I had come the wrong way in the morning so I had no choice but to go the wrong way at night.
I left Komaba Campus by the main gate, the one close to the local line, if I had been, as if I had been, intending to catch it—to Shibuya, transferring there … But I wasn’t and didn’t. I followed its route, however, towards the southerly end of Yoyogi Park. Once again, like the time I left National Noh Theatre, I was caught in the spatiotemporal vortex that surrounds Harujuku. Because I could not cross back over the line, I was channeled into central Shibuya, to the very same streets I had traversed on my first day of taking the route, having all day to do so, from the little ryokhan where I’d spent my first night, to Yoyogi Memorial Youth Olympic Hostel. I descended the same hill. It was dark this time but lit up for the thousands thronging the streets. A black guy leading an American tour party shouted at me as he passed in the opposite direction, Hey! Watch where you’re going! I came to the crossroads, famous, at Shibuya Station. It was more crowded at night than during the day—the crowds out looking for nightlife, and so becoming it. This time I took a left up a more northerly directed avenue and soon the crowds thinned out, whether a good or bad sign, I had no idea. There were only busstops, no metro lines—a bad sign.
I persevered. I came to a Yoyogi Sports Arena. Now there was noone on the streets. I found I had, since leaving Shibuya Station Square, climbed a hill. I took a left at the arena. A few commuters passed, some visitors—ones who knew where they were going. I knew the right to take me back to Harujuku, at least, not more.
I went down the hill, the hill I had no memory of either climbing or descending. I reached a crossroads by what appeared to be parklands, with pruned pines, a stone retaining wall. This was finally the vicinity. Perhaps 15 minutes later I reached Yoyogi-Koen Station. I took the Chiyoda line to Akasaka, Hotel Felice, J., happy home.
That night, last night, we made a new plan: take the No.2 exit from Yoyogi-Koen. Start on Enokachira-dori Av. Turn right out of the station. It’s a big street. Turn right again. This is Inokashira-dori Av. Be prepared for the absence of streetsigns and signposts. Turn left onto Yamate-dori—you achieve this feat by taking the first on left under a pedestrian overbridge, it veers away from the big street at an acute angle—not a right angle!
As it happens, and it was so far clear, this route took me back over another hill, one I had climbed the night before last, and recognised. An embassy area on the left of this narrow residential road was guarded at every egress by police. I reach Yamate-dori. The chimneys appear, for the underground. Here it is, right, into the back entrance of Komaba Campus, past the familiar vege plot, under the trees with crow warning signs. The weedfilled plots on closer inspection are planted with a variety of grasses—an ecosystem of grasses. Today, all day, we are in Komcee West.
Morning snacks are laid out on the third floor—the numbering starts with 1 at groundlevel. I am early. It has taken me barely 20 minutes, including the metro. I take a marmalade bun, square, like a brioche, but chewy, and a coffee.
I find my spot for Session 13, chosen because Izidor Bařsi, who had whiskey our first night at Yoyogi Hostel, is presenting. He has been writing this paper while here, beginning at the Camp, finding it gave him no time, having to skip some events—that and the night drinking and the jetlag…
Violence is the title for the session.
William Hebblewhite begins in rhythmic prose. He speaks on the unpresentability of violence—on that curious phenomenon in which, when shown the before shot, in sequence with the after, an audience will attest to having seen the gruesome act of a nail being driven through someone’s ankle and recall the blood, the blunt impact, the piercing of the skin, and so on, which they did not see and were not shown.
Violence occurs in the cut: an example Deleuze uses—the face of horror in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin produces a world in which the unseen violence has occurred, is, in fact, occurring, is always with us.
Rancière’s framework of representation enters the paper being delivered. This, I feel, is a backwards move.
Violence is an impropriety. But then what is the relation between horror and the violence of the state?
State violence is a violence that seeks to mediate what is presentable and what is therefore conceivable. (Does this entail that it may exclude and occlude its own violence?) “The ends melt away and the means become substance.” The state determines the thinkable. The power of representation is taken on as the right to represent. This appropriation of violence—aesthetic violence—constitutes, for Deleuze and Guattari the state’s violence.
The war machine is outside—outsides—as the violence there where the state does not allow its perceivability or thinkability. It is a contrary, “what else could be possible,” and competes with an interior logic of the state.
The state here is constrained to, limited, constraining and limiting an interior against the horrific outside of frame of the war machine, having been deemed by the state unrepresentable. The state is not here productive—as it is in Foucault and in Deleuze and Guattari.
