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| Дата | 06.01.2006 22:19:38 |  |
| Рубрики | Интернет & общество; |  |
"Ибимат". Становление Becoming-Intense Becomig Animal, Becoming Woman...
> 1) спецкурс по теме Ибимата (много) и
> 2) - развитие темы "общества Контроля" (первая статья Делеза "Контроль
и Становление" - в Альманахе и на первой странице сайта)
>
> -----
http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/
> ------
Тысяча Плато, глава 10
Один из центральных моментов Ибимата. Принципиально "ортогональный"
процесс к простому "развитию" как "росту". Становление ребенок-
взрослый,девочка-женщина -эмерджентный процесс, вовлекающий "встречи" и
сугубо индивидуальный. Но в то же время -закономерный.
Другой тип. "Становление животным" (молекулярный тип процесса).
Все это не метафоры.
Общая теория "интенсивностей" (потоков, мощностей) практически та же,
что и научная версия теории -Побиск.
Рассматриваются на основе древних концепций - "здесьность" (thisness)
по Иоганну Дунс Скотту и главное,по теории аффектов Спинозы. Делез тут
основывается на своем решении проблемы интеллект-аффект, центрального
пункта системы Спинозы. Подробней - в спецкурсе лекций Делеза в Винсенне
(полностью выложены в сети)
Дальнейшие ходы - на главы Тысяча Плато : "Micropolitics", "Захват",
"Машина войны"
Дальнейшее чтение. Рекомендуется чтение на любителя по отдельным
направлениям. Напр. В чем суть становления женщиной и т.д. Откуда это
"внимание феминизма" к Ибимату...
наберите "Becoming Cat, Becoming Irena" в поисковике. вообще,
делезовский Интернет дает почти все необходимое
( Недавно эту вторую после Машины Войны центральную 10 главу ТП -
Becomig Animal, Becoming Intense.... разбирали у нас на семинаре - есть
аудио,будет текст - выложу)
Опять к сож. по английски
Some Remarks on Plateau 10: Becoming-Intense ....
Comments and Questions to: {John Protevi}
{LSU French Studies}
{Protevi Home Page}
1.The key term of Plateau 10, devenir, is one of the relatively few
cases where the translation of D/G into English is problematic.
Relatively few, that is, compared with the absolute necessity of reading
Derrida or Irigaray in French, for instance. This is due to three
factors: 1) D/G's insistence on the primacy of the concept (philosophy
is the creation of concepts, they declare in What is Philosophy?); 2)
their disdain of treating language in terms of signifiers; 3) their
abjuring of "typographical cleverness, lexical agility, ... syntactical
boldness" [22E/33F] in favor of a method that will construct the
multiple. As they say in a famous passage a little earlier in the
"Rhizome" plateau: "It is not enough to say 'Long live the multiple' ...
No typographical, lexical or even syntactical cleverness is enough to
make it heard. The multiple must be made [Le multiple, il faut le
faire]" (6E/13F). Other examples of translation difficulties would
include, as Massumi notes: puissance vs. pouvoir, which we will deal
with later, and signifiance and йnoncй, which we wrestled with the last
few weeks.
Devenir is the infinitive form of the verb. Infinitive means unlimited,
without temporal or logical restriction, that is, without a "tense" or a
"mood." Now French can use the infinitive form as a noun: un devenir; "a
to-become" or un кtre, "a to-be." English, obviously cannot do this, so
Massumi translates devenir with "becoming." "Becoming," on the other
hand, is in some cases a gerund, a verbal that functions as a noun: "a
becoming" or in other cases a present participle, a verb form that
functions as part of a verb phrase: "the wasp is becoming the orchid,"
or as a modifier: "the wasp, becoming the orchid ..." In these latter
cases of becoming as a present participle, there is a temporal
restriction to the present.
This is important to recognize because, as Deleuze/Guattari explains at
MP 263E/322F, an infinitive, even though it is not temporally
restricted, is not "indeterminate" with regard to time; rather it
expresses the "floating, nonpulsed time proper to Aeon, in other words,
the time of the pure event or of becoming." Deleuze/Guattari explains
that the plane of consistency, the virtual realm of continuous
variation, the BwO, has both a specific plane of content: haecceities or
assemblages of unformed matters and pure functions or affects; and a
specific plane of expression: indefinite article + proper name +
infinitive verb. We thus have a clue as to "becoming": it is an event, a
bifurcation, the actualization of which moves a system from one zone of
its phase space to another.
