I've been plodding for some days now through Out of This World, a piece of secondary scholarship by Peter Hallward on his postmodern eminence, Gilles Deleuze. His exegesis I find frequently illuminating, though it often hews a bit too closely to Deleuze's own argot and peculiar spin on all things metaphysical (a shortcoming I've found in secondary scholarship on Derrida, as well), making for occasional knots of prose as impenetrable as that of his subject.
What I've taken from Hallward's study is the relationship of an individual — a discrete, singular entity — to the conditions of her existence is much like that of a character in a shoot-'em-up video game. I haven't played a video game in many years, but I recall that often the character under my control would have some sort of vitality or "life" meter above his head, which was indicate to me, the force behind his actions, how much more injury he can sustain before dying. This life meter is something that represents the video game character's state of well-being — a measure of what is otherwise dynamic of conditioning, constitutive forces — and is something the character cannot directly perceive about himself. Only I, the game player situated outside the field of the game's immediate action, enjoys this view on the character I control. That which the life-meter indicates, i.e., the imperceptible roil of vital forces that at any moment are dwindling or surging, is, however, no less essential to him that his observable features and condition.
According to Deleuze, we are in a similar state. Everything about us we take to be solid and substantial dissolves into the refulgent flare and shimmer of determinant forces, which, rather than lying beyond us in some realm of the transcendent or Ideal, "hover" above us in a manner roughly analogous to the life-meter above the video-game character of my example. Deleuze therefore declares philosophy's task as widening, if not as opening altogether, channels of intuition that can put us in touch with these hovering forces, immanent to us but no where perceivable by us, which occupy what Deleuze terms "the virtual."
This is all I can confidently speak to at the moment, but I'm reasonably certain I'm beginning to master Deleuze's thought — even to the extent where I'm beginning to dispute some points of his. But more on that later . . .
Please offer comments, especially if you find me incorrect or otherwise deficient in anything.
25 September 2007
18 September 2007
16 September 2007
A Detournement
Vegetarian times great food,good health, smart living =
Simple; suppers
29. Satisfying salads,
Healthy pastas,
Easy stir-fries,
Soups, breads — &, more,
A GUIDE TO COOKING WITH! SQUASH
THE ULTIMATE
CHILI FEAST!
FOUND! THE BEST MEATLESS SAUSAGES,
THE WINNERS! 2007?
READER RECIPE? — CONTÈST!
Simple; suppers
29. Satisfying salads,
Healthy pastas,
Easy stir-fries,
Soups, breads — &, more,
A GUIDE TO COOKING WITH! SQUASH
THE ULTIMATE
CHILI FEAST!
FOUND! THE BEST MEATLESS SAUSAGES,
THE WINNERS! 2007?
READER RECIPE? — CONTÈST!
11 September 2007
Overheard (IV)
Drives and flows, farts, bursts of feeling —
Features of our featured speaker, our paragon.
Believe you me, he'll have them squealing
In no time. . . . I know, I know, "the parergon."
That bit where the Platonic paint is peeling.
"Aporia," "lacuna," some such jargon,
Read, of course, across forces failing
To coalesce presence, dethroning the archon,
And yadda yadda yadda. . . . All due deference,
But the way he belabors Heidegger? Tired stuff,
That schtick, trotted out every conference.
Gallic-phallic gobbledygook. Man, it's rough.
"Difference," "differánce" — what difference
Does it make to one whose meat is meter,
Whose words don't rob Paul just to pay Peter?
Features of our featured speaker, our paragon.
Believe you me, he'll have them squealing
In no time. . . . I know, I know, "the parergon."
That bit where the Platonic paint is peeling.
"Aporia," "lacuna," some such jargon,
Read, of course, across forces failing
To coalesce presence, dethroning the archon,
And yadda yadda yadda. . . . All due deference,
But the way he belabors Heidegger? Tired stuff,
That schtick, trotted out every conference.
Gallic-phallic gobbledygook. Man, it's rough.
"Difference," "differánce" — what difference
Does it make to one whose meat is meter,
Whose words don't rob Paul just to pay Peter?
06 September 2007
Clapboard Pastoral
Boy, he couldn't wait to get that out.
Dinner steams its cooking —
Hot little matter that's already perched a blister
On the end of his tongue for him to worry,
Worry tomorrow as he marks working hours.
