Some stuff I've been reading
Not really bearing direct relation to Adam's last poem, like I said in the comments I would try to do, but here's some stuff I've been looking at which I wanted to toss out. I'm mostly interested in writing that self-consciously generalizes about life and the human scene. Here's Byron in "Don Juan", Canto VII
When we know what all are, we must bewail us,
But nevertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things, for I wish to know
What after all are all things - but a show?
[...]
They accuse me - me - the present writer of
The present poem of - I know not what -
A tendency to undertake and scoff
All human power and virtue and that;
And this they say in language rather rough.
Good God! I wonder what they would be at!
I say no more than has been said in Dante's
Verse and by Solomon and by Cervantes,
By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault,
By Fenelon, by Luther, by Plato,
By Tillofson and Wesley and Rousseau
Who knew this life was not worth a potato.
'Tis not their fault nor mine if this be so.
For my part, I pretend not to be Cato
Nor even Diogenes, We live and die,
But which is best, you know no more than I.
Socrates said our only knowledge was
'To know that nothing could be known,' a pleasant
Science enough, whch levels to an ass
Each man of wisdom, future, past, or present
Newton (that proverb of the mind) alas,
Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent,
That he himself felt only 'like a youth
Picking up shells by the the great ocean - Truth.'
Ecclesiastes said that all is vanity;
Most modern preachers say the same or show it
By their examples of true Christianity.
In short all know or very soon may know it;
And in this scene of all-confessed inanity,
By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet,
Must I restrain me through the fear of strife
From holding up the nothingness of life?
Dogs or men (for I flatter you in saying
That ye are dogs - your betters far), ye may
Read or read not what I am now essaying
To show ye what ye are in every way.
As little as the moon stops for the baying
Of wolves, will the bright Muse withdraw one ray
From out her skies. Then howl your idle wrath,
Whe she still silvers o'er your gloomy path!
Here's Han Shan (Cold Mountain), ancient Chinese hermit poet (translated by Red Pine):
Brothers share five districts
father and sons five states
to learn where the wild ducks fly
follow the white-hare banner
find a magic melon in your dreams
steal a sacred orange from the palace
far away from your native land
swim with fish in a stream
(Poem 13)
The new year ends a year of sorrow
spring finds everything fresh
mountain flowers laugh with green water
cliff trees dance with blue mist
bees and butterflies seem so happy
birds and fishes look lovelier still
the joy of companionship never ends
who can sleep psat dawn
(24)
Since I came to Cold Mountain
how many thousand years have passed
accepting my fate I fled to the woods
to dwell and gaze in freedom
no one visits the cliffs
forever hidden by clouds
soft graass serves as a mattress
my quilt is the dark blue sky
a boulder makes a fine pillow
Heaven and Earth can crumble and change
(26)
Who takes the Cold Mountain Road
takes a road that never ends
the rivers are long and piled with rocks
the streams are wide and choked with grass
it's not the rain that makes the moss slick
and it's not the wind that makes the pines moan
who can get past the tangles of the world
and sit with me in the clouds
(32)
They don't know all that much about Han Shan cept that he went up to this mountain, and seems to have both Buddhist and Daoist influences (most of those liberation-seeking types stuck to one or the other). What I think is interesting is how you can take the drift of those short poems, and see the idea magnified and made invective under the pen of Nietzsche. This is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann (if you ever read Nietzsche, his are the best translations to read):
ON THE NEW IDOL
Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not where we live, my brothers: here there are states. State? What is that? Well then, open your ears to me, for now I shall speak to you about the death of peoples.
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
It is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them "state": they hang a sword and a hundred appetites over them.
Where there is still a people, it does not understand the state and hates it as the evil eye and the sin against customs and rights.
This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights. But the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies- and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and bites easily. Even its entrails are false. Confusion of tongues of good and evil: this sign I give you as the sign of the state. Verily, this sign signifies the will to death. Verily, it beckons to the preachers of death.
