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Ἀκαδήμεια
from David Berman to Wallfacers
In a very abstract frame today, I tried continuing with my writing and realised I would rather be talking to you. Whoever you are … wherever you are …
I have a lot of tabs (1, 2, 3 …) open I’ve been meaning to close once I wrote something about David Berman, David Cloud Berman I read in one of them. It was to be an RIP piece. Beside me I have the notes from when I heard he had suicided. They go like this:
this is coming
I’ll explain how
we’re all going to get through it
and “rebuild” society
“Video after the jump“
The last is from one of the links.
Then there is the line with the typo: The meaning of the world lies outside thw world. It’s from a Silver Jews album, the song ‘People.’
“Video after the jump” links to Berman’s blog, mentholmountains: arc of a boulder, which doesn’t link anywhere, but has links to writers, Thomas Bernhard, for example, and Robert Walser, and pictures and videos. It is not too dissimilar from squarewhiteworld.
An arrow directs on the kokuyo paper from the line “Video after the jump” to a reference to Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem. It reads:
Become a Wallfacer.
Humanity faces extermination, the extermination of a species of bug, coming from the stars, from the planet Trisolaris. It will take four light years to arrive. Meanwhile every human effort is directed towards defending itself, not the earth, but doing whatever it takes to defend itself.
400 years would seem to be sufficient time to prepare, however, the Trisolarans have sent an expeditionary force ahead to spy on human efforts and to limit them to what can be achieved from a current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics. The technology of Trisolaris far exceeds this limit, since the expeditionary force itself comprises AI supercomputers shrunk down to the size of subatomic particles, protons, quantumcomputers called Sophons. (The word for proton 质子 (zhì zǐ) is the same as the word for Sophon .) The lockdown on scientific research imposed by the Sophons is something that I was writing about in view of the comparable lockdown or limitation on paradigm shift, on fundamental advance, in the sciences–and more generally, in political economy–that is self-imposed in neoliberal institutional systems of governance where the pursuit of science is becoming the performance of science through representative means. (This source, considering the science of Three-Body misses the potential for critical diagnosis Liu’s fiction contains: note it contains info you might want to avoid if you intend to read the novels: it has the strangely phenomenological name, Exposing the structure of how we got our answers: Poetry in Physics.) (The diagnostic criticism implicit in Liu of the Sophonic lockdown as science fiction is explained by Philip Mirowski as the neoliberal fact of Open Science, ironically, at 56’57” in Hell is Truth Seen Too Late.) (I recommend reading Three-Body for its clinical diagnostic potential–and equally I recommend watching Mirowski, even if just for the part about Open Science.)
The Wallfacer project is undertaken by a humanity under threat of annihilation because of the lockdown on science imposed by the Sophons–which is described as being their ability to falsify experimental results from research in fundamental physics (note the Popperian line on falsification). The Trisolarans have a vulnerability: they communicate with each other through thought-reading, thought-hearing, thought-speaking. But they can’t read the thoughts of humans. Neither Sophons nor Trisolarans can see what is going on inside human minds. The notion of lying, of misrepresenting one’s true thoughts, of misrepresentation through speech and language is alien to these aliens–as is the notion therefore of representation. The Wallfacer project is to take advantage of this vulnerability. Wallfacers are selected to help save humanity through indirection and misdirection–through not representing their intentions. Besides the mental freedom to dream up plans and projects the use of which they need neither justify nor defend–in fact the Wallfacer project depends on their doing neither–they have all the world’s resources at their disposal to carry out their plans and projects.
They would be artists, poets, revolutionaries, for not having to answer to anyone for their freedoms, but for the fact that they are so and unquestioningly so resourced. Perhaps this is the link I wanted to make to David Berman: Become a Wallfacer.
The diagnostic import of the Wallfacer project can be seen when placed in relation to the lockdown on science. If, as I tend to think, neoliberal systems of institutional governance entail of the sciences a comparable lockdown–and we can see evidence of this in the shutting down of labs in the ‘hard’ sciences (those without direct application in technology and commercialisable IP) and see it also in the decrease in institutional support for intellectual labour, whether in fundamental theory in the sciences or in philosophy–then the Wallfacer project serves as critique of the view that it is to science, to scientists and to scientific research we must turn to find solutions to the problems facing life, to overcome the threat from earth.
Earth has this vulnerability: it doesn’t know we make it in our own image.
To overcome the threat from the earth, first undo the image we have made of it. The meaning of the world lies outside the world…
[R.I.P. David C. Berman, 4 January 1967 – 7 August 2019]
for Raymond Boyce, 19 May 1928 – 1 August 2019, presented at the tribute held 10 August 2019, Hannah Playhouse, Wellington, NZ
some links:
see also,
under the lefthand margin heading
TAYLOR ARCHIVE,
which is of course
the TAYLOR | BOYCE ARCHIVE
23 June 2019: Akasaka – University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus, 21KOMCEE WEST – Akasaka – Ramen Street, Tokyo Station
Out the back gate, past the ventilation chimneys, crossing, the beware of ghost sign, up over the hill, down residential oneway, police manning the inroads to embassyland, under the pedestrian bridge, left at the south-easterly corner of Yoyogi, in through exit 2, minutes before Chiyoda line sped away, under the city, to Akasaka, debriefing with J., dinner at the first place I’d eaten two doors down from Hotel Felice: clams, grilled fish—Norwegian or Nihonese was available—the local, chuhi and birru. Now I know the way, this morning, the last day of the conference—it is almost sad, to have resolved the problem of finding one’s way, soon to be leaving one’s way behind. Like a secret one carries.
For Kenneth Surin, I decide on Session 28—four other sessions are running at the same time, 9.20-10.50. Morning snacks are served on floor 3: coffee, marmalade bun.
Felicity Coleman, Rebecca Hill and Catherine Dale—the last convening, the former presenting at this session, with Kenneth—talk about being here. Felicity Coleman has in the past hired a car, made her way through the small towns, stopping at onsen. Today, in the rain, she says, an onsen in the woods would be perfect. She is, tomorrow, presenting in London—but will gain a day inflight. In fact, many of the conferees are going straight to London.
I wonder at this moving group of people conducting their business all over the world—taking this world with them, insulated by it; as one is, traveling by car, J. and I later decide, insulated, not reliant on the confusion of finding one’s way along with locals and other visitors, in the confusion, for example of rail, and how it opens one up to by forcing types of exchange which would be missing in the car-bubble. Then there is traveling as a couple also—and this trip we have both traveled alone and together: how couples become a world, infacing.
I introduce myself to Ken, who has come in early, is consulting his laptop. He seems to recall our meeting in Stockholm, but is probably being polite.
Al, preferring the front, we move ringside. He does his round of the table, finding out who is there, what they do, with his great receptive smile.
“Becoming Gender” the session is called. Dale calls it something of a misnomer.
Ken’s preamble is to say that he has to wait until his retirement from Duke University—where he is professor emeritus—and after decades of teaching, to finally present on becoming gender. He has a Union Jack T-shirt, distinctive whiskers, an orotund delivery. …becoming is intrinsically tied to the category of the minor. To which Coleman’s the minor failed, the minor is no longer a possibility… has no salience.
Becoming-animal … part of a constellation, being analytically rather than arithmetically in the minor.
Everyone has to become woman, even women.
Everyone has to become animal, even animals.
Deleuze and Guattari—what is new, remarkable, interesting—“the actual is not what we are but what we become.”
“we become animal so that the animal also becomes something else.”
a zone of interchange
of passage between human an nonhuman
Gregor Samsa fails (to escape Oedipal coding in authoritarian family). Already I want to ask if every such becoming is a failure.
The Wolf Man – Freud’s – his position is in a territoire sauvage, the steppes, between forest and farmland—he is a pack animal.
Eugene Thacker—there are prejudices we have to overcome.
The life of the group forms a plane of consistency. The aggregate comes to have a life
– of packs herds swarms.
Donna Haraway loves dogs.
…it becomes a political question, to set up a steppe, a plane, a pathology … a plan/e of escape.
Wolf Man’s depression: bourgeois interiority.
Schizoid element: outside.
There can be molar collectivities, e.g. kolkhozi, collective farms, set up under a regime of collectivisation—and one might say the open office as well.
In molar collectivities there is also group belonging.
I think about this question:
Is Deleuze-Guattari studies a molar collectivity or does it set up a molecular plane of consistency?
In the molar, negation is used to determine difference in contrast to same. A question of either internal determinations of a concept or external determinations of molar or static nomination, accusation.
What marks one as part of a molar aggregate?
One is only ever sufficiently English Brazilian… but this sufficiency is still not affirmative. It conceals “desire, convention, contrivance.”
Deleuze and Guattari’s first move requires us to work on what I and you do or do not have in common. They do not require an identification, one drawn from abjection. There is a tautology in the racist: the one who claims to be the only one who is French or American; the one who claims to be the only one who has this essence and can have it. This one is inevitably the one who is. (But is it still drawing on abjection, on what we may call ontological abjection, to talk about being sufficiently British? British enough to wear the T-shirt? Deleuzian enough and Guattarian enough to wear the T-shirt?)
Rather than the ontological abjection of identification, we might enter a becoming, as a passage through a zone of indiscernability.
(I am put in mind of the letter in which Kafka writes, I’m going home to China.)
Rebecca Hill speaks next, she is “conceiving immanent desire with Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari.”
Irigigaray offers a diagnosis of phallocentrism. Rather than her criticism of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman Hill traces the “generative commonalities and divergences” amongst these thinkers.
In a 1973 seminar, “Dualism, monism and multiplicities,” Taoist immanent desire is contrasted to Cartesian dualism. From the latter, every statement splits, cuts the subject—dividing thinking from desiring. From the former, there is no need for a split in the subject: thinking and desiring “is a pure process.”
Thought is monist multiplicity outside the status of number.
To become is to escape capital and man. (In a “pure process”?)
Immanent thinking is not feminist and is not colonialist.
The 1973 seminar acknowledges a “phallocratic imperial” background to all thought.
Hill offers that she gives a “highly motivated reading” of Irigaray.
The transcendence of Irigaray’s view of sexual difference—
“Volume without Contour,” “When our lips speak together,” in Speculum of the Other Woman: these concern immanent thought.
Western metaphysics uses woman as its “ground and resource” (all through this I am thinking of the Derridean chora).
Woman overflows and unravels the systematisation of reason and order.
What is stated is an “immanent feminist topology” of thought.
The feminine is the locus of chaos and terror.
The Oresteia trilogy is cited: Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon for killing her daughter Iphigenia.
Orestes—the titular—kills Clytemnestra and is put on trial.
Mother and daughter, Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, become unspeakable.
A feminine topology of immanence, from “Volume without Content,” sets up an impersonal and unlimited field of immanence.
In “When our lips speak together,” lips are a figure of multiplicity: against the representative interpretation.
A w/hole that is never totalised—lips are a multiplicity.
The place of woman is mentioned in relation to Taoism.
The phrase is used “absolute self-survey,” but not in reference to Ruyer.
It comes to questions: That was, I say, between “sufficiency” and “purity.” This is a question for both—but perhaps Rebecca will be able to correct the statement—Irigaray writes somewhere, Perhaps (it is only) a (true) (understanding) (of) sexual difference that will save us?
I don’t think it was “true,” says Rebecca Hill. It was of course taken from Heidegger’s phrase.
Of course, I say. (Only a god can save us now, I think.)
And, Hill continues, it is in her later work. I have not dealt with her later work here…
…there seems to be some kind of zone of indiscernability in Kenneth’s phrase, an immanent feminist topology invoked…except polarised…
What do you mean by polarised?
Well, more rigidly constructed.
I would not use the word rigid. I mean, in her later work, Irigaray talks about a zone of something like indiscernability, where a becoming that is dual is possible, of both man and woman, of man with woman… But, I don’t work with her later writing, where she says sexual difference is real. … And she actually says, for which she has been heavily criticised by the trans community, There are only men and women. …
I see I backed away from a proposition rather than having to state it: I might have said polarised over gender—on the basis Irigaray, that it is in her later work notwithstanding, says very much this. But what I was asking had nothing to do with inclusion or exclusion in becoming gender, or becoming animal. It had to do with what the human might be; however, we can never excuse or avoid or refuse addressing sexual politics.
This question of what the human might be, I raised it because Coleman was in the room: in an algorithmic becoming there is no possibility of being saved—or saving us—let alone by understanding sexual difference.
But is this really the case? Isn’t algorithmic becoming something for which men and women can or should take responsibility? Even as it is nonhuman becoming, belonging to a technosemiosis which is not human or gendered. Still, isn’t this letting it go, this question? And I am reminded of Coleman’s As a feminist, I can’t possibly answer that question. Perhaps the algorithmic becoming—well we know that in its use, like reason, it is—uses women and men unequally, makes use of them, where it encounters them differently?
This would not be a question of what the human (contested in its internal differences) can do, it would not be a question of what whatever we is ought to do—therefore it would not be a question of morality—but it would be a question of what the human, we, can be, of what we is, exactly contested in sexual difference. Isn’t this the ethical question of only (an understanding of) sexual difference can save us (now)?
Another question: Ken answers with the long list of becomings which Deleuze and Guattari give. Getting to becoming mineral, he says, this is one I have never really understood. I suppose you could speak of the mineral as that which is used for jewelery, or in computers… is in watches, gemstones and precious metals…
Strangely there is some sage nodding of heads. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that minerals are mobile elements. They pass through sedimentary layers of strata. What might be at stake in a mineralisation, or becoming mineral, is gaining this fine grain level of mobility—and a granular point of view or perspective. (That of the mineral subject, I might now say.)
Ken pronounces haeccitas “hex-itas.”
The next keynote is again presented in the wooden hall underground with the hinged chairs and the technical difficulties. It is Alex Taek-Gwang Lee: “Deleuze/Guattari and the Third World: Rethinking Political Philosophy After May 68.” He is perhaps the third speaker Koichiro-san has introduced as his best friend.
Foucault said political philosophy is a theory of government. Yet Deleuze and Guattari call their own work political philosophy. It does not so much address governmentality as a people who are missing. This is what makes it political philosophy.
The Third World constitutes the historicisation and the politicisation of a people who are missing. (Note: it is not the singular people of a Volk, not a People who is missing.)
In Cinema 2 political cinema is to think about people who are missing—the Third World.
This consideration comes in light of the cinema being an art of the masses. Stalinism. Nazism. Americanism. It is an art of the the mass subject.
Once America was the land of deterritorialised peoples. Now its concerns are its its own ends and interests.
The aim of political cinema is to invent and not to represent people who are missing. “The missing people are a becoming.”
This future politics in my terms is planetary communism.
