Saturday, February 28, 2009

The Shadows of Totalization, Part X

I return to Orla’s quotation,

“Isn’t this exactly what thinking should be: A Disturbance? Of conventionally used images. The Dynamics of Creative Interruption.

Or to continue this hypertext of texts (or waves creating waves) with a Deleuzian quote, 'The logic of a thinking is like a wind that pushes us in our backs, a series of gusts and tremors. As Leibniz says, you think you have safely arrived in harbor, but discovers that you are still on the open seas'.

And isn’t this what open, generous blogging should be: Tender gusts, irritating head winds, warm breezes, deadly twisters, and inviting waves? Curves instead of angles.”-from Valentine's Day 2009.

I’m willing to swing at curve balls--there are several in Orla’s quotation. In fact, “Curves instead of angles,” is a wicked one… Maybe Orla has a career ahead of him as the greatest major league screwball pitcher since Gaylord Perry.

For my own purposes, I’ll trace the trajectory of this screwball…It’s worth studying.

We start out being asked to consider that thinking should be a disturbance or disruption of conventionally used images. We end with the prescription “Curves instead of angles.” I don’t know where it comes from (have I given it to myself?) but there is a suggestion here that we think of disturbance and interruption (and thereby the act of thinking) in terms curves instead of angles. In order to disturb or interrupt conventional images, we need, Orla thinks, curves instead of angles.

I am willing to try this little thought experiment of imagining a disturbance or disruption as a curve instead of an angle. Of course I wonder why a disturbance is seen as either a curve or an angle, or why one is necessary while the other is to be excluded, as well as a variety of other wonderings. I have to admit that the notion of disturbance as a curve does work against my conventionally-used imagery. I probably do ordinarily think of a disturbance as angular rather than smooth (curved.)

So: have I, through this little disturbance of my conventionally-used imagery, been forced to think?

Perhaps I am the only one who can answer this question, but before doing so, I am going to stop in order to give Orla a chance to respond. What was his purpose here? Was the intention in juxtaposing the idea of thinking as disruption with the comment about curves instead of angles intended to disrupt a conventionally-used image, or was the "screwball" really a screwup?

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The Shadows of Totalization, Part IX

I want to look very briefly at Orla’s comment,

“Isn’t this exactly what thinking should be: A Disturbance? Of conventionally used images. The Dynamics of Creative Interruption.

Or to continue this hypertext of texts (or waves creating waves) with a Deleuzian quote, 'The logic of a thinking is like a wind that pushes us in our backs, a series of gusts and tremors. As Leibniz says, you think you have safely arrived in harbor, but discovers that you are still on the open seas'.

And isn’t this what open, generous blogging should be: Tender gusts, irritating head winds, warm breezes, deadly twisters, and inviting waves? Curves instead of angles.”-from Valentine's Day 2009.

Thinking, Orla says, should be a disturbance of conventionally used images.

Let’s assume this is true. Assuming its truth, what is required for us to think is to, 1) determine which images are conventionally used; 2) determine what the conventional use of these images consists of; 3) determine what the disturbance of conventionally used images consists of.

With regard to 1): is there any reason to restrict the inquiry to “images”? Is there a reason to restrict the inquiry to “use”?

With regard to 2): I think it is necessary to differentiate between levels and spheres of conventional use—in politics, business, social life, art, architecture, or any other part of life. I think some of the interest would be in how the conventional use of the same image varies or stays the same over different regions (for example, the image of the father—why the father image appears at all in the political sphere conceived as a sphere of rationality.)

With regard to 3): Which is disturbance? There is a conventionally used image of what a disturbance is…In other words, there are preconceived notions of what disturbs or does not. Left “undisturbed” these preconceived notions disturb disturbance. This points to the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that there is nothing primitive or simple about disturbance—whatever it is, it isn’t itself an act of thoughtlessness, something which can be accomplished without thoughtful effort. It can’t be accomplished as reaction, as temper tantrum. What seems counter-intuitive to me is that disturbance must involve something like delicacy. As both Orla and Deleuze rely, above, on conventional use of imagery (there’s nothing unconventional about using wind-imagery to evoke mind, spirit) the disturbance of conventionally-used images involves some conventional use of imagery—a delicate use.

