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i've had enough! it's time we get some deleuze up in this mothafucker! i have a proposition for those of you who live in the bay area: an honest to lobster (god is a lobster), in the flesh deleuze and guattari reading group. i've been working through mouthfulls of a thousand plateaus for about three and a half years, and i've read the majority of it, but i have the attention span of a starfish, and have thus been drawn ashtray at every turn. this is perhaps the proper strategy if you want to build a rhizome, but it is not conducive to finishing a book.
seeing as i'm more concerned with building rhizomes than finishing books, you may be asking yourself "why is he concerned with this finish this book?" well, i'm not. but that's no reason not to finish it. and who knows, maybe some of you still have trees growing in your heads; perhaps you are concerned with finishing books. who am i to stomp on your oedipalized book finishing desire? and maybe i am concerned with finishing books. who am i to stomp on my own preconscious oedipalized desires?
but really, who cares about presence anywayz. to build a proper rhizome, we ought to send out subterranean shoots that deterritorialize simple geographical space! so it needn't be in the flesh. let's rather create a smooth space of discourse-- i propose seven reading groups of the haecceity type, linked or not, which will act as nodes through which discursive intensities can be passed. the groups can be composed of one or many (since we are each multiple to begin with anyway).
who's in? (we are)
[let the flames come, i am ready]
seeing as i'm more concerned with building rhizomes than finishing books, you may be asking yourself "why is he concerned with this finish this book?" well, i'm not. but that's no reason not to finish it. and who knows, maybe some of you still have trees growing in your heads; perhaps you are concerned with finishing books. who am i to stomp on your oedipalized book finishing desire? and maybe i am concerned with finishing books. who am i to stomp on my own preconscious oedipalized desires?
but really, who cares about presence anywayz. to build a proper rhizome, we ought to send out subterranean shoots that deterritorialize simple geographical space! so it needn't be in the flesh. let's rather create a smooth space of discourse-- i propose seven reading groups of the haecceity type, linked or not, which will act as nodes through which discursive intensities can be passed. the groups can be composed of one or many (since we are each multiple to begin with anyway).
who's in? (we are)
[let the flames come, i am ready]
posted by:
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SF Bay Area
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Re: all right, that's it!
Wed, February 11, 2004 - 7:04 AMBrendan,
I'm down for some Deleuze and Guattari. Maybe we could also do the "Logic of Sense". Question: is there any relation between a rhizome and a meme?
Gilton -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Wed, February 11, 2004 - 8:49 AMno, there is no relationship between a rhyzome and a meme. primarily because they deal with different levels in different systems of order. a meme would probably be part of an event for deleuze as it is an virtual, but still essential quality, for guattari though, i'm pretty sure the meme would not be part of the event, but part of the virtual functorial. but that is just my interpretation. -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Wed, February 11, 2004 - 1:54 PMthere are *relationships*, just not a relationship of identity-- but i would claim that a lot of (most? all?) memes are highly rhizomatic. one of the points of the rhizome is the creation of monstrous relationships, in which the accusative case may be connected directly to a moustache without mediation.
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Re: all right, that's it!
Wed, February 11, 2004 - 1:49 PMyeah, i'd be all about tackling "logic of sense"... at some point. -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Wed, February 11, 2004 - 4:31 PMI'm totally game. In SF. I've been reading him for over 10 years, and I think i've nearly read most of the english translations twice each. LOS scares teh shit out of me, especially the freudian section at the end simply coz i dont know melanie klein well enough. Thousand Gateux is compilation of all deleuze in a way. I also like his foucault and bergson books. but the shit is difference and repetition. the challenge would be to read that one and then read Badiou's set theory response to it.
Alternatively, Zizek's Body w/o Organs is an entertaining response to deleuze from a lacanian perspective. Michael hardt's intro to deleuze: an apprenticeship is an excellent backgrounder on his spinoza/bergson/nietzsche synthesis. The intro to Deleuze's hume book is a superb cover of deleuze's transcendental empiricism, a somewhat mind-toppling idea sometimes.
I'm game. I read my deleuze once a week. Currently reading Bacon and Proust books.
adrian -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Wed, February 11, 2004 - 5:56 PMwow. i am a novice, and therefore intimidated. glad to have you aboard. hope i don't slow you down too much... -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Thu, February 12, 2004 - 6:49 AMWhen I think of rhizomes I think of weeds run amuck within a garden of interpretations, totally wild and untamed, cognizant but exploratory. And to this extent, it seems to reason that a meme is a kind of "contagion" run amuck within a community of language users. Are we speaking on the same semantic level here?
Gilton -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Thu, February 12, 2004 - 11:20 AMi think the difference is that the meme is the objectified 'meaning' the smallest bit of meaning. if we assign any systemics to that, it is on top of that, a meme exists whether it is viral or contagious or not. a rhyzome on the other hand is already a system, weeds run amok, but all connected, and meaning in a rhyzome is in the flows, but because there are nodes, that meaning might never be 'objectified' the best bit i think this is clarified is when deleuze and guattari talk about science and its qualities. for state science or big science you have memes or objectified bits of knowledge their defined relationships and heirarchies, but for rhyzomatic science it doesn't work like that. the meaning is subjective and negotiated at every turn, there is no objectification of it, because to do that changes its meaning and dissolves it out of the rhyzome. hope that helps. -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Thu, February 12, 2004 - 6:56 PMgood. agree. the idea of "memes" is based on a false conception of meaning (and one dropped long ago by philosophers). but biz and marketing folks brought it back to life w/ the dotcom/viral thing. a meme as a unit of meaning would imply that meaning can be contained and as a unit, be circulated/transmitted while keeping its integrity--still meaning the same thing. Bad idea, or rather, false idea. meaning doesnt exist in that sense, as jeremy says.
Deleuze/Guattari's idea of rhizome is offered as an alternative to the acorn/oak tree idea of teleological identity/truth, and to contrast with teh western idea of a tree of knowledge (trunk, branches), which they think gives concepts a false organization, one that suggests some kind of progress/growth and which also subordinates ideas to one another (thus implying a value system)... this is hard to summarize. The rhizome is an attempt to have us think differently about how ideas associate. They're going back to Hume and trying to get the cultural ballast out of ideas so that they may form connections w/o serving to reproduce some greater narrative or ideology...
sidenote, i think network theorists could benefit from a discussion of some of this stuff. i see some very poorly conceived analogies and parallels drawn between technical networks and philosophical ideas out there. A network is not a model of society, not even a model of communication... nodes in a network after all arent subjects!
let's keep this going. It gets interesting!
adrian -
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Re: all right, that's it!
Fri, February 13, 2004 - 6:53 AMJeremy,
Thanks man, I agree. you are right on.
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