Anubha Sinha’s presentation emphasises the singularisation of fear—gives that it is studied and represented through the individual, through the individual’s fear. It is in the anticipation of being subjected to violence, either physical or verbal.
What about the group? What about collective anticipation of either verbal or physical violence? What about the fear of the group?
“Fear is anticipatory … in view of a threatening future.” It is fear of humiliation, of being cornered—is it then there affect? free-floating and impersonal? Doesn’t this disembody it?
Sinha has been working with a central Indian village, where she is ’embedded,’ that is, living, working, practicing theory. Her engagement is with domestic violence. She asks how alcohol can be causative with regard to violence.
Her subject is a low-income agricultural village where the inhabitants must work long hours. They drink for recreation, the local brew, mahoua (?).
Bulima (?) is vulnerable for not having given the family where she is living—her husband’s family, of which he is the eldest son—children.
… the body was resisting the environment of the terrified woman undergoing abuse and anticipating violence in the present … she makes her way along the wall staring at her feet, but she cannot walk.
Women’s small talk, gossip and bitching are “horizons of becoming” for Deleuze and Guattari, taking molar events down to the micro level, sharing them over a multiplicity, involving a group subject in a becoming-woman, deterritorialising it from molar gender.
Friendship—telling stories as skin, in kin, kinship—a contact with blood and tradition—to heal a wound.
Izidor Barši, presenting next, cites Balibar’s view of intellectuals’ fascination with violence.
Stupidity – communication – goodwill – agreement: enemies of violence. The thought of violence is related to the violence of thought.
Gewalt—a word encompassing power and force and violence.
Cruelty is a residuum of violence, its “inconvertible remainder,” in the dialectic of power Balibar calls “cruelty.” It is pre-Oedipal.
Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” makes “violence crowned by fate” the “origin of law.”
Desiring formations are social formations, that are based in production.
Voice-sign-eye: theatre of cruelty and Nietzsche’s genealogy are “blows” that “ward off the state … which relies on an accumulation of blows which it can turn into capital.”
In the primitive economy blow is exchanged for blow—the final blow begins a new series, a new exchange, putting off indefinitely the absolutely final blow.
The Urstaat begins with the final blow.
What is produced in modern man at this stage is latency.
“Where has the violence gone?”
Anti-Oedipus, written in the context of the Vietnam War, describes the orgasms from having tortured so well of the “bloody good boys” and “bloody good killers.”
The well-behaved good boy who kills and rapes is the working of cynicism as a desiring formation of violence. The good boy’s killing is under sanction of the state.
“Society becomes a battlefield but a battlefield in which one has to smile.”
Foucault therefore in his foreword calls Anti-Oedipus a book in which we can confront the fascism in all of us.
Izidor: I would say it is a book in which we can confront the violence in all of us.
A question—now that the three presentations are complete—concerns the role of the death drive in violence.
The problem is that it seems too easy to let Deleuze and Guattari get away with a violence that is not one.
Anne Sauvagnargues delivers her keynote in the hall underground, a beautiful woody space: Semiotechnics: On Political Ecology. Deleuze and Guattari’s Theory of Encounter.
In view of encounter, it is worth noting that in these posts I limit myself to the use of the last name to refer to those whom I did not individually encounter. (Hence: Anne—although I merely got to say to her that I loved her book Art Machines, encountering her on her way to deliver this keynote, I think, which she said was like a shot of coffee or as good as one. But, also, hence: Buchanan, Coleman, Sinha—whom I didn’t individually encounter.)
Anne: My main point will be to move from a symbolic reading of culture, to a metabolic one.
The sign is always given in relationship with the body.
Sign and sense poses the question of the body and intelligibility, related with the problem of immanence.
It is hard to overestimate Spinoza as a conceptual persona in Deleuze’s work.
On what level is immanence achieved?
Spinoza objects to meaning in transcendence, where signs are severed from what they expose, which is affect-body relations.
To change the economy of signs we’re caught in—this defines a politics, of going beyond affectology.
How is it possible to say as Deleuze claims in Expressionism and Spinoza—his 1967 complementary thesis—there are no signs only expressions?
Cut: two positions—signs / expression; interpretation / experimentation.
Deleuze in Expressionism struggles with equivocity. The book takes a precise problem as its field.
This is a political project.