Friday, February 20, 2009

The Totalization of Shadows, Part XV

Though we have on some occasions in passing used or mentioned someone else’s definitions of Totalization, we have avoided relying on them, nor have we made any serious attempt to modify these definitions for our own purpose, or to make our own formal or strict definition, starting from scratch, so to speak. Though I refuse to uncritically accept any of them, I prefer to proceed by honoring all of the various meanings and connotations (not definitions) of Totalization which float around like sea urchins or jelly fish in the mare populi in which I swim. Can this be productive, let alone more productive?

For assured productivty, we could start out with a very simple schema (or definition?): there is an S and an O, defined in a variety of ways, in a variety of relationships, which together form, in some place and time, a Totality, a historical formation. This simple arrangement does offer an enormous number of conceptual possibilities to toy around with and rearrange—there is nothing static about the scheme, on the face of it. The scheme is also not “negative”…It has yielded a great deal of “positive” results.

And yet we suspect there is something oppressive, blocking, and freezing in it somewhere.(In other words, something unproductive, not conducive to creativity or movement.) What? It isn't everything about the schema,obviously--it is productive of some things in some ways. Totalization isn't totally unproductive. What prevents us from being content with the range of both theory and practice this scheme gives us?(The Totalization of theory and practice our own historical formation provides. It is undoubtedly more rich than at any other time in history.*) What could be insufficient with this range? Surely we are far from exhausting all it offers.(Also, I want to be clear on this point: I don't take seriously the idea of the schema being faulty because it offers only some specific range...I don't believe in the existence of an "all-range".) Rather than working within it, why would we ever think it more valuable to contest it? Working within it, a great deal is realizable. Working against it, failure and waste are the most likely outcomes. Working against it, we may not even be "working". (We might be feverish in psychosis.) Are there truly good reasons for dissatisfaction with “a great deal”?

*I might have to qualify this by saying 30-40 years ago it was more rich than at any other time in history--my opinion is we've suffered a serious and global retrenchment, retreat in the meantime. However, this doesn't change the problem I want to focus on, though from a polemical point of view it complicates it because a lot of people see my approach to the problem as part of the cause of the retrenchment, rather than as a way out.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

The Dynamics of Interruption, Part IV

I would like to linger (and ponder) on the simile of waveology and thinking. Not to be dragged down but to catch the wave and see where it leads us. This is, humbly, in the spirit of Nietzsche’s idea of thinking as ”shooting an arrow and imagining it reaches someone” or (more apt in this imagery) in Adorno’s ”hope of leaving behind a message in a bottle amidst the rising tide of barbarism.” (from Minima Moralia)

In other words, I’m not trying to ”arrive”, to generalize or define, but rather to experiment, play, and intuit. As Yusef has often stated, definitions limit and block creation. A text should be read as a stream instead of as a code to be deciphered.

Yusef writes,

You know as well as anyone the underlying ploy in using wave images to evoke what thinking is--we conventionally use wave images, sea images, romantically, poetically, as images of the unconscious seen as the effortless and natural and basically the thoughtless in thought.

Yes, of course, that’s the conventional interpretation of water. And ”thinking” would then be ”solid ground” beneath our feet? Stasis versus fluidity? Stability and ”truth” versus randomness and frivolity? Really?

Yusef further writes,

I am not persuaded your "wave" concept is not a generalization. You are taking one case of a propagation of force and then using it as the general case.

I take it you are using ”propagation” in the sense of physics as ”The act or process of propagating, especially the process by which a disturbance, such as the motion of electromagnetic or sound waves, is transmitted through a medium such as air or water.”

Isn’t this exactly what thinking should be: A Disturbance? Of conventionally used images. The Dynamics of Creative Interruption.

Or to continue this hypertext of texts (or waves creating waves) with a Deleuzian quote, ”The logic of a thinking is like a wind that pushes us in our backs, a series of gusts and tremors. As Leibniz says, you think you have safely arrived in harbor, but discovers that you are still on the open seas”.

And isn’t this what open, generous blogging should be: Tender gusts, irritating head winds, warm breezes, deadly twisters, and inviting waves? Curves instead of angles.

Speaking of waves (- again):

If things aren’t going too well in contemporary thought, it’s because there is a return under the name of ”modernism” to abstractions, back to the problem of origin, all that sort of thing … Any analysis in terms of movements, vectors, is blocked. We are in a very weak phase , a operiod of reaction. Yet philosophy thought it had done with the problem of origins. It was no longer a question of starting or finishing. The question was rather what happens ”in between”? And the same applies to physical movements.