All-too-many are born: for the superfluous the state was invented.
Behold, how it lures them, the all-too-many- and how it devours them, chews them, and ruminates!
"On earth there is nothing greater than I: the ordering finger of God am I"- thus roars the monster. And it is not only the long-eared and shortsighted who sink to their knees. Alas, to you too, you great souls, it whispers its dark lies. Alas, it detects the rich hearts which like to squander themselves. Indeed, it detects you too, you vanquishers of the old god. You have grown weary with fighting, and now your weariness still serves the new idol. With heroes and honorable men it would surround itself, the new idol! It likes to bask in the sunshine of good consciences- the cold monster!
It will give you everything if you will adore it, this new idol: thus it buys the splendor of your virtues and the look of your proud eyes. It would use you as bait for the all-too-many.
Indeed, a hellish artifice was invented there, a horse of death, clattering in the finery of divine honors. Indeed, a dying for many was invented there, which praises itself as life: verily, a great service to all preachers of death!
State I call it where all drink poison, the good and the wicked; state, where all lose themeselves, the good and the wicked; state, where the slow suicide of all is called "life."
Behold the superfluous! They are always sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves.
Behold the superfluous! They gather riches and become poorer with them. They want power and first the lever of power, much money- the impotent paupers!
Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one at another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness- as if happiness sat on the throne. Often mud sits on the throne- and often also the throne on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
My brothers, do you want to suffocate in the fumes of their snouts and appetites? Rather break the windows and leap to freedom.
Escape from the bad smell! Escape form the idolatry of the superfluous!
Escape from the bad smell! Escape from the stream of these human sacrifices!
The earth is free even now for great souls. These are still many seats for the lonesome and the twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas.
A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty!
Only where the state ends, there begins the human being whoo is not superfulouous: there beigns the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune.
Where the state ends- look there, my brothers! Do you now see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Ok, so this is abhorrent to anyone with a liberal sensibility. No one with a political conscience will take Nietzsche up here, or at least where he gets to calling people 'superfluous'. In the next section, Nietzsche writes "Where solitude ceases the market place begins." I think that summarizes his stance acutely. I don't want to comment on all of this too much. But I think these three writers are only standing at various distances from the same abyssinal view of things. For anyone interested in Deleuze, everything Nietzsche says here about 'preachers of death' is the same as what Deleuze will say. Nietzsche essentially takes Byron's 'holding up of nothingness' and Han Shan's flight to the hills and turns it into a philosophical symposium, treating all the approaches and all of the solutions in his own very biased, but deliberately polemical style. Anyway, this is long enough. Hope it was worth something.
When we know what all are, we must bewail us,
But nevertheless I hope it is no crime
To laugh at all things, for I wish to know
What after all are all things - but a show?
[...]
They accuse me - me - the present writer of
The present poem of - I know not what -
A tendency to undertake and scoff
All human power and virtue and that;
And this they say in language rather rough.
Good God! I wonder what they would be at!
I say no more than has been said in Dante's
Verse and by Solomon and by Cervantes,
By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault,
By Fenelon, by Luther, by Plato,
By Tillofson and Wesley and Rousseau
Who knew this life was not worth a potato.
'Tis not their fault nor mine if this be so.
For my part, I pretend not to be Cato
Nor even Diogenes, We live and die,
But which is best, you know no more than I.
Socrates said our only knowledge was
'To know that nothing could be known,' a pleasant
Science enough, whch levels to an ass
Each man of wisdom, future, past, or present
Newton (that proverb of the mind) alas,
Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent,
That he himself felt only 'like a youth
Picking up shells by the the great ocean - Truth.'
Ecclesiastes said that all is vanity;
Most modern preachers say the same or show it
By their examples of true Christianity.
In short all know or very soon may know it;
And in this scene of all-confessed inanity,
By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet,
Must I restrain me through the fear of strife
From holding up the nothingness of life?
