All 30 entries tagged Guattari

Research Notes: what is a concept? and the role of attention

Here's an initial concept map:

Robert O'Toole : 08 Nov 2005 13:58 |  Tags: Attention Concept Conceptual Components Conceptual Personae Deleuze Guattari Pedagogy Of The Concept Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality What Is Philosophy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Notes: virtuality, speed, necessity and cognition

Follow-up to Research Notes: Multiplicity, co–involution, Being abstract but not generalized from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I am now reading Andy Clark's book Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. This is a successful attempt to bring together strands in situated robotics (which I studied with Dave Cliff at Sussex), cognitive science, evolutionary and adaptive systems (from von Uexkull, also Deleuze and Guattari's inspiration), developmental psychology, and phenomenology.

The book contains many good observations and conjectures derived from all of these fields. But the guiding principle is that nature tends towards the simplest and most efficient solution. This is, in many cases, a devolved 'subsumption architecture' of the kind employed by the roboticist Rodney Brookes. In some cases however, a more complex solution emerges. An example of this may be simulations that act to provide "virtual feedback" within action loops:

…proprioceptive signals must travel back from bodily peripheries to the brain, and this takes time – too much time, in fact, for the signals to be used to generate very smooth reaching movements. To solve the problem, the brain may use a trick (widely used in industrial control systems) called motor emulation. p.23

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Robert O'Toole : 02 Aug 2005 11:14 |  Tags: Andy Clark Being There Cognitive Science Deleuze Extended Cognition Guattari Motor Emulation Philosophy Research Proprioception Situated Robotics Speed Subsumption Architecture Transversality Transversality Virtuality Von Uexkull |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Notes: Method of transversality and the method of intuition

Follow-up to Research Notes: Multiplicity, co–involution, Being abstract but not generalized from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

And for my next trick: i'll be looking more deeply at the relationship between the methods of Bergson and of Deleuze and Guattari.

Firstly, transversality is the key feature of Deleuze and Guattari's method. I need to define this more precisely, and show how it differs from other methods (dialectical, hermeneutic, phenomenological);

Secondly, i'll write an effective explanation of Bergson's method.

Thirdly, the difference between the method of transversality and the method of intuition (KAP deals with this well in Germinal Life).

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Robert O'Toole : 27 Jul 2005 11:43 |  Tags: Bergson Deleuze Deleuze And Philosophy Germinal Life Guattari Keith Ansell Pearson Method Of Intuition Method Of Transversality Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Notes: Artaud, the theatre and its Body without Organs

As a break from Deleuze and Guattari, and as input for a proposed research network on virtuality and performance, i've been reading the collection of essays by Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double. This contains some fascinating schizoanalysis of theatre and its Body without Organs, biological life. Here's some killer lines from the essay on Theatre and the Plague:

Above all we must agree that stage acting is a delirium like the plague, and is communicable. p.18

…conditions must be found to give birth to a spectacle that can fascinate the mind. It is not just art. p.18

The plague takes dormant images, latent disorder and suddenly carries them to the point of the most extereme gestures. Theatre also takes gestures and develops them to the limit. Just like the plague, it reforges the links between what does and does not exist in material nature. p.18

For theatre can only happen the moment the inconcievable really begins, where poetry taking place on stage, nourishes and superheats created symbols. p.18

Like the plague, theatre is a crisis resolved either by death or cure. The plague is a superior disease because it is an absolute crisis after which there is nothing left except death or drastic putrification. In the same way, theatre is a disease because it is the final balance that cannot be obtained without destruction. It urges the mind to delirium which intensifies its energy. p.22

: 11 Jul 2005 23:04 |  Tags: Art Artaud Body-Without-Organs Deleuze Deleuze And Art Delirium Guattari Performance Philosophy Research Schizoanalysis Symbolic Exchange And Death Theatre Transversality Transversality Viral Virtuality |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Notes: Singularity/continuum, a multiplicitous event

Follow-up to Overman, creativity and beyond transcendental recognition from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

The second chapter of Germinal Life contains some brief commentary on Badiou`s critique of the concept of event in Deleuze and Guattari. I've not succeeded in reading Badiou yet, but can understand the need for a clarification, as the concept of 'singularity', Deleuze and Guattari's event, can be misleading.