2. Deleuze/Guattari will tell us outright how to think devenir: it is a
"mutual but dissymetric deterritorialization" (Dialogues 77F); it is the
entry into a "symbiosis" (MP 238E/291F); the production of a new
assemblage (257-8E/315F). What is real is the "the becoming itself, the
block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that
which becomes passes" (238E/291F). Let's take their favorite example,
the wasp-orchid. The orchid becomes necessary to the life of the wasp
and vice versa: what is primary is the new assemblage, the wasp-orchid
machine. The becoming of wasp-orchid does not have a subject separate
from itself: it's not that the wasp, say, stays the same and merely adds
a new property to the set of properties that defines it. Nor is there a
goal or finish (or "term" = terminus) separate from the block of
becoming, for the other in the pair is also changed by its entry into
the new assemblage. In complexity theory terms, the new assemblage, the
symbiosis, is marked by emergent properties above and beyond the sum of
the parts. It is also important to remember that a becoming is a
combination of heterogenous parts; it is an alliance rather than a
filiation, an "unnatural participation," a "marriage against nature," a
"transversal communication." Keith Ansell Pearson cites Lynn Margulis'
revolutionary work in contemporary biology on mitochondrial capture as
the origin of the eukaryotic (nucleated) cells as a heterogenous
becoming, a symbiosis that produces a new assemblage (Viroid Life,
132)..
3. A few words on "becoming" in two of its most important instances in
the history of philosophy.
A. Hegel's Science of Logic begins with the triad:
Being-Nothing-Becoming [Sein-Nichts-Werden]. The first, most general and
most abstract thought possible is that of pure being, pure immediacy, or
pure intuition with no determination whatsoever. But this thought is
also precisely the thought of nothing at all: it is the pure form of
thought with no content whatsoever. But this thought of nothing can not
be held onto either and the thought then moves to Becoming. We thus
recognize that Being, pure self-identity, and its absolute opposite,
Nothing, are interchangeable. This sameness means we can never isolate
being and nothing, for they have always already gone over into each
other: "What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that
being--does not pass over but has passed over--into nothing, and nothing
into being." (83/82-83). As Gadamer shows, the "always already" of "has
passed over" [ьbergegangen ist] indicates the circularity of the system.
Spirit is always on the move, the movement generated by an originary
splitting (being and nothing are opposites) that is always already a
healing (being and nothing are the same). The sameness of being and
nothing is not self-identity as simple undifferentiation, but as the
always already accomplished disappearance into each other of what is
absolutely different. Becoming, then is the basic movement of Hegel's
Logic, and thus of thought and nature and spirit, the elements of the
system
But just what purchase on real becoming does one gain by examining pure
thought (or pure consciousness, the correlate of pure thought which
Hegel examines in the Phenomenology of Spirit)? None at all, Deleuze
writes. Michael Hardt has pointed out that Deleuze's early Bergson work
is the locus of Deleuze's working through of his hatred of Hegel.
Deleuze writes in
Bergsonism: "To Bergson, it seems that in this type of dialectical
method one begins with concepts that, like baggy clothes, are much too
big. The One in general, the multiple in general, nonbeing in general
... of what use is a dialectic that believes itself to be reunited with
the real when it compensates for the inadequacy of a concept that is too
broad or too general by invoking
the opposite concept, which is no less broad and general? ... The
singular will never be attained by correcting a generality with another
generality" (44E).
B. Nietzsche contrasts Being and Becoming. While Deleuze and D/G are
obviously more sympathetic to Nietzsche than to Hegel, Nietzsche's
concept of Becoming is not that which animates Plateau 10. For
Nietzsche, Being is the privilege of stability over change, of substance
over event. Becoming is the insistence on the "eventualizing" of
substance: rather than being a
substance with properties all things are events of capture and escape,
the outcome of struggles of forces against each other, struggles that
are stabilized in relations of power via a process of "interpretation."
Now for Nietzsche, a substance with properties is a fiction produced by
the "metaphysics of grammar," that is, a projection of the subject --
predicate structure of Indo-European languages onto the inhabitants of
the world, so that they are seen as substances with predicates.
(Although it is possible to give more interesting readings of him, I
have to admit that Aristotle's text can yield a prime example of the
analogy between the structures of language and reality: this analogy is
reflected in the term logos: language, logic, ratio, structure of the
world.)