The kind of movements you find in sports and habits are changing. We got by for a long time with an energetic conception of motion, where there is a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, a lever. But nowadays we see movement defined less and less in relation to a point of leverage.

All the new sports – surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding – take the form of entering into an existing wave. There is no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to ”flow into something”, instead of being the origin of an effort.

And yet in philosophy we are coming back to eternal values, to the idea of the intellectual as the custodian of eternal values.


(from interview with Gilles Deleuze by Antoine Dulaure and Claire Parnet in L’Autre Journal, October 1985, published in Pourparlers 1972-1990)

Friday, February 13, 2009

The Dynamics of Interruption, Part III

Before we are all swept away by the image of the wave and left gasping on the beach where thinking dies, let’s throw ourselves into the surge and its possibilities of ”reactivation”. But first we have to backpedal from Yusef’s metaphor-surfing :-),

If we were so inclined we could take it for granted, happily surfing from one wave of it to the next, up onto the sand wave of the beach, and on to the bar wave of the nearest cocina, where we would surf the waves of a delicious margarita, never pausing in the delight of continuous surging, unless perchance in misfortune we intentionally had a thought which of itself erected a barrier for further surfing. Thought, critique or pause is the absolute enemy.

Of course, thought, critique or pause have never been the absolute enemy on this blog! Forgive me, but that's absurd.

But maybe, when discussing ”life” and ”thinking”, we might still learn something from waveology (yes, there is such a subject of study!) that could wash our eyes and clear our minds. In the following definition from Wikipedia please substitute ”wave” by ”ideas” or ”concepts”,

"Waves travel and transfer energy from one point to another, often with little or no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium (that is, with little or no associated mass transport); instead there are oscillations around almost fixed locations.

Some waves undergo a phenomenon called "breaking". A breaking wave is one whose base can no longer support its top, causing it to collapse. A wave breaks when it runs into shallow water, or when two wave systems oppose and combine forces. When the slope, or steepness ratio, of a wave is too great, breaking is inevitable.

Surging: these may never actually break as they approach the water's edge, as the water below them is very deep. They tend to form on steep shorelines. These waves can knock swimmers over and drag them back into deeper water."


Like waves ideas and concepts transfer energy from one position to another, often with little or no permanent displacement of their cores. In fact, the concepts are frequently oscillations around almost fixed locations.

These oscillations are also examples of "The Dynamics of Interruption" and ultimately "Instances of Reactivation", like the vibrating pauses between one concept and the next. When you reactivate a philosophical ethos, don’t you add to, expand, and create a new ethos from the previous one? In other words oscillate, staying calm in the still waters under the roaring waves?

When I earlier described ”life” as ”surging” it was naturally not synonymous with there being no ”breaking waves”. (Btw: thanks to Christoffer for his clear analysis, but I never meant to turn ”life” into metaphysics).

Reactivating is also repeating (portions) of the old and shaping new formations, new lines of flight. Externally a wave is moving and strong, internally not so much. But still. Something is stirring.

Life moves on: Cliché. Life surges: Biochemistry. That’s no ”misleading generalization”.

The Enlightenment was ”the transfer of energy from one point to another, often with little or no permanent displacement” but over a century or more it turned into a ”surge that may never actually break as it approaches the water's edge, since the water below is very deep”. It still is.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Instances of Reactivation, Part II

To continue examining instances of reactivation, I have to be willing to assume for the time being there is reactivation. To assume there is reactivation, I have to assume there is both discontinuity and change, in some instances. Whether life is continuous or surging or continuously surging, I cannot say. I’ve been sitting here scratching my head trying to think of “the continuous surge of life” as anything but an empty and misleading generalization of the type I try to avoid, and I can’t do it. Unless I have input from someone else, I’m not going to worry about it any further. I am also not going to worry about my stopping, isolating, and freezing the flow of emerging streams of creativity through commenting on rationality or Totalization. I doubt either deactivation or reactivation of creativity or thought is so trivial.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

The Dynamics of Interruption, Part II

The question before us is the power of breaking off, the desire to ”undesire” continuation and whether this contains a dynamics that can be fruitfully pursued.

Can ”thinking” be stopped, and if so, does it present us with new possibilities? Is the pause plausible? Is it even a space that might signify a return or a beginning?

