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)