Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Review
Let's take a moment to review my writing process so far and determine what's holding it back from being more efficient.
1) Not updating daily. Make it an absolute that tonight you will type up on the blog the material you've written for the day. Today that will consist of a revised introduction and continued work on your articulation of DeLanda's solution to the problem of the genesis of individuals, and, if possible, your articulation of D&G's solution to the problem of the genesis of strata or territorialities.
2) Spending too much time writing outlines of the material without writing material on the material.
3) Taking days off for being sick, requiring a day of catch-up to refresh the memory of the material once held firmly in mind.
So, I'll stop getting sick and start writing before or as I outline the section I'm writing on, or outline only with a mind to the problem I'm right then taking on.
1) Not updating daily. Make it an absolute that tonight you will type up on the blog the material you've written for the day. Today that will consist of a revised introduction and continued work on your articulation of DeLanda's solution to the problem of the genesis of individuals, and, if possible, your articulation of D&G's solution to the problem of the genesis of strata or territorialities.
2) Spending too much time writing outlines of the material without writing material on the material.
3) Taking days off for being sick, requiring a day of catch-up to refresh the memory of the material once held firmly in mind.
So, I'll stop getting sick and start writing before or as I outline the section I'm writing on, or outline only with a mind to the problem I'm right then taking on.
What I Wrote Yesterday
Yesterday I finally began a practice which I aspire to keep with me a long time: that of writing on paper for extended periods of time, daily.
I'd done it before when arranging my hours or drafting poems, but not yet in writing research.
I'm attracted to the practice for several reasons: 1) the great writers of the past, when great writers were widely recognized as great, wrote with pen and paper, with the rhythms of a single hand, or else with a typewriter, or with some combination of the two practices, and I'd be a moron to not at least attempt to emulate the great writers of the past over any current schmuck typing on a computer (my favorite setup being that of the pen and paper during the day, typing late into the night, a daily combo I take from my adolescent writer hero who I admired, as is often the case for such age, for little interesting reason, Paul Auster), 2) it forces you to put more concentrated muscle into what you're doing, and to pay attention to the movements of your thought, to recognize writing for the self-punishing, attention-draining practice that it is, 3) it literally makes legible the way in which your personality, your bodily constitution and the way in which the world's affections (not in the romantic but in the Spinozist sense, as that of emotions with exterior origin) influence the quality of your activity, as indicated by the rhythm and tempo, the intensity of pressure, and the fineness or cruddiness of form in the handwriting, 4) it avoids all the averse effects the computer and the internet have on one's capacity for single-pointed attention, for being "too wired to concentrate" or subject to "continuous continuous partial attention" (see <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011659.html> for a rundown of how widespread neverending digital interpassivity affects our very brain receptors everyday), and 5) it demands I restrict myself to what I know off the top of my head or can grasp with the material text at hand, rather than what I can look up on the internet in twenty seconds.
Here's what I wrote yesterday (typed out a day late due to exhaustion and MoA reading the day before). I should be complete except for citation:
I will begin the task of detailing DeLanda's proposed solution to the problem of the genesis of spatiotemporal form by first describing his account of the virtual's basic structure, consisting as it does of complex elements derived from formal theories (that is, theories which generate experiments) in the advanced mathematics and sciences.
The virtual, which I will here define as that dimension out of which intensive processes drive the progressive differentiation of forms that populate the actual, consists of three main elements: the plane of consistency, multiplicities, and quasi-causal operators. We will see later that in "The Geology of Morals" these elements are termed the Body without Organs, rhizomes (?), and epistrata. The concept most essential to understanding Deleuze's solution to the problem of the genesis of spatiotemporal form is that of multiplicity. To understand the concept I will need to provide some background information in differential geometry, group theory, and dynamical systems theory.
The term "multiplicity" is closely related to that of "manifold," a term designating a geometrical space with certain characteristic properties. Some history of differential geometry will help us grasp the particularities of manifolds, especially those which enable the concept to go beyond the resources offered by essentialist explanations for the genesis of form. The term derives from the differential geometry of Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. Differential geometry can first be understood through its distinction with regard to analytical geometry. Analytical geometry, invented by René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat, consists of the "now familiar method of embedding curves into a tw0-dimensional space on which arbitrary axes could be fixed" (DeLanda 11). This embedding of fixed axes allowed the assignment of a pair of numbers (coordinates) to every point on the curve, making it so that the geometric relations between points could be expressed as relations between numbers, a task for which the newly developed algebra was perfectly suited. In short, a translation scheme was invented that allowed the combinatorial resources of algebra to be employed toward the solution of geometrical problems. The basic inspiration behind differential geometry is congruent: tapping into a new reservoir of problem-solving resources--this time not algebra, but differential and integral calculus. In particular, problems involving the relations between the changes of two or more quantities became the original application for the calculus, it being a way of find the instantaneous value for the rate of change (relations between changes) of two or more quantities.