This brings us back to the whole concept of ”thinking”. Is this a separate entity in human enterprise? Let’s explore this. Traditionally, thinking is representational in nature. You think about something. And we presuppose that ”everybody knows” what it means to think, and that the only prerequisite for ”thought” is an individual in possession of goodwill and a ’natural capacity’ for thought. Descartes, for example, presumes that everybody knows what is meant by self, thinking, and being. But isn’t this image of thought as cognito natura extraordinarily complacent?

Don’t we, as Deleuze suggests, rarely think and, when we do, more often than not we think under the influence of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking?

Genuine thinking is necessarily antagonistic towards the combination of good sense and common sense that form the doxa of received wisdom.

In other words, ”thinking” is an event, and an accidental ditto at that. It is basically intuitive and impressionistic, never programatic and planned.

Since you cannot decide to philosophize (unless you are ”doing your homework” = reading about what others have been thinking) you are at the mercy of sudden impulses that may or may not lead to new concepts.

The traditional ”image of thought” is a geological one: You start with a ”tabula rasa” and then you sequentially develop a series of arguments that lead to the next arguments – etc. But this never really happens.

Maybe the ”breaks” in this serial are the spaces where the shock of the new occurs. When you let down your defenses you create. By withholding ejaculation you produce desire. ”Coitus interruptus” is not the denial of pleasure, but rather the displacement of it.

Thinking is disruptive. And if not, it isn’t thinking. Maybe the interruption of thinking is REAL thinking = the flow of intuition and spontaneity. We have to discard the whole notion of linearity to get to another place. (And that may even include giving up the whole idea of "interruption" since this implies that there IS a place or time, when you can stop!)

Saturday, February 07, 2009

The Dynamics of Interruption, Part I

Before I turn into Yusef’s caricature of me as the Beach Boy of Philosophy, happily surfing the waves of continuous creation and ”refusing to pause for anything”, let me celebrate interruption, the still waters of correcting the course, and the opportunity to search for the next ”Surfin’ Safari”:)

It is only fitting in this Darwinean year that we take a look at Henri Bergson’s concept of Creative Evolution = the idea that evolution is motivated by an élan vital, a "vital impetus" that can also be understood as humanity's natural creative impulse.

This also ties in with his idea of ”Durée” = duration which refers to a more individual, subjective experience of time, as opposed to mathematical, objectively measurable "clock time". This experience of time as "duration" can best be understood through creative intuition, not through intellect.

The question of ”life” or ”the continuous surge of creation, the vibrating intensities of existence, the chaosmos of living and thinking, the plasma of perpetual becomings" is playing out on a microcosmic , biological, atomistic level whereas we can ”pretend” on a macrocosmic ”niveau” to pause, to ”reactivate” - to ”stop”, in fact, the continuity of life.

But let’s play pretend. Let’s pause. And intuitively say that we can temporarily locate a blank space to ponder.

There is a perfectly understandable urge to ”examine a life (or a thought)” as Socrates reminded us of the value of. And this is a unique interregnum that can produce change and creation.

So when we are ”taking a break” to think, are we then also imposing a stop to a ” duration” that is a purely individual and intuitive. Can it be credible when we know we cannot ”stop” to think?

And yet there is a curious sense of well-being when we savour a moment to reflect, when we sit down and look back, arrange our thoughts, and (maybe) arrive at some sort of clarification and perhaps even a direction to go in. We have a feeling (that might even be psychosomatic) that now we KNOW how to proceed. It may be (and probably is) purely illusionary, but it seems ”real”.

A case could be made that this is indeed what philosophy is all about: The attempt to arrest creative evolution by denying it. Philosophy as the celebration of the dynamics of the interruption of LIFE.

Instances of Reactivation, Part I

I note a symmetry and synonymy between these two formulas: “Enlightenment is the overcoming of Totalization through critique,” and “Enlightenment is the reactivation of a philosophical ethos.” The juice I wish to get out of this is that I am willing to assume Totalization is overcome through a reactivation of a philosophical ethos. This is all well and good, but very little is learned because I don’t yet have a non-metaphorical understanding of reactivation, which means I don’t have any effective idea of a way to overcome Totalization.

What I want to do over the next several dozen posts is to look at a variety of cases which in one way or another are examples of reactivation. I want to take each example in turn, weigh it, and then extract from it what I think I can use to get the specific mechanisms I believe will be useful for the creation of the kind of reactivation I want—the reactivation of a philosophical ethos. Then, I am going to put that reactivation together, plug it in, and play it—in my head.

