notebookeleven

Report from Volcanic Lines reading group, Monday 22nd January 2007

The essay in question for this session was ‘The Method of Dramatization’, contained in ‘Desert Islands and other texts:1953-1974′; Semiotext 2004:94-116.  I gave a short introduction, not really a paper but simply a set of thoughts and notes intended to begin the discussion…you can find the notes from my introduction and the discussion that followed over here.

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Let’s begin by looking at the ‘natural attitude’.  In the ‘Ideas’ (class reader extracts), sections 27, 28, 29 and 30 contain the core outline of the ‘natural attitude’ (NA) that will concern us at the moment.

Before going any further let me give a ‘pre-philosophical’ definition: the NA is that attitude in which we normally stand, the way in which we go about our life, prior to all questioning of what we are doing or thinking.  The NA is like the unquestioned life, as it were.
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odilon_redon_originofvision

Originally uploaded by razorsmile.

On Wednesday this week (24th Jan) in the MA Seminar I spoke about the role of images within ‘Difference and Repetition’ (DR). They are important because the thought of difference that Deleuze is developing within DR is a ‘difference before identity’ and our thought patterns and culture are so imbued with ‘identity’ thinking that it can be strange to try and think of a primary ontological difference. The beginning of Chapter 1 of DR (Difference in itself) is ripe with a series of images, from the lightning flash, the black indeterminacy as against the white indeterminacy, as well as Goya and Odilon Redon in reference to ‘chiaroscuro’. The image here is from Odilon Redon and is called ‘The origin of vision’. In it I find something of this dark chaotic difference that is the primary ontological category and the ‘individuation’ (coming to be) of an object or organ before it’s integration into any sort of system of organisation that might constitute a ‘full identity’. The single eye and the feathered surroundings that appear like the eyelashes catch a sense of an almost fetishistic vision, one in which we catch sight of things not through a simple appearance but precisely because the thing, our interests and the relations between them constitute an individuation from out of a chaotic set of forces that is difference in itself.
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So in Lecture 2 I talked about the act/content distinction and the way it’s set-up within Husserl, with a view to understanding the critical role of a thought-content for our later investigations into Husserl’s phenomenological method. These are notes from that lecture and are a quite quick and ‘formalised’ account of Husserl. In other words, the account I’m presenting is a specific version intended to guide us in our reading – it is not a detailed nor a particularly critical account. There could be some radical alternatives found in other presentations and there are a number of features – notably to do with what we might call ‘linguistic referentials’ or ‘things the words refer to’ – that I’m glossing over quite heavily here. The point of lectures like this is not to give you a full and finished account but to open up the texts for you to read yourself and develop a critical understanding of. If something I’m saying here and something you think after reading Husserl doesn’t seem to match then ask in the seminars. We will also be returning to some of the same distinctions numerous times as we fill in our understanding through the ongoing discussion of Husserl and the Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s development of phenomenology in their own directions.

Let’s begin then by recalling the elements Husserl draws from Franz Brentano. (Here I am drawing on an account given in the book Husserl by David Bell, Routledge 1990 – for further reading you are welcome to turn here, in particular to the first section of Bell’s book ‘Prolegomenon’).

Remember, Husserl’s two big influences are the foundations of mathematics (what makes it secure and certain as a form of knowledge) and the newly forming science of psychology. Brentano, then, is part of the psychological legacy within Husserl. Brentano argued that:

• CLAIM1: all phenomena are mental phenomena
• CLAIM2: mental phenomena are acts with content

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Phenomenology begins with the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). His project develops out of an attempt to understand the basis of mathematics as well as an engagement with the (at that time) newly formed science of psychology. Philosophically, however, it can be seen as a critical point in the development of philosophy. From Descartes onwards, modern philosophy was dominated by something we can refer to as the ‘Epistemological Project’. As its name suggests, this placed the emphasis of philosophy on discovering the forms of knowledge (epistemology – theory of knowledge), but it did this with certain commonly agreed preconceptions. The ‘Epistemological Project’ refers to the attempt to discover the forms of knowledge by searching for two key things:

• Foundations
• Certainty (the ‘quest for certainty‘, a notion derived from John Dewey’s work ‘The question of certainty’ from 1935)

Descartes ‘cogito’, for example, is proposed as an answer to the epistemological problem because Descartes thinks he has discovered the foundation of all knowledge in the certainty of the ‘cogito ergo sum’. The method of doubt reveals that the concern is with certainty in that it rejects anything that can be doubted precisely because it can be doubted. It was not, however, simply the rationalists who were part of the ‘Epistemological Project’ – the empiricists, from Hume onwards, were also constrained by similar concerns even though their attempt to resolve the problems of knowledge used radically different methods.

Both rationalists and empiricists are located inside the ‘Epistemological Project’ through their concept of ‘the given’ (ie; something that is ‘given to us’ rather than ‘created by us’ and thus liable to distortion by opinion). Something is needed, goes the argument, that can be taken as the ‘absolutely given’ and thus the starting point for building up our knowledge. This ‘given’ is to be found, the rationalists and empiricists think, by examining subjective appearances – in other words, by examining that which is given to the subject.

