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.