Why do the people of liberty not accede to a liberation of others? So that A Thousand Plateaus speaks of “exploitation of the Third World; the arming of dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.”
Imperialism provides a counter-history of liberalism.
Ultimate aim of Deleuzian politics, according to Mbembe, is
- a founding violence
- imposition of law
- a system designed to sustain colonialism and to replicate it.
But there is then a boomerang effect, from the colonised peoples: Auschwitz has its origins in colonialism—implanted back in the imperium. This is Mbembe’s necro-politics.
Commodification of labour—subjugation of labour force—in colonial countries, flows back—an authoritarian politics—flowing back to Europe and to the West in general.
The fascism and biopolitics in nation-building in the Third World rebound on the West.
Manjiko—as it is called here—Manchuria, shows how fascism grows up in the mechanism of capitalism. Capitalism incubates and bears forth fascism—leading to the mobilisation of the newly imperialised Third World in Total War.
Fascism is the counter-current in imperialism.
Nationalism in the 1930s in Japan became Empire—and failed.
The Japanese designed Manjiko as a nation-state in answer to this failure.
Emancipation and development are the goals of the game: an anti-imperialist nationalism.
The Third World movement shows colonialism does not work out unilaterally. Colonial territory is established on the exclusion of native peoples.
The colonial regime in Manjiko failed because of the division of the colonists and the colonised.
In a Land War, the colonised is a “wild beast” to hunt down.
Foucault writes that in the 17th century the form of power changed from disciplinary power to biopower: people became population.
From Malthus, for whom it is population that matters, while liberalism relies on people and on a cancellation of the population, to Hobbes’s liberal Leviathan, it is an easy step to biopower—to people as data.
Liberalism in Malthus concerns population. The people who are missing concerns a geophilosophy: taking up the conflict for settlement, colonialism, and therefore also imperialism, between land and sea, that between the Behemoth and the Leviathan.
In Schmidt, sea threatens earth-born nature. The Leviathan has no hierarchy. It threatens the Ship of State.
For Deleuze, humans cannot live in security unless they assume the struggle of and land and sea is over.
The Third World is an “island,” the missing people a “desert.”
Inhabitation does not end a desert island.
The island as a field of struggle of ocean and land precedes Robinson Crusoe.
It is prior to the opposition of Crusoe the coloniser and Friday the colonised. In Tournier, the island changes Crusoe.
Crusoe cannot perpetuate our world because he cannot reproduce: he is asexual.
He is a pervert.
There occurs the internal subjectivation of the island as such.
Planetary communism goes from the island as subject. Becoming-island is a politic of the desert island.
The Third World means this kind of island.
Danilo asks about the link between fascism and imperialism.
The French and English empires survived because they underwent development and modernisation.
Nationalism in Japan occurred for the purposes of the modernisation of Japan, resulting in imperialism.
Adam Smith is anti-imperialist. Imperialism in the UK is a product of the nation-state. There is a time lag between empire and nation-state: an attempt to return to empire.
Christoph asks why we should leave our food and our shelter, those of the developed world, and become Third World.
The Third World is an abstract world: it is not a question of refusal but of working against exclusion.
Greg asks after the coherence of a homogeneous concept of the nation-state when the state as we know it is heterogeneous, made of many peoples.
To become Third World you must invent the Third World. A territory.
Leviathan reminds us and recalls us to the nation-state we must be part of.
Greg: First Worlds coexist with Third World, in Mexico, the US, in China.
Craig Lundy: Is Third World a new earth?
In Third World, we are inventing an earth in common: that means communism.
(There are the now commonplace technical difficulties with the mics.)
I read in the programme that Philip Martin, from Macquarie University, Sydney, is presenting on the Kyoto School: something I have been missing is the connection between Deleuze and Guattari and Japanese philosophy.
The Kyoto School’s most well-known representative is Kitaro Nishida.
Working in the tradition today are Shizateru Ueda and Ryosuke Ohashi.
Jun Tohsaka (1900-1945) coined the name Kyoto School.
Martin goes about formulating a connection: the suprasensible in the sensible is how Deleuze frames Kant’s project.
Deleuze’s criticism—of having done with judgement—comes from a criticism of a total form of history—in real historical institutions.
There is another model of the sensible and the suprasensible in Deleuze: this is art.
From Law and Judgement, to, in Deleuze, Art.
Kitaro Nishida’s logic of basho—which a simplified translation might give as place—entails an expressive and transformative relation to the world and to history.
Logic and Life (1936) proposes the reciprocal determination of individuals and their actions and the world as a whole. It is a monadology.
The continuous history of change and transformation between consciousness and the world means we are caught in continuous transformations with the world (as a whole).
Art, ethics and religious experience is a knowing of itself to be transformative.
Miki—is another figure, Martin has not the time to present.
Nishida: the world of historical reality … is the subject of his 1936 work.
Jun Tohsaka: What is the Technological Spirit (1937/2018). This work informed by scientific Marxism links art to life to science. The technological spirit is social production in and of history, working on the level of a technology of self as a creative procedure, and creating thereby, rather than taking it as a given, a common sense—in the production of a society or social and cultural sense.
Antonio Catalano: his theme Deleuze as political thinker, through the work of Italian political philosopher, Toni Negri.
Deleuze does not isolate politics as a way of thinking. The real issue is the relation between ontology and politics.
Marxism follows two lines of descent: a theological-political direction which is that of Benjamin, Schmidt; a biopolitical direction, that of Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari.
Negri: At the Origins of Biopolitics (1997).
Negri with Guattari: Communists Like Us.
Our time is one of the saturation of discussion between society and economics.
Capitalism builds a real plane of immanence.
Every singularity is pure energy.
Hegel—dialectics, negativity, history
Deleuze—philosophy of nature, affirmation, becoming-woman
Negri needed from Deleuze and Guattari an ontology of the spontaneous production of beings to transform Marxism.
Living singularities will always exceed the structures of domination.
From Deleuze issues a biopolitics creative of subjectivities, biopolitics as a constituting power and one not simply constitutive or given power in a given set of power relations.
Spinoza engages first philosophy of ontology, materialist immanence: “matter that produces is expression.”
From an ontology of absolute immanence is it possible to derive a politics?
There is no purely theoretical level which must be translated into action—theory and action enter a zone of indistinction where politics equals ontology.
It is in the ideal hegemony of the “inside,” of ontological interiority, that the political is determined.”
Absolute ontological: the ontological inside—the plane of immanence equals an ontological inside.
What relation to singularities does the plane of immanence have? What relation to subjectivities?
Communism is to subjectivities what the plane of immanence is to singularities.
Communism—space for free and autonomous development of singularities: the part is not subordinated to the whole, but a plane of immanence and singularities; work becomes creative process.
Jean-Sébastien Laberge states his theme as a dissensual meta-modelling of ecosophical democracy.
The metamodel is an external apparatus of synthesis.
A few months after joining the Greens, in 1985, Guattari first uses the term dissensus.
Guattari took the Greens in the direction of Rainbow Network, which was an experiment in creative dissensus, agreement in respect of difference—in which dissent is not denied.
With a network of 5,000 each individual or collective cannot claim to the exclusive representation of its membership.
This way of working reverses theme and variations. It starts from variations.
It works in parallel with the priority of the social over the political. It is a movement in social world (not necessarily first a political movement, and not one imposed on or to be imposed on a social world).
Ecosophical democracy is fabulating, not the acceptance of difference but fully assuming it.
Guattari died in August 1992.
Before questions commence, Antonio Catalano leaps to his feet to profess to his shame at speaking before the great Anne Sauvagnargues–in French–had he known, he would not have dared, which Jean-Sébastien Laberge responds to in an equal torrent of French, while Anne makes a little joke, almost concurring with the first speaker, then explaining she is only joking.
In the questions, which again followed after all three presentations, Anne criticised Martin for the use of suprasensible, which, it seems, she heard as super-sensible, therefore in ethical breach of her polemical insistence on immanence without transcendence.
Martin replied that the suprasensible maintains contact with immanence.
Laberge remarks on dissensus that it is used by Guattari and then becomes common in Negri (and also in other Italian political philosophers, like Esposito).
The issue is: new ways to put different points of view together in the social.
It must have been yesterday, in the coffeebreak, that Wren Nishina, or Nishina Wren-san, who was the interpreter for the artists exhibiting at Chiyoda Arts Centre as well as for Uno Kuniichi-sensei, was wearing his dovegrey pleated shirt, and I said to him, Ah, Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please.
Yes, it was the Saturday, because Wren said to me, I thought, since I was presenting, I ought to make an effort. His paper had been “Spatiality according to Deleuze and Shinobu Orikuchi”—taking up on the idea they share of the frontier or boundary not being a ‘geometric fiction sandwiched between two blocs of land’ but a ‘world,’ or—if one were to co-opt computer speak—a partition, that is an horizon on which a world dataset takes place.
It really was a beautiful shirt. Wren is an MA student at Tohuku University. His English-speaking voice is Oxonian. He said, You are a Japanese expert.
No, an amateur.
You seem to know more about Japanese culture than anyone else here.
This impression must have come from simply knowing a little of Uno Kuniichi’s background with Butoh, and Hijikata.
…and then he said something even more flattering, after I’d said I was a late doctorate currently looking for a position—and that if he knew of where I might be welcomed, I would willingly go there. He said, You have such amazing curiosity. If only we all had such curiosity.
What the cure is for that, as Dorothy Parker wrote, noone knows.
Joff Bradley presents the final keynote, in the woody hall, with the technical problems, and the little chairs, that, when Kenneth arrived, he called built for midgets. He had a chair brought into the hall from the foyer, and positioned himself in the aisle.
Joff Bradley’s presentation is called “On deadly spirals of ipseity.” I had gained no real insight into Joff’s area of interest, despite his having convened the session at which I presented, despite having had, albeit cursory, encounters with him, through R.’s intercession, her introduction.
If Chiba Masaya-san had been, as I wrote, the first revelation of the Deleuze|Guattari Camp, with his disconnective Deleuze, Joff was a, if not the, revelation of the conference, his contribution entirely unexpected—in its suggestiveness.
Wilhelm Reich is the figure who presides over the presentation: Nick Land’s dark Deleuze is invoked, as is Masaya Chiba’s disconnective Deleuze. A negative Deleuze, an affirmative Deleuze, but what about a joyful Deleuze? A Reichian orgasmic Deleuze—and Guattari.
He cites a discussion between Žižek and Schutzer—Deleuze and pleasure.
He is dealing with the avoidance of stating the real importance of that crackpot Reich to both Deleuze and Guattari—all through Anti-Oedipus, which even quotes some of his fruitier, whackier theories, commentaries. … “the embarrassment with Deleuze and Guattari for celebrating the anti-fascism of Reich.”
But Reich was Freud’s favourite disciple.
What Joff’s real theme is is the hikikomori—the locked-in-the-parental-home of those too, in fact, embarrassed by themselves. The socially withdrawn.
Of the hikikomori Reich would say it is the worm in man.
But Joff makes the alignment of hikikomori with autism—withdrawn-ness, isolation—not depression, which to me is in this relation to autism.
The (biological) tapeworm spreads cancer—is active in spreading cancer around the body.
Rudolf Steiner might be a blue (as opposed to a red) kind of fascism. (This is a reference to a session in the conference called “Red and Black Deleuze: Planetary Communism and Open Marxism,” which was a panel discussion, taking place at the same time as the session I was attending on Bergson, Space-Time, Deleuze, with Craig Lundy, yesterday.)
With the worm in man the organism can be dammed up petrified and cannot pulse. Reich says fascism of the worm in the life force that does not wiggle but goosestep.
There is a double capture of worm and hikikomori.
Reich holds that orgone energy kills cancer. Resignation shrinks.
Joff speaks to the death in life of the hikikomori: the orgasm frees energy, for Reich.
Reich’s guide to a joyful life is to have as many orgasms as possible.
So as not to be Nietzsche’s lonesomest one.
The lonely withdrawing ones, says Nietzsche—from this comes the possibility of the Overman.
(Once again, it is worthwhile comparing this with Simondon holding up Zarathustra as epitome of transindividual—withdrawing from the crowd, being left to bury the friend, the dwarf, the highwire artist, returning to the cave, and transindividuation.)
The serpent hanging out of the mouth of Zarathustra is none other than the Reichian worm in man.
Armoury is, for Reich, in this contactlessness and affective blockage; an autophagy—in connection with the little machines supposed to provide contact in the hikikomori’s room, or those Reich is left with, in the end, his orgone machines, autophagy belongs to the body without organs: it turns cancerous.
The Id in Reich communicates cosmic orgone energy.
But then in armoured seclusion, waves of desire—undulations of the worm—freeze into segments.
Ipseity is the singularity of the self.
The hikikomori nestles down deeper into the self—in deadly spirals of ipseity.
The face does not open the self to the other, opening to the self—as in Levinas. (Joff states his singular move, not just in this presentation, but in a pragmatics, is not to make recourse to Levinas.) Ipseity is hostage to itself.
Spirals of ipseity occur in detached auto-immunity of the self.
The sovereignty of the self turns to itself—possibly through micromachines—or—spirals into itself.
It concerns the centrifugal rings as the worm recedes into itself. It becomes a malignant subjectivity.
Lingis is the source for the title of the presentation, his phrase “engendering spirals of ipseity,” which describes orgasm. So, here, for Joff, these become deadly.
It concerns, says Joff, not the fascism of the rhizomatic potato but that of the couch potato.
Ryu Murakami, a very different writer from Haruki, (one I have been reading as soon as English translations become available) writes after Fukushima—which Joff states as decisive, a threshold for the increase in the numbers of hikikomori—of the “movement of sorrow of the past to the loneliness of the present.”
– Murakami Ryu’s The Symbiotic Worm
For Stiegler, there has to be a pharmacological coexistence with the worm in man. (Joff does not reject the use of pharmaceuticals—neither, in fact, did Guattari.)
No one can withdraw from withdrawal – spit out the black serpent – the worm in man – “we are all hikikomori.”
As I write this out, back in New Zealand, it resonates with me more; at the time I took as a gesture. I took it to be gestural, and to theatricalise the moment Joff was intending to mark. But now it has something of Coleman’s hopelessness of humanity’s current algorithmic becoming—and of course it has to do with isolation, which is that of the individual who, forced to watch, withdraws, who cannot withdraw from her withdrawal, or who deadens himself.
This enervation is not the same as the numbing to mediated atrocity we are said to suffer as a result of our saturation with images of violence and abjection. No, it is much more personal and has to do with personal shame, libidinal or perhaps orgasmic shame—with which, in adolescents, Joff will identify it.
