Week 2 Reading, Critical Theory Seminar (3)

Deleuze and Massumi – Recording posted by Maria Belen
Ordonez

sound recording under 17 mins, less than 2 minute clip, share connections of deleuze, massumi, manning.

20/09/20 9:00 PM

Notes

  • percepts – sensations that become autonomous, affects – sensations that overwhelm (becomings)
  • ontology – nature of being human
    • affect / percept etc is a non-human ontology of being.
    • ontogeny – alternative to ontology, always emerging organism
  • minelli clip – awful is the affect, aesthetics is a percept
  • “deleuze conceptualizes body via percept concept affect,” make up ideas
  • Massumi – the body of discursive site as occupied much of critical theory… sensing body has not been granted same theoretical focus
  • movement makes body without form (incorporeal)
  • movements, forming what the body feels, results in change, unpredictability.
  • “movement and sensation as a process before signification.”
    • process=change, not essence but modification, not binarisms but passing into
  • ontology = being, ontogeny = development(movement, becoming)
  • sociality (before individual or collective), Erin Manning, no distinction between cultural and natural, natural cultural continuum.
  • critical method – is not enough to critique- productivist approach, affirmative methods, not outside of own debunking and critiques, affect and sensations come with joy.

discursively philosophy marked by a method of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones marked by analytical reasoning https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discursive

body as discursive site: location where discourse takes place … position from where discourse is situated

incorporeal: not corporeal having no material body or form https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incorporeal

corporeal – having, consisting of, or relating to a physical material body https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corporeal

20/09/20 10:00 PM

Week 2 Reading, Critical Theory Seminar (2)

The Conditions of the Question: What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze

18/09/20 3:40 PM start time

Deleuze, Gilles The Conditions of the Question: What Is Philosophy? In Critical Inquiry; Spring 1991; 17, 3; pg. 471-478

PRE-READ (SCAN)

When does a person ask about philosophy? Question requires trust, vulnerability, between friends. Like us, concepts need friends, and for evolution of philosophy, their friend must be diverse. A philosopher must be a friend to his creations (concepts). “The question of philosophy is […] the single point where the concept and creation are linked together.” The concept is not a representation, or knowledge, but a reality. It is self-positing. Encyclopedia, pedagogy, commercialization, the third age is a disaster of thought regardless of social benefits. (83 words, paraphase).

QUESTIONS

Aiming for a quick(er) read using reading strategies. Check end notes, first+last para, topic sentences, getting gist of it. On second read I want to take notes on the things I am interested in and have questions about, with only the quotes that grip me, the details that jump for me (paraphase), and jots of my own thoughts/questions. (30 mins).

After scan, I am interested in concepts being described as friends and the relationship of community supports impacts this thinking. I am also interested the way philosophy posits itself in relation to other disciplines, especially as a very old discipline in comparison to very new (and insecure) ones like creative research. The ideas I am reading about today are exciting and tap into things I feel like I understand on an intuitive level, I am interested in how these ideas are made accessible, how they are taken out of academia and used in “low-brow” creations.

READING NOTES

  • (Published 1991) Deleuze – prof of philosophy, University of Paris, Capitalism and Schizophrenia / Anti-Oedipus 1983 + A Thousand Plateaus 1987, Cinema / The Movement-Image 1986 + The Time-Image 1989, The Logic of Sense 1990, Expressionism in Spinoza 1990.
  • transitions from friend to enemy, trust to mistrust
  • friend = intimacy, or = potentiality?
  • “infinite sharing and patience” (Blanchot, L’Amitie 1971)
  • “art brings spiritual entities into existance”
  • “….must begin by fabricating and creating [concepts], positing them and making them convincing to those who have recourse to them.” (nietzche).
  • “[philosophy] is neither contemplation, nor reflection, nor communication,” these are tools that are universal in all disciplines.
  • philosophy has a desire to dominate disciplines
  • Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’ cogito, Leibniz’s monad, Kant’s condition, Schelling’s potency, Bergon’s duree
  • philosophy is enduring—sociology, epistemology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, logical analysis, computer science, advertising, marketing—try to use “concept” but faith and trust philosophy endures in creating concepts
  • hegel – concept – figures of creation, moments of self-positing, not related to general or abstract, stretch philosophy into other disciplines because it took on common tools.
  • post kant- encyclopedia, subjectivity – pedagogy, analyse conditions

INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS

Maurice Blanchot

POST-READ

Talking about a philosopher’s relationship with concepts as friends (either in intimacy or honouring potentialisty) didn’t really include a kind of jovial friendship type relationship but more of a responsibility. When talking about friends on a greater scale, involving others, I don’t know if I got friends of friends as much as rivals, a combating of ownership rather than appreciation of concept from different angles. I guess that there are concepts that go round the world and interact with everybody and are free to, and the philosopher does not feel jealously in this because the philosopher has trust and faith that the relationship that is had (friend/creator) is unshaken although not untested. I guess it’s such a difficult thing to look deeply at ones self (as a discipline) that it comes off as cagey. Compare this to a younger creative research discipline actively bringing in ideas from other disciplines (musemology in artefacts) to give shape to itself. Although I guess much of this writing about disciplines is a defense.

18/09/20 4:46 PM end time