• For Descartes and the rationalists the given is thoughts
• For Hume and the empiricists the given is impressions or sensations

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Following the reading of Alain Badiou’s ‘Clamour of being’ that we undertook as the first task of the Volcanic Lines – deleuzian research group at Greenwich University, I recently re-read Alberto Toscano’s interesting review of Badiou ‘Clamour’ and his ‘Manifesto’.  This piece dates back to 2000 when it appeared in the Warwick University journal ‘Pli’.  It concludes with a set of four tasks, which Toscano frames in terms of the responses Deleuzians might need to make to Badiou, tasks that still seem to me very resonant and which perhaps might frame the key moments of an attempt to think through Deleuze.  Part of the resonance, no doubt, results from the fact that the first two of these tasks are ones that I intuitively agree with and which I think I took up, somewhat unconsciously, within my doctoral thesis.  They have continued to maintain their presence as the main focus of my reserach.  The fascinating point, for me at least, comes in the third point however. 

Recently I have turned to begin thinking the ‘political’ in relation to Deleuze and this was, at least in part, the subject of a presentation I gave to the conference on Deleuze we held at Greenwich last July.  There I began to try and think a concept of the ‘human bomb’ that derived from a kind of struggle to use a Deleuzian method to articulate contemporary political actions.  The paper provoked a quite hostile response from some attending, which was gratifying to a degree, but did become blocked in some ways through an underlying difficulty, that of thinking an action, in some sense, ‘beyond justification’, that is, an action that appears both ‘beyond justification’ in ‘good sense’ (unjustified) and the tension with an action that is ‘beyond justification’ in the ‘common sense’ (unthinkable).  There seemed to be something missing, some ground or preliminary set of arguments that would be needed before such a task could take place and my intuition now, resonant with Toscano’s tasks, is that this preliminary work needs to take place in the realm of the ontology, that is, specifically, in terms of the ‘link between univocity and ethology’.  Crudely speaking – or rather, speaking in another register – this feels at the moment like it would be something like articulating a position akin to the ‘compatabilists’ in the debate on free will, or the possibility of a naturalistic philosophy of mind (these being very rough indications of possible comparisons).

Toscano’s four tasks for Deleuzians are:

• “One, to grasp Deleuzian affirmation as a resistance to the present,transforming Badiou’s ascetic image of the ‘purified automaton’ into a constructivist one. This point depends on a close encounter with Deleuze’sethics of the event through the concept of counter-actualisation.
• Two, the extraction from Deleuze’s work of a new theory of illusion, cast in a deeply Nietzschean mode, that does not depend on the re-instatement of a separation between truth(s) and simulacra. The necessary prelude to this is an exhaustive account of Deleuze’s theory of the problem.
• Three, the elucidation of the essential link between univocity and ethology, or, why Deleuze’s is a political ontology.
• And four, a careful inquiry into the tensions which potentially mine the consistency of the relationship between immanence and virtuality.”

(Pli 9 (2000), 220-38)

There is a background to every text, a life, a thought, an obsession, a spilt cup of coffee on papers badly placed on a temporary desk. Good sex, drunken rants, flirtatious concepts, all of these form part of that which will never be said within the text, only ever sensed, occasionally and differently, by the readers and writers who follow the words along the page. This, maybe, is why people want to read biography, interviews, trivial detritus from the lifetimes of another, the writer, the author, the proper name appended to the title. When the text is one within philosophy there’s this sense that somehow knowing about the brandishing of a poker or the peculiar arrangement of garters, socks and toilet habits, somehow knowing this will help know the concepts. This betrays a latent humanism, most often, where we want to know what the author thinks, we want to discern accurately, so we think, the moments that occurred in someone elses’ mind and re-occur them in our own. There seems no reason to assume this humanistic notion of a transport of ideas from one mind to another as the central task of reading and interpreting a text. There seem many reasons to assume that a text is in fact nothing to do with an author to the extent that the act of reading occurs without any author and if the text works it works without an author other than the reader. Would it matter, say, that the images and ideas drawn from a book that had been read under one name suddenly found themselves shifted to another name? It might matter in terms of understanding the author but surely the point of reading is to understand the ideas and images not the author? Otherwise I would always be in a better position to understand an author by talking directly to them and not reading their work? The author really does seem somehow redundant, theoretically, since it is the ideas and images that we are interested by and in.

Despite this, those texts that occur on the margins of ‘real’ texts, authorised works, always seem to have a strange, uncanny necessity to them. This is no less the case than in ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ by Felix Guattari, a collection of strange and varied notes and jottings produced in the course of writing, jointly with Deleuze, the work ‘Anti-Oedipus’, the first volume of ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. When I first acquired this text a few months ago I read through it quickly and briefly, finding it strange and impenetrable, dismissing it as a rather weak and perhaps idiotic collection put together more as part of an attempt at hagiographical recuperation than intelligent concept creation. Guattari is increasingly viewed as an aberrant force on Deleuze, the ‘wild’ infecting the ‘pure’, lunacy implicating itself into rigour. Zizek is no doubt the main location of such a view (in his ‘Organs without Bodies’) but it’s not isolated to him alone and the increasing interest in the central and more ‘classically philosophical’ work such as ‘Difference and Repetition’ also appears at times, justifiably or not, as the result of an attempt to subtly, perhaps even subconsciously, purge Deleuze of Guattari. In this context ‘The Anti-Oedipus Papers’ (henceforth AOP) might be thought as an attempt to regain the crucial duality or pluralistic-monism of the name ‘Deleuze-Guattari’. All this, however, would be to miss the point or purpose of the AOP. There is no hagiography here, nor any attempt to somehow provide evidence for the absolute necessity of the double name. Instead there is a kind of compassion.

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