So perhaps it were better said than forced to watch, watched—forced to be watched—even to the self-consciousness of knowing she is and the autoveillance as an amplification—in a deadly spiral of ipseity—of his being watched: the little machines, who, in that lyric of Mercury Rev, have telephones for eyes.
Ryu Murakami says that Japanese youth may be a new possibility of the human.
I think, Why the interest in the strange pleasures of failure? Is it that fascination Izidor Barši spoke about in his presentation of the intellectual—and by extension the intellect—with violence?
Why the stupid embrace of “vacuoles of noncommunication” (Deleuze’s phrase for what we need in societies of control—in the “postscript” with that title)?
Joff’s big Reichian joke came after his rhetorical gesture: “we are all hikikomori.” He was finished, made a movement to leave the lectern (behind him some of the slides I snapped above), and applause burst out.
But then he returned—held his arms up to quell the applause, saying, “Sorry! Sorry! I finished too soon!”
And he went on:
Where there is processual schizophrenia in schizoanalysis, in hikikomori the question is one of disarming the rings enveloping the body of the hikikomori—getting the worms to stream (in Reich’s term—here problematic considering the streaming media that is a relentless fact of life for hikikomori, as Joff acknowledges).
Narcissism, self-hatred, orgasm-anxiety, forms the basis of the general hatred of life.
Nonfascism, there produced in Anti-Oedipus by processual schizophrenia of schizoanalysis, here is in Nick Land’s cry:
DEATH TO THE HUMAN SECURITY SYSTEM!
Questions:
Anne asks about the social production of autism. Are they (hikikomori) too connected? Or too unconnected?
I am thinking about Josh Cohen’s book Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. His word for the propensity that is innate in humans to stop, to give up, withdraw, lie down, is ataraxia. Cohen gives four case studies for the four types of the ataraxic: for the burnout, Andy Warhol; for the slob, Orson Welles; for the recluse, Emily Dickinson; for the slacker, David Foster Wallace. Note that all four suffer from hyperproductivity at the same time—effecting a remarkable dynamic between creativity and enervation, or the sort of exhaustion which precedes and doesn’t follow from productivity, between work and stopping.
Danilo asks: how does gender apply?
Joff answers there are more male hikikomori.
Danilo asks around the notion of armoury, coined in the sense it is used by Joff, by Theweleit in writing about character-armour against the flood of women and Jews.
There is a question also about the outbursts of deadly violence from otherwise reclusive and alienated hikikomori types: Joff makes the brilliant point that this a question of the drives and not of desire—it is not because, as Stiegler puts it, of a crisis in desire, but is a deadly expression of the drives, the Triebe—sometimes translated as instincts. Desire does not find its destination and the drives now burst out.
Joff gives the numbers of hikikomori as around 1.2 million in Japan. Asked how these figures can be stated, he answers that they come from diagnosed cases, since, often, concerned parents will take their hikikomori children to doctors—for advice and for treatment.
Hikikomori is not limited to Japan: in the US and the UK numbers of such cases appear to be on the rise.
Perhaps it is when answering Danilo’s question, Joff becomes overcome with emotion and says, I am just sick of losing students. One month they are in your class. Then they just disappear.
He also talks about using Pokemon Go in a research project to get hikikomori outside, about which he wrote a very long paper. His conclusion, he says, was not very hopeful: he doesn’t hold out a lot of hope for this type of approach.
Koichiro makes the final address. He says that he has been restrained by his official role from making any kind personal statement, but that now he would like to take this opportunity to make a personal statement: a slide comes up—my book is coming out soon, published by Edinburgh Press, and I would like you all to buy a copy. Buy one for friends too.
He invites a representative from the next Deleuze/Studies Asia Conference to come forward: it will be held in Nanjing. She begins, as Koichiro did, days ago, that Ian Buchanan approached her and said that there should be a Deleuze/Guattari Conference Asia, this time, in China.
I try to find Dan W. Smith to say buy and share my contact details. He must have left. I find Greg Flaxman. He says it’s been great meeting and that all my questions were right on point. I invite him to come to New Zealand. He says he has no doubt our paths will cross some time in the future.
I say goodbye to Al Lingis. It’s been great meeting—I am hopeful of seeing him again—perhaps next month, when he is visiting Christchurch for a conference?
This didn’t happen sadly, the event in Christchurch having already taken place at the time of writing.
My final notes, before leaving on the direct return route to Akasaka and Hotel Felice, concern my own project:
…the joints of opponents as Ronaldo dodges or tackles them… …the letters and articulations of the words and sentences I now write… are so many subjective events, determining the field of a subtractive sensible interest.
In other words, the system of objects on the outside becomes determinate only in actual (becoming) the spontaneous perception of consciousness.
Neither is it determinate in the pattern lying in wait to be found, nor is it animated—in the strongest sense of inspirited, of the simulacrum brought to life, to lifelikeness, by the sculptor: it is rather the thought in action, that is consciousness.
That night, J. and I go out to Tokyo Station to find Ramen Street. It turns out this is underground. We join the queue, and when we reach the machine, we punch in our choices, going by the photos, for our ramen and our drinks, pay entering the coins and notes, and receive tickets which we take to our table, in the middle of a crowded ramen bar.
22 June 2019: Akasaka – Komaba Campus Tokyo University #tokyodeleuze day 2 Deleuze|Guattari Studies Conference
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.
fin
21 June 2019: Akasaka – Komaba Campus Tokyo University – first day of Deleuze/Guattari Studies in Asia 7th International Conference
Today is the first day of the conference. The camp ended. J. arrived. I moved from staying at Yoyogi Memorial Olympic Youth Hostel to Akasaka, land of many reasonably priced eatingplaces and the old red light district, and Hotel Felice.
I reckoned on taking the Chiyoda line, since it seemed the more direct route than changing the local line at Shibuya, and arriving, albeit directly, at Komaba Campus Tokyo University. Together we planned my walking route from Yoyogi-Koen to Komaba. On the right would be a Doutor coffeeshop. I would walk 50 metres. At the end of the road, I would turn left, and, after 145 metres, I would turn right. At the twolane expressway, after 85 metres, turn left, for 25 metres, then right. Another 145 metress—left onto Yamate-Dori Ave. 515 metres down the avenue. Right at Tokyo University. 20 metres, then left, back onto Yamate-Dori—are you kidding? After 70 metres, right: there it is, see? University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus.
I saw no Doutor coffeeshop. Leaving the station, I headed into Shibuya, grazing the side of the area I’d been in when first I arrived. This meant I knew to turn right. Straight, let’s say is South. Komaba, is West. Is it?
I asked at a Family Mart. There is always a Family Mart. The people who work there are very helpful and friendly. They never know where you are going or how to get there.
I headed west. Young people, couples, I asked one. They looked studenty. He knew the way. And gestured vaguely nor-west. I entered an interior of two-bedroom dwellings, a residential zone. These always have curving narrow streets. They rarely have streetsigns. One remembers Barthes’s Empire of Signs.
I reach a park. There is a well-dressed young businessman—in a thin dark suit—with a tablet, not even smoking, which would have been more usual. He is standing under a tree. Is he watching TV?
He has little English, but understands my pronunciation of Komaba and Tokyo University. He searches in the browser of the tablet, without any luck. He opens a new window. Perhaps it is Google Earth, because on the screen I see, thanks to him allowing me to, the earth. With two fingers splaying on the screen he zooms in: there is Japan. Zooming in closer, we both see Tokyo. We share the joke that we can’t find out where we are without visiting the planet as extraterrestrials might, from space—to Shoto Park, Shibuya. You might even expect to see us both under this tree, if we zoom in close enough. But of course, there are many steps to go.
There is Shibuya. Far to the left of the screen is greenery, the New Zealand embassy, strangely, and appearing now, below it, to the south, one might say, is Komaba Campus. It looks to be several hours walk away. I have half an hour. As for the route, it is perfectly incomprehensible. At most I can see to reach the tip of Shoto Park and to head off in this orientation. (What is orientation if its westward? Occidentation?)
I thank him doomo arigato! Soon I reach a wide expressway with tall chimneys from the median strip, providing ventilation for the underground. A fence along the road seems to be a construction site but behind it there are trees, and where it ends a lane leads to a metal gate held ajar like a turnstile to stop vehicular access and warning signs, from which I infer only those on legitimate business should enter. Behind the gate there are areas going to weed and wide concrete paths. A young woman approaches and I ask her if this is Komaba. She extracts her cordless earphones and looks surprised I know where I am.
I have a campus map and it shows the building I should find, Bldg 18. This back entrance leads past an athletic field and a baseball park. The grounds in general, around the modernist blocks, look like they are left to grow wants to grow; and there is a central pedestrian avenue lined with northern-hemisphere trees. They could be plane trees, and must turn in the autumn. There are cyclists but no throng of students.
Finding myself in the back in an unkempt area of wild grasses and weeds a block behind the avenue, I hear in the distance a HEY! And Over here! I can’t see anyone and turn completely around. In the distance a small figure in the shadow of an entrance waves its hands. I look around to see whether I am the intended recipient of this signaling. HEY! Rings out again. Seems like it.
The figure disappears indoors. I reach the entrance to building 18, so it must be. The distances collapse—like that I saw on the map in Shoto Park intervening between there and here—and soon I am in crowded foyer. Alphonso Lingis is standing in the middle of it talking to a dancer and theorist I recognise from the camp. I hang around, but am rather swept up in the registration process, receiving a bag branded with Deleuze and Guattari’s names in Japanese, and in it a reprint of the programme, another journal, white with silver graphics, matching a T-shirt, also white and silver.
We filter through into the hall where Koichiro-san will deliver Opening Remarks. Al Lingis has come into the hall. I approach and introduce myself and we end up sitting together, the Australian dancer theorist on his left. I say, You are surrounded by antipodeans.
Koichiro-san talks on the theme of the conference: war machine conflict coexistence.
In the name of the field in which we gather the most famous conflict is that over the Continental Analytic divide. But then there is also that of Deleuze and Guattari studies with the Derrideans: “I do not like to avert my eyes from these conflicts,” says Koichiro-san. (I almost wrote ‘bravely.’)
He notes during the recent Deleuze|Guattari Studies conference in Brazil the protests against Deleuzian studies.
Here we are, speaking in English about a very French philosopher, in Japan.
This itself speaks to the third theme coexistence—over representation exists a complete injunction.
Ian Buchanan’s opening address is entitled “Society of Control (Revisited)” and of course he trespasses on that injunction I have just name making representative application of the philosophy we are set here to discuss. Perhaps we were better to conclude this no conference but an inference?
Deleuze/Guattari Studies Asia began 7 years ago in Taiwan. I forget the context, but Buchanan quotes Twain—perhaps it is an orthographical association with Taiwan?—“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter so I wrote a long letter instead.”
“Many young people,” he says, “have a strange craving to be motivated.”
(In light of the storming of Hong Kong’s Legislative Chambers today, this is more or less ironic?)
Buchanan cites the book, The Tyranny of Metrics, then Deleuze: “We are in the middle of a general breakdown of sites of confinement.” That is the prisons, schools, houses of legislation and government, places—this is really an architectural theme—where disciplinarity is demonstrated and its authority is now being contested, or, rather deposed.
The theme of the talk is open capture—in the global algorithmic field of data. So Surveillance Capitalism is also cited—one of my ‘lolly-scramble’ of capitalisms in the appendix to the presentation I will give later today.
David Harvey: “The best way to get rich is to sell something you didn’t pay for.”
Frederic Jameson: culture can be sold like nature—to exploit culture in the way we exploited nature.
(This too may be more or less ironic given the deforestation of the Amazon, that proceeds today at the rate of one ‘football field’—the source is BBC—a minute, under Bolsanaro.)
Compared to Google the surveillance of the Stasi in now nonexistent East Germany, where one in five were reputed to be informers, is “child’s play.”
On average, every time you agree, ticking the ‘agree to terms and conditions’ box to gain access to some digital and online service, you are agreeing on average to 1000 contracts: you data is being shared with, on average, 1000 services-businesses, other than the one for which you are signing up.
I successfully recall the term agnotology: the willful, not to say strategic, production of ignorance—in the consumer population.
A change is noted from central out circulation of ‘news’ to point to point distribution.
“In the open air, fake news can be debated and exposed,” but not on Facebook, where you are the product.
What Deleuze is doing in talking about score-cards in the “Postscript on Control Society” is evoking the situation we have today, for example, in education, with outcomes and metrics designed to represent them, and autoveillance designed to self-assess one’s efficacy in securing, or producing, them: score-cards are the best way of turning education into a business.
Services are sold now; and the general field of activities bought.
Deleuze says, machines don’t explain anything by themselves.
Cybernetics connects, as Adam Curtis maintains, to Control Society.
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write that the flow of capital is always accompanied by an equal flow of stupidity.
In knowledge workers and service-information, or informatics, labour stupidity is axiomatised, meaning the self-authorising, the law-making, of axiomatics. (If the law don’t fit the rule, change it to make it, or make a new law.)
The media machine no longer needs us for it to function. (But doesn’t this already hold and isn’t this already entailed in cinema? And there theorised? Not to speak of the machines of the unconscious: they don’t need us, or what we call ‘us,’ to function.)
Facebook—here the new form of capitalism is being adduced—has approximately 4000 workers. But it makes USD500 billion.
This is because 2 billion people work for Facebook for free.
Our response? We should be looking for new weapons.
Question: how do we respond to the speed of modulation?
Buchanan: “We have lost the aesthetic capacity to respond to our times.”
This last well-rehearsed phrase warrants discussion. It does so not over the question Have we? Have we lost blahblahblah… There have been, and there will be more, too many grandstanding WE HAVE’s and WE ARE’s. As Greg and Anne pointed out earlier: this is exactly the eternal return of ontology, of the ontological: this is how we are now; I am justified in my observation for its timeliness—it is after all, after all, NOW we are talking about and now we are talking. Or, as I supposed, now about which we confer at this conference.
Does ‘conference’ always presuppose the inference of the now of the timeliness of our participation in discussion? … From which various diverse positions can be elaborated, before, in fact, they elaborate themselves in whatever consensus or dissensus is at stake.
The young man from the Philippines with the elaborate name, Elijah Joshua Benjamin D.F. Aban, was the most politically radical speaker—for which I admired him. We shared the next session, because the third presenter, Mikkel Astrup, didn’t show.
He read at breakneck speed volumethreeofCapitalisusedbyDeleuze&Guattari lack&desireaddressedinthatbook CapitaltheonlybookpublishedduringMarx’slifetime …
Revolution is still being conducted in the Philippines in the form of a protracted people’s war. It is mentioned in The Communist Necessity. Negri also cites Philippino radical movements.