I am arbitrary as to which example I will use as my starting point ( I was going to use some examples from science to begin this,) but as Orla has offered a number of hypothetical examples of Totalization and what doesn’t work as reactivation, I have decided to examine these cases first.

“But this is counter-intuitive to the continuous surge of life, to the vibrating intensities of existence, to the chaosmos of living and thinking, to the plasma of perpetual becomings.

When Yusef is battling the concepts of totality and rationality he is trying to stop, isolate, and freeze the flow of emerging streams of creativity. This is understandable and true of all of us in our attempts to create patterns and stable entities. We also know that this desire is rarely qualitative, multidimensional, and inclusive.” – June 7, 2008


Reactivation is a false problem for the reason that life is a continuous surging. A continuous surging is obviously uninterrupted and, suffering no deactivation, requires no reactivation. One way or the other, activation is always happening. If we were so inclined we could take it for granted, happily surfing from one wave of it to the next, up onto the sand wave of the beach, and on to the bar wave of the nearest cocina, where we would surf the waves of a delicious margarita, never pausing in the delight of continuous surging, unless perchance in misfortune we intentionally had a thought which of itself erected a barrier for further surfing. Thought, critique or pause is the absolute enemy.

Therefore: as long as we avoid thought, critique or pause, we cannot need to trouble ourselves with reactivation for whatever purpose or by whatever means. If we should, in our surfing, strike against the shoals or reeves of thought, critique, or pause, (how could we in the first place, as thought, critique, and pause, don’t even exist) life will see us stranded, damaged, there, and hasten to extend its salve of continuous surging to rescue us, (at least from what is not continuously surging, such as pause, hesitation, and nerdy critique.)

Perhaps we can say, following Orla, “Enlightenment is the overcoming of totality through the refusal to pause for anything,” or “Enlightenment is the reactivation of a philosophical ethos through eschewing Enlightenment, reactivation, philosophy, and ethos.”

Monday, February 02, 2009

The Totalization of Shadows, Part XIV


The Desiring Machine known as Poutine, a Quebec fastfood consisting of gravy over "french fries" and curd.

After the recent exchanges here, it has become obvious we have misunderstandings about what is being done, and why. While I can’t accept the idea that talking about Totalization means one is Totalized or intends to be Totalizing, I can accept a certain impatience with dwelling on this one theme, even though I do ask it be recognized the interest in Totalization was a motivation for beginning the blog in the first place: “Enlightenment is the overcoming of Totalization through critique.”

There is an aspect of the impatience with which I am not the slightest in sympathy, and that’s the seeming belief we should be finished with any theorizing and need to get right to the action, the practice, the doing. There’s also a sense that the impatience isn’t going to be slaked with mere action—we seem to be urged toward an activity which will be manic, hectic--a bouncing off the walls, energetic to the limits of our mass, as if we were electrons in plasma. In other words, our thought and our theory are demanded to go at a speed which evinces no clinging, retention or reflection, passivity or negation. Can theory go at such a speed? Or am I right with my original impression of this—that to require this of theory is to negate theory? (And if so, the demand contains some self-contradiction.)

I continue to wonder how the speed of theory as theory would be discerned. Are there slow theories and fast ones? Though I can easily conceive of measuring the speed of actions, or even responses to actions, and I do believe I can perceive the lagging of theory behind the actions of those who are theory-unladen (those who know what they know and don’t need to ask how,) just what is the way to get rid of this lag? Where does it come from? Is it truly the case that the worst way to overcome Totalization is to think about it? Why would this caveat be restricted to Totalization? Why not, if this is true, say that the worst way to overcome anything is to think about it? Totalization would be best overcome by adopting thought processes which amount to a kind of "Jackson Pollock" of the mind? Perhaps.

Jackson Pollock, however, was not without thought or theory. Even Jackson Pollock labored for years and years before he became “Jackson Pollock.” He had to fidget and experiment and think and even technically innovate (e.g. in his discovery of precisely the type of paint which worked best for dripping,) and as a matter of fact, he apprenticed…To Thomas Hart Benton. Wonder of wonders: Jackson Pollock spent years in psychoanalysis, and I don’t know it if he later spoke of this as a waste of his precious time. We can examine Pollock’s work in sequence and see the walls he breached while under analysis—they are many and to me they appear significant.