Day Whatever: Still 0 Fucking Pages of Anything but Outlines of Primary Texts and Proposal

11:00 - 1:20: Begin Ch. 2 Terms and Outline of Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy


Shouldn't I be reading "Geology of Morals" simultaneously, given that I'm concerned right now with its literalization as achieved in DeLanda's works?


Shouldn't I write both sections on geology/morphogenesis so as to determine what the relation between the two is, how the one differs both in rhetorical style and theoretical substance, from the other?


Yes, so go home and get ready to work from 2:00 to close with the exception of the bike pick-up.

Day 4: One Day After 15 pp. Due

Hours: 3:30 - 4:00 p.m.: Read tortuously beginning of Ch.2 of DeLanda. No pages even outlined.

Day 5: 0 Pages, Not Even an Outline of Ch. 2, 1/3 of the Key Terms for Ch. 1 & 2

I'd estimate I worked two to three hours, which seems to me totally inefficient. I'm not sure how much time I may have wasted searching for jobs I won't get or working on that poem that may or may not be any good. At least I made it through Ch. 2.


Would've worked more but figured I'd go to a birthday party.

Day 3 of 15 pp. Streak: Notes and First Pages of Final Body Section

Hours: 10:30 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.: Notes on "The Mathematics of the Virtual." First strokes on DeLanda's report on Deleuzian morphogenetic ontology.  2:45 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.: Finish notes on chapter. 6:15 p.m. -

Day 2: A Copy of My New Proposal

“On the Genealogy of Post-Nietzschean Genealogy,” or

“From Nietzsche’s Genealogy to DeLanda’s Morphogenesis”

                  The proposed title stakes out an attempted exegetical foray into a philosophical method for which there is no clear textual referent: no interpreter of Nietzsche writes as though he understands himself developing anything referred to explicitly as post-Nietzschean genealogy, and those that understand themselves as employing or developing a properly Nietzschean genealogy are often ambiguous, imprecise, or straightforwardly mistaken about how their interpretations of Nietzsche derive from the letter of his texts. Nonetheless, my essay will attempt to demonstrate that certain philosophical methods, ranging in title from simply genealogy to archaeology, anti-genealogy, and the study of morphogenesis, have as highly relevant to the understanding of their own historical trajectory and technical definition some source, however partial, in Nietzsche’s writings on genealogy. As will be seen, the obvious fact that any formal discussion of methods significantly deriving from genealogy must be founded on a precise technical definition of genealogy itself will, rather than simplify their explication, complicate it, since Nietzsche, and indeed I, are restricted to write, as both titles indicate, not in the mode of genealogy, but on the mode of genealogy. The nature of genealogy, as Nietzsche writes of it, is itself inherently problematic and diffuse or obscure.

                  So, what is genealogy? What kind of values does it seek to investigate and measure, how, and why? What for all this is its value? What conditions this value? And in what way does it condition relevant philosophical methods that in some fashion claim to derive from it? These are the questions that must be asked and answered. Perhaps no other philosophers have suggested implicit answers like the philosophical “enfants terribles” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, and the Deleuzian philosopher of contemporary science Manuel DeLanda, and certainly because none have so infamously and creatively adapted genealogy to ends beyond the purported “inquiry into the origins of moral phenomena,” or “revaluation of all values,” than each—all spawning, in addition to some of their own distinctive versions of genealogy, similar methods with their own names:  archaeology for Foucault; anti-genealogy, or geology, and geophilosophy for Deleuze and Guattari; and the study of morphogenesis for DeLanda. On the other hand, perhaps no authors have done so poorly in providing a clear, thorough, and valid textual explication of the highly ambiguous, perhaps even contradictory way in which Nietzsche speaks of genealogy in On the Genealogy of Morals and its companion book, Beyond Good and Evil, in order to found and supplement their discussions of genealogy’s transformations—as has been painstakingly documented by a good handful of less celebrated academics outside the continental tradition who came before me. Providing this deliberately explicit, meticulous account of genealogy’s transformations from Nietzsche to Foucault, to Deleuze & Guattari, and finally to DeLanda—as well as, in supplement, from a method of ambiguously metaphorical narrative critique of normative values to one of precise literal description of intensive or morphogenetic processes—is exactly what this essay will attempt to accomplish.

                  How, precisely? By what method will my own investigation proceed, and in what way does it relate to that of genealogy or any of its concomitant methods of interpretation as presented in the texts I will examine? Broadly speaking, the essay, as hinted in the title, will proceed by a method of reading I will refer to, per the recommendation of Levi Bryant, object-oriented ontologist at Collins College, as problematic reading, originally proffered by one of the primary authors to be interpreted, Deleuze. The method supposes the following:

The history of philosophy isn’t a particularly reflective discipline. It’s rather like portraiture in painting. Producing mental, conceptual portraits. As in painting, you have to create a likeness, but in a different material: the likeness is something you have to produce, rather than a way of producing anything (which comes down to just repeating what a philosopher says). Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don’t tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. Hume, for example, sets out a novel concept of belief, but he doesn’t tell us how and why the problem of knowledge presents itself in such a way that knowledge is seen as a particular kind of belief. The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn’t say but is nonetheless present in what he did say. [emphasis added] (Negotiations, 136)

As Professor Bryant expands, such a method of interpretation:

...everywhere grapples with the letter of the text… [yet] nonetheless looks for something that is everywhere present in the text but which the text does not itself say. Put a bit differently, a problematic reading seeks the horizon, the problematic field, [sic] that renders the concepts invented by a philosopher as solutions. Such a reading strives to reconstruct the problem that renders a particular constellation of concepts intelligible as solutions… The advantages of a problematic reading are threefold. First, problematic reading opens the possibility of immanent critique. Some philosophers seem to think that critiquing [sic] a philosophy consists in the activity of pointing out contradictions or invalid arguments in their reasoning. These philosophers behave like civil servants and bureaucrats worrying over whether the paperwork has been filled out correctly… Where the reading of texts in terms of whether or not they are logically consistent and composed of valid arguments brings extrinsic criteria to bear in the evaluation of the text, a problematic reading provides us with immanent criteria for the evaluation of the text. Does the text, work of literature, or work of art respond to its own problem? Moreover, a problematic reading now reveals the reason these contradictions and invalid arguments inhabit the philosophical text. It reveals the agency that maintains these contradictions… Yet all of this is still a largely scholarly affair. The second advantage of problematic reading is that it is the space of our freedom. Non-problematic scholarly reading is always authoritarian in the precise sense of tying us to the authority of the text. “Yes I agree with that text!” “No I disagree with that text!” It’s all so dismal. “You use a hammer to pound nails, damn it!” We are forced to become Lacanians, Kantians, Deleuzians, object-oriented ontologists, Hegelians, and Spinozists. We become disciples able only to ape the solutions that the master has provided. By contrast, when I understand the problem to which a hammer responds as a solution a space of freedom is opened up. Now a minimal gap between solutions and problems appears, such that the hammer and the text are subject to critique. Why? Because a problematic field is always in excess of any of its solutions, allowing for a variety of different solutions. Is a hammer the best solution to this problem? Are there other solutions available or that are possible?... Finally, third, problematic reading opens the possibility of critiquing problems [sic] themselves, such that a space is open for the posing of new problems… The archaeology[1] of a problem would thus be a means of freeing us from false problems, of escaping false problems and the sad monsters they engender, creating a free space in which other problems can be invented and new solutions can be invented as well. Through a dis-attachment to poorly formed problems, the possibility of posing new problems is open. [emphasis added] (“Problematic Reading,” Larval Subjects)

As has likely already been inferred, such a method suggests the metaphor of genealogy in addition to that of archaeology insofar as it aims to uncover the implicit problematic field which functions as the genesis of the solutions that constitute the explicit material of the text under examination. That is, a problematic reading is genealogical in character to the extent it operates as immanent critique.

                  To close, I must make explicit one key peculiarity of my essay that delimits its potential impact as an exemplar of problematic reading. My essay will not seek any new solutions to the problems implicitly constructed and explicitly solved by genealogy, archaeology, geology, or the study of morphogenetic processes by uncovering those problems anew. Rather, my essay will seek to explicate the ways in which each methods develops from one problem-solution set to the other, a trajectory which, rather conceived as continuous or discontinuous, remains as implicit as each individual problem does to its individual solution. That is, my essay will not attempt any novel philosophical contribution, either through the invention of a novel solution or by the invention of a novel problem with or without its correspondent solution, but will attempt to demonstrate more clearly and meticulously than any author the trajectory or genealogy of genealogical problem-solution sets as they develop in sophistication from the metaphorical critique narrated by Nietzsche to the philosophical-scientific study of morphogenetic processes described by DeLanda. In so doing, I will perform a partial problematic reading of several problematic readings which I will assume to be ‘complete,’ or unabridged, though also controversial, at least partly obscure, and with an excess of their respective problems left over which I will hopefully be able to at least indicate, even should I remain devoted not to solve anew.

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[1] This is not a reference to the method of archaeology proposed by Foucault.

Day 1 of 15 pp. for the Week Countdown

What I've Accomplished So Far

1. Explanatory Letter to Professor Mascuch Requesting His Continuing Anxiety Devoted to the Completion of My Thesis, However Minimal that May Turn Out to Be

2. Some Silent Thoughts on the Many Virtues of Manuel DeLanda's Attempt to Explicate Deleuzian Process Ontology with the Clarity and Rigor of an Analytic Philosopher

3. A Basic Timeline of Quotas on My iCalendar

4. A First Draft of My Full Proposal

5. A Revision to My Barebones-Style Full Outline

6. Some Silent Thoughts on the Way in Which I'll Have to be Generous and Thorough, but not in the Least Successive in Setting Up the Argument Against Deleuze's Idiosyncratic, Seemingly Un-rigorous or Offensively Obscure Interpretation of Nietzschean Genealogy and its Supposed Relation to the Will-to-Power as Differentiator

7. Revisitation of the Deleuzoguattarian Writing Process - Turn in Something, However Sloppy a Diagram or Draft it May Be, Every Single Night; Daily Results Are Essential