I deliver my paper. (This is the link to the paper I presented.)
More—I deliver my presentation; and, strangely, although it is written, lineated, to fit as a reading within the 25 minute limit we would have if there were three presenters, it sits nicely in the allocated 35 or so.
Joff P.N. Bradley, one of the convener’s and running this session, asks the first question: Why this form? (You will see, if you follow the link, what he means.) Is it a collage?
It is written as a presentation, to be presented—and the time for these presentations is short. It is not a representation. It is not written to represent themes, ideas, concepts or illustrate them, with examples, but to present them.
Deleuze—and I have in mind his lack of good will, his being, as Joe Hughes has it, a surly interlocutor, a phrase I already used in my question to Jae a few days ago—is nonpropositional. He does not represent, or, in philosophical exposition, offer a one to one correspondence between terms and concepts: he is nonrepresentational. Multiplying voices presents another way in which his books do not represent, say, the views of their author—or of an author.
This idea is in Deleuze as indirect discourse. It takes the place here of any kind of literary criticism or interpretative approach or hermeneutics.
Rather than a collage, there were three themes I wanted to present. So there are three bins. I was tempted, upon hearing Kuniichi Uno’s presentation at the Camp, where he spoke about the figure, to rename them figures for the damage they do—a damage Deleuze ascribes to the movement of thought: fig. 1, fig. 2, and so on. But… As the writing progressed, relations among the themes developed in a reciprocal contagion, forging connections in mutual imbrication.
Why Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem? I am asked.
Because I like it, I say. …and because of its insolubility. The three-body problem is not, cannot be, solved in the novel. It is insoluble. The movement of three celestial bodies, three suns in this case, cannot be predicted.
In the novel the attempt is made in a virtual reality game, played by characters on earth. So it sets up a plane of the problematic—where the three themes can each consist in a nonpredetermined way.
There is a special poignancy about this, since, given the insolubility of the problem, earth is subsequently threatened by invasion, an invasion which it is unlikely humanity will survive. There is this movement from virtual reality to reality—from a game to the reality of the end of humans.
Also, I found echoes for neoliberal tactics—of autoveillance, of constant controls, reductive metrics, outcome-based, where price is the only organ of sense the thought collective offers to perceive the problem and in its determinations of the individual, social, the political, as well as the economic—in the depiction, at the beginning of the novel, of conditions at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, 50 years ago. These echoes amount to a technology of the self—of selves—governed by technocracy and presided over, in China by the Party, and, for us today, by corpocracy. (I recalled that Elijah Joshua Benjamin D.F. Aban in his presentation used the name Mark Fisher, saying Rest in peace, Brother.)
Before I began I saw a figure I recognised from Stockholm, the Deleuze|Guattari Conference there: Dan W. Smith, the superb commentator and translator of Deleuze, currently working on his lectures. He approaches and says, That was really great.
If anyone was going to pull me up on points of contention, I thought it’s going to be you, I say.
Why would I? He says. It all worked together and was great.
Al Lingis attended this session, sitting next to Ruth Irwin, who liked it. Al is also all smiles. We have lunch together.
Al maintains a curiosity about people, asking each one he meets their name and what they do.
At lunch, he speaks of his birds, his aviaries, the two acres he has at home—and how Muhammad Ali used to look after rooftop pigeonhouses for dimes when a kid.
A boy he knew once went up there and killed the pigeons. Ali confronted him and, although he was bigger, took him on, and severely beat him. After this is when Ali began to train as a boxer: he knew he could not control his anger; and this was the only time, he said, he ever lost control.
Muhammad Ali kept and cared for pigeons all his life. He had several thousand pigeons.
Felicity Coleman is the next keynote speaker: “Becoming Algorithmic: Modalities of “collective interactivity” in the post-media era.”
Coleman maps the modal onto the physical where it engages an ethics. From the modal and modality I hear something of Spinoza, the mode being individual, or individuating—an individual, sufficiently individuated to interact in the post-media era.
Guattari’s notion of ‘post-media’ points forward to an algorithmic becoming of the world.
The relation of code to what it encrypts is entirely arbitrary. Guattari’s molecular revolution indicates a modal ethics, as both a future condition and a hope—for post-media.
Guattari starts to worry about International World Capitalism on the threshold of its integration through algorithms. He asks, How can the singularity of mediatic expression be recovered? When there is a paradox: it is mediatic, not singular. Yet it is necessary that it is at once mediatic and singular.
Modal logics belong to philosophical logics. Karen Barad is cited for the materialism that distinguishes matter from materialisation—that is how it comes to be and is used. Here are apparent epistemological and discursive interests: an interest in the users.
70.8 million people today are displaced—the highest number of displaced since WWII.
Coleman shows a slide of the refugee boat installed at this year’s Venice Biennale. 1000 people lost their lives on it. It had sunk and the artist salvaged it to be a monument to refugees.
Helen Storey’s work at the camp Za’atari is representative of algorithmic becoming.
Camp registration shows the number of people in the camp and their status. These are “Human Capital Data.”
Za’atari is about to achieve city status. Humans here are the assets.
The UN funds (what I note at the time under the acronyms GIS and ICT) the self-mapping of refugees for the sake of camp administrators and ‘stake-holders.’ This is a measurement of “axes of value” (Guattari).
In how the suffering mode (of “human data points”) is lived and played out, one must guard against all mechanistic automatic thought.
Coleman asks, What is the point of the human species?
What is the point of the human species—as it undergoes an algorithmic revolution that is equal to the industrial revolution.
This question consists in asking after the modes of life—of an algorithmic humanity.
“Becoming algorithmic” is “to be completely subsumed in the dataset.”
For Coleman, Guattari’s notion of minor is over. The minor is over.
The molecular revolution didn’t happen.
“I think desire has been completely obliterated in this global moment.”
Asked about AI, she respond, “I don’t think AI is what the media would have us believe it is.”
code is neutral (should this have a question mark?) – algorithm is not.
The minor is over, therefore a new scale of organisation of subjectivities is called for (Coleman makes clear she does not see this happening at the scale it would need to—to produce results).
Elijah Joshua Benjamin D.F. Aban asks, What can be done to recapture the potentialities for revolution, given that algorithm is in utero? (That is, the totalisation of the field of humanity as data assets or data points is not yet fully effected.) He invokes a “capitalist mindset” and it is unclear whether Coleman’s presentation is part of it.
“I can’t possibly answer that question because it’s 2019 and I’m a feminist,” she says.
She namechecks at the end Barad, Claire Colebrook, and another whose name I don’t get, whom she calls—although I might have misheard—an abolitionist. This is a thinker, or these are thinkers, whose belief is that the earth should be and presumably will be better off without humans. It’s not a nihilism. Then again presumably it is a feminism adequate to 2019.
I am reminded of The Three-Body Problem. Once it is established the Trisolarans are on their way to earth, there are those who work with the master species to hasten the demise of humanity.
Is a feminist thought adequate to 2019 one that works with the earth to abolish humanity? Of necessity?
I also think about Deleuze’s “open a window, to let in a little air.”
As I’m leaving the hall, I say to Elijah Joshua Benjamin D.F. Aban that I liked his presentation and that I thought he should be asking about possibility in the light of algorithmic becoming.
Torsten Jenkel is presenting in the next session—three are running concurrently.
Torsten’s work is on Macunaíma, a novel written in 1938 by Mario de Andrade. He is writing his PhD on it. On the way to the National Noh Theatre we talked about it. He is unnecessarily self-deprecating.
Mario de Andrade is also the author of the Anthropophagic Manifesto, in which we read: “Only cannibalism unites us! Socially Economically Philosophically.”
The specific cannibalism in question is that of the Tupi tribes, in Brazil. “Tupi or not tupi, that is the question,” he also writes.
Torsten’s presentation is a philological excavation of bibliographical sources.
He speaks of the St. Thomas legend—which is how the Portuguese on their arrival interpreted the legend of the indigenes about a white man who preached peace many years before their arrival. He left footprints in the rock and had a cross as his emblem.
Theodor Koch-Grünberg illustrates the telling of this tale by an indigene. In it the white man is well-dressed and placed above the indigenous informant, who is silent, semi-nude, and listens to the white man rather than telling his story. Koch-Grünberg’s written description completely belies this pictorial depiction. The indigenous informant is well-dressed, the white man listens.
I think of Cabeza de Vaca, his journey, how it mirrors that of this St. Thomas.
Torsten talks of the whitening policy—through intermarriage, an active policy to whiten the indigenous population through miscegenation.
In Macunaíma the capitalist is a mythological cannibal giant.
Torsten talks of Macunaíma as a schizo movement, a picaresque, its logic “not being logical” as Mario de Andrade says.
James Martell’s presentation deals with Beckett as diagnostician of these Trumpian clown-times.
Trump: “I know words. I have the best words.”
Beckett’s diagnosis gives us a war machine—“absolute mindlessness” as the ground of thinking or where thinking cannot quite be, yet be or any longer be—this definition of the virtual—distinguished from the ground, Schelling’s Ungrund. … “bottom of thought rises to the surface where an individuation cannot give it form.”
“Wreck it, like Beckett”—sing Scottish band Therapy.
… “the sound of the surface being broken”—Beckett.
Deleuze: Beckett’s l’épuissé—being the emblem of the exhaustion of possibilities. (But this is quite unlike Coleman’s absence of possibilities and foreclosure. Again the problem and therefore the distinction devolves on this (or that) being the case, on a grounding, as is the focus of Christian Kerslake’s book, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy, taken from the title of an early series of lectures (1956?) delivered by Deleuze, “What is Grounding,” itself recalling of course Heidegger. That is this distinction between knowledge and being, or the problem of sense, as Deleuze puts it, after Hyppolite.)
Tingting Hui speaks on Lewis Carroll’s Alice. (What is it about Logic of Sense that has so captured attention at this time?)
Or, as Tingting puts it, “what is more serious, to eat or to speak a word?”
All three presentations deal with different kinds of mirrors:
– Torsten: the mirror of history or mythology that is literalised in history.
– James: mirror of Fallon and Trump; again something literal here in the repetitions of Trump, in portraits on the walls, and the interview of Trump in a dressing-room mirror by Fallon as Trump.
– Tingting: mirror of the looking-glass.
Logic of Sense comprises 34 series of paradoxes.
Question of oral regress, regression intrinsic to the mouth where what is said and the edible switch places, ingestion and expression.
Agamben et al. pair language and silence, and depth.
Louis Wolfson called himself a schizophrenic working in language—he feels as guilty after eating as after hearing his mother’s voice. He is unprepared for the division of interiority and exteriority.
Again, it is interesting to note that Wolfson, Carroll and Artaud all appear together in Logic of Sense, where literal language is that of surface and schizophrenic language is that of depth, speaking food, devouring words, by Artaud, leaving only skeletons.
The questions for this session, for each of the presenters, are taken together.
I am interested in the idea that it is the indigenous and mythological component of Macunaíma for Torsten that perverts its logic. There seems to be here an impulse that wants to ground the transgression of logic, the trans-sense, of indigenous mythology, as it is taken up in Macunaíma,in a kind of ‘indigenism’ diagnosed by Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga as being a cultural nostalgia for an historically ‘more native’ understanding that never was, was never absolute, but could only appear relative to a later cultural formation.
Tropicalísmo by contrast works by way of the smallest difference, by calculating a cultural differential, a shift in rhythm, that is all the more disruptive (although this word has been cheapened).
Esposito might also read cannibalism into immunity? A morsel of the other is taken into oneself.
Macunaíma‘s transgressive force is the rupture of laughter? That is to say, its immanence?
Coffee. Then it’s all happening again: I choose the session with Dan Smith, not just because he said nice things about my presentation.
Janell Watson is with Kenneth Surin. Were they both then in Stockholm?
Michel Serres, reports Watson, attributes his work to the problem of violence: all his writing is about Hiroshima.
Were Deleuze and Guattari, as Badiou says, just a couple of desiring anarchists?
Is axiomatic commodification more cruel, as they say, in Anti-Oedipus, than acts of barbarism and savagery? Really? (I hear Watson’s singular intonation on that emphasis.)
There is a fathomless abyss between the flow of capital and wages and purchasing power. Capital increases exponentially, while money in the pocket is a trickle.
Capitalism is “no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror but of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety.” Piety spiritualises capital extraction of surplus value.
The state is always barbarism … capitalism requires reterritorialisation.
Jason Read—must be the same as the would-be translator of Simondon—writes on the capitalist split subject—split over: a cynical capitalist intention; with a pious state requiring the subject’s belief.
There are two pieties:
1) Obama—metropolitan globalist piety
2) Trump—ethno-majoritarian piety
Despotic residues haunt the capitalist state.
Deleuze and Guattari: “the state desire, the most fantastic machine for repressing is still desire.”
This fantastic desiring machine is Lacan’s objet petit a—a little machine driving all desire.
Tauel Harper works his Habermas virtuous communication bubble sociological positivist nice guy schtick. (All the good will Deleuze’s surly interlocution abjures, for all its affirmation.)
He sounds like High Performance through High Engagement—the course the PSA has foisted on council employees… that nods to Interest-based Problem-solving, only because it is a repackaged course bought some five years ago: all that Habermas virtuous communication bubble sociologically positivistic view of society schtick, that ended when Thatcher said “There is no such thing as society.”
Tauel Harper says, “Brexit is the biggest thumbing of the nose to international capitalism I have seen in my lifetime.” Trump with Brexit he coins as Truxit, not Trumpit or Brexump.
In his presentation I hear this word repeated “represent” again and again.
Dan Smith takes the desk, presenting.
Deleuze says explicitly, “powers of the false—come from time”…
- form of the true contrasts with the power of the false—the universal and necessary universality of right
- form of time—what could possibly undermine the form of the true? Deleuze’s answer is time. Truth changes in time, but – this is just a change in contention – it doesn’t change the form of the truth Error is only an effect of the true. The form of time is independent of its contents, puts the form of truth in question. The form of time is nonchronological.
- What is it that the primary form of time is is coexistence – if it is true that a naval battle may take place tomorrow: then, two paradoxes. The paradox of possible propositions, each become necessary. 2nd logically impossible cannot be derived from the possible. This is the paradox of contingent futures.
- The falsifier—his master argument allows Deleuze to paint a picture of the falsifier, as he who “imposes a power of the false adequate to time.” (Deleuze) – allows falsifier to give direct appearance of time: incompossible present. – Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” in which all possibilities occur at once. Pure form of time frees form of false from subordination to time: False is no longer not true – but raises the false to the power of metamorphosis – stands opposed to the eternal and the true.
Philosophy – creates concepts in time
– concepts don’t have an identity but a becoming in time;
put time into concept—intensity changes AND so the form of time is introduced into Deleuze’s concepts.