Keith writes that for Badiou:

the event does not come into being from the world, whether ideally or materially, but from not being attached to it. The event is an 'interruption' that is always separate from the world. Instead of a world defined by 'creative continuity` there is the 'founding break'.

I had, at one point, a confused concept of singularity that privileged the 'interruption' or 'coupure' (Foucault's cut/break). It worked like this:

1. The break has an irreversibility. In fact it is the irreversible – about as real as real time can be.
2. A break can be repaired, but only with the addition of something to the closed system of that which is repaired.
3. The loss of the originary state is therefore irreversible.
4. But the break also originates the new individuation, which may be the synthesis of the broken and the repaired.
5. It then acts as the singular fact of the event of that individuation.

In this model, the break is the singularity around which an individual is oriented. It is the missing, the irrecoverable, the inaccessible that prevents the individual from becoming other. We can then say that the individual is a response to the break, its activity copes with the break, with its history, its singular specificity. That coping is its function, its telos. And its tendency to either simulation or creation, simulacra or originary form, defines its authenticity. The break is the singular first and final cause.

But as Keith states, this:

fails to understand the work being done with Deleuze's conception of the event, namely that, it seeks to provide an account of how rupture and discontinuity are explicable and possible.

This is the very meaning of "schizoanalysis": looking into the specific conditions for each schizm or discontinuity, and considering how those conditions form a continuum with that which is broken, carrying it across the break.

In this way, Deleuze and Guattari run counter to phenomenology and its bracketing-out. In schizoanalysis, as for Nietzsche, everything is implicated in the event. Nothing can be bracketed out, only moved in and out of focus (or folded and un-folded). They say: look at chaos, death and by implication life, right in the eyes, get to know each individual chaos, each death and each life on its own terms…

…to look into the break is in fact to look towards a horizon in which detail disappears into confusion, into chaos. It is to look into a Body without Organs, through which one may deterritorialize by relative degrees, moving around to gain further clarity and to provoke a response, to feel its unique texture and possibilities.

This is not to deny irreversibility or real time. Or indeed that individual A may never become individual B because in doing so individual B is destroyed (which amounts to saying that there is no possible world in which A = B, the difference being absolute). Rather, we can say that there are different kinds of irreversibility. Each exchange with the Body without Organs, the horizon, is itself a different recipe of irreversibility. There are as many such recipes as there are events. In some cases they tend towards entropy. In other cases they provoke outbursts of creativity. Even the individual that seeks never to enter into the exchange, that seeks isolation in the safety of its refrain and turns chaos away with large blocks of redundancy, in fact engages in a brutal interchange with the Body without Organs and provokes a response. In all cases, whether convoluted or relatively direct, the interchange between individual and Body without Organs operates an eventual non-linear effect throughout, resulting in complex but irreversible involutions specific to each unique assemblage. Singular and multiplicitous continua of disappearance.

Importantly, we shouldn't deny the possibility of the kind of 'foundational break' described above as a confused concept of singularity. Rather, consider that such behaviour may occur in certain types of system, such as those in which large blocks of redundancy create highly isolated individuals. This is not however typical, merely one specific type of event. It is interesting to speculate about why philosophy, and so many other aspects of modern Capitalism should raise such a rare case to the level of a universal. We seem obsessed with apocalyptic events, with foundational breaks.

In what sense is the notion that philosophical concepts perform an absolute deterritorialization (D&G What is Philosophy?) also an expression of this fascination with destruction?

And in what sense does the statement "we never deterritorialize alone" (D&G ATP) – provide a model for passing into the BwO with concepts and artworks (monuments) as catalysts and helpers?