When Gauss began to tap into these differential resources offered by the calculus, a curved two-dimensional space was studied using the Cartesian method: again, with the surface embedded in a three-dimensional space complete with its own fixed set of axes, coordinates assigned to every point of the surface, and geometric links between points determining the form of the surface exposed and algebraic relations between the numbers. But Gauss realized that the calculus operated entirely with local information, focusing on infinitesimal points on the surface itself, thus allowed the study of the surface without any reference to a global embedding space. He developed a method to implant the coordinate axes on the surface itself and use differential rather than algebraic equations to characterize their relations. As Morris Klein observes, Gauss advanced the new concept that "a surface is a space in itself" (cite).
It would be Riemann who would develop the resources necessary to think the term originally referred to as "manifold." He extended the study of the surface as a space in itself from the two-dimensional case Gauss had dealt with to that of N-dimensional spaces, thus developing the concept of the "manifold," and N-dimensional curved structure defined exclusively through its intrinsic features--that is, defined without the need to embed them into a higher-dimensional (N+1) space. We could define a multiplicity similarly: "Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organization belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system," which "however many dimensions it may have... never has a supplementary dimension to that which transpires upon it. This alone makes it natural and immanent" (Deleuze in DeLanda, 12). In this way they oppose the concept of essence, which supposes both a defining unity and a transcendent space in which they are embedded. Though it may be objected that these are purely formal differences between concepts, in the following paragraphs I will specify the way in which multiplicities relate to the physical processes which generate material objects, thus showing how these formal differences indicate deeper ontological differences. Along the way I will of course eventually articulate the other two main elements of the virtual, as they become necessary to our understanding of the genesis of form.
I'd done it before when arranging my hours or drafting poems, but not yet in writing research.
I'm attracted to the practice for several reasons: 1) the great writers of the past, when great writers were widely recognized as great, wrote with pen and paper, with the rhythms of a single hand, or else with a typewriter, or with some combination of the two practices, and I'd be a moron to not at least attempt to emulate the great writers of the past over any current schmuck typing on a computer (my favorite setup being that of the pen and paper during the day, typing late into the night, a daily combo I take from my adolescent writer hero who I admired, as is often the case for such age, for little interesting reason, Paul Auster), 2) it forces you to put more concentrated muscle into what you're doing, and to pay attention to the movements of your thought, to recognize writing for the self-punishing, attention-draining practice that it is, 3) it literally makes legible the way in which your personality, your bodily constitution and the way in which the world's affections (not in the romantic but in the Spinozist sense, as that of emotions with exterior origin) influence the quality of your activity, as indicated by the rhythm and tempo, the intensity of pressure, and the fineness or cruddiness of form in the handwriting, 4) it avoids all the averse effects the computer and the internet have on one's capacity for single-pointed attention, for being "too wired to concentrate" or subject to "continuous continuous partial attention" (see <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011659.html> for a rundown of how widespread neverending digital interpassivity affects our very brain receptors everyday), and 5) it demands I restrict myself to what I know off the top of my head or can grasp with the material text at hand, rather than what I can look up on the internet in twenty seconds.
Here's what I wrote yesterday (typed out a day late due to exhaustion and MoA reading the day before). I should be complete except for citation:
I will begin the task of detailing DeLanda's proposed solution to the problem of the genesis of spatiotemporal form by first describing his account of the virtual's basic structure, consisting as it does of complex elements derived from formal theories (that is, theories which generate experiments) in the advanced mathematics and sciences.
The virtual, which I will here define as that dimension out of which intensive processes drive the progressive differentiation of forms that populate the actual, consists of three main elements: the plane of consistency, multiplicities, and quasi-causal operators. We will see later that in "The Geology of Morals" these elements are termed the Body without Organs, rhizomes (?), and epistrata. The concept most essential to understanding Deleuze's solution to the problem of the genesis of spatiotemporal form is that of multiplicity. To understand the concept I will need to provide some background information in differential geometry, group theory, and dynamical systems theory.
