Notes on Deleuze’s ‘The Fold’ resulting from the work being done as I attend the excellent new reading group hosted by Matthew Dennis at Goldsmiths College, with thanks to him for the opportunity to study the work and for the others at the group for stimulating and interesting conversations.
Matthew Dennis made some introductory remarks when we first met for the reading group and noted that one of the first things encountered in the book is the architectonic metaphor of the room with two levels. Dennis rightly, I think, drew our attention to the way this particular image can stand in conversation with the Platonic cave. We can articulate two philosophical dynamics or views by allowing these images to stand as the organising centres of thought.
Curiously I had tended to glide over the image on this reading of the text. I’ve read ‘The Fold’ numerous times before, only gradually getting to grips with its peculiarities and only recently feeling even slightly familiar in its surroundings. The familiarity of the image had perhaps encouraged its disappearance in my horizon, in that common effect of presentation whereby the common becomes the invisible. It was good to have this foregrounded, therefore and in the course of such foregrounding to have my own familiarities de-familiarised. I had been reading straight past the image – but what then had I been reading?
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3 Minute Consciousness Mash Up
Confronted by an ever more absurd state power, we shall speak no more LE MONDE | 16.03.09
bwo Multitudes-infos list/ Frederic Neyrat
bwo the nettime list / trans Patrice Riemens
For four month now, the legal & media spectacle titled “The Tarnac affair” won’t come to an end. Was Julien Coupat to come out of prison for Christmas? For New Year’s Eve then? Or would Friday the 13th be his lucky day? No. In the end ‘we’ will keep him a bit longer in jail, locked into his new role as ‘leader of an invisible cell’.
Since a few people in power appear to have an interest in letting this charade go on, even beyond the limits of the grotesque, for the sake of collective clarification, we will have to take once more the garb that has been knit for us (”the 9 from Tarnac”).
Well then.
Firstly. As journos were burrowing into our garbage cans, the cops were fingering our assholes. Not the funniest of experience. For months you have been opening our mail, eavesdropping our phones, harassing our friends and video-tapping our homes. And you delectate in these actions. We, the ‘nine’, we endure them, like so many others. We have been atomised by judicial procedures, nine times one single individual, whereas you are one administration, one police force, and the one and whole logic of one system. As we stand now, we have been double-dealt, and the stake is already erected. So please don’t expect us to play cricket. Read the rest of this entry »
As a pedagogic device for working on NVC the suggestion I made to my students is that a series of ‘themes’ are identified which then provide a backbone for ‘indexing’ some of the content with a view to building up a ground for exegetical work. The idea would be to take each theme - or at least a selection of them - and find relevant passages within the text in order to then have a focused selection from the text to think about. Obviously these themes interlock but the need to ‘ignore’ some things to focus on others is a methodological tool, enabling us to gain some focus before perhaps expanding again. (This is not, by any means, a comprehensive list of the themes that might be extracted from NVC, nor even a list of the themes which might be thought to be the ‘most central’ or ‘most obvious’. It arises from a particular class and discussion and as such is located in that context is intended to be added to and improved through discussion). Read the rest of this entry »
Klossowski – Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle - Reading notes for Ch.s 3-5
(These notes are partially exegetical for students and partially exploratory for myself).
CH3
The ‘Eternal Return’ is the thought experiment from Nietzsche, the central presentation of which is found in ‘The Gay Science’, S.341 and runs as follows:
‘The heaviest weight. - What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?’
In the ‘Will to Power’ #1066 Nietzsche makes a more argumentative presentation although it is still in the form of a hypothetical, a thought experiment (note the opening - ‘If the world may be thought…’ which is akin to saying ‘Just suppose for the sake of argument…’ and then setting up an argument of the If…then… format which I have inserted into the text in italics in this case. If we pay attention to this way of arguing we can see that it is both very compressed and contains a chain of implications from a basic ontological model. The paragraph could be unpacked by trying to reconstruct the line or argument – in other words by trying to make explicit all possible suppressed premises.): Read the rest of this entry »
I have popped in and out of Second Life at various points over the last four years and keep a client on my laptop which usually needs to be updated each time I log each because of the infrequency of those occasions. I love online environments in many ways but never found anything of any interest in SL, with the graphics being rather crappy and the whole interaction thing seeming to be dominated by rather puerile and sex-obsessed masturbators or geeks. I did hope to find places where there might be some interesting discussion, such as the Philosophy House for example, but they tended to disappoint and eventually I decided that it might simply be that I was not devoting enough time to breaking through the ‘n00b‘ barrier when it came to SL but I also knew that nothing motivated me to do so. Compared to Warcraft, for example, neither the ‘fun’ nor the desire element are there for me in SL. To be honest nothing I’d seen there impressed me culturally or intellectually either.
