Interview with Serres

A very good inteview with Michel Serres, not long after Gilles Deleuze's death.

Football and theory: Game-play, ball as object cause and the match

The moment that the two series resonate and communicate, we pass from one distribution to another. (this is Deleuzean description of a game-play) The moment that the series are traversed by the paradoxical agent, singularities are displaced, redistributed, transformed into another, and change sets. (followed by a description of the movement of the ball as the object cause of the game-play)If the singularities are veritable events, they communicate in one and the same Event which endlessly redistributes them, while their transformations form a history. (history here is analagous to the match as limited)

quote from Logic of Sense, p.64

Revolution

"Any society whatsoevver has all of its rules at once - juridical, religious, political, economic; laws governing love and labor, kinship and marriage, servitude and freedom, life and death. But the conquest of nature, without which it would no longer be a society, is achieved progressively, from one source of energy to another, from one object to another. This is why law weighs with all its might, even before its object is known, and without ever its object becoming exactly known. It is this disequilibrium that makes revolutions possible. It is not at all the case that revolutions are determined by technical progress. Rather, they are made possible by this gap between the two series, which solicits realignments of the economic and political totality in relation to the parts of the technical progress. There are therefore two errors which in truth are one and the same: the error of reformism or technocracy, which aspires to promote or impose partial arrangements of social relations according to the rhythm of technical achievements; and the error of totalitarianism, which aspires to constitute a totalization of the signifiable and the known, according to the rhythm of the social totality existing at a given moment. The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator - computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribes there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about."

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.59

Deleuze and Proletariat: path to Ranciere

" ... it is as though each affirmation referred to its negative, or has 'sense' only by virtue of its negation, while at the same time a generalised negation takes the place of the problem. Thus begins the long history of the distortion of the dialectic, which culminates in Hegel and consists in substituting the labour of the negative for the play of difference and the differential. ... Furthermore, if the truth be told, none of this would amount to much were it not for the moral presuppositions and practical implications of such a distortion. We have seen all that this valorisation of the negative signified, including the conservative spirit of such an enterprise, the platitude of the affirmations supposed to be engendered thereby, and the manner in which we are led away from the most important task, that of determining problems and realising in them our power of creation and decision. This is why conflicts, oppositions and contradictions seemed to us to be surface effects and conscious epiphenomena, while the unconscious lived on problems and differences. History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed; they repel shadows into the shadows and deny only as the consequence of a primary positivity and affirmation. For them, as Nietzche says, affirmation is primary; it affirms difference, while the negative is only a consequence or a reflection in which affirmation is doubled. That is why real revolutions have the atmosphere of fetes. Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems are."

Difference and Repetition, p.267-8

Ranciere, in the Misadventures of Critical Thought makes a very similar point with regard to 19th century elites and their use of critical thought. The premise of critical theory to reveal what's hidden beneath mystifications is what Ranciere criticizes there. He argues that this pattern of thought which acts like an authority, revealing the reality of problems was acquired by the elites for social engineering, leading to the assimilation of labour movements into social democratic regimes. On top of that the quote above would reject any interpretaion of Deleuze as "a non-political philosopher before he met Guattari".

Individuation

"The individuating factors or the implicated factors of individuation therefore have neither the form of the I nor the matter of the Self. This is because the I is inseperable form a form of identity, while the Self is indistinguishable from a matter constituted by a continuity of resemblances. ... By contrast, every individuating factor is already difference and difference of difference. It is constructed upon a fundemental disparity, and functions on the edges of that disparity as such. That is why these factors endlessly communicate with one another across fields of individuation, becoming enveloped in one another in a demesne which disrupts the matter of the Self as well as the form of the I. Individuation is mobile, strangely supple, fortitious and endowed with fringes and margins; all because the intensities which contribute to it communicate with each other, envelop other intensities and are in turn enveloped. The individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its nature. It is not a Self with regard to what it expresses, for it expresses Ideas in the form of internal multiplicities, made up of differential relations and distinctive points or pre-individual singularities."

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.257-8

Contingency of an Encounter

Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself."

Difference and Repetition, p.139

Childhood Block

Memory yells "Father! Mother!" but the childhood block is elsewhere, in the highest intensities that the child constructs with his sisters, his pal, his projects and his toys, and all the nonparental figures through which he deterritorializes his parents every chance he gets. Ah, childhood sexuality - it's certainly not Freud who gives us the best sense of what that is. The child doesn't cease reterritorializing everything back onto his parents (the photo); he has need of lowered intensities. But in his activity, as in his passions, he is simultaneously the most deterritorialized and the most deterritorializing figure - the Orphan. He also forms a block of deterritorialization that shifts with time, the straight line of time, coming to reanimate the adult as one animates the puppet and giving the adult living connections.

Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p.79

Assemblage - Bir-araya-geliş / Montaj

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/deleuze-on-assemblages/

Assemblage, Türkçe'ye çevirmeye çalışırsak, bir-araya-gelme benzeri bir şeye tekabül ediyor. Örgütlenme pratiklerini Deleuzean kavramlarla düşünmek için temel. Seslerin, çizgilerin, sözlerin, bedenlerin bir-araya-gelişleri, heterojenlikleri içinde ilişkilenmeleri...Montaj...

Difference in Itself

At the Larval Subjects provided a note on Deleuze's notion of difference in itself. Difference and Repetition'ı okuduğum bu zamanda iyi geldi.

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/difference-in-itself/#more-2413

"...

Deleuze will claim that ontological difference is affirmative. Where a distinction is based on negation insofar as it compares one thing with another thing it is not, ontological difference is compared to nothing, but rather is the difference that it is.

This second point about the affirmative nature of difference becomes clearer a bit later when Deleuze provides examples to illustrate his point. As Deleuze writes, “…a temperature is not composed of other temperatures, or a speed of others speeds, …[rather]…each temperature is already a difference, and [those] differences are not composed of differences of the same order but implies series of heterogeneous terms” (237). These two examples, I believe, are absolutely crucial for understanding the concept of ontological difference. A temperature would still be exactly the temperature it is, regardless of whether there were any other temperatures to compare it to. It is a difference in itself, not in relation to something else. Likewise with speed. Difference is therefore not distinction, but rather the prior ground of distinction or that which precedes any and all distinction."

Deleuze'un speed ve temperature gibi örnekler kullanması benim kafamda Spinoza okumasının Deleuze'un ontolojik farkı anlarken ne kadar baskın olduğunu gösteriyor sanki. Speed ve temperature yeğinlikler (intensities) olarak anlaşılabilir. Fark, bir noktada yeğinlik derecelerindeki fark olarak ortaya çıkıyor. Deleuze'ün farkı qualitative ve quantitative gibi ayrımlara girmeden anlaması da felsefesini tanımlayan önemli noktalardan. Bunu söylemek önemli bence çünkü speed ve temperature bir taraftan da sürekli ölçüldükleri ölçüde dolaşıma giren şeyler. Ancak 'difference in itself' ölçülebilen ve ölçülemeyen fark ayrımının ötesine geçmeyi amaçlıyor. Daha kitabın başında iki kavramı anlatarak başlıyor. Qualitative alanda farkı ehlileştiren 'resemblance' ve quantitative alanda farkı ehlileştiren 'equivalences.'