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: 11 Jul 2005 22:20 |  Tags: Apocalyptic Events Badiou Body Without Organs Closed System Continuum Coupure Creative Continuity Deleuze Deterritorialization Eternal Return Event Foucault Founding Break Germinal Life Guattari Helper Concept Irreversibility Keith Ansell Pearson Multiplicity Nietzsche Philosophy Definitions Schizoanalysis Singularity |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Notes: Naive Deleuzianisms, the war on terror, the valorization of self–organizing systems

Follow-up to Research Notes: Fascism within networks: China and the internet from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

My reading of Germinal Life has reached the third chapter, with Keith's call for a temporary and critical 'suspension' of Deleuze and Guattari's attempted equation 'ethics = ethology'. This suspension opens them up to an awkward but necessary critique.

And at the same time, I have been thinking more in the style of Manuel De Landa, applying his method of 'non-linear' history to the analysis of extremist and terrorist bodies. I am considering their emergence from pre-individual singularities on the machinic phylum to individuated and efficient learning machines. This raises some interesting issues concerning naive readings of the schizoanalytic project.

Consider this: are the various armed groups in Iraq benefiting from the continued presence of the US in a way that a naive schizoanalysis would praise? There were clearly many disparate splinters formed from the explosion of the Sadam Hussein regime of hierarchies, each itself a pre-individual singularity. And in response to the crudely striated tactics of the US military, are these otherwise unconnected singularities finding common currency, points of convergence, catalysts for the creation of their own internal consistency? As with the Nazis, I would say this is likely.

It would seem that the ethology leads to an ethics in which al-Qaeda might be valorized. Clearly there is something wrong, something out-of-order with this. Perhaps it is the same imprecision and confusion of differences that leads to the problem described by Keith in Germinal Life:

the various 'becomings' that characterize 'evolution', and serve to make it nongenealogical and nonfiliative, cannot be treated as if they were all the same, so that, for example, we could move simply but far too quickly, from talking about the transversal movement of the 'C' virus that is connected to both baboon DNA and the DNA of certain domestic cats, so talking about the 'becoming-baboon in the cat', to talking about the becoming molecular-dog of a human being, as if they were of an equivalent order. p.188-189

De Landa's free use of 'abstract machines' made me nervous. But what principle can there be to guide us as to the required level of detail, of specificity?

The answer from Deleuze and Guattari, and which I think Keith is about to give in the next section, is that understanding each deterritorialization's relationship to its own specific Body without Organs, and its passage into the possible constitution of an abstract machine, is the way to understand the appropriateness of that abstract machine to the specific case.

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: 04 Jul 2005 22:55 |  Tags: Becoming-Animal Body-Without-Organs Co-Evolution Co-Involution Deleuze Ethics Ethology Germinal Life Guattari Keith Ansell Pearson Manuel De Landa Method Of Transversality Naive-Deleuzianisms Non-Linear History Philosophy Research Pre-Individual Singularity Schizoanalysis Self-Organizing Systems Terror Transversality Transversality |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Research Notes: Fascism within networks: China and the internet

I have just read and greatly enjoyed Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Non-linear History. In fact, i'm so excited by its approach to creating dynamical models of the world, that i'm using it all the time with a wide range of applications. De Landa takes the ethological approach of Deleuze and Guattari, considering how stratified bodies (organic and inorganic) are built up and eroded by the emergent and self-organising expression of network effects (including geological, biological, social and economic netwoks). So here's a few conjectures based on this...

The Nazi's emerged through a meshwork of radical individuals on the periphery of a range of disciplines: mystical, military, medical, commercial, beaurocratic, artistic and the media. Their individual ideas were not particularly innovative, being mostly concerned with the intensification and purification of existing processes. However, it was their intense and fundamental will to application regardless of cost that marked them out in an otherwise consolidating and cautious climate. The meshwork of these diverse forces was consequently drawn together by the combination of their shared peripheral status along and a powerful belief in the necessity (ethical) and certainty (metaphysical, historical) of the foundation of a new world from the traits (in need of purification and authentication) that they could see all around.

Such peripheral forces exist within any large and relatively homogeneous body of individuals. They are the product of its genetic drift, deviations necessary for the existence of adaptive potential. In some cases, selection and replication mechanisms may form that act to single out, purify and intensify traits within the ceaseless drift. And it is not unusual for a small set of such deviations from sometimes very different bodies to become associated through their co-identification as 'outsiders', despite the fact that they may be concerned with quite different traits. An increase in the mobility of such diverse radical agents is often a catalyst for this co-identification. This was certainly a factor in the emergence of the Nazis, with the increase of mobility and resulting inter-connectivity during and following WWI.