Dogs or men (for I flatter you in saying
That ye are dogs - your betters far), ye may
Read or read not what I am now essaying
To show ye what ye are in every way.
As little as the moon stops for the baying
Of wolves, will the bright Muse withdraw one ray
From out her skies. Then howl your idle wrath,
Whe she still silvers o'er your gloomy path!
Here's Han Shan (Cold Mountain), ancient Chinese hermit poet (translated by Red Pine):
Brothers share five districts
father and sons five states
to learn where the wild ducks fly
follow the white-hare banner
find a magic melon in your dreams
steal a sacred orange from the palace
far away from your native land
swim with fish in a stream
(Poem 13)
The new year ends a year of sorrow
spring finds everything fresh
mountain flowers laugh with green water
cliff trees dance with blue mist
bees and butterflies seem so happy
birds and fishes look lovelier still
the joy of companionship never ends
who can sleep psat dawn
(24)
Since I came to Cold Mountain
how many thousand years have passed
accepting my fate I fled to the woods
to dwell and gaze in freedom
no one visits the cliffs
forever hidden by clouds
soft graass serves as a mattress
my quilt is the dark blue sky
a boulder makes a fine pillow
Heaven and Earth can crumble and change
(26)
Who takes the Cold Mountain Road
takes a road that never ends
the rivers are long and piled with rocks
the streams are wide and choked with grass
it's not the rain that makes the moss slick
and it's not the wind that makes the pines moan
who can get past the tangles of the world
and sit with me in the clouds
(32)
They don't know all that much about Han Shan cept that he went up to this mountain, and seems to have both Buddhist and Daoist influences (most of those liberation-seeking types stuck to one or the other). What I think is interesting is how you can take the drift of those short poems, and see the idea magnified and made invective under the pen of Nietzsche. This is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann (if you ever read Nietzsche, his are the best translations to read):
ON THE NEW IDOL
Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not where we live, my brothers: here there are states. State? What is that? Well then, open your ears to me, for now I shall speak to you about the death of peoples.
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
It is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them "state": they hang a sword and a hundred appetites over them.
Where there is still a people, it does not understand the state and hates it as the evil eye and the sin against customs and rights.
This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights. But the state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies- and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and bites easily. Even its entrails are false. Confusion of tongues of good and evil: this sign I give you as the sign of the state. Verily, this sign signifies the will to death. Verily, it beckons to the preachers of death.
All-too-many are born: for the superfluous the state was invented.
Behold, how it lures them, the all-too-many- and how it devours them, chews them, and ruminates!
"On earth there is nothing greater than I: the ordering finger of God am I"- thus roars the monster. And it is not only the long-eared and shortsighted who sink to their knees. Alas, to you too, you great souls, it whispers its dark lies. Alas, it detects the rich hearts which like to squander themselves. Indeed, it detects you too, you vanquishers of the old god. You have grown weary with fighting, and now your weariness still serves the new idol. With heroes and honorable men it would surround itself, the new idol! It likes to bask in the sunshine of good consciences- the cold monster!
It will give you everything if you will adore it, this new idol: thus it buys the splendor of your virtues and the look of your proud eyes. It would use you as bait for the all-too-many.
Indeed, a hellish artifice was invented there, a horse of death, clattering in the finery of divine honors. Indeed, a dying for many was invented there, which praises itself as life: verily, a great service to all preachers of death!
State I call it where all drink poison, the good and the wicked; state, where all lose themeselves, the good and the wicked; state, where the slow suicide of all is called "life."
Behold the superfluous! They are always sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves.
Behold the superfluous! They gather riches and become poorer with them. They want power and first the lever of power, much money- the impotent paupers!
Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one at another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness- as if happiness sat on the throne. Often mud sits on the throne- and often also the throne on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
My brothers, do you want to suffocate in the fumes of their snouts and appetites? Rather break the windows and leap to freedom.