It engages a theory of meaning, ideational meaning and body of signs, without it being a co-production of spiritual substance. (That is how to think signs and bodies non-equivocally.)
Spinoza does not have a correspondence between noetic content and the body of the sign.
Eminence, equivocity, analogy are objects of struggle for Spinoza. In order to maintain God in his eminent position you require equivocity, and analogy.
You need a separate and dominant interior—a place of eminent origin, obscure, requiring help in its understanding, in understanding God’s meaning, from priests, experts, interpreters, exegetes.
The primacy of God’s sense requires the incapacity to reduce meaning to literalness. (If its sense were given there in the saying, not only would the whole interpretative power apparatus not be necessary, but this sense would not be over and above; it would not be transcendent.)
Eminence and equivocity are entailed in a system of analogy.
The system of analogy implies eminence and equivocity.
God does not reveal himself equivocally in the Bible. But that the Bible is a social and political understanding of God, this is Spinoza’s treatise, The Political-Theological Treatise.
The social-political understanding is one of transcendence sustaining the sociology of experts, priests.
Spinoza confronts the domain of the sign—always ambiguous—from the domain of expression—which is always univocal. This is his struggle with equivocity.
We have to choose between immanence as a political front that is pragmatically consistent (that is, consistent with a pragmatic context to which it is not transcendent, about which it is neither in a relation of equivocity or analogy) in which victory is not so important as the struggle.
Or—immanence (remains) an abstraction for metaphysicians. (Here there can perhaps be victory, and consensus.)
There are two figures of immanence: transcendent abstraction and practical social-political struggle.
Spinoza’s expressionist semiotics produce a rupture with regard to allegorical substitution.
Spinoza cannot conduct this struggle without
– natural signs—indices, indexes
– moral instituted signs—those of society
– the revelation of supernatural signs.
These three types of signs are taken up in Spinoza’s struggle.
The natural sign is of perception: a horseshoe in the mind of a soldier, is in the mud, in the mind of a blacksmith, is in the fire, on the anvil, under the hammer.
The institutional sign is of language or discourse: homo is the Latin word for man.
In the sign of revelation, however: God is a fire. Spinoza says, no, but for Moses he is a fire. There is no transcendent relationship: “Neither memory nor imagination have resemblance to their object.”
A horseshoe for a soldier in the mud equates with war; for a peasant it equates with work in the fields. The relationship is bodily and affective.
This 1967 book of Deleuze maekes it almost impossible to make sense of God’s movement from expression to signification. While A Thousand Plateaus is a sociopolitical treatise.
The status of law in the 1967 book: “It is when we believe when understanding is to stand under the Word of God.” It is a figure of social domination.
There is a critique of social domination through signs, in a dispositif where the Sign requires interpreters to relay true meaning.
But for Spinoza, signs shall be taken as exposing a real relationship. Not: What they claim they mean. But: What they do.
The split is political—signs and expressions. Sense is produced and not given. The morality of duty (to authority) is distinguished from the ethics of relationship, practice, in an ethology.
God expresses himself directly, says Spinoza.
Ontology means you can judge. So it remains tied to dualism:
– active / passive
– transformation / obedience
– relationship / transcendence
We have therefore to move from a symbolic to a metabolic understanding of signs.
Signs are indicators of our real relationships.
Signs have to be taken at the level of their real domination—at the affective level—to be metabolic, affecting bodies, and the affects of bodies.
Signs—as affective encounters and not as given signification.
There is a question to Anne from Koichiro-san—where perhaps I have been hearing all along “signs” he has been hearing “science.” But who is mishearing?
Soul is the situation of the body. Anne cites Experience and Eternity, written in the 1990s on Spinoza.
There are three genres de connaissance …
I lose the thread. Common notion is entailed, which has a body-like relationship in community of real shared experience.
Extension and thought—the substantial and semiotic—are univocal.
For Spinoza, the more relationship, the more joy; the less relationship—all the way to immanence—the more sadness.
It is lunch, chicken katsu bentos. I sit with Al and Izidor and a young Chinese American. We talk about how the planes were already in the air when Trump called them back.
The next session calls itself a panel: “The Perception of Space-Time in Deleuze and Bergson.”
It starts with Craig Lundy speaking on Deleuze’s Bergsonism and leads on to his essay dealing with the Other-structure (in French Other is here Autrui and not to be confused with other, as in big or little other—for example, woman as other.)
A world with others produces a “complete margin” or field of potentialities and virtualities; or, a virtual image, in Bergsonism.