But they don't often grow into the kind of wildly abberant monster that was the Nazis. What then might have been the extra condition that catalysed the transformation of the Nazis from fringe to global threat? One way of answering this would be to look at the 'network effects' internal to the Nazi meshwork. De Landa discusses several 'abstract machines' that exploit network effects in different ways. For example, the 'group and grid' model proposed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas. The 'grid' refers to organisations that maintain their identity through an intensity of centralized regulation (typically propogated through hierarchies). The 'group' on the other hand, operates through an intensity of group allegiance (typically propogted through memes, propaganda etc). Most organisations exist with a mix of both group and grid. However, at the extremes, there are some groups that are highly grid structured, having little opportunity to propogate memes (due to external controls). And there are other organisations that have no grid, and propogate via indirect means (memes). We can take this a step further by arguing that any organisation that is able to master all of the combinations, and switch between them as required, will be able to maintain its consistency regardless of external controls.

My conjecture is that the Nazis crystallized around the collapse of a state hierarchy. As the hierarchy collapsed and became less rigid and certain, access to key elements of its operative functions opened up. In response, the Nazis occupied positions of power within the fragmenting hierarchies, and thus formed their own internal grid based hierarchies from them. This resulted in 'immune responses' from the grided hieracrchies of the official organisations that they parasitised, which responded by attacking the emergent grid of the Nazis, who in turn were forced to return to their meme based 'group' roots, until they were again able to consolidate their control of (or just replace) the state hierarchies. This symbiotic relationship continued throughout the 1930's, with the Nazi party gaining increased mastery of the trick of switching modes of operation.

In a very real sense, the Nazis were subjected to a learning process as they were forced between each mode of operation. Perhaps the lesson that should be learnt from this is:

During a time of rapid change and collapsing hierarchies, the auto-immune response of the state to the evolution of networks may actually provide the ideal learning experience for extremist organisations.

It may well be that in response to the expansion of the internet, capitalism and the release of its sedentary populations, China is providing just such a learning experience for a new generation of extremists.

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: 21 Jun 2005 08:20 |  Tags: A Thousand Years Of Non-Linear History Auto-Immune Response Deleuze Dynamical Models Ethology Group And Grid Guattari Manuel De Landa Mary Douglas Memes Meshworks Nazis Network Effects Networks Philosophy Research Self-Organization Stratified Bodies Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Rhythm, in chaosmosis

Follow-up to Expression, content, assymetrical synthesis of the sensible from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Some notes on rhythm.

From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born.

Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it.

See the entry on Expression for the mechanics of this.

The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between – between two milieus, rhythm chaos or the chaosmos

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.313

An attendant figure, passing of into chaos or the inexplicable, and back again repeatedly. Losing sense, reforming it seperately, and then reconnecting. Asymetrical synthesis of the sensible.

Robert O'Toole : 12 Mar 2005 22:40 |  Tags: A Thousand Plateaus Asymmetrical Synthesis Of The Sensible Chaos Chaosmosis Deleuze Guattari Milieu Philosophy Definitions Rhythm Transcoding |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Noise against visual imagination, and the refrain (or how Leibniz would like cinema)

Against noise

Faced with white noise, a void, extreme intensity or excessive speed of modulation, a refrain offers some relief. It is an expression, but one that operates in a tightly closed loop. In the case of a typical human refrain, a song, the singer sings the refrain back to themself. Its content is the human organic form, deterritorialized into the simple, familiar and predictable form of the song. It may continue at great length with little effect on either the singer or the song, until exhaustion sends them to sleep. It is in this way a closing-down, a retreat into simplicity and predictability, away from the world (into the baroque house, for which the harmony and melody of the song build the impenetrable facade): an expression yes, but only just. Almost zero.

The refrain is a desperate defence, a second-level immune response to the failure of the visual imagination. A defence against the penetrating incursion of the sonorous plane, passing through the blockade of the visual imagination. To understand this, first consider how that sonorous plane penetrates and defeats visual defences, how it passes through the image (Bacon's screaming pope).