Escape from the bad smell! Escape form the idolatry of the superfluous!
Escape from the bad smell! Escape from the stream of these human sacrifices!
The earth is free even now for great souls. These are still many seats for the lonesome and the twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas.
A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty!
Only where the state ends, there begins the human being whoo is not superfulouous: there beigns the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune.
Where the state ends- look there, my brothers! Do you now see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Ok, so this is abhorrent to anyone with a liberal sensibility. No one with a political conscience will take Nietzsche up here, or at least where he gets to calling people 'superfluous'. In the next section, Nietzsche writes "Where solitude ceases the market place begins." I think that summarizes his stance acutely. I don't want to comment on all of this too much. But I think these three writers are only standing at various distances from the same abyssinal view of things. For anyone interested in Deleuze, everything Nietzsche says here about 'preachers of death' is the same as what Deleuze will say. Nietzsche essentially takes Byron's 'holding up of nothingness' and Han Shan's flight to the hills and turns it into a philosophical symposium, treating all the approaches and all of the solutions in his own very biased, but deliberately polemical style. Anyway, this is long enough. Hope it was worth something.
posted by Tongue-tied Lightning at 12:22 PM
12 Comments:
Yeah, that was useful. Esp. the Nietz where else did he write about this?
his demagogaury is a breath of fresh air. We need more verbal philosophers. Or, as I listen to Talib, I think maybe we just have to listen to verbal philosophers. Like Lord Byron. Shout on the rooftops, brothaman: we are mortal.
I was interested that this (the neitzche) is abhorrent to anyone with a liberal sensibility--what does this mean of liberalism? Are there no liberal cynics or even nihilists? I guess I'd never thought about it before, because one of the assumptions that had been brainwashed into me (ideology permeating and so on) was that liberal occupied a place on a spectrum, left of conservative but not-so-far right of marxism. And a marxist would be comfortable with this passage, I think. I bring this up because it's an important time in my life to understand the word 'liberal.' I find my political vocabulary woefully deficient these days, facism is not what it was, and I am beginning to question "if neoliberalism and facism have similar ends, what next?" Neoliberalism being a cancerous outgrowth of the idealistic, broad minded middle-class idea that I have inhabited my whole life.
I wanted to post a passage from Guattari's essay "Why Everybody Wants to be a Facist" which Tongue Tied (to what extent are you your digital self, alex?) reccomended to me. The problem is, i'm too lazy to type it up right now. Maybe soon.
I stated that about the liberal sensibility because I figured the Nietzsche passage would leave a bad taste in peoples' mouths. Nietzsche is a-political. And when I walk around Brown campus and see things like "Indifference is the greatest sin" carved into walls (it's written on the statue which sits in front of the steps on the main green), I figure Nietzsche couldn't garner much respect in our environment. He wants us to throw it all away, to leave off any immediate participation in the government. This is what I meant by his offending liberalism, since it seems to me that anyone who does not take up a cause nowadays is impugned for being 'apathetic,' for not caring enough about injustices. Nietzsche says "Men were not born equal," and thinks most injunctions to justice are merely veiled forms of brutality and a will to punish, a barbaric will to power.
Nietzsche would've hated Marxism, even if it were so libertarian and run by such do-gooders that there were no oppressive government, no 'new idol.' There are a lot of sections of Zarathustra I could recommend, but Genealogy of Morals is his famous book on 'ressentiment' and the 'bad conscience' effected by the State, by Christianity, and perhaps also by liberalism. He mainly wants people to think for themselves, to make their own values; though it would seem that if one's values were money or politics, Nietzsche would be disappointed. The point is this: Nietzsche appeals to you the reader, you the singular human individual. Liberalism appeals to you the member of society, to the duties and responsibilities it is said that we have, especially as persons of 'privileged' upbringing. And there's a strange tension here with D&G, because they don't believe in singularities, only multiplicities, groups flowing in and out of different social orders and interpellations. That's what I can't understand about them: that they could take so much from Nietzsche, and then argue (and take my word for it, they do believe this) that there is no such thing as an individual human subject.