Matter and Memory: through the projection of the image around the bend we are given sufficient reason of the thing. (That is, although we might not see around the curve of the bend, others, we assume, can, so we are given—under the assumption of others—the thing in dimensions we may not see.) The curve extends beyond the “meat” of the thing.
The other is a structure without which the field could not function.
The Other-structure stands in contrast with the concrete-other.
The Other-structure conditions the whole field rendering perception possible.
The virtual whole provides the transcendental conditions for real experience.
The structure of the ‘possible’ is not the possible of what exists: “The time without the other is only in the past.” The category of the possible is the past. It provides me with the face of the fear I do not yet feel: it is in the past, the past of my future.
The past is ontological, not psychological.
The second effect of the other concerns time.
Without others we are without past to our futures. We come to lose the very structure of reality.
In Tournier’s novel, Robinson and the island become one. “Everywhere I am not, total darkness reigns.”
An eternal present and total surface—the former belongs to time, the latter to space: necessity replaces possibility in a world without others.
For Bergson,humans are unique for being able to follow the curve around the bend.
“In humanity, the actual becomes adequate to the virtual.” – Deleuze
Indetermination: a world without others takes away the possibilities and virtualities of the Other-structure—the a priori structuring of the perceptual field. (I ask a question regarding this point at the end, because it seems to reduce the Other-structure to organising the perceptual field along instrumental lines, that is, along the lines of Heidegger’s instrumental field. Lundy responds that the perceptual field of the Other-structure and the Heideggerian instrumental field are one and the same.)
Bergson: Humanity has a superior zone of indetermination. (That is the virtual image, or complete margin.)
There is no perception not full of memories. (Others’ memories as well as one’s own—the past that is yet to come is my future; in this proposition can also be felt the meaning of matter being memory in its most contracted state—the matter that extends around the curve of the bend.)
There is a strange Spinozism in Robinson, Deleuze writes, because there is a complete zone of determinism, and a complete necessity, which is that of a world without others. Robinson is the island, Esperanza.
Is Mr Kurtz also a Robinson?
Kokubun Koichiro-san presents the following:
Depth – the part of the world I don’t see I posit as visible to others.
What is the relation between the Other-structure and Transindividual? Is there one? (I ask this question, I put it to Anne at the last, knowing her to be a Simondon scholar. She acknowledges I have asked it, but does not answer it.)
Those with autism lose the margins of the world, see without depth.
The world looks to them like a two-dimensional theatre set, having no depth. (Is this really an image either for a world without others? Or for autism? Or is either adequate to the other?)
People with autism have great difficulty finding others. (Because a degree of similarity has to exist for you to be my other as well as a degree of difference.)
For one with autism, each flower is perceived in the singular: she could not perceive the flowergarden.
These singularities invaded her. Maybe generality is something with which we defend ourselves. (I take up this formulation in my questioning at the end. It seems to belong to Hemingway’s iceberg theory: it leaves most of what it says unsaid.)
In a technical book, all of the terms are rigidly defined. But autistic people have difficulty with the vagueness of everyday language.
Autistic ones are said to lack imagination.
(Koichiro-san’s pronunciation makes perceptive field sound like prosthetic field.)
Mlle X cannot recognise her own face. She recalls her face as a faceless monster. This case is presented by Mitue Shimizu in negative terms—she cannot … she does not … But it is not that she cannot recognise a face but that she recognises singularities, uniquely posited at the level of the individual: this angle between nose and eye, this haecceity … Singularities are the only events (that are perceptible to her).
“She does not recognise singularities that precede individuality.” (Cf. Preindividual—potentialities and virtualities—of Simondon.)
What about the practice and process of autism mapped onto Simondon?
(…as one would talk of the practice and process of schizophrenia mapped out by Deleuze and Guattari in terms of a schizoanalytics…)
What I am interested in is rapprochement with Simondon.
Jae-Yin Kim returns to speak of Baumgarten, of a return to Baumgarten’s view of aesthetics.
Violence is distinguished between representational violence of war and violent encounters of thought. (This is useful in parsing the sense of Deleuze’s notion of there being an intrinsic link between thought and violence and trespass. Cf. Izidor Barša earlier in this post.)
Question time comes on.
For Leibniz, the subject is secondary to POV. (Is this so? … it would concern the monad, and be of interest to my work on the subjective encounter.)