The defensive imagination

The image, which can be re-presented instantly and switched at will, provides an effective and impenetrable barrier to the exterior, as with the portrait, the image of the ascending head, or the church steeple in Kafka. Deleuze and Guattari argue that these images act not as simple memories, reactivating the past, but rather as means for handling the encounter with uncertainty or the future, finding strength in a certain relation to at least ine object that may be assimilated (the end of the desire):

…it acts as a childhood block, and not as a childhood memory, strengthening desire instead of cramping it, displacing it in time, deterritorializing it, proliferating its connections, linking it to other intensities.

The image acts as a block in both senses: a block as an element or screen that can be placed upon a new territory and onto which connections can be territorialized or projected, carrying away desire into a concentratory dispositif; a block to the chaotic and disruptive effects of that proliferation of connections, a delay, a spacing-out. Its power as such lies in four aspects:

1. the speed with which the image can be conjured, with all of its points present almost imediately – how all that is needed is a few suggestive points, lines and colours;
2. how it is constantly rescanned and reconfirmed in perception;
3. how an image can appear solid and enclosing, blocking out and constituting an exterior;
4. how the image creates an expansive but delimited territory of co-ordinates, in which expression or a procedure of desire (deterritorialization and reterritorialization) may play (the baroque house).

The scream cuts across and penetrates the image

In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari say of the image (portrait or figuration):

But that's not important. What's important is the light music, or, more precisely, the pure and intense sound emanating from the steeple and the castle tower: "a bell began to ring merilly up there, a bell that for at least a second made his heart palpitate for its tone was menacing, too, as if it threatened him with the fulfillment of his vague desire. This great bell soon died away, however, and its place was taken by a feeble, monotonous little twinkle." Kafka D&G p.4

Whereas the image acts to concentrate, focus and strengthen the desire within a delimited space, sound is said to interfere with order, connecting with 'vague' or minor expressions that are not oriented towards the reconstitution of the territory of the image. Unlike vision, sound leaks through spatial structures, resonates throughout the body, and concentrates into the ears. Its passage through the meat and chambers of the bodily organs overrides their functions: the stomach now is equivalent to a double bass in terms of resonation – suddenly the voice, the location of human sound, is displaced by a more animal sonic body (think whales):

It's curios how the intrusion of sound often occurs in Kafka…Music always seems caught up in an indivisible becoming-child or becoming-animal, a sonorous block that opposes the visual memory. Kafka D&G p.4–5

The cinema is the place for experiencing this effect. (It is the baroque house of The Fold.) The cinema is constructed as a radical interplay of the sonorous and visual planes. Visual imagination is territorialized upon the screen or perceptual block, both cutting out the exterior, offering a concentration of light and colour, whilst spatializing and slowing down (into the narrative of the film, which is spatial not temporal). But at the same time, sound penetrates the body in deep surround-sound rumbles and piercing dolby screams.

Refrain

Of course any sensible movie director knows not to leave the audience immersed for too long at the point of this schizophrenic collision of visual and audio fields. As the scream fades away into the night, a more familiar pattern of notes rises from low down in the auditorium, as if from the galloping hooves that carry us safely from the scene of brutality. Sing the refrain back to the world, which doesn't expect it, doesn't ask for it. But the refrain sure makes us feel more easy sleeping at night. Sing yourself to sleep.

Robert O'Toole : 12 Mar 2005 22:02 |  Tags: Active Memory Auto-Immune Response Chaos Childhood Block Concentratory Dispositif Deleuze Desire Deterritorialization Figuration Film Guattari Imagination Kafka Leibniz Network Effect Philosophy Research Refrain Scream Sound Speed Transversality Transversality Vision |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Expression, content, assymetrical synthesis of the sensible

Expression is the operation of a programme of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Repeatedly carrying elements formed in context or territory A into a new relation with elements formed in context B. The deterritorialized elements being the content or payload carried by the expression.

The effect of the delivery may be entirely disruptive when reterritorialization occurs. But more productively, it could trigger a response in the second context B that dissipates the effect, but at the same time releases further elements that may be deterritorialized and reterritorialized within the first context A.