I popped in again this week, having come across a piece online about a version of Macbeth and for once was pleased to have done so. A brief scoot around made me want to come back and that’s the first time I’ve actually been motivated to explore a little. TBH the interaction is pretty basic and some of the write-ups by the artist / constructor read like secondary school (High School?) teaching notes for the dumb but there is enough other material there to make me interested. It made me think again about what other things I might be missing, not least in terms of places where there might be some online philosophy discussion or collaborative work open to the general bod and so if anyone has any suggestions for interesting places to visit please drop me a SLURL in the comments or if you have an avatar and wanna offer some general advice I would love to hear from you. I don’t think it’s gonna take away from my time with Bauris and my other alts in Warcraft, but it would be interesting to finally find something in SL. I’m Razorsmile Hesse in SL btw…
Reading Chapters 1 and 2 of NVC we come fully and squarely up against the peculiarity of Klossowski’s text. The discussion interprets and does so using a swathe of textual evidence but the interpretation is not a gentle teasing out of an argument, a kind of ‘efficient paraphrasing’, rather it is a positioned interpretation. That is, it offers a reading of Nietzsche that attempts to articulate a position with regards the body of Nietzsche’s work. That is to say, it both suggests a reading of Nietzsche that is a ’cause’ (ie; what Nietzsche says ‘comes first’ and our understanding is the effect of this) and it offers a reading of Nietzsche that makes Nietzsche an ‘effect’ of the reading (such that the reading ‘comes first’ and only through this reading do we come to understand Nietzsche). This curious ambiguity means that the reading is offering a ‘way of reading’. It is, as it were, intended to make us see Nietzsche’s work in a particular way. The danger, of course, is in distorting (’doing violence to’) the Nietzschean corpus. The question is, what are we to make of Klossowski’s reading? If we were to assess it simply on its textual accuracy, whether it is that ‘efficient paraphrase’ so beloved of secondary academic texts (Introductions to …) then we would miss the performative aspect of Klossowski’s reading, the way in which he wants to do something with the corpus and make it do something anew. Of course we have to allow that Klossowski has a desire to bring some truth to light rather than assume he is trying to mislead us or merely ‘read Nietzsche for his own purposes’ but to do so we have to acknowledge that in some way it is only through making Nietzsche into his own that Klossowski can reveal something interesting about Nietzsche. It is because of this peculiar reciprocity between Nietzsche’s corpus and Klossowski’s reading of it that we should perhaps speak of the ‘Klossowskian-Nietzschean’ (K-N) account offered in NVC rather than think of the book as merely an ‘interpretation’ of Nietzsche in the weak sense of paraphrase.
What is it that Klossowski pushes to the fore then? There is a distrust of thinking as a pure and moral capacity within Klossowski that he wishes to draw out of Nietzsche and pursue. This is grounded in a tension between the individual as thinker and the society of which they are a product. The terms Klossowski uses are the gregarious and the singular (NVC: 4) where the gregarious is the name given to the social aspect and the singular the name given to that which opposes or comes into conflict with the social. The social is above all formed in the context of language, or the ‘code of everyday signs’ and the tension can be understood as one between an immediacy located in the ’singularity that we are’ and a mediation of that singularity in the ‘code of everyday signs’. Roughly speaking we might think of this as a situation in which we are somehow trapped in language. Each time we try and think or express something, in particular each time we try and express our ‘depth’ (present the ‘true self that we are’, though this phrase is highly troublesome) we are betrayed by language.
This way of presenting things of course assumes that there is some way in which we are which can be betrayed. It would suggest, for example, that there is a real or true (we might say, following Heidegger, an ‘authentic’) self which we cover over and betray (fail to express) simply because any act of expression mediates the immediate. We might want to fall back on means of expression that aren’t linguistic and suggest that art, perhaps, is a means of authentic expression of the immediacy that is our depth precisely because it isn’t caught within the ‘code of everyday signs’. If we do this, however, we need to be careful to avoid an obvious problem - if we ‘read’ an artwork as expressing something more truthfully, and this ’something’ is taken to be a meaning, then for Klossowski-Nietzsche it looks like we will fall back into the code of everyday signs because the code of everyday signs is not simply language but meaning itself. Meaning is mediation and any search for meaning falls into the position of betraying our depth which is outside of any meaning. Klossowski-Nietzsche claim that “our depth is unexchangeable because it does not signify anything” (NVC: 31). Are we not left at a dead-end then? Can we simply not say or express anything since there is no meaning? This would amount to a form of quietism, of a giving up in the face of a nihilistic understanding of life and the social. This, i think, would be a mistake and a mis-reading of K-N because it would make it difficult to understand the ‘combat’ which it seems is central to the ethical drive of NVC.