The metaphysics of grammar is at root a phenomenon of a weak will that
separates a force from that it can do: the weak "could have" been
strong, but they "chose" not to-thus the sin of the strong is not their
strength, but their acting on their strength. This separates a subject
underneath of action. For Nietzsche, a force goes to the limit of its
strength: or at least that is the definition of nobility. In any event,
Nietzschean Becoming is much too much a cosmic concept for D/G's use in
this plateau, where it designates the most concrete of actions.
4. Spinoza. The real philosophical heritage upon which D/G draw in the
central "ontology" section of plateau 10 is Spinoza. There is a brief
mention of Bergson early in the plateau during the discussion of blocks
of becoming, but let's defer any discussion of Bergson to a later
meeting.
Deleuze's two works on Spinoza are marvels. Expressionism in Philosophy:
Spinoza was Deleuze's submission to the jury for his doctorat d'кtat in
1968; Spinoza: Practical Philosophy is a little gem, the work in which
Deleuze's love for the object of his writing shines forth most clearly.
Deleuze is extravagant in his praise of Spinoza in his interviews and
writings: "the prince
of philosophers"; "the Christ of philosophy" (to which Alain Badiou,
whose Deleuze: Le clameur de l'кtre is the most challenging of the
recent French reactions to Deleuze [along with Alliez, Mengue,
Zourabichvili], adds that Deleuze was "one of his most considerable
apostles" [150]).
Reading Spinoza's Ethics (Demonstrated by the Order of Geometry) is
without a doubt one of the most exhilarating experiences available to
students of western philosophy. Deleuze sets a passage from Bernard
Malamud's The Fixer as the epigraph to Spinoza: Pratical Philosophy. In
it, a poor and poorly educated man explains to a judge how he felt upon
reading Spinoza: "I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a
kopek and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I
read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a
whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn't understand every word, but when
you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a
witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man ..." (The feeling I had
reading Anti-Oedipus for the first time!).
What draws Deleuze to Spinoza? Immanence. Spinoza refuses all
transcendence. His single substance, Deus sive Natura (God or Nature, an
equivalence) saturates existence. Its two attributes (or more precisely,
the two attributes accessible to us) thought and extension, are, because
immanent to the same substance, univocal expressions of that substance.
Spinoza thus refuses the reserve of negative theology (the substance
saturates the world with no reserve) and the analogical being of
positive theologies that propose a transcendent God (God/Nature is fully
expressed in its attributes; there is no supereminence to God's being in
relation to the being of thought and extension in the world). In D/G
terms, God/Nature is a plane of consistency or desiring-production
itself as the being of the world.
Spinoza's theory of bodies is also very attractive to Deleuze. Bodies
for Spinoza are assemblages: Part II, Proposition 13, Definition: "When
any given bodies of the same or different magnitude are compelled by
other bodies to remain in contact, or if they be moved at the same of
different rates of speed, so that their mutual movements should preserve
among themselves a certain fixed relation, we say that such bodies are
in union, and that together they compose one body or individual, which
is distinguished from other bodies by this union." Notice that bodies
are not composed of definite types of stuff, but by achieved
relationships of speed or rest. Earlier Spinoza writes: "Bodies are
distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness
and slowness, and not in respect of substance" (II P13 Lemma I). We see
D/G explicating this notion of body in "Memories of a Spinozist I." A
body is composed: it is an assemblage of parts whose relative motions
are able to be preserved for a time in a ratio of capture and escape,
deterritorialization and reterritorialization. D/G call this the
"longitude" of a body (256E/313F).
"Memories of a Spinozist II" deals with "latitude," which is the set of
affects of a body, the set of actions of which it is capable. "Affects
are becomings," D/G write: affects are the set of incorporeal
transformations, the bifurcations that move a body into a different
region of its phase space, that is, that allow it to enter new
assemblages, new forms of interminglings with other bodies to form new
machines. As capacities, affects are virtual or intensive as opposed to
the extensive parts that form the longitude of a body. Affects are "what
a body can do" (Deleuze loves to quote Spinoza to the effect that "we do
not know what the body is capable of" -- we do not know [a priori], and
hence we must experiment. Defining bodies by affects is not the same as
by genus/species (this relies on the substance-properties model).