Furthermore, if the deterritorialization from A into B is effectively handled by B, without the immediate destruction of B, and the transmission of released elements from B back to A (feedback) is beneficial to A, then A will tend towards repeating the exchange. Having responded to A effectively in the first instance, B will is more likely to be prepared for the second instance, and in fact has started to stabilise around the expectation. And in turn A is stabilising around the sensation of the return delivery of content.

In this way each context has its exposed surfaces or senses repetitively disrupted. In isolation this interference could only ever be noise, but when part of such a mutually beneficial relationship, the exchanges are sensible. This is the case even though the payload exchanged and the programmatic form by which it is carried in each direction may have no necessary relation. In fact it can be said that the meaning only exists in the overall process, between the lines carved out by each seperate context, combining both contexts and the movements between them in an asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible.

Robert O'Toole : 08 Mar 2005 20:49 |  Tags: Asymmetrical Synthesis Of The Sensible Connectivity Content Deleuze Expression Guattari Networks Philosophy Definitions |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Difference and Repetition, Nietzsche and the creative turn

Follow-up to Freeing the concept of creativity from the concept of possession from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

The answer, for Deleuze at least, is yes. Or rather, the concept of the new or difference (in its composite with repetition), is one of these 'helper concepts' – Nietzsche's best friend, saving him from the interminable closed cycle of Cartesian recognition or Kantian good-sense.

The Image of Thought chapter in Difference and Repetition states it quite plainly. The really big question for philosophy is not how recognition (clear, distinct, true or otherwise) is possible - that's trivial. Rather it is the question of how we break out of the everyday, the familiar. It is the question of how difference is possible. But not in some abstract sense, but genuinely how we go beyond the algorithms of our constitution. So it is the case that Deleuze is not Kantian (or as Keith Robinson has said, perhaps he is re-activating a pre-Kantianism). He was out to engineer a creative turn rather than fixing the critical turn.

In Difference and Repetition, as in Logic of Sense, we see Deleuze dealing with the metaphysical question of how creativity, difference, is metaphysically possible: what is its ontology? In this domain the question concerns the possibility of time itself.

Nietzsche's distinction between the creation of new values and the recognition of established values should not be understood in a historically relative manner… In fact it concerns a difference which is both formal and in kind. Difference and Repetition p.136

But it takes an involvement with Guattari to give Deleuze a chance to answer the really useful problem of creativity. Guattari the psychotherapist involved on a daily basis with dislodging people from the viscious circle. This engagement combines with Deleuze's fascination with painting and with cinema to establish, following on from the ontology of difference and repetitiion, a practical approach to creativity.

Robert O'Toole : 04 Mar 2005 08:26 |  Tags: Creative Turn Creativity Critique Deleuze Deleuze And Philosophy Difference Difference And Repetition Good-Sense Guattari Helper Concept Image Of Thought Kant Keith Robinson Logic Of Sense Nietzsche Ontology Philosophy Research Psychotherapy Recognition Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Schizoanalysis as philosophical imagination, as philosophical method

Follow-up to The double agenda of this thesis: a method and an application from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Schizoanalysis as a method brought together a psychotherapist (Guattari) and a philosopher (Deleuze). Guattari was concerned with the provision of philosophical concepts to patients in an attempt to give them room to manouvre, the chance of escape, freeing them up from patterns of addiction and inescapable habits. Deleuze moved in the opposite direction, from his studies in the history of philosophy, seeking to re-personalise, situate, and re-animate philosophical concepts, restoring their vitality and application, reconnecting them with their generation in a powerful philosophical imagination, with 'conceptual personae', and hence making the emergence of new concepts a real possibility for us.