False no longer means not true because form of the false has been freed by the form
of
time.
One still requires immanence.
The truthful person is the first falsifier.
The concept is an invention.
Art: 3 great texts
– Melville’s The Confidence Man
– Fourth Book of Zarathustra
– F for Fake, Welles
… “The forger does know how to change. The forger relies on the expert who recognises the true Vermeer.” All the forger has to do is to study the criteria of the expert. The expert always has a forger in him. Both forger and expert engage judgement.”
Science: is not dogmatic, willfully fallible—a theological notion
– asymptotic progress towards the form of the true.
Kant – God expresses the ideal of absolute knowledge that is the goal of science.
Mononaturalism: precisely because of its fallibility most of the propositions of science will be shown in the future to be false
– progress of science equals that of falsity to falsity
– the movement of science embodies the power of the false as a power of metamorphosis—and of the multiple.
Through Popper’s falsifiability science becomes a patchwork of ceteras parabas—all things being equal
from Deleuze we have an autonomous power of the false freed as the not untrue
Nietzsche’s critique must be borne in mind: “What if we want untruth?”
– Deleuze shows true is in fact secondary to the truth subject to the pure form of time.
Questions:
Anne: where time is no longer eternity, the form of time is also metamorphic. The form of time is itself not ontological.
Dan: Deleuze says reality, time—it’s all a problem. That problem is a pure variability. It is continuous variation.
Greg: You are looking for a true form of the false.
Greg (to Janell Watson): the reference to piety is also a reference to Nietzsche.
Dan: belief is the relationship to a proposition. This is most readily seen in the question, Do you believe in God? – as where we are asked about a relation, our relation, to the proposition.
3 modes of time—
succession
coexistence
simultaneity
—get rid of a developmental idea of evolution
coexistence in Anti-Oedipus of capitalist state form with barbarism and savage states (or nonstates): between them there is neither evolution nor progress; not a succession but they are coexistent.
– static genesis
– dynamic genesis
pure form of what is not eternal (a Platonic and non-Platonic form): the pure form of things that change.
Language of dynamic genesis is within the static genesis. It is dynamic because of a mobility of language. (And appears, again, in The Logic of Sense.)
Kenneth Surin: Does the power of the false operate on the conditions of the proposition?
– the proposition requires representation.
Deleuze means to have done with judgement—of Kant: so Deleuze will have done with propositions. Because of the truth and the false. Heidegger says we need to take questions as the model for propositions. We should have done with propositions as the model for thinking.
Dan: We need to get to a nonpropositional level of sense. Carroll on surface. Artaud’s screams and breaths can’t even … too hard … to get to sense.
Underneath sense lie the depths of bodies.
Logic of sense comes from the depths of bodies.
The question is How do you get sense out of that?
Gregory Flaxman’s keynote: “The Screen is a Brain: On the Techno-Genetic Evolution of Images”
This rests on the problem of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
3 million years in the past a clan of hominids scavenge at the tail end of a drought that has been going on for tens of thousands of years.
An alignment of the planets always accompanies the appearance of the monolith.
Organisms constantly instrumentalise their bodies but nothing prepares the relationship of the hand with the hammer. A secondary technicity is required.
3 million years of technogenesis in a single cut: the bone-hammer leaves the hand of the human ancestor. A space station floats in orbit around the earth.
Artificial life was always going to be the most likely way extraterrestrial makes contact with terrestrial life—given cosmogeological timeframes.
1. obelisk manifests intelligence and intention
2. radio signal suggests the monolith was hidden to be found. Its planned discovery indicates the triggering is by evolution
3. sign of evolution—Kubrick precedes the triggering, from the moonbased monolith, its second appearance, of the radio signal, with the appearance of a camera. This triggers the sign.
There is no more profound sign of the evolution of our development than the capability of envisioning technosemiotic awakening in moving images.
The point is made that in 2001 there is reflexivity and a self-consciousness—of a film positing the development of this capability of the technosemiotic. The film-making knows itself to be about and stages itself upon and as this technical, genetic—because evolutionary, although not necessarily human, because technical—and semiotic threshold.
If you look at the scene in 2001set in the excavation in which the monolith stands centrally, you witness what seems to be an insignificant moment in which the scientists are lined up, are making smalltalk, that the camera is there to record: the camera operator turning it, as if resetting it—is it clear that it is a moving-image in question? It is at least clear that this specifically unmomentous moment triggers the monolith to emit a highpitched signal, which the headsets in the suits worn by the scientists pick up—initiating the chain of events that the rest of the film will follow: the long journey of the long ship with HAL, the AI, onboard to the next giant monolith, the one to which that on the moon was sending its signal—in a chain of technosemiotic events.
Of this threshold being reached, the idea of conspiracy, of faking in film, attests to the same one.
What does it mean to have conceived a film as history of the universe? To have reimagined the cosmos as a moving image?
Greg mentions once again Matter and Memory.
Cinema creates a cosmology with which we go can go beyond nature and the human—the immanent plane extending to unfolding of the cosmos itself.
Deleuze understands cinema as cosmogenetic or cosmocinematographic.
As in 2001 so too in Terence Malick’s Tree of Life.
The power of cinema is to provide an automatic movement and nonhuman perception.
Husserl: all consciousness is consciousness of something.
Bergson want to (condemns) cinema to mimicking (mimicry). Deleuze celebrates it because it does. (Cinema gains a power of the false as well as that of a spiritual automaticity.) (This is also the reason Deleuze takes Bergson to the movies—in Cinema 1 and 2.)
Cinema is capable of “going up the paths that natural perception goes down.”
There is the absence of anchorage and postural level.
Bergson: the image is a road by which we pass in every direction … modification … and uncover the universal undulation of matter: the movement image dwells on chaos.
– through to axes
– subjective centres
to—in Cinema 2—the body without organs.
Matter coagulates into molar aggregates, refers to a living being.
Each image is afforded a double image by its registration.
…another system, in which all the images vary. Plane of immanence. Plane of light. From a system of anchorage and relative deterritorialisation—the passage of the evolution of cinema becomes the instrument of envisioning evolution itself—autonomous, automated evolution—and a new kind of brain.
Here, once more, as in Greg and Anne’s keynote at Chiyoda, Spinoza’s spiritual automaton enters. And Leroi-Gourhan’s Speech and Gesture: “the symbol and its contents are merged into one.”
That the spectator cannot intervene entails a new stage of human development—of reflective thought, before which the human is powerless, in which “individual interpretation is drastically reduced.”
“Cinema puts movement inside of thinking.”
Each stage of evolution, for Leroi-Gourhan, “creates a brain on top of the brain.”
– the potentially revelatory nature of a brain on the brain.
Questioned as to what the monolith means, Greg: we need to resist, he thinks, allegorising it. Far from being answered within the film, this is answered by the film itself. (The film is this thought.) It creates its own conditions of possibility.
Leroi-Gourhan: the body can be instrumentalised but it is not (yet) a tool (note the echo of Heidegger’s not yet thinking). Asked what is a tool? Leroi-Gourhan hesistates.
Question: Does agency in VR take away from the spiritual automaton?
The face of a frame and thereby an off-frame, this is what interests me about cinema.
I think about the regression of the brainscreen that Damasio repeats as the image of what is called thinking, and the essence of human cognition, of the neuroscientific understanding of cognition—this regression states the impossibility of an interior spectator on thought looking at the screen—the perceptual field—while this spectator is in turn observed by another… so there is a succession of little subjects, each one looking on what the brainscreen shows of the one before. But it states the view as necessary of a series of two—which is all the sense regression needs to gain its impetus, its direction—it is still going inside… This off-frame Greg Flaxman mentions as being what interests him about cinema, it seems to be is the possible direction, sense and movement of thought: to an outside.
Let me give you an example of this outside—off-frame, I am sitting at a table in a house on Waiheke Island, writing this. Another example is presented in the snaps above: the students with plywood flats belong to a music department; the sounds of applause, and stabs of music from a jazz orchestra, as well as the unison chanting of an audience, reach us through the windows over the three days of the conference. These sounds and the cawing of crows—are neither in the text or the snaps. The windows are open.
19 June 2019: Anne Sauvagnargues & Gregory Flaxman, Kondo Kazunori, Uno Kuniichi at Chiyoda – Akasaka, Hotel Felice
Anne Sauvagnargues and Gregory Flaxman (two whose separately written books I greatly admire, and now get to meet, now working together) present “Techno-Genetic Semiotics”:
…which concerns the status of images, no longer seen as representation, but a new form of individuation.
In 1989’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies Guattari shows production of subjectivity is with machinic assemblages (agencements—but as here the emphasis is on the machinic assemblages is not entirely misleading).
Guattari’s 1969 “Machine et Structure” review of Deleuze: structure is not only an ideal structure in the mind but it has an affectivity in machinic systems, involving technical social agents and human agents (i.e. assemblage-agencements), for example—the smartphone.
In Deleuze’s Cinema 1 sensory-motoric image involves technical and biological production of subjectivity—to achieve a “geology of morals” as the plateau of that name in A Thousand Plateaus puts it.
Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech is read closely by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
—tools made by hand feedback to the human:
moving forward into dimensions of images—cinemas is a threshold for technology.
Cinema no longer produces an image we can call human.
In cinema a spiritual agent or mind (Anne uses the English “spiritual” when I think she means d’esprit which rather means of mind than the French spirituel. In fact, Massumi makes this mistranslation in A Thousand Plateaus where he translates Plato’s republic of free minds as republic of free spirits.) … in cinema, spiritual [I just left the ‘p’ out of that word and got siri-tual, is this the source of virtual spirit, Siri?] or mind is not trying to master an agency in the film camera.
The scandal of cinema is that it is no longer possible to attribute to the human the film-making: film/camera has its own agency/agencement.
Image of thought is how thought represents itself to itself.
Cinematic image is not related or relatable by way of representation. It has no image or model. The cinematic image appears as an apparition in itself. It is itself the actualisation of a perception (the camera’s/film’s). It therefore involves an individuation. (The image is not part of representation because it itself individuates.)
The cinematic image, the image in cinema, shows that it is possible for the image to have perception and motoricity. So the cellphone has agency.
Signs are no longer just to be understood under human language.
Semiology passes—outside of human language—to semiotics.
Image or sign does not have a specificity to the cinema because of the same feedback loop of tool and hand.
Technik—in Greek—does not separate out literature from technology and science.
A Western metaphysics is needed to perform this split between higher ‘spiritual’ (mental) production and the applied arts of the technical or technical arts (that is any art that has a technical aspect which can then be separated from it, and separated from it have its own pedagogy). This split does not obtain in Japan at all.
There are symbioses between living agencies and technical agencies.
Noo – image of thought in cinema as in la noologie.
Mechanism + software:
Greg: we do not see the camera in the image. Its agency is invisible.
(Again I was taken to the thought of Merleau-Ponty, because of this distinction between visible and invisible and flesh: so that in a certain way, in a sense, the camera, the mechanism, is visible in the flesh. … like code and computerthere is a self-consciousness of agency and to separate the viewer in this way is to play into the notion of a separable perceptual field, which presupposes an abstract and disembodied viewpoint that can that partition some of itself off, and say this to you is the portion we call perceptible and visible. In fact, Greg and Anne’s argument is towards the relative viewpoint of the film and camera as a subject distinct from the human subject—a technical subject. But then there are technical, biotic and symbiotic subjects—and are they not anorganic?)
… breaking out of this parenthesis, it is not a subjectivity of image, the image not subjective, if this is thought only as being human subjectivity.
What is an image in Deleuze?
Deleuze says, It is time.
The subjective production of science is cited as one “no longer reserved to human subjectivity.”
Cinema is neither a [human] language nor language system. Semiotics refers then to a “system of images independent of language in general.”
aesthetic – system of sensibility
Image and perception (and perhaps even the entire perceptual field) are the same thing. This is speaking from the point of view of Cinema 1 and 2.
Subtractive model of subjectivity: whole field of perceptual images—as immanent—is that, a whole field or plane of immanence—without “everything that does not interest my perception.”
Anne: “Subjectivity comes to be the problem of the earth. … Culture is something that happens to our planet earth.”
It is not simply an ecology of subjectivity, but an ecotechnological transformation, or in ecotechnological transformation.
Geology of morals—again in A Thousand Plateaus—means the elision of culture and nature. The problem of the earth understands or comprehends as problematic this elision.
Deleuze does not turn to Bergson’s Creative Evolution but rather to his 1896 book Matter and Memory, particularly in view of taking Bergson to the cinema in the two cinema books.
For evolution, for evolution following this subtractive model of subjectivity, all phenomena are included except that which does not interest the perceiving, as the thinking, the conscious subject.
Greg spoke of an “acentred universe” (quite a good phrase, I think) meaning the “englobing or an image around a particular centre of indetermination.”
Centring on “indetermination” ours is a provisional centring that obscures the subjective field rather than revealing it—obscuring this other dimension of images.
What does the concept allow us to do?
Provisional acentring—englobing an image of indetermination …
“There are no other aesthetics not pragmatic” – Anne.
Habit – is both habituation and habitation. Habit is the only way to exist as a subject. (This is Deleuze’s first synthesis, in Difference and Repetition.)
No longer ego cogito but ego habitus—the habitus of rhythmicity and periodicity defines the subject, or its subject.
It entails the PATTERN OF ITS INDIVIDUATION. – Anne.
Matter-life-spirit: if we don’t want ontology so split, we need to open up subjectivity. (This also resonates strongly with the work I have been doing independently—this and the acentring of the subject of and by indetermination. For me, this means the torroidal space of the durational event of subjectivity.)
The sign is both nonsyntactic and asygnifying, writes Deleuze: “even human language has always been asignifying.”
Anne on Deleuze citing Jacobson and Sausurrean structuralist (formalist) linguistics: “There is no inner signification.” (The division between signifier and signified is nonspatial, nontemporal—nondimensional.)
Anne also cites—as a beautiful book—Howard Cohen’s How Does the Forest Think.
Greg: What is a sign?
What makes a sign?
The cut is arbitrary—if we think about it—as to where we say a sign begins and ends. Is it phonemic? Orthographical?
The image in cinema makes explicit this implicit practical problem of what is a sign.
Benveniste’s 5 pages on Saussure are some of the most revealing.
Greg: the “relationship of sign, signifier and signified, AND the real therefore cannot be simply parsed.”
Irony is that of Derrida’s favourite trope of catachresis—meaning a misuse, of the sign, that becomes habitual, creating a new meaning, from misuse—when deconstruction itself is subject to catachresis. That is deconstruction is rolled out as a sign for everything from the demolition of a building to the most banal of interpretative strategies of analysis.