Grouping bodies by affects breaks open the organic stratum to the
"machinic phylum" that cuts across it: for example, a race horse has
more in common with a race car or speed boat than with a plow horse,
which is closer to an ox than to the race horse.
In "Memories of a Haecceity," D/G bring the two previous Spinozist
points together: "On the PC, a body is defined only by a longitude and a
latitude." This mode of individuation is called by D/G haecceity,
recalling Duns Scotus' use of the term for singular being. A haecceity
is an assemblage, a certain relation of particles in motion or rest
giving rise to a set of affects. This is an individuation, but not that
of a subject or substance. Examples are "five in the evening" or a life:
a set of matters and functions on a PC individuated from others on that
PC. Here we see a theme familiar to us from our study of the Geology of
Morals: D/G's insistence that the virtual is not chaos but is inhabited
by its own denizens. This refuses the transcendence or chaos forced
choice (Louis XVI: "aprиs nous, le dйluge"). The time of the PC is Aeon,
as we remarked at the beginning of the lecture.
D/G do not detail it here, but Spinoza's ethics and politics are
fascinating. (Here I rely on Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An
Apprenticeship in Philosophy [Minnesota, 1993], a model of clarity.) The
train of thought is the following. Affects can be either passive
(external cause) or active (internal cause). Encounters with others
produce either joy or sadness, depending on whether the other body is
composable with ours, that is, whether the new assemblage results in an
increase or diminution of our
strength. So we can have either passive sad or joyful encounters or
active joyful or sad encounters. Spinoza's realism makes him say that
most of our encounters are passive sad. But we do have the principle of
selection: move to the active and the joyful. Spinozist politics is
arranging a system of joyful encounters that tend to more activity and
more joy. This is only possible
through the puissance of democracy rather than the pouvoir of the State,
which precisely relies on the multiplication of sad passions, as D/G
recall for us in Anti-Oedipus in quoting Spinoza: the prime question of
political philosophy: how can desire desire its own repression? "Why do
men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their
salvation?" (AO 29) How can people possibly reach the point of shouting:
"More taxes! Less bread!"
In the insistence on joy rather than pleasure we see a key difference
between D/G and Foucault. For D/G pleasure is the subjective
appropriation of the shared energy field that is joy, while for
Foucault, pleasure is the (notorious) rallying cry for resistance to
bio-power and the dispositif of sexuality at the close of History of
Sexuality I: "bodies and pleasures." (Resistance to power, by the way,
is the other major difference: for D/G, the line of flight is primary,
and power relations
are secondary phenomena of reterritorialization; hence resistance is
reactive.)
-------
process is the subject of the two memories of a Spinozist sections. I
think it's correct to say that at one end of this process of composition
is the haecceities; they are more or less the raw material, the
heterogeneous elements that enter into the process of composition. Now,
the term haecceity comes from the work of Duns Scotus, the Scottish
scholastic philosopher (14th century?) and specifically from his book on
individuation. I think haecceity can be used interchangeable, at least
in the context of scholastic philosophy, with the term singularity. A
haecceity, D&G explain, is a mode of individuation very different from a
person, a subject, a thing, or a substance. A haecceity might refer
rather to a season, a time of day, a wind. The light at that hour, or
that color was singular. It cannot be captured in its difference from
something else, but is only defined in its thisness. (The recourse to
"thisness" or to the "here and now" are often used to understand Duns
Scotus's use of the term.) D&G of course explain it somewhat
differently. "They are haecceities in the sense that they consist
entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or
particules, capacities to affect and be affected" (261). Or, in their
terms they consist of longitude (relations of movement and rest) and
latitude (powers of affect). (I have no idea why the words longitude and
latitude are used.) This definition of haecceities as longitude and
latitude demonstrates how they are available or disposed to the process
of composition. On one hand, and this according to Spinoza's definition
of the Individual in the Ethics, an Individual is composed of bodies
that have a common relationship of movement and rest (that is the
longitude part). And on the other hand, (and now in terms of latitude),
the affects of each body, including both its power to act and its power
to be affected, determine a different axis of composition. This has to
do with the Spinoza line Deleuze likes so much: we still don't know what
a body can do. What it can do indicates how it can be composed. "We know
nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what
its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with
other affects, with the affects of other bodies, either to destroy that
body or to be destroyed by it..." (257). What interests me in these two
axes, longitude and latitude, is that they begin to identify how the
process of composition can take place.