The term "multiplicity" is closely related to that of "manifold," a term designating a geometrical space with certain characteristic properties. Some history of differential geometry will help us grasp the particularities of manifolds, especially those which enable the concept to go beyond the resources offered by essentialist explanations for the genesis of form. The term derives from the differential geometry of Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. Differential geometry can first be understood through its distinction with regard to analytical geometry. Analytical geometry, invented by René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat, consists of the "now familiar method of embedding curves into a tw0-dimensional space on which arbitrary axes could be fixed" (DeLanda 11). This embedding of fixed axes allowed the assignment of a pair of numbers (coordinates) to every point on the curve, making it so that the geometric relations between points could be expressed as relations between numbers, a task for which the newly developed algebra was perfectly suited. In short, a translation scheme was invented that allowed the combinatorial resources of algebra to be employed toward the solution of geometrical problems. The basic inspiration behind differential geometry is congruent: tapping into a new reservoir of problem-solving resources--this time not algebra, but differential and integral calculus. In particular, problems involving the relations between the changes of two or more quantities became the original application for the calculus, it being a way of find the instantaneous value for the rate of change (relations between changes) of two or more quantities.
When Gauss began to tap into these differential resources offered by the calculus, a curved two-dimensional space was studied using the Cartesian method: again, with the surface embedded in a three-dimensional space complete with its own fixed set of axes, coordinates assigned to every point of the surface, and geometric links between points determining the form of the surface exposed and algebraic relations between the numbers. But Gauss realized that the calculus operated entirely with local information, focusing on infinitesimal points on the surface itself, thus allowed the study of the surface without any reference to a global embedding space. He developed a method to implant the coordinate axes on the surface itself and use differential rather than algebraic equations to characterize their relations. As Morris Klein observes, Gauss advanced the new concept that "a surface is a space in itself" (cite).
It would be Riemann who would develop the resources necessary to think the term originally referred to as "manifold." He extended the study of the surface as a space in itself from the two-dimensional case Gauss had dealt with to that of N-dimensional spaces, thus developing the concept of the "manifold," and N-dimensional curved structure defined exclusively through its intrinsic features--that is, defined without the need to embed them into a higher-dimensional (N+1) space. We could define a multiplicity similarly: "Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organization belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system," which "however many dimensions it may have... never has a supplementary dimension to that which transpires upon it. This alone makes it natural and immanent" (Deleuze in DeLanda, 12). In this way they oppose the concept of essence, which supposes both a defining unity and a transcendent space in which they are embedded. Though it may be objected that these are purely formal differences between concepts, in the following paragraphs I will specify the way in which multiplicities relate to the physical processes which generate material objects, thus showing how these formal differences indicate deeper ontological differences. Along the way I will of course eventually articulate the other two main elements of the virtual, as they become necessary to our understanding of the genesis of form.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Been Busy Writing on Legal Pads
And getting really sick.
Will resume updating this week, though perhaps not tonight.
Will resume updating this week, though perhaps not tonight.
Finished All My Notes
Now I'm going to see if I can write the entire thing before I collapse from need of sleep. That way I'll be done with everything but revision before my interview w/ Omnidawn on Thursday.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
What the Problems Are
1. Nietzsche - genesis of values (minimally buttressed by an argument about the genesis of individuals--there is no atom which exists distinct from the forces that compose it, no good or noble person that can withhold from acting in a good or noble fashion)
2. Deleuze on Nietzsche - genesis of values and genesis of objects or forces (will-to-power as differentiator of forces)
3. DeLanda - genesis of individuals
4. Deleuze & Guattari - genesis of strata or territorialities (organisms)
5. Foucault - genesis of values of traditional historian
Me - genesis of each individual problem-solution set, and how this accounts for the transformations and appropriations of a theoretical entity called genealogy
Note: those scholars complaining against Foucault and Deleuze, who seem to be the target of this essay, operate with a misunderstanding of the problems dealt with, a misunderstanding of what counts as relevant and what counts as irrelevant, seeing only the actual text and calling for exhaustive exegesis about the text, they complain against Foucault and Deleuze for not simply repeating as they do, charging them with (gasp!) illicit scholarly method, but would they but attempt to penetrate beyond Nietzsche's words to see the incompleteness of his solutions, they would see how Deleuze has been all along attempting imperfect solutions to a genuinely philosophical problem Nietzsche had himself engaged with and recognized as beyond his anti-philosophical moral critiques: that of the genesis of forces or forms, that which accounts for the very constitution of the universe in all its difference.