Anne—in somewhat pedagogical mode—and here we can see she is a very good teacher, but perhaps does not need to make everything polemical: So, 2 series, continua, one signifying, and one signified (easier to imagine in French, in the gerundive form of signifiant). The sign comprises these two continua. But it is not a meeting point and inside the sign there is no signification. We cannot plumb its depths or uncover its secrets. It is bare of depth, empty, because purely formally differential.
Anne: for Lacan the question of signifier and signified leads to a new theory of subjectivity. — to endure symbolic means to endure the cut. (Cf. castration as it is presented by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.)
flows of series – cut between – where one ends another begins
“Language is a virtual system existing in each of our heads simultaneously,” says Saussure. – says Greg.
Language is an automatism (a MACHINE IN THE ESPRIT or GHOST – says I).
Bergson’s – line on language and signs – language is a structure that is not given by my own invention. It is a mode of subjectivation that is unconscious and productive of subjectivity.
Phenomenology is not produced by an act of consciousness. Phenomenology relies on the vécu.
But I cannot access language in self-consciousness.
The Sartrean ego cannot any longer obtain when you are interested in collective modes of subjectivation.
(Deely’s Poinsot—I want to add to the genealogy of semiotics being unfolded.)
I am informed, intelligenced. Consciousness results from a social and political construction.
Saussure—Beneniste—Jacobson— the shifter, the deictic I you he she one …
You have to have a consciousness outside of consciousness to say I.
Discourse is language in action.
Anne overstates her non-hospitality to human language.
What is the tense of the moving image?
It is an existential dimension, the clause “there is …” (Cf. Blanchot and Bataille and Levinas, I think, all three concerned with the there is.)
Cinema is not privileged because its subjectivity is avowable: say, this is me again, in Dziga Vertov’s I am camera.
Marxist analysis of Deleuze and Guattari: the person comes after the Middle Ages at the entry of the capitalist subject.
Simondon’s metaphysics mean also differenciation of sytheses of time:
1. – habituation, actualisation, territorialisation;
2. – territorialisation as deterritorialisation – “a machinic assemblage, a collective assemblage of enunciation and assemblage of machinic bodies. Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. So in Simondon, deindividuation and individuation.
These, de- and re- are in mutual presupposition.
Territory is an act, a gesture.
Every territorialisation begins with a deterritorialisation.
Greg: territory begins in a hunting ground. But now, in societies of control, we live in an open field in which we are being surveilled and tracked. (We are no longer the hunter, but hunted within a specific dispositif.)
Decoding in this open field is difficult.
The relationship between presignifying image and prelinguistic signs is difficulted – vantage, POV.
Greg: Bonitzar [?]: “every image is a moral” – a valence. Every sign is a perspective. (Now we are getting close to semiotics again.)
A sign presupposes a valence, a vantage, an evaluation. The object it creates is but an evaluative disposition. (And we are leaving the perceptual field.)
Deleuze writes that cinema is not a universal or primitive language system.
Rancière “stupidly” says Anne says Deleuze uses cinema to provide theological insight into matter itself. This is because cinema is more capable than human consciousness to delve into matter itself. You cannot distinguish degrees – for cinema, matter equals acentred images. There is no ontological hierarchy of the three levels, only the relationship between uncentred and centred.
Cinema presents a type of image that is not humanly produced.
Nietzsche gives a metabolic as well as symbolic interpretation. (Metabolic is a good way of addressing the symbolic against the physical framework of bodies and proxemics.)
Anne: Habit – external relationship.
Greg: Whitehead says “life is robbery.” All life lives off other living forms.
Greg: psychomechanics and Spinoza’s “spiritual automaton.” Spinoza uses the spiritual automaton in The Treatise on the Intellect. Leibniz takes up this term.
Cinema is a material automaton: the image, says Greg, exists as
automated
autonomous
animation.
(Is this, I asked later, not the definition of the neoliberal market? (i.e. its vantagepoint, exactly, as the conceptual mechanism giving rise to it.)
– the brain on top of the previous brain,
an animation and autonomous, an automatism in thinking.
What brings together mots and choses is the spiritual automaton (singularity) – a little divine thing.
Deleuze: the cinema is a cinema of the world—is a meta-cinema.
Thinking in relationship to an image.
Anne: Conception of world – Spinoza and Descartes – “removed a closed world to an infinite existence.” This means infinite extension – the problem of the spiritual automaton connects matter and mind.
The modal idea is then where there is thought, where there is body.
Anne: “when you read Spinoza under God you can understand necessity and you can understand chance.”
God? Anne: it is writing. (This again links to the work I have been doing on writing and AI, as the late working-out of a dispositif present in writing from the first: the Word, God, the Law.)
God today is automatic automatism.
I ask my question, thinking also, why Norbert Wiener and cybernetics in the feedback from the tool to the hand? Isn’t the automatism of the marketplace as conceived and promoted by the neoliberal thought collective here in play? Like a projection of the projection transferred to the projector—cinema.
Greg asks for clarification. He doesn’t get the leap to market neoliberalism. But we talk later … and tend to agree. Particularly when it comes to cinema’s intrication in the market. That is that the market does not exist.
After this, Koichiro-san announces that the sponsors of the event will be presenting their product for trial and for sale: JT.
JT is of course Japanese Tobacco.
The product is e-cigarettes, using small capsules, englobing the drug / flavour of choice.
Christoff comes up and says, I like that your last question was followed by the introduction of … the market.
That there is nothing ironic and not even critical in the Japanese attitude to an academic event being sponsored by a tobacco company seems to me to be quintessentially Japanese. It acts as a reflector to all those oddly proxy attitudes of censure built on ressentiment—an American later declared, on finding out that the sponsor was JT, that maybe he oughta leave right now.
…
The catering as usual was great for lunch. Was it bento today? I think it was Katsu chicken bento. If it was, it came from a nearby restaurant that Koichiro-san had approached. Again, this opposing movement to abstraction of localising and terroir—eating from the territory. It is opposed in its intention.
…
Kondo Kazunori:
It is 1300km to Kondo … Kazunori-san has written on Cavaillès—mathematician and Victor Delbos—his two books on Spinoza.
He offers a textual survey, which he calls an archeology, of Deleuze’s notion of immanence. It’s difficult and unrelenting stuff, and he quotes extensively in French and then subsequently in English from his sources. It’s also admirable, but sometimes seems to suffer from the presumption of scientism that comes from the accumulation of proofs, as well as an accent that is reading rather than speaking from a pre-prepared text in English.
Léon Brunschvig 1869-1944 – the first pairing cited, immanence and transcendence distinguished between as the difference between the “directions of the two beliefs towards God.”
André Laland 1867-1964 – Kant’s “transcendent principle” distinguished from the “immanent principle” in Kant.
Deleuze uses ‘immanence’ on its own in regard to Spinoza’s “immanent cause” in the Ethics.
‘Univocity’ is retained throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre. But the first time it is in regard to Spinoza that Deleuze brings univocity thought together with immanence. It is his invention, because univocity is a concept of Duns Scotus.
In Logic of Sense there is immanence of the ‘quasi-cause.’
Deleuze does not originate use of immanence in relation to transcendence (and Kant). But what is original in Deleuze is linking univocity to Spinoza and immanence with univocity.
In Anti-Oedipus “champ d’immanence” appears in association with capitalism.
According to Kazunori-san the second major threshold in the use of ‘immanence’ is its association with Hjemslev.
“Champ d’immanence” is entirely original to Deleuze and Guattari.
Relative immanence is distinguished from pure immanence: relative immanence occurs in relation to transcendence.
1977 marks another threshold in the definition of immanence.
– “Désir et Plaisir” in Two Regimes of Madness;
– Spinoza and Us: Spinoza’s Practical Philosophy;
– Dialogues with Claire Parnet.
Here “champ d’immanence” changes to “plan d’immanence” (usually translated as plane of immanence. But as you can see, there is elision in the French between plan and plane with important consequences.)
In Dialogues with Parnet, there appears the optional clause: either plane of consistency or plane of immanence. They may not be the same thing but they are presented together.
It is ‘plane of consistency’ again in Spinoza and Us. Here it could also be a ‘plane of immanence’ as well.
Anne asks whether the cut of a threshold in the use of these notions begins a new continuity, as in a rhizome, where the cut of a threshold is a new beginning.
Kazonori-san answers that the plane is folded with the singularity. He draws a picture of a wavy line on the curve crossed by a straight line, which is the singularity of a threshold cutting across the wave but also at the fold.
I ask whether Deleuze gives reliable or adequate representation of his concepts. Is there a correspondence between terms and concepts in Deleuze? Joe Hughes calls Deleuze a “surly interlocutor.” Perhaps he is an unreliable narrator, unreliably narrating, and initiating a mobility of terms, which do not necessarily cleave—at least not at all rigorously, as has been presented—to their concepts?
Kondo Kazonori-san’s answer is that there are patterns. There are in fact three.
Uno Kuniichi-sensei has arrived at lunch. He is wellknown to many of the professors, including Anne, who introduces him to Greg.
The theme of his presentation is that Deleuze and Guattari—either unfortunately or fortunately—contrast the Eastern sagesse of thinking with figures with the Western philosophy of thinking with concepts. The figure is inadequate to the concept; Eastern wisdom does not arrive at philosophy, identified with the creation of concepts—autochthonous in Greece, @5th century BCE.
Western ego is contrasted with Eastern figure. Do they hold a notion of the soul in common?
The soul sees war as struggle in combat. While the East flows.
Figure in East and concept in West: a rhizome of flow.
Hegel provides an image of the sensible, that is a symbol: only spirit can grasp the concept.
Kuniichi-sensei makes the point of Hegel’s symbol being almost like a figure.
He cites the translation by Andrew Cole of vorstellen as “picture-thinking.”
For some reason I note: first there is externalisation of relation, then internalisation of relation, in subjectivation(production of a subject).
And: making a thought in the encounter with cinema’s non-feedback in non-cybernetic imagery. (The inclusion of Norbert Wiener in Greg’s presentation is still worrying me, thanks to Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.)
The figure is a disaster.
“We see the damage the figure has done.”
“What is the figure of the Orient? And then the figure of the Orient in relation to the immanence of Deleuze and Guattari?”
The sense here is that the figure does not and perhaps cannot reach immanence.
Izutsu’s book [sic?] on Eastern religions is cited.
Zen immaculates beings from the all. (Compare this with the obscenity of the tree root in Sartre’s novel Nausea.) Zen launches the all into chaos.
“The concept belongs to the philosophy of the West and the figure to the wisdom of the East.”
Perhaps, from excessive use or misuse of the figure, a singular translation has been elaborated in the East.
For Hegel the Figure blocks the East from forming concepts.
However, there is another type of the figure in Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation, which differs from that of Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?
The figure found in Francis Bacon’s painting bears no relation to the wisdom of the East invoked by Deleuze and Guattari.
Kuniichi-sensei elaborates Bacon’s disfigurement and distortion and damage to the figure in his figuration on a coloured plane.
Isolation deformation dispersion modulation – captured: to make visible the invisible forces in a
matter of fact
all that is on the plane of sensation
Bacon’s figure has the same name as what is observed as the opposite of the concept.
The haptic, the manual or tactile aspects of Bacon’s painting, is distinct from the optical or purely optical.
“In the spatial zone of closeness, the sense of sight behaves just like the sense of touch, experiencing the presence of the form and ground at the same place.” – Maldiney.
Deleuze discovers his own East and deterritorialises the figure—it has become a sign of the outside.
Bergson: the figure is like fabulation. Its sensory surplus enters into the supersensory.
Figure appears in the encounter of the finite with the infinite.
In Difference and Repetition thought without image is figured by Antonin Artaud.
Artaud says to himself, I cannot think. His is a thought that constantly turns about a point of pain and impossibility.
The Artaudian thinking machine seems to lose all image.
Figures appear in Artaud’s poems (the poems are articulated in and by figures): 1921 stones become figures.
Artaud lost the image but he did not lose the figure—not reserved to the theatrical figure and to a theatre of cruelty.
The thinking body and the theatre of a body in crisis defines the theatre of cruelty.
Artaud, in being done with the judgement of God, puts an end to the institution of thought. (The institution of thought might be identified with the concept.)
The “figure works the thought—more real than an image; less abstract than a form.” And: “less visible than an image.”
The immanent and intensive use of the figure of Artaud’s invention does not contradict that of Bacon. It is another figure than that invoked in relation to the wisdom of the East.
He suffers from the transcendence.
– there is certainly a transcendence of the figure;
– from the beginning of Buddhism there has been a strong immanentism in combat with Hindu transcendentalism: a place of immanence of oneself—emptiness and nothingness;
– a betrayal of immanence.
Nietzsche and Spinoza arrive at immanence by introducing an intense seduction of life. In Artaud, it is by thinking the unthinkable, by figures, that a singular body, a body without organs puts an end to the judgement of God.
Matter, genesis, sincerity, haptics, fragile, fluctuating, harmony of sorts …
… it is possible the figure is crucial for immanence.
Kuniichi-sensei’s presents a poetics—could it be anything else?—of the figure, reticulated around the physical and mental alienation to thought suffered by the body in pain, the mind in pain of Artaud.
I try to form a question: I start by saying that I am a fan of the damage done by the figure. Although without the context of Minus Theatre, and its method of decomposition, this statement on its own does nothing.
Immanence seems to be articulated as an agonism in Artaud.
Is immanence which can be said of the immanentist aspects of (Zen) Buddhism, equally agonistic?
Before Kuniichi-sensei can answer, Anne, who is now sitting opposite me, repeats agonism? Qu’est-que ça veut dire? Agonisme?
Oui, ç’est agonisme. Someone confirms.
She does not seem happy with the question.
Kuniichi-sensei’s translator, assisting him, repeats the question in Japanese to him. It is the same person who translated for the students presenting their work in the exhibition associated with the Camp and Conference.
I back up the question with the background of Western agonism—the tradition of trials and struggle—supposed to fit the spiritual hero for enlightenment. This also extends to the mortification of the flesh and austerities of all sorts which are still visited on Western peoples. (I am aware of a variation of this tradition in so-called Eastern wisdom: and I am thinking also of Zhuang-zi and traditions of rupture through laughter, through dancing, which is again Nietzschean, music and trance—all of which Japan participates in.)
Kuniichi-sensei answers that there are also trials in Buddhism.
I ask more generally about Hijikata Tatsumi, inventor of Ankoku Butoh.
Kuniichi-sensei answers he spoke many times and at length with Hijikata about Artaud. Neither one of them shared the almost religious mythologised view of Artaud that was common in Japan at the time. Hijikata’s book is an exploration of immanence, Kuniichi-sensei said.