"Whad'ya think he's about,
That guy across the alley
Who's always reading at his dinner table?"
"Sad man-tits, defeated virility.
A trove of commonplace tragedies."
This as she rinses dishes,
Rowing her elbows close to those "y'know's,"
Hard baseballs beneath her blouse;
Those always got him going.
And, ah, eftsoons it will be snowing.
Dinner steams its cooking —
Hot little matter that's already perched a blister
On the end of his tongue for him to worry,
Worry tomorrow as he marks working hours.
"Whad'ya think he's about,
That guy across the alley
Who's always reading at his dinner table?"
"Sad man-tits, defeated virility.
A trove of commonplace tragedies."
This as she rinses dishes,
Rowing her elbows close to those "y'know's,"
Hard baseballs beneath her blouse;
Those always got him going.
And, ah, eftsoons it will be snowing.
04 September 2007
The Broken
What is so troubling about the shattered, the torn, the marred, the inoperative — in a word, the broken — is that it jeopardizes the validity of the distinction for which it is a functional term. The Broken calls attention to those considerations papered over if not totally elided by notions of utility. Broken objects do present some real dangers — a chipped glass can cut the drinker’s lip, and a punctured tire can pull a car off the road — but to these practical concerns is added the fact, not acknowledged in utilitarian calculations, that the broken object in its broken state acquires new powers: only broken glass can cut, only a punctured tire can draw the car off the road. The in-tact object meanwhile can only perform its designated function successfully if it performs other functions poorly. The broken object’s mal-function is indeed then a malefic function — fugitive, deviant, dangerous in its disutility.
The Broken enjoys the added ability to bring the Whole into doubt, because it both defies and descries the Whole. Every identifiable absence — the chip missing from the goblet, the frayed end of an electric wire, the flabby amorphousness of a punctured tire — points to a prior wholeness from which the broken thing has deviated. It is the terminus of a line of flight always already a property of the Whole. One can in fact claim that the Whole is in fact nothing more than a massive aggregation of a huge number of these points of departure, of these originary points of possible trajectories of becoming-broken.
This tension characterizing the relationship of the Broken to the Whole finds early expression in the mania for “the picturesque” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A crumbling castle, a dilapidated spire, a tumbled-down tower — such elements of the landscape were precisely those which the typical Regency ambler found so appealing, because every crack, every dislodged stone, every jagged line or interrupted curve univocally bespeaks of the previous wholeness which made it possible. In order for it to crumble a castle must first be built.
* * *
In The System of Objects Jean Baudrillard speaks of “the ambiguity of the object,” an infernal consumerist toil “in which individuals never have the opportunity to surpass themselves, but can only re-collect themselves in contradiction, in their desires and in the forces that censor their desires.” And this state of affairs is brought about by the fact that “a censor is personalized in the object,” resulting in “censorship [that] operates through ‘unconstrained’ behaviors (purchasing, choice, consumption), and through spontaneous investment.” The system of objects is thus a system of personalized censors, each one seeing to it that the individual’s desire is aroused in such a manner that it may be channeled into an “impoverished language” of limited signs (i.e., saleable goods) and indexed assumptions about desire (i.e., market research, target demographics)— desire as alienation, a fuel for the juridical mythopoeisis of advertising.
Does Baudrillard’s analysis presume, however, a system of objects eternally whole, eternally unbroken yet of more or less fixed signifiance? If the answer is “yes,” then the relationship of the individual to the system of objects, lamentable as it may be, is largely unvarying. If “no,” then it becomes incumbent upon us to discover some of this system’s unaddressed complexities. For instance, the power of the Broken is one of absolute negation. When something breaks, it becomes de-coded, not in the sense that one deciphers it, but in the sense that it spontaneously resituates itself in the chain of significations that is the series of dislocations that determine that thing’s value. But whereas these relative dislocations — not use or exchange value simpliciter, but some admixture of both along with other social significations — remain necessary to an object’s value, breaking represents near-absolute dislocation vis-à-vis the other signifiers in the chain.
Broken things sever possibilities of synecdochic metonymies; a potshard can never aspire to the arête of the pot. Rather broken things in their brokenness tend paradoxically to be whole and complete unto themselves, and thus resist enlistment into the same proximal representations as their in-tact counterparts.