The first chapter, in which we find the ‘Combat against Culture’, supposes that there is something of interest in the conflict between the unexchangeable depth of the singular and the gregarious leveling of the social. If the social is a form of indoctrination, an imposition of a morality that commonly makes thinking and the thinker / philosopher into little more than lie-makers that produce ways in which the social can reproduce itself to the detriment of the singular, then where does the impulse or force of the singular come form. Do we posit something like an original singularity to each ’subject’ which is then swallowed up in the social? Where did this singularity come from, what produced it? It would be a mistake, I believe, to attribute some ‘original subjectivity’ to K-N. Instead we will find the ‘depth’ described as chaos, as a flux or soup of impulses, a chaos that is formed into a singularity. The ‘formation’ of this singularity is what we need to investigate and what K-N will do so through the concept of ‘formations of sovereignty’ found later in NVC. Roughly speaking, the singular is nothing other than a formation of sovereignty in which one impulse (drive, force, instinct are all analogous concepts although not identical) triumphs over another. The “affects are enslaved by other affects - and not (at least not initially) by the affects of other individuals but by those within the same individual” (NVC: 10). It is not the social that ‘imposes’ itself on the singular but rather the singular that trains itself into becoming a ‘reasonable, rational and competent individual (member of society)’. We train ourselves to be slavish, we are not trained and imposed upon by some ‘oppressive’ force from outside. Consciousness triumphs over desire and we become reasonable people (NVC: 10).
(more on Ch 1 and 2 to come)
If one of the first impressions on reading NVC is that something like a ‘psycho-analysis’ is being done then it is worth asking why this impression occurs and what relation to Freud exists. That it should be, in a sense, relatively uncontroversial to suggest NVC ‘reads like’ a psycho-analytic text comes from the emphasis of the biological, biographical and historical interpretation of ‘forces at work’ in Nietzsche, an emphasis on these bio-facts rather than on the texts that resulted. The texts are to be read as expressions of something underneath, something which we might encounter a little like we encounter the unconscious. Texts become symptoms to interpret, something with which to diagnose the ‘real’ or ‘important’ forces that are the ‘truth’ of Nietzsche’s work.
This, however, brings us close to one of the first difficulties. If we take a Freudian psycho-analytic interpretation to occur, as it were, from ‘outside’ the subject then close attention to Klossowski would suggest that the exact opposite is the practice of NVC. For example, in psycho-analytic practice / interpretation the relation of the analyst / interpreter to the analysand / interpreted is crucially important. The establishment of transference, the encounter with an ‘Other’ and the centrality of what i would call the ‘relation as revealing’ suggests a prime importance is given to a kind of sociality. We might say that for psychoanalysis, it is in our ‘being-with’ (mitsein) we find our being. The analyst / interpreter justifies their position on the basis that the addition of their position is necessary to establish this being-with which is a precondition of finding the truth of the analysand /interpreted. This sociality, this being-with, however, is a being-with of subjects and subjects are constituted as language speaking, meaning using beings. Being-with reveals being because it is a kind of ‘being with meaningful beings’. If this seems obscure then let me put it in more colloquial terms.
Take being-with to be ’sociality’. The claim is something like ‘the way we are with others reveals the way we are’. Thus sociality is just this ‘being with others’ but it is in this ‘others’ that the presupposition can slip through, the metaphysical contraband. To see this think of the situation in which the others are animals, not ‘humans’. The distinction is important because it is as meaning using beings that we place ‘humans’ in a privileged and unthought position of social pre-eminence. Why is it, for example, that the dog you talk to or the cat you confess to cannot play the role of an analyst / interpreter? It is because they cannot offer this ‘mirror of meaning’, they cannot play the role of an analyst because they cannot talk. It is not what an analyst says, of course but the fact that they could say which enables them to play the role they do. It is not that the analysand talks which makes analysis the ‘talking cure’ but rather that the analysand talks to someone who can hear, by which we mean someone who can also talk (and talk back).
How, then, does NVC differ from psychoanalysis?
A good example to students all across the world - I encourage my own students to consider such Direct Action when faced with the increasing attempts to commercialise and commodify education and culture
New School In Exile
Websites with information on the Tarnac9:
the US support committee - http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/
the main French support site - http://www.soutien11novembre.org/
fragments from ‘Introduction to Civil War’ - http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/v21/tiqqun.php
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10. Civil war is the free play between forms-of-life; it is their principle of co-existence.
…
12. The point of view of civil war is the point of view of the political.
(from ‘Introduction to Civil War‘)