The method that resulted, schizoanalysis, tends towards the production of concepts, philosophical creativity and experimentation. The elements of this being:

• the creation and pedagogy of the concept, its creation and re-creation, its journey (deterritorialization and reterritorialization) in time and space, localized in and transported between people, places, societies, texts and other abstract machines;
• the result of what could be called a 'philosophical imagination';
• an imagination that acts to 'free-up' abstract machines, not simply by offering a novel set of possible-worlds, but more radically by offering new sense to what it means to be possible and impossible, to be a world;
• an imagination capable of taking us beyond the permutations of our operational ontology;
• doing so in response to and to enable changes in the material of thought and the apparatus of reality, for example at the extremes of physics, or the social production of the human;
• freeing up and enabling new directions in science and art otherwise locked-in to the currently operational ontology;
• providing a special class of concepts that can be relied upon to help carry us through these changes, concepts such as 'art', 'science', 'imagination', 'schizoanalysis', and perhaps also 'creativity';
• whilst guarding against concepts that appear to have this power, but which in fact are empty, meaningless, black-hole concepts that merely absorb energies that drive towards such freeing-up, that act on every such desire with indifference – transcendent.

Robert O'Toole : 15 Feb 2005 22:21 |  Tags: Abstract Machines Black Hole Concepts Creativity Deleuze Deleuze And Art Deleuze And Philosophy Deleuze And Science Deterritorialization Geophilosophy Guattari Imagination Ontology Philosophy Research Schizoanalysis Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Freedom

Follow-up to Opinion from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Deleuze and Guattari do sometimes refer to freedom and freeing up, but it is a kind of diagrammatic freedom.

A particular activity may be constrained in several ways. The material of its expression may impose a limit, and as Guattari argues in Chaosmosis, a change in the material may act to free it up, to give it a chance of escape. Conversely, material of expression may be constrained to the point of starvation by a language, concept, artistic practice, scientific experiment (all of the aparatus of capture). Loosening the dependence between the material and the aparatus may bring life back to the material. This need to do this may be the source of transcendence. Again Guattari employs this as a psychotherapeautic practice, but guards against transcendence.

Regarding literature (Kafka, Lawrence), they say:

It is always a case of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned. p.171

Robert O'Toole : 20 Jan 2005 07:15 |  Tags: Chaosmosis Diagrammatic Freedom Expression Freedom Guattari Philosophy Definitions Psychotherapy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Free expression – a misconception

A misconception of a misconception:

"A third misconception is that creativity is to do with free expression. This is partly why there's such concern about creativity in education." Out Of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative, Ken Robinson, Capstone 2001, p.112

Of course Ken is right to argue that creative activity necessarily involves more than just wild and unguided behaviour. Creativity requires a discipline, some kind of order. However, in placing such disciplined creativity in opposition to 'free expression' a powerful connection is missed.

Firstly, we could say that creativity and freedom are dependent upon each other. This follows from considering that any activity that tends towards the stereotypical and away from difference is in no way free, being determined by the stereotype. And if we then consider that creativity always involves such differentiation, we could argue that: to be creative is to differentiate, to differentiate is to be free. Similarly, there is no freedom in a speech that simply applies stereotypes and secondhand opinions.

Secondly, we could argue that all expression requires some form of discipline, order, organisation: a language of expression, or the 'material' of expression. And therefore, all 'free expression' is ordered and disciplined to a varying extent.

From these arguments we can conclude that creativity must always be in some way a free expression, a differentiation that applies a discipline to break out of some stereotypical behaviour.

Going one step further, we could consider if a unified and strongly deterministic discipline, one that is unaltered by its application, is ever capable of producing anything new? If that is the case, then free expression is a special form of expression in which the tools, the material or language of the expression, and the potential of those tools, is somehow extendable and modifiable. Perhaps being modified by the act of expression in which they are applied: a non-linearity in expression.

Now consider again the fear of 'free expression' that Ken talks of. What real fear does it mask? A fear of chaos? Or rather the fear that a cherished discipline will become modified? A fear that a toolset will be developed independently of its stereotypical application?

Is it then the case that this simplistic concept, deployed in the campaign against creativity in education, is a parody-concept designed to lead us away from more sophisticated, powerful and essential concepts of freedom, expression, creativity and intelligence? For readers of Deleuze and Guattari this will be a familiar ploy, they repeatedly identify concepts that are designed to parody complexity, creativity, desire and chaosmosis. The parody is always the same: portraying them as an uninhibited and undifferentiated sublime.