Anne makes the terminological point parenthesised above: autrui is used in the human sphere, so Other-structure Englishes “structure pour autrui”—this is an enormously important point. Not only is this phrase not hyphenated, autrui is explicitly distinct from l’autre or autres.
De Ligny asked by his frustrated staff what they ought to do when the autistic children in their care ‘left the script’ of care, of what care ought to be about, which is a kind of control, informed them they could not intervene or constrain, but should draw maps of the behaviours and the movements, singularising them in diagrammes, choreographies, and so dealing with their frustration.
An equation is made between the likeness of the other and the changeability of the other.
The perceptual case of Ronaldo is adduced whereby sensors were attached to map what in the soccer field he was looking at when he was tackling or evading being tackled by another player. These found that he ‘saw’ joints, elbows, knees, ankles, hips, that is the points of articulation for their movements but not the other players themselves. This case deals nicely with idea of singularities of perception in the perceptual field.
I ask this question: What if we turn this image inside out?
Ronaldo is not making decisions based on his various singular loci of attention within the perceptual field. Rather these constitute subjective singularities, points of view, deciding for him: making sense for him. There are no general subjects, but such subjective events.
I also make the point about the perceptual field noted above, that it does not precede the points of view, whether of others, autrui, or of elbows or knees. It is not a field until intention is granted its place, as if that ought to be the case, in which instance it becomes an instrumental field.
It is better thought of, perhaps, as a multiplicity in movement, by its relationships making the maximum joy, and so constituting what is wrongly called a field in its singularity—that may rightly be called a soccer field, or a field of flowers.
The occupation with the single flower—this then is the relationship with which the moving multiplicity is engaged. And more than this, the single flower, in its singularity, that is in its internal difference, becomes the subject of that movement.
I refer to the writer who is autistic who has been translated into English—at least two of his books, whose name I do not recall (it is Naoki Higashida, translated by the novelist David Mitchell and his wife, K.A. Yoshida), the two books being The Reason I Jump and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8. Koichiro-san seems to know who I mean. For this writer autism comes with a great deal of self-consciousness about the neuro-atypical nature of autistic perception—such that the field is experienced as a world with neuro-typical others but not a neuro-atypical world.
For Higashida Naoki, autism resembles more a locked-in scenario, where the subject’s apperception precedes its perception and the constitution of a perceptual field and does not because it is instrumentally incapable of constituting it—or of organising it. Rather there is a lucidity and highly developed subjective voice that suffers from no cognitive disorder, disability or impairment but a communicative one. A distance that is itself communicable, given the language tools, and itself constitutive of self-awareness, even without them, imposes itself between perception, the perceptual field, and the subject’s experience. The mismatch, the dissensus, is between inner experience and outer, regardless of self-experience. But what is important in light of Bergson and phenomenological as well as cognitive and neurocognitive theories of mind and memory is that this writer with autism can say that he not only cannot control his own body and bodily relations with the world, he can neither control his own mind, nor what it tells him to do or gives him to understand to do, as necessary to do, from a datum given in perception or without that stimulus of a distinct, singular perception—beyond the distinction between singular datum and complete margin of the world with others, that has here, erroneously, I believe, been identified with the perceptual field: he cannot lay claim to his mind as his own, know it as his own, neither can he, voluntarily, make associations based on memory. My feeling is that this complicates greatly the picture of autism we are being shown here. (Perhaps we are closer to Koichiro-san’s prosthetic field here, with a prosthetic subjectivity, and language and the tools of communication as features of an unreachable outside.)
A long break intervenes. Of course, I got only to dot in the points above and not to connect them in anything like a meaningful or even comprehensible pattern. But over coffee I meet James Dutton, from University of New South Wales, working out of the English department, and we are suprisingly in agreement about many of these points, as well as one developing in my head, from which my paper took its impetus, about the affirmation of the problem in Deleuze, and internal contradiction, in his works, or between them, as a secondary consideration, not even so important, paltry. What an unsuccessful encounter, I say to him, Not the slightest bit of dissensus!
He is presenting in the next series of sessions, unfortunately not in the one I am heading for, to support Ruth Irwin, one called “EcoEnviroPolitics.” James’s one’s called “Psychoanalysis, the Clinic, and Overwriting the Subject”—and I wish I’d gone.
Several things may be added out of order to the foregoing.
Firstly, the singularity must be defended from the singular just as much as the multiplicity must be defended from the multiple. The single flower in its singularity, in view of the multiple flowers in the field or flowergarden in their multiplicity, is not recognisable as a singularity, just as the field or garden full flowers does not form a multiplicity.
