Artaud composition as another user helpfully pointed out) 7 Year Zero (time of Christ. there's even a pic of Jesus here) 8 1874 (In the Cage-James, The Crack-up-Fitzgerald, Abyss/Spyglass, Fleutiaux. The actual significance of the DATE remains unclear to me) 9 1933 (reference to fascism/war-machine?) 10 1730 ("from 1730-1735 all we hear about are vampires.", apparently a Voltaire quote, him commenting on the new meme-manimal: jasoncolavito.com/voltaire-on-vampires.html ) 11 1837 (a musical work maybe? I don't know which) 12 1227 (Death of Genghis Khan as it relates to nomads and the war-machine) 13 7000BC (another generic date I assume, referring from passing from pre-history into history, or thereabouts, and what comes with it, money, agriculture etc.) 14 1440 (early modernity just getting going, new world about to be discovered, science, witch persecutions around here. Exact signicance of date I'm unsure)
Again, if I'm way-off-base on any of these or if you can fill in further gaps let me know.
Angel Davis
4. November 20, 1923 > The German mark was pegged to the Rentenmark at a trillion to one, solving the hyperinflation crisis and returning Germany to the gold standard.
I remember D&G saying something about this either in ATP or in AO.
Or:
> November 20, 1923 - Invention of three position traffic light
Both seem plausible. There were some other events, but I'm not sure if they're related.
> Born: Nadine Gordimer, writer and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2014) > Died: Rudolf Havenstein, 66, German lawyer and president of the Reichsbank
Nadine was related to fighting apartheid so maybe that? Probably not.
Sebastian Nguyen
holy crap, a thread with actual content instead of one-liner retardation
good job guys!
Hudson Harris
Good color reproductions of the objects from which the two pics heading "Becoming intense, becoming animal" derive. Both are Etruscan and depict wolf-men. This one is kept at the Louvre, Paris, and the other thingy is kept at a dedicated Etruscan museum in Rome.
Parker Taylor
The Rome plate, or bowl maybe. Notice the centaur also matching the detail in ATP.
They are suspiciously close together. It's probable that page-maker is familiar with ATP.
Noah Hall
> 1874
This is a tough one. It's related to many things. It's the year Nietzsche wrote Schopenhauer as Educator which was one of Deleuze's favorite texts. It is also related to the third Carlist war in Spain and since D&G often mentioned the Basque rebels in their work together there might be a link. It's also possible that it"s related to the beginnings of impressionism (it was first used in that year). Or, maybe some other piece of literature that I missed?
Joseph Smith
more like deloser and gayttari
Oliver Turner
What makes it especially difficult to figure out is that apparently none of the three sub-section novellas were actually written in 1874, nor were any of their authors born that year. The third one is some obscure to Anglo-me French thing I've never even heard of. Short of, oh, I don't know (again) actually reading the dang book I'm at a loss.
Kayden Flores
You may be right about 1837.
Hector Berlioz – Grande Messe des Morts was created that year and I recall D&G mentioning Berlioz. Unless it's a reference to The Little Mermaid which was written that year (also The Emperor's New Clothes).
Wyatt Bell
Again, I can glean a lot just by thumbing. Klee's birds are engaged in song (being part of a song-machine), a refrain is an element of music, musical terminology is used routinely in the chapter, and no other part of the book (and the arts are discussed at length) explicitly goes into music in the way in which this one would seem to do.