A couple interesting final notes: in Bleak House, Dickens satirizes the bourgeois philanthropists of his day, calling it 'telescopic philanthropy.' It's a worthwhile critique of a certain sort of liberalism, an impersonal altruism based on Societies and fund raising and donations, all with the understanding that help is going somewhere, though the someones of that scene are faceless abstractions, 'people in need.' You might read about that for your thesis (I wouldn't recommend reading the Dickens itself) - and also, Thoreau in Civil Disobedience gives the most poignant and American expression of a-politicality. The latter writer was of common ideological ancestry with Nietzsche: both adored Emerson.
Wow, that Byron is fantastic. I'd love to hear more on how you relate the Han Shan to the Nietzsche.
"No one with a political conscience will take Nietzsche up here"
or with an ethical conscience, I'd add (people as superfluous).
But it's appealing to me! In some way, at least. So, why?
It's probably the completeness of his refusal...I would like to know more about what historical state-model this critique is launched (hurled?) at...
"The point is this: Nietzsche appeals to you the reader, you the singular human individual. Liberalism appeals to you the member of society, to the duties and responsibilities it is said that we have, especially as persons of 'privileged' upbringing. And there's a strange tension here with D&G, because they don't believe in singularities, only multiplicities, groups flowing in and out of different social orders and interpellations. That's what I can't understand about them: that they could take so much from Nietzsche, and then argue (and take my word for it, they do believe this) that there is no such thing as an individual human subject."
Orr not that there is no human subject, but the notion of the autonomous (singular, isolated, "free") subject misleads...which has very actual consequences
supplying the critical force of Nietzsche into the institutional (political, social) frameworks AS ARE (no other way
around it--
)
how do we get made
then
how can we get less made, or
differently
*
I gotta read more neitzche. I remember nothing of the segments I read freshman year.
I think the tension you're feeling with Deluze & G really cuts to the heart of the matter, and I think Adam's last comment started us down the right path. I think Deluze aggrees with N that the state is a mass superflous illusion, a trick, a delusion, but that that is all there is; this doesn't imply an subject at all, especially given that the state is both macro and micro, it organizes everything. We don't exist and have individual subjectivity outside of the mechanisms that we use to organize ourselves. He talks about microfacism in "A Thousand Plateus":
"In short, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics. Take aggregates of the perception or feeling type: their molar organization, their rigid segmentarity, does not preclude the existence of an entire world of unconcious micropercepts, unconcious affects, fine segmentations that grasp or experience different thingsare distributed and operate differently. There is a micropolitics of perception, affection, conversation and so forth."
And then a page later:
""But facism is inseperable from a proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood facism, youth fascism and war verterin's facism...every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with othersbefore resonating in a great, generalized black hole. There is a facism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche."
Now we get to the interesting point, another page later:
"Only microfacism provides an answer to the global question: why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its onw repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor to they 'want' to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attituides, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undefferentaiated insinctual energy, but itself results froma highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascest determination. LEFTIST ORGANIZATIONS WILL NOT BE THE LAST TO SECRETE MICROFACISMS. It's too easy to be antifacist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules bothe personal and collective."
So, while N. seems to see the state as a veil of delusion pulled over the individual, D. argues that we organize ourselves into the state on a molecular level, and, (although maybe this isn't explicitly in those passages), that we have no autnonomous subjectivity outside of this molecular political structure. It's segmented in ever-smaller segments of the Big Rhyzome, but it's not individualistic at all.
sorry for the great mass of text poured upon the computer screen.
Thanks for the great mass of text poured upon my computer screen. This is reminding me of a coversation me and the old roosting sturgeon had in the comments section of an essay he posted last summer. I'll be excited for when he gets his ass to a computer screen himself to comment here.