: 16 Jan 2005 10:52 |  Tags: Chaosmosis Creativity Deleuze Education Free Expression Guattari Ken Robinson Out Of Our Minds Philosophy Research Sublime Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The engineering in science, the experimentation in philosophy and art

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"Experimental method does sometimes manipulate things" – no, it always manipulates things. Tell me of an experiment that doesn't involve the manipulation of a variable and the recording of the effect of that manipulation. Even in the case of experiments that seek to be purely the observation of 'natural events', those events are manipulated such that variables may be isolated and their relationships, as events occur, quantified. So every form of experiment is engineered, constructed, manufactured. And for every experiment, there is possibly an alternative configuration, a different engineering solution.

"Some of the most famous experiments in modern physics are gedankenexperiment – thought experiments – that don't actually require any prodding of stuff at all." – it depends on what you think that stuff is. A thought experiment considers a possible world in which variable A is somehow related to variable B. Some mechanism is posited that explains how the variables interact. Again the whole thing is engineered, this time as a simulated set of variables and functives. However, those simulated objects must still be constituted as mathematical, computational or conceptual objects so that they may be manipulated. For the thought experiment to have any 'scientific validity' that engineering must hold up to scrutiny, must work, in the same way as any engineered structure must work.

And here's the final twist: are physical experiments and scientific thought experiments different in kind, or only by degree? In the former case, a model is applied to the physical world in order to see if something is missing or inaccurate. The model predicts what will happen. Even when we are just seeking to gather empirical data, we apply a model, assuming that the things that we are measuring are the things that we think them to be and not some figment of our imagination (consider if the sense data that we are tracking turns out not to belong to the object that we assume it to be part of, and in fact is just there by coincidence). In the case of thought experiments, we are again looking to see if the relationships that we posit can be seen to necessarily result in the effect that we posit as the result of the interactions – or is there something missing from our model? Perhaps the only difference between scientific thought experiments, which I am calling simulations, and physical experiments, is that the former deals with a restricted and less complex environment.

Notice the shift of terminology there, from talking of scientific thought experiments to referring to them as simulations. At the moment i'm reading the section of What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) that deals with the difference between science and philosophy. Science we are told is concerned with functions and variable. Philosophy is the realm of concepts, which are quite different. I'm still working on this, but it seems that the key difference is that functions and variables represent reversibles, and concepts are irreversible. Anyhow, D&G seem to reserve the term 'thought experiment' for a mode of experimentation that works with concepts, and is therefore the domain of philosophy. This implies that they see a commonality between experimentation in science (be it physical or simulated) and experimentation in philosophy (with concepts):

To be sure, there is as much experimentation in the form of thought experiment in philosophy as there is in science, and being close to chaos, the experience can be overwhelming in both. What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 127

The different modes of experimentation are defined by their relationship with chaos. In the case of philosophy, the aim is to pass through chaos such that an impossible world is actualised, a formerly inconcievable state is reached. In the case of science, experimentation posits a set of possible states that can be interchanged for each other through the operation of a function along variables. The model opens itself to chaos through its application, and on the discovery of missing elements, assimilates them back into the model as further possibilities, as further variables. In this way science progresses, whereas philosophy differentiates.

But in reality science and philosophy are mixed. Scientific models can suddenly breakdown upon their engagement with chaos. And creation (or differentiation, its pseudonymn in D&G) then occurs:

But there is also as much creation in science as there is in philosophy or the arts. ibid p.127

The tendency of science, it could be said, is to sometimes creatively fictionalise the sense of progression by reinventing its model in a new but familiar form. Philosophy, of course, also suffers from this delusion, and must itself be more prepared to abandon the concept of progress. Art, the third of the trinity of disciplines, suffers from a related delusion, in this case the idea that it proceeds without experimentation, simply through a sensus communis of good taste experienced as genius:

There is no creation without experiment. ibid p.127

Robert O'Toole : 27 Nov 2004 21:22 |  Tags: Chaos Creativity Deleuze Deleuze And Art Deleuze And Science Functives Guattari Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality Variables What Is Philosophy |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem