DELEUZE AND ANALYSIS (BACKGROUND) (w/ Terence Blake)

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[@krisjones05]

My partner has bought me this course for my birthday. I have plunged into Deleuze and Lacan during my undergraduate studies this past year, and now Terence is teaching both! I am very excited.

[@firesalamander4795]

I wish to have the amount of books that requires a ladder someday..

[@mandys1505]

theres D+G schizoanalysis, theres even the analysis of heidegger...but then to compare both to Lacan, using derrida and foucault!🎉🎉 yeah thats prob the analyst i need 😂

[@mandys1505]

lol

[@exlauslegale8534]

Terence (former friend of the infamous John David Ebert) said there's no subject in Deleuze. Has he read Empiricism and Subjectivity? Does he know that desiring machines are so many larval subjects on the BwO? Terence doesn't distinguish a flow from a flux... I pity the fool who will pay for his seminary

[@TerenceBlake1]

On the difference between flow and flux: "In Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works in the original French the word « flux » crops up constantly and is a central technical term in their philosophy. The English translations render this one French word randomly as « flux » or « flow », jumping from one translation to the other even within a single paragraph. In English the word « flux » is a term appropriate to more technical, more quantitative (even vaguely so) discussions, « flow » is employed in less technical, or more qualitative contexts. On the technical side, we may think of thermodynamics and its vocabulary of fluxes, and this is indeed relevant to Deleuze and Guattari’s network of multi-disciplinary references, but for « flux » I think the intended reference is at least as much to history, sociology, and economics as to physics. In the preface to the Italian edition of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS Deleuze sketches out a three point summary of ANTI-OEDIPUS. Point 3 is about fluxes: « Universal history indeed exists, but it is a history of contingency (the fluxes, which are the object of History, are canalized through primitive codes, the over-coding of the despot, and the decoding of capitalism which makes possible the conjunction of independent fluxes) ». Two Regimes of Madness page 309. Note 1: the translation has « flows », I have replaced its two occurrences in this passage by « fluxes ». Note 2: two commas present in the French text are missing in the English translation: after the first use of « fluxes » and then again after « History ». I have restored them so that the passage reads: « the fluxes, which are the object of History, are canalized » (instead of « the fluxes which are the object of History are canalized ». This radically changes the sense. With the commas we have a definition of « fluxes » as the object of history. Without the commas we have a limitation or selection of the fluxes. Note 3: Deleuze’s prefaces to the English and Italian translations of his books are of extreme value, given that he explains himself so rarely. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari the « fluxes » are the « object of history », even if the meaning of this term is generalised to encompass an ontology of fluxes. The reference in the first instance is directed more to the work of Fernand Braudel and Gabriel Tarde than to that of Charles Fourier. To sum up and push further my thoughts on the flux/flow conundrum: the term « flux » is both more quantitative (broadly defined) and more technical in connotation than « flow ». This quantitative/technical acception of « flux » is what is relevant to Deleuze’s use of the term. This conjecture is confirmed by Deleuze’s remarks on « fluxes » as the object of history and on the need to quantify fluxes, including writing. On this idea of the quantification of fluxes, one may turn to the first paragraphs of RHIZOME where Deleuze and Guattari speak of the need to « quantify writing », taking it as one flux among many, and so the need to quantify the fluxes of any assemblage: speed, acceleration, viscosity, sedimentation, etc. Writing as more than literature The quantifying criteria that Deleuze and Guattari enunciate at the beginning of RHIZOME concern all fluxes, including writing, and situate these fluxes within and between assemblages. Thus the habitual translation of « flux » as « flow » tends to nudge the apprehension and reception of ANTI-OEDIPUS in English more towards the literary pole than the original French text authorises. A second problem is that the preference for the term « flow » makes us lose the intrinsic link between fluxes and assemblages (or better « arrangements » or « set-ups »). We move easily from « flow » to « free flow » and to a naive anarchistic interpretation of ANTI-OEDIPUS as « anything goes » or formlessness. A further consideration, only implicit in ANTI-OEDIPUS but one that emerges very clearly in KAFKA (1975) and RHIZOME (1976) before receiving fuller expression in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS is that for assemblages there are no purely machinic fluxes, fluxes are also always also semiotic, and thus not only quantified but « indexed ». « the flow and its quanta can be grasped only by virtue of indexes on the segmented line, but conversely, that line and those indexes exist only by virtue of the flow suffusing them » (A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, 218). Terminological note on the quasi-synonymy between fluxes and lines: Fluxes are both machinic and semiotic, they are situated between the ideal poles of pure sensations and pure representations, they are lines, becomings, percepts and affects. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish 3 lines: segmented, supple or molecular, and line of deterritorialisation (primary over the two others). One must also distinguish the line traced (actualised) and the line that is tracing itself (virtual). Fluxes are quasi-synonymous with lines as they are being traced. F We can say that fluxes and lines are « quasi-synonymous » because Deleuze and Guattari discuss them in the same terms and the same contexts, but that « flux » has a more active, material, hyletic, connotation and « line » a more orientational, conceptual, noetic connotation. The fluxes both follow and trace the lines." Quoted from my blog Agent Swarm, 20/10/2022, title: "Are fluxes flows? A Deleuzo-Guattarian Conundrum" (youtube deletes links so I am quoting).