Allow me to commence on a tirade. I simply do not believe that the political permeates every possible sphere of existence. Now I was watching 24 tonight. Grand new 2 hour premier!!! Millions sat gleery glued to the One Eye with me, watching as the resilient Jack Bauer fought all odds and waged a one man war on terror. That show and all the ads that divvied the episode up made me want to curl up in a ball and suck my thumb til I imploded myself into a cute little white bunnie. Did you know that our 'culture' (Kultur in german, it looks so much more barbarous in that tongue, so much more consistent with its character) currently consists of a battlefield on which we all stand hostage in the center, looking dumbly and drooling at each other, while 4-5 major cell phone/electronics companies joust for the possession of our souls? Music, YES, we have this, and look we have little dancing bars that move up and down to the beat; NO, you can watch football on this one; NO, your life will be that much more scheduled and profitable would you only switch to cingular. Everything we do and have habituated ourselves to enjoy is being placed in cute little red (GET YOUR SPRINT CELL PHONE NOW IF YOU HAVE A CONSCIENCE, BECAUSE SOME OF THE PROFITS GO TO AFRICA!) boxes, and they hide their antennae inside because they do not want to remind you of your insecticide existences.
But I figure that's being written on a million other blogs right now. In any case, Han Shan is where I go here: who will walk down Cold Mountain road? Did anyone notice that Nietzsche talks of a cold monster? I thought that was a happy coincidence. It doesn't matter what state he was talking about. They're all the same. He would be the first to say that. It's you or the herd. You or the They, Das Man. And Heidegger was not only the first to take Nietzsche and make him superbly theoretical; he was the first to make us all pessimists. If Nietzsche is not an existentialist, it is because he has hope; because he wants you to know evil that you might do good -- there are beautiful passages in Zarathustra about the 'virtue of gift-giving,' and when I first read it, I wrote in the margins: Japhy (you two know what this would mean). But I think Deleuze is himself a preacher of death. 24 and the ads interpellated the shit out of me tonight, they reached right on up there so far I could feel em in my liver. Oh the gall they have, god I love to be entertained but not at the price of my soul.
But who will walk down Cold Mountain road? Nietzsche hated Buddhism. He didn't understand it fully, no doubt: else he would've known that the Buddha, like he himself, was fighting against asceticism, fighting against blind denial of the body. Buddha loved the body, Nietzsche loved the body (as much as he suffered for having one), and Deleuze, well he can't get a fucking nuff of the body. And his hope, his ray of hope is always that enigmatic body without organs. But who will walk down Cold Mountain road? It's so much simpler, I think, than Deleuze and Guattari ever make it. They're a bit lost in the French cuisine of writing: ever so much complexity, when really we all would've been fine filling ourselves up on the bread. It is individualistic. It can be anyway. There are things we do not share with anyone else. Yes we communicate them, yes we molarize them, and yes, above all, we are all fascists. But that's nothing more than to repeat what Nietzsche had said long ago with the 'herd instinct' and 'will to power.' It's a matter of instincts. And because it is so goddamn unfashionable to talk about instincts any more, never mind the 'subject' in which they subsist, D&G completely lose the critical value of what Nietzsche is doing, the injunction, the declamation, and finally, the optimism. It's all there, sure, but saying things outright, saying quite simply what it is they do not like, what they find distasteful in it all, is not a passage found commonly enough amidst all the metaphorism in the Cap & Schiz books. A thousand plateaus, but this always at the expense of the One. Alain Badiou, one of the most prominent 'interpreters' of Deleuze, focuses on this, but he actually thinks Deleuze does too much to preserve the One -- he's a strange cat, Badiou, I don't get him at all yet, or whether he's worth the time. But there is a form of the One which the western world still has no comprehension of, which its intelligensia (and I think we are all feeling this at school) is all too inhumanly comfortable with casting off. Who will take the road to Cold Mountain? But that is a book which only Buddhists read.
alex so smart.
but why does the political not infiltrate every sphere? I'm beginning to loathe the word 'political' maybe you are too, maybe that's where we're breaking down here. But it seems that your battle with the TV was a 'political' struggle.