Immanence can change into transcendence.
“I have to see exactly what happens: when something happens to reverse”… immanence to transcendence, transcendence to immanence.
Two associated questions arise: is enlightenment—in the only sense of reaching a plane of consistency or immanence—singularity, a threshold at which the plane is folded? Or, rhizomatic, a cut commencing a new series?
Is immanence—moreover, in this sense—“spiritual” or in thought? i.e. might not the whole confusion over spirituel and d’esprit, between mind and spirit, devolve on this point?
I made a note here on Ainu being the indigenous people of North Japan. There is a picture in the park fronting Chiyoda Arts Centre of the aristocrat whose residence it had been. He is wearing a long atavistic kind of necklace, threaded with stones.
Koichiro-san asks, By what do we receive the figure?
Form, answers Kuniichi-sensei, by the intellectual eye. By the image of sensation.
The haptic is key for understanding the figure. So, I noted, a proxemics is in play, an imperceptible relation between that which was seen… a relational perception.
The link of misosophy, about which Jae asks, with violence: we can only think with some sort of violence. That is in the encounter.
Violence on a more physical dimension detects some undetectable perception—a relation between violence and impossibility.
For Artaud it is the impossibility of thinking, this violence. The unthinkable became some sort of figure very concretely—the stone, the Stone.
A background appears on the screen where Kuniichi-sensei has been showing quotations. Anne: Dürer’s mother. No, says Koichiro-san: Spinoza, the hypotenuse.
I approach Kuniichi-sensei after the presentation. I tell him of our friend in common. He says, You are from Brazil? No, I say. Not a good time for Brazil, he says.
After this Koichiro-san addresses me as Simon-sensei. I treasure this moment.
I leave for Akasaka, to which Chiyoda Line provides a direct route. J. flies in today. We meet at Hotel Felice, the corridor above. And pictured also is our first meal two doors down from the hotel.
18 June 2019: Chiyoda Arts Centre – National Noh Theatre – Yoyogi
Koichiro Kokubun asks, Does schizophrenia remain the key concept in understanding Deleuze and Guattari?
Psychosis was not sufficiently analyzed because inaccessible to psychoanalysis.
In oppressive excess—neurosis ensues.
Kokubun-san makes three “completely indefensible” hypotheses:
1) the 19th century is neurosis;
2) the 20th century is schizophrenia;
3 the 21st century is autism.
As in previous sessions, there is a possible confusion within the epistemological field of psychoanalysis, if not the field of philosophy, of ontology with the field itself, or the horizon and conditions of its appearance: the pathology that is diagnosed—is it a thing? Is it something—an existent?
Domination of (father’s) authority—malfunction of discipline—liberation of individual—gives to 20th century psychosis.
W.H. Auden calls the early 20th century the Age of Anxiety.
“your perception of the world presupposes what you do not perceive.”
“the part of the object I do not see I posit as visible to others.”
—this is from Deleuze’s work on Tournier’s Robinsonnade: “A World Without Others.”
And: “the margins of the world disappear” on a desert island or in a world without others. “I am nothing other than my past … past is not present for me. No self without others.”
Shin’ichiro Kamagaya:
our next speaker, was born in 1977 with cerebral palsy. He suffered procedures of normalisation as a child and found them physically painful, and “as you see,” he says, from his motorised wheelchair, “they did not work.”
He first practiced as a pediatrician and in 2001 began work on autism using a method developed in Japan called Tojisha-kenkyu.
The method came out of the paradigm shift to coexistence with disabled people in the 1980s. The person with disabilities should not have to change. It is rather society which must change.
Shin’ichiro notes the differences between a social model of “disability” and a medical model of “impairment” and the friction between the two.
Co-production or participatory or user-led research—with the ‘subject’ of the research, that is ‘tojisha’ participation—tojisha-kenkyu developed in 2001 from the work of the group Schizophrenics Anonymous, which had begun the year before, in 2000. It was therefore started by schizophrenics.
The beautiful distinction is made between disempowerment in the sythesising of different viewpoints and empowerment in the juxtaposition of different narratives to form a polyphony.
Tojisha-kenkyu has 5 steps:
1) assuming a metacognitive position, of myself as others see me;
2) putting my problems into words and sharing them with others;
3) making up hypotheses about why we are living like this;
4) experimentation in how to live of the tojisha where failure disappears and where failure is an important resource to update our hypotheses;
5) testing and updating our hypotheses; building up a shared database: giving rise to manuals, worksheets and a literature in tojisha-kenkyu.
Individual characteristics indicate impairments. But the social dimension exists between people.
Autism is the misfit here because communicative disorders of miscommunication cross both social and medical lines: autism is both impairment and disability at once.
“We cannot ask whether there is a cause on the part of society, if we adopt ‘impairment of social interaction’ as our definition of autism.” The medical definition of autism has to be replaced.
In the last several decades the number of diagnoses of autism has increased by 3000 per cent. Academic research cannot explain it. A biological explanation can only account for a small portion of the diagnosed number.
Another factor for consideration is that the condition expresses itself differently according to the social context. Auditory processing characteristics have been shown to differ between the UK and Japan in the literature. The autism is different from culture to culture.
“It is not an example of a pure natural kind” and calls into question social contract thinking.
Part of autism is socially constructed. The rest is biologically describable.
The approach of “primary deficit in social cognition is not only empirically but also logically problematic.
Theory of mind does not suffice to explain autism because it goes to the sender as well as the receiver in communication.
Variability in autism from place to place is in view of social norms—of communication, registration, sending, receiving.
Local social culture determines autism as a ‘deficit in social cognition.’
A 2010 study by Elinor Ochs and Olga Solomon, “Autistic Sociality” shows Austistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to be socially specific.
Unlike other ‘disabilities,’ ASD people do not have the option of demanding that society change to allow their coexistence with and within it. But they must either be isolated from it or must themselves adapt to it.
Individuation in characteristics amount to an heterogeneity in the symptomatology of austism, quite apart from talking about a ‘spectrum’ of disorders of sociality.
This leads me to wonder about there being a Japanese phenomenology and a Japanese Merleau-Ponty, both for the construction of a perceptual field perputed to belong to the autistic person and for the epistemological construct as well as the ontological speculation which brings autism, in its individuating heterogeneity, to light on these levels, phenomenological, epistemological and ontological.
Social cognition can be divided into identification—sense of self—and autobiographical memory—mentalising, empathy based on self-other discrimination, where sense of self works by “intentional or emotional contagion.” The latter provokes the consideration of similar neuro-atypical others in the case of the autistic individual.
Ayaya Satski is a tojisha-kenkyu researcher with autism. For her, “a familiar face is seen as an assembly of parts.” She has no automatic recognition of either her mother’s face or of her own.
“Unconscious and automaticity” are very important in autism, conscious and unconscious control—this is a very good hypothesis for tojisha-kenkyu’s with autism.
Kokubun Koichiro-san: the hypothesis is connected to capitalism today, to an increase in the diagnosis of ASD.
People go for diagnosis because they fear their own inability or impairment in view of social cognition.
“In order to entrust our perception to others, these others must be similar,” says Koichiro-san.
I’m thinking about narcissism, a narcissism spectrum: depressive cannot escape from self. ASD cannot but. Cannot return (to self).
Is the desert island model—of Deleuze’s “world without others”—a normalising one?
Danilo asks: Is a protected [isolating ASDs from others] better than integration?
Shin’ichiro-san cites the deaf community as rejecting integration: “people with invisible impairments tend to be neglected [by society]; they have to adapt [not society].
The problem is the included minority rather than individuation.
“Mainstreaming” necessitates adaptation.
“Inclusion” ought to cover minority but in practice does not.
Next to speak is Takuya Matsumoto, a very young professor, flicking his fringe from his face.
Eugene Bleuler 1911 described schizophrenic patients as autistic because they were withdrawn from the outside world.
Leo Kanner 1943 described infantile autism from the start as “extreme aloneness,” unlike schizophrenia, of which it was first diagnosed to be a symptom, in which a previously existing relation is disrupted.
The 1970s distinguished autism from schizophrenia.
ASD is a recent development.
1981 Aspergers was recognised as a syndrome and named for him.
1995 Lorna Wing introduced Austistic Spectrum—inclusive of Aspergers.
2011The Wall: Psychoanalysis at the Test of Autism a propaganda film made by Sophie Robert disparages psychoanalysts in France for not distinguishing autism from schizophrenia.
Donna Williams, autistic writer, in Nobody Nowhere, described autism as a battle to “keep out of the world and a battle to join it.”
Lewis Carroll, Louis Wolfson and Raymond Roussel have all recently been diagnosed ASD.
The process of a “minor literature” in minorisation of language in particular is not so much schizophrenic as autistic.
Hypersensitivity to temperature, from which Carroll famously suffered, is part of ASD diagnostics.
Carroll and Artaud are differentiated in The Logic of Sense, the former a writer of the surface, the latter a writer of depth, due to their suffering from different disorders: Artaud schizophrenic, Carroll autistic.
“The problem is not to go beyond the bounds of reason, it is to cross the bounds of reason as a victor. Then one can speak of good mental health.” Deleuze on Wolfson, in Essays Critical and Clinical.
Matsumoto Takuya-san cites Lacan’s the sinthome as useful for understanding ASD.
Is the question one of the radical outside as invoked by Deleuze in Foucault?
…rencontre…encounter… Ritornello … refrain, exists as autistic trope of echolalia, forming a territory. [What about Beckett?]
…
We all followed Koichiro-san through the metro system to the National Noh Theatre.
Here we were introduced in a talk to the ritornello underlying Noh performance—Jo Ha Ku.
Jo—slow plateau of rhythm;
Ha—rapid increase in speed leading to peak;
Ku—abrupt completion of rhythm.
Each performance, each scene in each performance, each movement, down to gesture, in each scene develops in jo ha ku.
The Jo Ha Ku system was formalised in the early 15th century.
In Noh, there is no intention in the actor. The movement, gesture, stylised or natural, just happens. Jo Ha Ku follows the shape of natural impulse. It is spontaneous. Necessary for this spontaneity and naturalness is to cultivate mental nothingness.
The shape of impulse: it has not yet differentiated itself; it is inchoate; it begins not knowing its goal; this leads to an exponential curve of individuation in the movement, gesture, sound—for example birdsong—and its release; then its abrupt completion, as the impulse cancels itself in release.
Noh is between manmade and natural.
Control—but then let it go.
Noh—importantly, and in light of what Hijikata says of Butoh, that it is performed for the dead—is performed for the gods.
We tour the theatre, both auditorium and backstage. The dressing rooms are the series of identical tatami rooms, each with an identical locker, each identical to the one beside it, each one separated by sliding screen, extending in series. Each one is therefore characterless and impersonal. A formal structure is present in the backstage. But this formalism prepares an intensive structure of spontaneous—although formalised—gestures and movements and sounds, a theatrical language, onstage. Separating backstage from onstage is a symbolic threshold marked by a change in the wood of the floor: we were told that we were not to step over this threshold, onto the wood of the stage, even before it reaches the curtain covering the entrance to backstage—not wings because singular, wing—without the special toed white booties.
We were each given a pair of these and came to use them on the practice stage, a replica of the mainstage set up in a rehearsal room, complete with entryway bridge (to wing), stage marked by pillars, bearing a roof—Noh was originally played outside, under the cover of this tithing-house type awning, in shrines (separated from the audience by an empty space—for the gods?) and the traditional backdrop of the pinetree.
The Deleuze|Guattari-campers were split into fives and each group sent to a station situated in and around the practice auditorium. Here we knelt and learnt the basic different techniques for three types of drum used in Noh performances—one played on the left knee, one on the right shoulder, the base drum taipa on a stand with fat wooden drumsticks: each of these is assembled onstage by the player. All are horseskin. Players not only provide a rhythmic background but also vocalisations for the different characters, whooping to a high note for the young woman mask character. We learnt the transverse flute, getting breathless blowing over the hole, learning the most basic trill, again low to high—jo ha ku—the only melodic instrument in the band.
Performances are also accompanied by a chorus of singers in an almost continuous recitative, the origins apparent of Noh in trance, with odd asymmetrical whoops and offkilter rhyhmic and melodic motifs.
At each of the instrumental stations we had to kneel, feet tucked under bums, and make a bowing greeting, and at the giving a bowing thanks. Where this was too painful to sustain—it was—we were allowed to sit cross-legged, but if a camera was present, and at the start and end bow, return to traditional kneeling upright position, spine straight, and head level, keeping the rhythm, coordinating the whoops.
The last station our little group got to was the walking onstage. We put on our white toed slippers, stood in a line. The posture requires feet together, sternum angled to the ground, but head and chin back, to keep the mask—which we were not wearing—facing flat on to the audience. Arms are held out, elbows slightly bent, hands lightly clenched, with thumbs to the frontward plane. The master came around and corrected arms, angle of head and neck, hand rotation, then demonstrated what we were to do: feet are in continuous contact with stage—hollow to resonate when stamped—and toes lift at end of each sliding step.
Approach front stage in the jo ha ku rhythm, slow, accelerating, and performing the gesture of lifting the fan, closed, as if making a strong point to an interlocutor, while keeping arm slightly bent at elbow, moving arm from shoulder, hand lightly clenched. Then both arms, the left as if holding fan, the right hand holding one.
“Lift the fan as if the entire weight of all the air in the room lay on its end.”
Our lessons complete, our ankles bruised from kneeling, we became the audience for a demonstration performance. First the actor was dressed.
He explained in Japanese (translators were supplied who were PhD students for the workshops and a German translator, from Tokyo University, working on Noh, translated into English for this section) that this was embarrassing for him, since he had never been dressed in front of an audience before.
The dressing began with a skull cap and long underwear. The dressers were male, both in male kimono. They moved around the actor attaching and fitting the different parts of the costume for a drowned samurai spirit who makes his entrance at the end of a Noh drama. (Noh is sometimes referred to as the theatre where no one laughs; its sister form (kogyen?) is therefore the satirical form of Noh, using Noh elements—we saw a performance of this type in Hiroshima.) Costumes for Noh are all of the same size and worn by men and women—the acceptance of female performers into Noh is a recent development. Wearing a brilliant blue and gold-splashed stiff skirt-style kimono, the actor explained that this was a new costume but that in the next several hundred years it would develop a more beautiful patina. Costumes are still in use that are over 200 years old.
The final stage in the dressing is donning the mask. The actor said, When I put on the mask, I will no longer speak. My dressers, however, will speak for me.
The mask was only to be touched and held by its edges. The actor disappeared behind it. The dressers fitted him with his long fronded black wig. He has been in the sea, this spirit, so the hair does not need to be neat, but hangs over his face like seaweed.
