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.