The flower or singular or unique feature of the face, of the autistic subject, is not a singularity, even one in regard to the generality of the concept we use, as Koichiro-san put it, to defend ourselves. However, if generality is the ground, then the singular detaches itself from that ground, overcoming the defenses of good proportion.
This is the second point. A single drop of water can seem to Higashida Naoki to be a tsunami, and is as threatening as one, as frightening. The difficulty this writer with autism has in making associations with memories is in finding good and not terrifying memories. It would seem this too is a question of proportion. Distortions in the perceived sense—of scale or importance, of what is remarkable, or what is terrifying—are played out in Alice in Wonderland. Tears form a lake. Alice grows to big for the house. The sense of the cards in Through the Looking-Glass has something of this in it as well: it has always worried me as too literal a fantasy, the cards animation, or the chessboard world; but this is clearly the point—it is literal.
The third thing to add would have to do with the tools of language referred to earlier, in relation to autism being less a cognitive than a communicative disability. Tools are meant in the pragmatic sense of the letter-board Higashida Naoki learnt to use to communicate and to write. By no means is a word, a grammar, a linguistic construction a tool. Proportion might be thought of in relation to autism in terms of the figurative and figuration. The figure bears a relation to other figures as well as to the background, from which it jumps forward, or is set off, or invades—overcoming the defenses of generality. This is the sense Kuniichi-sensei gave it in his presentation which I recorded several days ago when he said, The figure causes damage.
Autistic people we might assume have language but it is not necessarily any more in their grasp than their own memorial associations, their bodies, or their mental impulses. Language tools do not include those of language but are those enabling the communication of linguistic signs. Is there a technosemiotic element here?
The idea of schizophrenia being a practice or method, or both, concerns the rupture in the thinkable, a violence in encounter and trespass. But the idea of autism being a practice or method, and, as Koichiro-san has said, a particularly 21st century one, concerns an entirely different problematic, as different as Habermas—and the ideal transparent sphere of communication—and Sloterdijk—and the incontinent froth of cognitive bubbles, or as Habermas and Deleuze. Deleuze clearly has a part to play for his claims on disabling communication to allow a little fresh air to come in, into the vacuoles and foyers, but this air, this window opening a fraction, is in aid of the possibility of thinking, of making thought again possible, as Foucault puts it. Deleuze has clearly a part to play in affirming autistic practices but he does so also in affirming depressive practices—in exhaustion: and as I would contrive to relate the two, in the case of the latter, you cannot escape the self; in the case of the latter, you cannot return to the self—but then one would have to add: as to the self is conventionally ascribed a kind of expressive faculty in being able to communicate and represent itself. If representation and self-representation are attributes of the self, then the autistic one does not lack but finds this faculty impaired and has no facility with it. Again, the notion of representation goes to the givenness of the perceptual field, since it operates within representation and in so far as it is represented. So, might we say that autism is representationally impaired? And neither exhaust the subject nor defend ourselves through generalities.
There is some doubt, but David Toohey is present. He begins his presentation. He teaches in Japan, but the area he chooses to exemplify an eco-enviro-politic is in northern Mexico. (I have in these journal posts before now referred to the concept of indigenism from the first philosopher of Mexicanness, Emilio Uranga. I will have cause to revisit this concept of a kind of Rousseauean regard and nostalgia for an indigenous thought that did not exist many times throughout this session.)
Guattari says, What to do with “the archaic”? The radically new does not exclude it. And it survives in the traditional colonial—as, what shall we say?—a perceptual prosthetic.
The question worth asking is, What does the land want?
…on those countries that no longer exist… like the old East Germany of Ostalgie or the whole so-called Eastern Bloc … or the precolonial lands of Indians, although they are not Indian, or of Maori, although they were not Maori…
Ruth Irwin begins her presentation with the gentle provocation that she perhaps unfashionably still works with Heidegger—but along with others, other thinkers and philosophers. In fact, she says, the other day, Simon said to me, Why are you wasting your time reading Heidegger?
I could either disappear through the floor or nod in stupid agreement. I nodded and grinned like an idiot.
Slides came up. Hone Tuwhare, the poet, as Hölderlin for Heidegger. What does this mean? Dame Whina Cooper’s picture came up, and then the lines Tuwhare wrote for her “move over, your tipuna walk beside you”—leading the hikoi—Bastion Point. Ruth remarks that she is an important activist.