[@exlauslegale8534]

@@TerenceBlake1 So many words! Do they serve to show off knowledge or to obfuscate it? Do you Terence know that AntiOedipus was written so that a fifteen year old can understand it (of course, French teens are much more versed in philosophy essentials)? “Flux refers to the rate of flow or transfer of energy, particles, or substances, often in scientific contexts. Flow describes the movement of a fluid or the continuous progression of elements and ideas.”

[@TerenceBlake1]

@@exlauslegale8534 In your first commentary you say: "Terence doesn't distinguish a flow from a flux". I point out that this is normal because in French there is just one word "flux" (which means both "flow" and "flux"). One word in French, two words in English, translations that slide chaotically from one to the other. It is the Anglophone translators that don't distinguish a flow from a flux, so I give a distinction. This is a technical question, but you slide into the pop-philosophy aims of ANTI-OEDIPUS: "AntiOedipus was written so that a fifteen year old can understand it". Deleuze admits that overall ANTI-OEDIPUS was a failure in this regard, even if it did produce some flashes of pop-philosophical insight. That is one reason that D&G moved away from the jargon in ANTI-OEDIPUS, including the jargon of "fluxes". For example, they moved from "machines" to "assemblages", and from "fluxes" to lines. You forget (1) I first read ANTI-OEDIPUS in 1978 and was so impressed and inspired that I moved to France, to the country that could produce such thinker. 46 years later I still consider it a great book. (2) I taught English in a French "lycée" (high school) for over 20 years, so I am well aware of what "French teens" can do. I loved my job and the teens' "philosophical" openness. Everything I write on ANTI-OEDIPUS, and other works, is to clear away the crap from people's eyes so that they can read like a fifteen year old, with their passion and freshness (3) To become an English teacher in a French lycée I had to study the linguistics of English from a French point of view. I succeeded in my exams (Agrégation - option Linguistique) thanks to my reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and to their espousal of enunciative linguistics (4) So, I owe my country (France - where I have lived for 44 years), the language I speak and think and dream in, my wife (whom I met in Paris) and children, my career, and even my bodily action (I began learning tai chi because of ANTI-OEDIPUS, to learn from physical experience about flows and fluxes on the body without organs), I owe all that and more to reading Deleuze and Guattari's work and taking it seriously. In conclusion, no showing off, no obfuscating, just reporting.

[@exlauslegale8534]

@@TerenceBlake1 OK, if you are such a D&G benefactor, what are you doing with these Hegelians, that spend half of the recent video (What is Philosophy and Lacan's Graph of Desire) mocking (taking a piss of) D&G's philosophy? Why are you trying to return D&G under the thumb of le nom de père?