The actor received his halberd. He retired backstage and the four musicians took their places on the practice stage. We had been told that filming was strictly prohibited during the performance; even the cameras recording the event were lens-capped: it seemed that this was less in reverence or out of tradition and more that the gods would not abide the competition of a technosemiotic eye.
The two dressers took their place stageleft, kneeling, to sing the chorus parts.
The samurai spirit returned to the stage by the bridge leading from backstage through a curtain to stageright. Bearing his halberd, he charged and jumped and raged and postured. The leaps took him off the stage, the surface of which boomed when he landed back onto its resonating surface. The voices of both chorus and musicians whooped and hooted, and the chorus chanted.
The rhythms and interlace of instruments and voices sounded as if each, apart from the recitative chanting (we were told that Japanese do not understand the words), were following his own (all male today) line. Drum. Hoot. Chant. Whoop. High to low flute trill. Leap. Posture. Jo Ha Ku. … like a crazy cart with wheels off-centre at each corner, less moving forward than in chaotic and cacophonous motion, back and forth, side to side, up and down.
The spirit came out again, after the performance finished and offered poses to the camera—as you might see from the snaps above.
R. stayed for dinner in the area, I headed away, relieved to be left to wander the subways and … in fact, I got out at Yoyobi station–on the Oedo Line from Sendagaya–not Yoyobi-Koen, and headed in what I hoped was the right direction, passing finally down the famous clothing market street in Harajuku, Takeshita, turning right, walking walking—I found I had performed a huge circle, and made no progress, but back and forth, side to side, uphill and down.
A handy map informed me I ought to have turned left not right at the end of Harajuku’s famous street, Takeshita (see UFO candy-floss above), which, when I got to it, I did. This took me to the bottom of Yoyogi park and soon I was back by the entrance to Yoyogi Youth Memorial Olympic Hostel. I walked right by to come to the street of food over the railway line. It was around 9.30pm when I bought, starving, after the drumming, the whooping, the walk of Noh, and the circuit I had taken, a ramen, which was heated at the Seven Eleven, and a salad. These I took back to my room. Delicious greasy pork noodles and sesame Japanese spinach.
…
a nice note on the white stones around the perimeter of the Noh stage: there for outdoor performances to reflect light into the masked faces of performers as footlights—now redundant, but retained; the poles define the stage for the masked performer—without them, she or he would not know where the edge of the stage is, the masks difficult to see out of, and the steps at the front of the stage are there just in case he or she misses the edge and tumbles from the stage to get back onto it.
17 June 2019: 3331 Arts Chiyoda Deleuze|Guattari Camp 2019 Tokyo
Director and coordinator of Deleuze|Guattari Studies Asia 7th International Conference 2019, Koichiro Kokubun, introduced Ian Buchanan as the ‘Boss’ of Deleuze Studies and born in the AUS he sang. In this first lecture there were some promising initial moves but these quickly gave way to justification through application of concepts from the collaboration of Deleuze with Guattari—in the first instance the assemblage or, in French, agencement—to reductive examples informed, unquestioningly, by sources from popular scientific writing (Steven Jay Gould) and National Geographic.
Of the initial moves, this might be adduced: do we not sometimes wake up in the middle of the night … screaming. No, not screaming … with the feeling—one I have never been able entirely to shake—that the collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari, to which we have, in some cases, devoted our lives, is a hoax?
The alloplastic stratum might be equated with a technosemiology.
The wheels began coming off around the time the idea of the refrain, as giving the one whistling in the dark (sing They Might Be Giants) the sense of a home away from home, became a home value which has surplus value. This surplus is the extra sense of a space, a dimensionality, that of a dimension to be moved through, because the worst thing is to get stuck. Getting stuck means falling into the black hole, arresting one’s movement in proximity to an assemblage. The surplus is produced out of the labour of whistling, perhaps. So the thinking leading into this reading of surplus value, and that leading from it, back around to the assemblage, works, moves, if not under its own steam. But the value extraction model is highly questionable in its application here.
Deleuze’s answer to Guattari’s black hole—the place in which movement is arrested—is the white wall. The white wall, too, can be a slippery notion: but we can grasp in it the social censure or the group expectation, insofar as they amount to the same thing, entrapping the individual through exclusion, or inclusion with conditions. To be one of us you must … .
If not, you are plunged back into a black hole. The beginnings of psychology—perhaps—where the refrain, that snatch of tune you whistle, becomes a mobile territory, opening out from the inside onto a milieu for further action, and enabling you to pass by way of other assemblages, agencements.
Deleuze’s Cinema 1 permits us to see the shift from a directional layout to one with the attributes of a dimension one can pass through in its transitions from sensory-motor schema—the classic Chaplin motoric vision of stimulus engaging more and more absurdly body-machine-like response, for example, going faster and faster—to Cinema 2”s deep focus (Welles) and time narratives (Antonioni) and characters in suspended action, contemplating their scenery, if not actually chewing it up, where the camera takes on the eye-function in the dimensional scenery of a new kind of filmic assemblage and agencement of image.
Strange things were said: the aboriginal population was so sparse that—“600 people can never do as much damage as [the] 300,000 people who live there now” where once they did, from which land, they have been expunged, effaced, and of which they, with their lives, have been dispossessed.
Cyclists are lions among lambs on footpaths, but lambs among lions on the road. This rivalry, and the liminal position of cycling in view of driving and walking, is where we see the psychology of territorial behaviour at work. But is it Deleuze and Guattari’s? Or is the illustration a motor-schema response to it? Does it thicken and deepen Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, or expunge, efface, and dispossess it of depth?
Next Jae-Yin Kim spoke. Foucault and Deleuze misinterpret Nietzschean genealogy. Deleuze holds that the total critique—all the way to the transformation of values and the creation of concepts—is the only way to philosophise with a hammer. For Deleuze critique is not about the destruction of the adversory’s position. It is rather to regard that position in relation to and as a field of forces, externalising a field, opening from a position, a posture, an attitude onto a field or as Lingis writes of Merleau-Ponty onto a level. But Deleuze brings critique and genealogy together.
Values are differential elements. Genealogy is the creation of these elements. Genealogy is itself an element. …to find, catch, make or create the forces which take possession of … territory, land, money, philosophy.
Forces appropriate a thing. Take it by … force.
All has a history of being appropriated by different forces at different times. All comprises the signs of these appropriations.
We can change all in its constellation by intervening in it and taking it by force, and change its internal form.
All is and can be constituted with new or different forces.
We can destroy only as creators.
But Jae insists here on the untouchability of the past—and does not consider Deleuze’s thinking about time and the past, in its Bergsonian and Nietzschean permutations, its taking by forces that are theirs and then his.
Isn’t Foucault’s distinction between past and history and past, history and genealogy—even as it constitutes and historical method, one, note, one in a multiplicity—here reversed?
“Past is untouchable and cannot be undone.”
Past in the future is the present we can create—the truth of the world to come.
It seems only accessible in the present. Is this Foucault’s and Deleuze’s misinterpretation?
Is truth in question here? Does Foucault, or does Deleuze, really set genealogy to the task of making truths—a truer history, a truer future, a truer past—that is with the moralising understanding of improving our lot in the future?
Anne Sauvagnargues asks … past is something that changes … ?
Jae’s approach, she says, remains theological in stating Nietzsche as origin of genealogy and itself is subject to a reflexive critique. Since in what sense is Jae doing genealogy? Is Nietzschean genealogy as it is presented Ursprung—absolute origin—or Herkunft—the process of transmission to the present—where presumably the action is, and where any intervention will be staged?
Origin or descent?
Jae: “In my life, what is the best thing?” And: “To justify [ourselves] we need art.” Art is a higher form of life.
Gregory Flaxman asks: To what degree does ontology still play a role for you in Deleuze?
He comments that ontology seems to be eternally recurring.
A pattern begins that will be repeated: not just ontology (if one can say “not just ontology”) but the polemical and pedagogical pincers of a double articulation effectuated by the Anne Sauvagnargues series with the Gregory Flaxman series will be produced after so many of the presentations, sometimes to temper, sometimes to tease, sometimes to plunge into cold water, that is, putting the hot metal to the test of a rapid temperature drop … will it shatter? Or will the inner qualities be teased out? … I never saw hammer blows of the philosophical forge. And that is to their credit.
Masaya Chiba—is the first revelation of the Camp—or its first instance of Nihonification, territorialisation in this Japanese context, tuned to it—or toned, and attuned.
He presents in laconic, not to say sardonic, fashion the thesis of his book, Don’t move too much, taken from Deleuze’s phrase, Il ne faut pas bouger de trop.
Vacuoles of noncommunication … les foyers?
Mayasa-san presented through bare statements the “disconnective Deleuze” to oppose the “connective Deleuze” of communitarian interest. That is he laid out in terse terms a current and powerful Japanese reading of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, but Deleuze particularly, as a philosopher of autism.
First came his provocative displacement of Bergson’s prevailing spirit to Hume’s in Deleuze’s oeuvre: of “Humean discontinuity and Bergsonian continuity” the former has more relevance for this interpretation.
“The Deleuzian self-enjoyment is autistic rather than schizophrenic.”
“In Bacon’s ‘figure’ what matters is not only deterritorialisation but also ‘saving its contours’.”
Masaya-san is working with Takuya Matsumoto, a Lacanian at Kyoto, among others on this project, picking up on Lacan’s sinthome—the singularising one.
“There is a relationist and antirelationist divide in Japanese thought.”
Wataru Hiromata, Shinnhichi Nakazawa—are for relationism.
Asada and Azuma—antirelationism.
“Asada and Azuma developed the so-called ‘critique of negative theology’.” This is a critique amounting to a system of thought organised around an X—the impossible.
From Azuma, it is NTS: Negative Theology System.
Lacan’s ‘real’ in RSI (Real Symbolic Imaginary) represents the instance of X.
The impossible organises from the inside of thought—around X—the outside.
Cites Asada’s Structure and Power (1983).
NTS diagrammes movements of instance X:
1) hierarchical movement
2) Klein bottle (endless internal reticulation)
3) rhizomic movement (multidirectional, multidimensional and open)
The fundamental lack in thought (X) is also at the same time excess (X).
Abundance and lack are foregrounded in the West. (Lacan and Bataille for example.) There is no such distinction in Japan. From the Japanese perspective, poststructuralism is concerned with and concerns the Negative Theology System, i.e. it fits within its categories.
Masaya-san moves to the titular terms of his presentation: Hole and Stone. (These will recur as motifs throughout the Deleuze|Guattari Camp.)
Lacan’s lack, impossible, hole, also means ontological abundance of signification. An absence organising an excessive thought, as if thrashing around in confrontation with lack—overproducing, and overcompensating. Or, the withdrawal of Kant’s Ding an Sich.
Another sort of “secret of things,” stopping the infinity of interpretation (stopping the hermeneutic bicycle wheel turning) is stone secret.
Hole secret is nonsense with … sense!
Stone secret is nonsense without sense: reality of the radical finitude of being.
Tony See spoke then, taking, perhaps to the chagrin of some, his cue from Heidegger: “The Orient does not thing.”
But, although this too is a problem, according to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy was brought to Greece by immigrants. Strangers. Asians, even.
Tony cited the 3 ecologies of Guattari as providing something of a solution to our current impasse—largely thought to be that of humanity confrontation with extinction, its own—psychic, social and environmental economies.
These three are linked by abstract machines.
An ecosophy.
Gregory Flaxman comment to Why Greece? Well for the very reason of environment! Distance from Persian empire. Cyclonic. Waves crash on the shore .. a fire burns … friends of wisdom get together…
Ruth Irwin comments, since her cue comes from Heidegger as well, that in order to get past this impasse—thought largely to entail something that is not happening, rather than what is—we have to stop thinking from failure and fault … and one might add guilt and resentment.
But I wonder if this is also (as if) to bring finitude very close to being a fault and a failure—we poor mortals; and aligning it with a negativity against the human? Or is it against the planet?
The question of finitude—is it a hole or a stone secret?
…
I have wholly failed to mention the subject to which is given the bulk of these snaps: an exhibition specifically for the Deleuze|Guattari Asia event, at Chiyoda Arts Centre, presented by students.
What was great about this was that the students presenting works could and did speak at length and with seriousness about their approaches to both Deleuze and Guattari and making art. There was no question of a polemic or a reaction, a shitting on the source, or a diminution of one’s own status in view of it. No need.
A painter referred to the theory of the haptic in Logic of Sensation.
A sculptor to the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus.
The bed you see at a weird angle, takes off from Masaya-san and a disconnective Deleuze.
Tamsin Shaw on “The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops”
Reading Shaw’s article in the New York Review of Books I reach a point where the question seems to be begged. This is not the same as raising questions.
Shaw raises questions around the ethics of dual-use research: research that has a potential military application as well as an application in civil society. She cites Martin Seligman’s research into “learned helplessness”, electrocuting dogs into a state of obliviousness to repeated shocks, and the psychological theories of depression and resilience that came from it. She cites the positive psychology movement Seligman founded and its research into love–and resilience, and other positive personality traits. She cites the turn funding took, under Seligman’s initiative, after 11 September 2001, to diversity research as a counter to the tendency to contract and magnify diverse viewpoints into the single worldview of extremism. She cites the boost given this strain of research, ostensibly concerned with human well-being, by the datasets available from social media–the Big Data enabled by machine surveillance.
Shaw also cites the net benefit of research with a potential for and with real high human cost–hence net in cost-benefit terms, that undertaken into tumours and the effects on the human body of radioactivity in military weapons, with its payoff in cancer treatments. The same sort of net benefit can be seen from research into diseases caused by military-grade bio-agents, in the manufacture of weaponised viruses, which she cites.
Citing these reversals and their reversals, from resilience under psychological torture, to resilience as a personal survival technique, from biological weapons to techniques of resisting infectious disease, from love technique, to love technique, and back, Shaw shows there is an assumption at work about the capacity of humans for rational thought: “a great deal of contemporary behavioral science aims to exploit our irrationalities rather than overcome them.” The dual-use research concerned with technologies of behavioural modification, persuasion, influence or nudging, assumes a constituency available to be so directed, controlled, even to their benefit, and manipulated. It assumes, for our erstwhile democracies, a nonrational constituency–the community of those who do not know better; the community of those who do not know at all.
The question-begging comes down to this notion of the individual rational agent, the responsible voter, as a presumption of the democratic setup and as being presupposed by the positive ethical field of political democracy. (It need not be pointed out that economics, as the science, pseudoscience, developed under the auspices of such as the Chicago School, support the assumption of nonrational choice, but is that economics then anti-democratic?)