So, the basic task of this thesis seems to be in demonstrating an adequate understanding of Deleuze's ontological speculation so as to show some learned fools in universities (should they ever happen across this little essay) they ain't go no ideas, only lots of references, a job, and a lot of undue resentment against a seriously great philosopher with more rigor to his thought than they have.
This could, however, lead to a much more interesting project: that of trying to understand what accounts for all the specific differences in Deleuze's models for the genesis of form; and, assuming it to be true that he felt none of them to be sufficient solutions to the problem, how might these transformations point us toward a new solution to the problem of genesis? Perhaps Miguel de Beistegui has something to say toward this in his book Truth and Genesis, though probably some of the Speculative Realists or Object-Oriented Ontologists so hot these days have more interesting models to propose, since Beistegui's book looks more an exegetical than speculative affair.
2. Deleuze on Nietzsche - genesis of values and genesis of objects or forces (will-to-power as differentiator of forces)
3. DeLanda - genesis of individuals
4. Deleuze & Guattari - genesis of strata or territorialities (organisms)
5. Foucault - genesis of values of traditional historian
Me - genesis of each individual problem-solution set, and how this accounts for the transformations and appropriations of a theoretical entity called genealogy
Note: those scholars complaining against Foucault and Deleuze, who seem to be the target of this essay, operate with a misunderstanding of the problems dealt with, a misunderstanding of what counts as relevant and what counts as irrelevant, seeing only the actual text and calling for exhaustive exegesis about the text, they complain against Foucault and Deleuze for not simply repeating as they do, charging them with (gasp!) illicit scholarly method, but would they but attempt to penetrate beyond Nietzsche's words to see the incompleteness of his solutions, they would see how Deleuze has been all along attempting imperfect solutions to a genuinely philosophical problem Nietzsche had himself engaged with and recognized as beyond his anti-philosophical moral critiques: that of the genesis of forces or forms, that which accounts for the very constitution of the universe in all its difference.
So, the basic task of this thesis seems to be in demonstrating an adequate understanding of Deleuze's ontological speculation so as to show some learned fools in universities (should they ever happen across this little essay) they ain't go no ideas, only lots of references, a job, and a lot of undue resentment against a seriously great philosopher with more rigor to his thought than they have.
This could, however, lead to a much more interesting project: that of trying to understand what accounts for all the specific differences in Deleuze's models for the genesis of form; and, assuming it to be true that he felt none of them to be sufficient solutions to the problem, how might these transformations point us toward a new solution to the problem of genesis? Perhaps Miguel de Beistegui has something to say toward this in his book Truth and Genesis, though probably some of the Speculative Realists or Object-Oriented Ontologists so hot these days have more interesting models to propose, since Beistegui's book looks more an exegetical than speculative affair.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Agh!
I've ended up finishing the entirety of Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, finding it necessary to read not only the third but the fourth section, given that this section explained the way in which Deleuze's ontology of the virtual (rather than one restricted to the actual) entails an epistemology of the problematic (rather than one restricted to laws). The way in which I've organized the overall aim of my thesis, that of determining whether and how each way of conceiving (and performing) a genealogy or some genetic story indicates a different conception of the problem of genesis, compels me to have a fully adequate grasp of the basics of Deleuze's problematic epistemology. Certainly I'll need to take further notes and review the material, but I'm already very excited: with this material learned and a full draft of the comparison b/w DeLanda and Deleuze, I'll be well on my way to deliver the final blows and type that shit out.
As expected, this puts me quite a ways behind regarding my other tasks, those of compiling an inventory of substantial and rhetorical differences and writing them out in well-formed, though only draft-quality, paragraphs...
I suppose in fact I'll need to copy out some of the most important passages from these sections before I move on to typing out the material for the comparative analysis, though I suppose there's no harm at least in typing up on here the differences as I've already noted them, without a full reading of DeLanda and without citing the differences to actual text. I'll do that right before I move on to reviewing and organizing the material on spatiotemporal actualization and problematic epistemology.
As expected, this puts me quite a ways behind regarding my other tasks, those of compiling an inventory of substantial and rhetorical differences and writing them out in well-formed, though only draft-quality, paragraphs...
I suppose in fact I'll need to copy out some of the most important passages from these sections before I move on to typing out the material for the comparative analysis, though I suppose there's no harm at least in typing up on here the differences as I've already noted them, without a full reading of DeLanda and without citing the differences to actual text. I'll do that right before I move on to reviewing and organizing the material on spatiotemporal actualization and problematic epistemology.
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