* * *
When one wants to convey the fact that she is the offspring of parents no longer married to each other she may say she is from “a broken home.” The implication here is that the lines of filiation constituent of one’s identity as a member of a nuclear family are no longer triangular, but radial. Being from “a broken home” brings one into a relation with a non-relation, though no less a relation for it, because it is measurable and therefore finite, but only so because it it has broken with its futurity. Its wholeness instead rests solely in its eternal anteriority, the only futurity allowed it. The offspring of divorced parents actually stands in relation to a severing that continues to sever, but that also continues to signify.
What we should conclude from all of this is that to break is never to destroy, but simply to re-make in some way in which the significant implications have yet to manifest themselves. If, as Carol Burnett once said, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” then truly the Broken is but the Whole plus time.
The Broken enjoys the added ability to bring the Whole into doubt, because it both defies and descries the Whole. Every identifiable absence — the chip missing from the goblet, the frayed end of an electric wire, the flabby amorphousness of a punctured tire — points to a prior wholeness from which the broken thing has deviated. It is the terminus of a line of flight always already a property of the Whole. One can in fact claim that the Whole is in fact nothing more than a massive aggregation of a huge number of these points of departure, of these originary points of possible trajectories of becoming-broken.
This tension characterizing the relationship of the Broken to the Whole finds early expression in the mania for “the picturesque” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A crumbling castle, a dilapidated spire, a tumbled-down tower — such elements of the landscape were precisely those which the typical Regency ambler found so appealing, because every crack, every dislodged stone, every jagged line or interrupted curve univocally bespeaks of the previous wholeness which made it possible. In order for it to crumble a castle must first be built.
* * *
In The System of Objects Jean Baudrillard speaks of “the ambiguity of the object,” an infernal consumerist toil “in which individuals never have the opportunity to surpass themselves, but can only re-collect themselves in contradiction, in their desires and in the forces that censor their desires.” And this state of affairs is brought about by the fact that “a censor is personalized in the object,” resulting in “censorship [that] operates through ‘unconstrained’ behaviors (purchasing, choice, consumption), and through spontaneous investment.” The system of objects is thus a system of personalized censors, each one seeing to it that the individual’s desire is aroused in such a manner that it may be channeled into an “impoverished language” of limited signs (i.e., saleable goods) and indexed assumptions about desire (i.e., market research, target demographics)— desire as alienation, a fuel for the juridical mythopoeisis of advertising.
Does Baudrillard’s analysis presume, however, a system of objects eternally whole, eternally unbroken yet of more or less fixed signifiance? If the answer is “yes,” then the relationship of the individual to the system of objects, lamentable as it may be, is largely unvarying. If “no,” then it becomes incumbent upon us to discover some of this system’s unaddressed complexities. For instance, the power of the Broken is one of absolute negation. When something breaks, it becomes de-coded, not in the sense that one deciphers it, but in the sense that it spontaneously resituates itself in the chain of significations that is the series of dislocations that determine that thing’s value. But whereas these relative dislocations — not use or exchange value simpliciter, but some admixture of both along with other social significations — remain necessary to an object’s value, breaking represents near-absolute dislocation vis-à-vis the other signifiers in the chain.
Broken things sever possibilities of synecdochic metonymies; a potshard can never aspire to the arête of the pot. Rather broken things in their brokenness tend paradoxically to be whole and complete unto themselves, and thus resist enlistment into the same proximal representations as their in-tact counterparts.
* * *
When one wants to convey the fact that she is the offspring of parents no longer married to each other she may say she is from “a broken home.” The implication here is that the lines of filiation constituent of one’s identity as a member of a nuclear family are no longer triangular, but radial. Being from “a broken home” brings one into a relation with a non-relation, though no less a relation for it, because it is measurable and therefore finite, but only so because it it has broken with its futurity. Its wholeness instead rests solely in its eternal anteriority, the only futurity allowed it. The offspring of divorced parents actually stands in relation to a severing that continues to sever, but that also continues to signify.
What we should conclude from all of this is that to break is never to destroy, but simply to re-make in some way in which the significant implications have yet to manifest themselves. If, as Carol Burnett once said, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” then truly the Broken is but the Whole plus time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)