I aggree that it's silly to ignore the presence of individual subjectivity, and that becomes more apparant to me as I spend so much solitary time with myself, reading; clearly, I am I and no one else is in the room. But I think there's value in D&G's position, and I think it could be argued.
I think that capitalism is primarily a bodily phenomonon, and depends on organs (NOT the body without organs. Maybe I don't understand it fully enough yet, but that seems like an absurd and somewhat useless construct). We buy things to put in or on our bodies, especially our genitals and mouths.
But there has also been an imperialism of conciousness assaulting all of us, a more cohesive and globally controlling force than in the innocent times of European Facism. Each body now lies on a global grid blanketing the earth, a grid made by harnessed light and electrical energy which binds all of us. I cannot help but stare at this grid in the face because it is my writing tablet. We are stuck like pods hanging off a data rhizome which catalogues and connects us to one another. Although the new society of information and cashflows is diffuse and multiple, there lies behind it a centralized eye which enables the eternal myth of selfhood within a society made of microcosmic alliances and relationships, all of which add up to a system of power and control. This force lurks behind Pynchon’s novels. bigly.
But i think it's good it's not fashonable to talk about instincts anymore. Because it's so easy to say, "oh, well that [whatever it is] is instinctual." that's no explanation at all. So we have a "herd instinct" sure. What the fuck? where does that get us in understanding it?
I'm gonna start signing off with the random letters that Blogger asks me to write in their little box every time, in order to be granted an identity:
oznix
uswumgl
I don't know why I moan about D&G so much, I think they are really important and are much more right than wrong. I'm gonna try to stop doing that. And I'm not sure whether my battle with tv is a political struggle.
Don't throw away 'body without organs' yet. Remember you're reading vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 1 is 'Anti-Oedipus,' and they say a bit about it there. And 'body without organs' is a term they borrow from Artaud. The thing about terms is that sometimes they are better unexplained. I think that's probably part of the Deleuzian project (and here I am now defending him), to affect a certain style of reading and theorizing, one where you are made to theorize about what it is that they are theorizing.
It works and it doesn't. But it's a fun enterprise. And so is Nietzsche's, especially with a term like 'herd instinct' or 'herd mentality.' When I say I want to preserve a thinking that allows for instincts, I do so because I think there is in fact something in us and our behavior that can be called an instinct. 'Something-that-can-be-called': that's all any word is. It asserts that there is some thing to which it refers.
I'm not meaning to get into linguistics here. All I'm saying is that I think 'instinct' is a useful term, especially, in a way, now that it has become so unfashionable. It's when a term has been over and mis-used that it can begin a new poetic existence. That's what theory does best: it takes terms you thought you knew the meanings of and redefines them. And that in itself upsets the symbolic (and indirectly, the capitalist) order, because it indicates an instance in which an individual has decided to go against the flow of language, to displace it, to call our attention to it. So I still like instinct. And I think if you ponder abstractly about something like a herd instinct, and read what N. says about it, you can visualize what he's talking about - if only to say, "yeah I see what you mean, though maybe I wouldn't have called it an instinct." It's just about opening up certain channels of awareness and insight. In the act of attempting to understand what they mean by a word, you're thrown into a pre-habituated mode of thinking, a pre-semiotic one. And this is another thing Nietzsche wants: for you to be a child again. And for that matter, the Buddha wanted it too.
word. This is all true. i've got a lot to learn from you. This is becoming a really productive dialogue.
I guess 'instinct' is a good construct as long as it stays close to something physically fundamental to survival. Like sex, death, or consumption. I haven't read N. (clearly) but I think that the 'herd instinct' is actually a direct result of fundamental instincts but may not in itself be one. a useless distinction, perhaps. I guess it depends what we're talking about. It's a long way from a herd instinct to a centralized State with repressive functions. I really liked your point about how we can change language over time.