Perhaps it was before this the slide for Heidegger came up, showing Heidegger, and Ruth said, This is Heidegger, and the room erupted in laughter.
Did I ever say to her she was wasting her time reading Heidegger? I think I said that her project, as she had outlined it, was deeply Deleuzian. But one should be cautious around the representation and its … dark precursor… which it seldom resembles, let alone represents.
Ruth repeated the diagramme on the whiteboard Anne had used at the Camp to show the cut between signified and signifier—the famous Saussurean diagramme. It had been used to show that below or inside the cut there is nothing, no interiority. However here it was to show the earth, the Heideggerian earth, as Ruth put it, thrusting up, and thrusting up, an upswelling she depicted on the whiteboard with a phallic shape that I show in the snaps above—perhaps it is unclear. But it was no less grotesque in its real depiction than it is in its, here, written one: Heidegger, thrusting up.
Elin Kanhov followed this display with a presentation on John Luther Adams’s—not to be confused with the minimalist, then neoromantic composer, John Adams—work “Inuskuit.”
These lines came to me from Rilke, in reaction, it seemed to the previous presentation: O sage Dichter was Du tuest,… Ich rühme Ich rühme Ich rühme.
Elin is from Stockholm. I’d talked with her about the Baltic, the slow movement of the earth rising, the solidity, and the documentary Into Eternity.
She played excerpts from John Luther Adams, saying, “It’s the only recording we’ve got so we’ve got to go with it.”
Hierarchical structure of the composition, resembling a cairn. “In nature as in music we find totally heterogeneous durations.” She referred to the essay Deleuze wrote from Boulez’s notion of pulsed and nonpulsed time. I realised I’d got it wrong in my paper, in a note to my paper, that talked of counted time, when of course it is pulsed and nonpulsed time. It is a distinction which recalls Stravinsky’s ideas, about rhythmic invention.
Alphonso Lingis delivered the final keynote presentation of the day on “The Work of Reconciliation.” I have included snaps of his slides.
Since World War II 103 countries have experienced civil war.
Nomadic war machines outside the state, coexistent with the state, transnational mining and industrial corporations, religions, Christianity, Islam, prophetic movements, there are still many collectives outside the state firing and re-firing civil wars.
Speaking organises, orders, directs and commands.
Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that the mounting emotions should be studied leading to war. So should those emotions leading to peace, in the undoing of civil wars.
After the Cold War stability was chosen over uncertainty.
For Deleuze and Guattari social change is driven by the production of desire.
Deleuze and Guattari would have reservations about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report being about truth. Rather, they would say, there are different ways of mapping, allowing lines of flight.
Throughout Al’s presentation there is the embarrassment of the tech: the soundtrack he has requested be kept at levels under his voice on mic keeps overtaking it; in front of me, there was a young woman who had been put in charge of jockeying the levels. For some reason, she simply left, then Koichiro-san took over—and some parlaying back and forth from the wings took place. The levels are displayed on an ipad app, like a graphic equaliser. From where I sat, I could see it was a matter of guesswork as to where the levels sat. At times, the flute and or voices overtakes Al’s voice entirely, at others it is inaudible. Noone gets it right.
Al mentions the retraumatisation caused by truth and reconciliation processes.
After WWII, there were war crimes tribunals in both Nuremberg and Tokyo.
In 1998 a permanent international court was set up. It tries perpetrators from small and weak countries. Individual perpetrators are tried, creating a distorted perception. It is artificial to try only top commanders. Only the top 24 Nazis were tried, the 5 top, in Cambodia. Nothing is done to restore the legal and civic dignity of the victims. Respect for judicial process is impugned by its unequal application—torturers go free and thieves are charged. Fundamental inequalities are not addressed in processes of restorative justice.
133000 Rwandans were imprisoned for genocide.
Reconciliation that prevents return to civil war is the most important political task of our time.
Anne comments in the time allocated for questions that while it may be fine in the US to say civil war in Europe it’s much harder to say.
The question comes: is reconciliation possible?
Al: with structural imbalances and injustices in economic and political terms, individuals are tried, not systems or structures.
Does reconciliation open up the opportunity for investment and capture by economic and political interests?
Those who engage in civil war, those nations that return to civil war, could be hurting themselves in the economic world order: this is the primary incentive at present for surcease.
Al cites the 52 year-old civil war in Colombia, the FARC.
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