Yeah I havent' read the bits on a body without an organ, i just saw the phrase. that was indeed a haisty reaction.
But the part I'm reading now raises a question. He starts the chapter like this:
"AXIOM 1: The War Machine is Exterior to the State apparatus."
And I think what? I guess I'm not sure what he means with the word "machine." How can you say a rediculous thing like that is axiomatic? surely it's more complex than that. I'm five pages into the essay and nothing yet has cleared my confusion.
hcosnx
Well, in anti-oedipus they use the term 'axiomatic' a whole lot. It's a term I think they use in a special way. I seem to remember them saying something like 'capitalism is an axiomatic.' They're like Nietzsche: they enjoy being polemical, so rather than use the word STATEMENT or THESIS, as philosophers before them had done when announcing their arguments, they go straight for what every philosopher is really doing (stating what they believe to be axioms).
Yeah, with 'instincts,' it's not really necessary to even suppose anything 'fundamental' about it. I like to think about it this way: whether or not there is anything genealogical, evolutionarily concrete, or even religiously teleological to the supposition of human or animal instinct, there is something to be had from the term. It may be purely poetic, and part of the poetry is to preserve the illusion that it's not just poetic. But I remember one thing from Literature and Society about the N. Armstrong article we read, about this argument she had made to the effect that stereotyping is an activity rather intrinsic (and not always harmful) to everyday life. The same goes for observing people around you in terms of 'instincts': it can be done tastefully, leading to insights into the world, or it can be done in a very ugly manner, i.e. racism. To say 'Everybody wants to be a fascist' is to make a stereotyping, instinct-invoking argument.
Let me first say that I have nothing to say. As I tried to read all this without letting my brain melt and spill like a greasy homelette down from the fine fur of my earlobes, my mind drifted away from that brain, and I found myself realizing my own history into reflective thought. I'm noticing myself do so more and more (which in itself is an example of the action which I am describing) - I don't know whether that means I'm noticing more or doing so more, or if there is a difference. Memory is an incredible thing. (...especially when it is failing you.)
Well, before I get onto a tangent, I wanted to relate what I was thinking about while reading the big theory upon medium theory upon little theory upon nothing. I'm writing this from a cafe in San Francisco. There's a pug wearing a burgundy jacket sitting on a ferrous chair outside the window. Iron & Wine in the ether, the cafe speakers buzz in time with the bass kicks. "Well, its a good cafe au lait!," I said. As I got on the plane from LA I had a mortal moment. I - not [I], not i, not the philosopher formerly known as "I", but I, simple I, goodly I, shameful I, painful I, frightened I, predatory I, regal I, surrepetitious I - I invoked images of my own fiery death, and wondered whether it would happen on take-off, or would there be a hijacking? Would I fight the Islamofascist with my bare knuckles? What if it was rather a mechanical malfunction? A mere mistake? A misfire? How would people react when we lost our first thousand feet? The pug is staring at me through the window. The girl at the counter is nice, but she talks to all the customers like that. Would our first reaction be to scream? Maybe everyone else would and I would sit there calmly. I don't want my last thoughts to be of Garden State. Or maybe it was that Bright Eyes video. Would I kiss the man in flannel on his grey furry cheek, over in the aisle seat, and tell him how much he means to me? Would I say I was so happy that nobody sat in the seat between us, so I didn't have to give an armrest to the anonymous elbow - but all that is meaningless now, now that we plummet. The view out the window was beautiful, even with the smog hazing brown over the mountains. The stewardesses - I guess I thought of them as flight attendants at the time - they're like mothers, so calming and make you feel good about it, even with the facelift. Is that what mothers do? The view is beautiful - it looks like a circuitboard. Humanity is just the pulse of a circuitboard, and I can see it so clearly through the smog.
Don't lean on me man cuz you can't afford the ticket back from suffregette city!
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