Hello Bill,



First let me say thank you for a thorough and thoughtful reply. I agree with a number  of your points and think that there is wider path in this regard than perhaps do you. However, as I said in a previous email, we can disagree and remain friends!



I did want to clarify one thing. The soul

 purpose of effort here is not to demonstrate the molecular journey that Julie takes. Instead, I am attempting to find a way to discuss the music in the film in a way other than the traditional musical analysis, a process which tells us much about the music but little about its relation to the film. In other words I am using Deleuze as a methodological bridge between the fields of film and music theory.  Therefore, I posit that both the score and narrative demonstrate traits of becoming and molecularization. Just wanted to clear that up.



Thanks again!

Gregg Redner

Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry



-----Original Message-----

From:         bill harris <[log in to unmask]>



Date:         Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:24:54 

To:[log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: molecularization





  
  
 
Hi Gregg, 
  
I’d like to thank you for such an erudite and detailed reply. Even in my older, more fluent days of Deleuzo-Guittarian, I could not have hoped to match your acumen. This is probably because back in the early seventies—even as his students—we read Deleuze more than studied him. Ant’-Oed and Mil’plat were understood as recipes of personal growth, becoming BwO’s, guides to the marginal life, how not to fall in love with power…and all of that. 
  
Speaking of which, do you know the story of how he decided to become a Philosopher; and that of his own “molecularization” in the summer of 1940?   Deleuze’s own “Eternal return”, as it were, revolved  back to how we might create concepts in order to redress injustice. There is no Deleuze who isn’t with us, his students out on the tear-gassed streets of Paris in ’68. 69. 70…. 
  
So when I speak of your extremely detailed expose as thin, I’m employing the Quinean sense of your having extended an ontology to the point of diminishing returns. In other words, what you are saying as an orthodox Deleuziology  is formally correct; yet better ways of understanding Julie exist, and I’ll moreover try to demonstrate why the concepts themselves are a bit flawed. 
  
First, please understand that “molar” and “molecular” are drawn from biochemistry, where neither term carries epistemic weight over the other. Certain processes are said to be on one level, others on the other; and in many cases participants argue over which level better explains the phenomena in question. 
  
The best example of this is Biology’s now-failed attempt to reduce life-processes to a molecular level. This began, probably, with the Phage movement of Delbruck who attempted to create a reductionist Biology in the manner of QM’s dependence upon hydrogen as a basic model.  Yet even Delbruck admitted the impossibility. In sum, genetics (indeed a molecular!) can explain transmission, but not growth or maintenance, which is commonly referred to as “metabolism”. From this perspective, life is said to be molar. 
  
Yet Deleuze simply took the reductionist model from Monod (who was the French genetic -guru at the time) and ran with it. In his sense, the molar arrangements (agencements) are transcendent, the molecular is the truly-you, the lived. Furthermore, this molecular real-ness is discovered through experiencing various stages of becoming de-molarized from a male, capitalist empowered society. Hence, we pass through the feminine, and animal—or precisely the things which this social molarity is not. 
  
By contrast, a Keslowskian understanding of his own film would be better based upon what we know of the concepts in question qua science. Without love we are nothing; and love obviously involves a molar commitment to others. According to her creator, Julie’s discovery, in essence, was that all of the Deluze she read as a sixties radical passes away: “gegonna chalkos icon, I kumbalon allolaxon”… becomings indeed. AT the finale, Julie simply sits upon the cusp, crying. Will she re-molarize is tantamount to asking, will she live, again? As for Kieslowski there exists no life on the molecular level, in the sense of having presented a correct analogue of the biochemical nomenclature, he stands as correct, Deluze, wrong. 
  
Science is also about boundary conditions; and the borrowing of terms by Philosophy without such stipulation has, of late, been given some really bad press. Please refer to Sokal for more. For example, in Deleuze’s own words, his conceptual life crumbled that day, in that season, in Normandy. Everyone has a right to spend time on the beach, yes? And what of that university student who just peddled away, but not before revealing all of that hidden knowledge? And how do these experiences create a rupture with my father, the fascist? 
  
All of this, I might add, is still moving to me; and to embody this experience in a word/concept such a “becoming molecular” is fine. Many of us have and still do feel the same way under the shock of like experiences; so to offer up a veritable rupture with qualia in the form of a shared univocality is quite profound. When these events occurred, we all felt “molecular”, and these are the boundaries which contoured our young lives.   
  
So are we not a bit overboard in applying a singular concept to all discreet events? Juie vaaants to beee alooone. We wanted to molarize into a new life. For the sake of argument, both she and we understand that to re-molarize is to live. Deleuze seems to be suggesting that we must molecularize in order to really grow. I always liked the BwO better, because it comes by way of Artaud from Kant's Critique #3. 
  
Again, regarding boundary conditions, he equations of gravity cannot be used on the atomic level; but where do philosophers—upon borrowing scientific terms—impose such conditions? My all-time fave in this regard is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty somehow standing, metaphorically enough, as epistemic lack of certainty for…everything! 
  
Certain goofy American geneticists still insist that skin color can predict “intelligence”, but are more or less policed by their more sober colleagues as to what genes can and cannot be said to do. In any case, several philosophers have duly commented on how Philosophy itself becomes enslaved by the extensional properties of language itself: Rorty, Wittgenstein, Quine, et al. 
  
Now let me interject my own view that these Deleuzianisms do not exist independent of the volition of the subject. In other words, becoming molecular is a willed state of rejecting per-existing social norms, hitherto known as “Molarities”. At Vincennes, our teachers could easily see us willing ourselves to become unisex in appearance, and moreover rejecting traditional boy/girl interaction. This involved females wanting sex, by the way; which I suppose has a lot to do with becoming animal for both genders. 
  
My notion corresponds nicely with young Marx, (big at the time!), and also that of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. There are no socio-psychological laws independent of human will. Deleuze was simply a recorder of history; and like the great philosopher he was, he embodied his observations with meaning; hence a creator of “concepts”. I might also note that Deleuze, like Nietzsche, thought of Philosophy in terms of timeliness. 
  
The alternative would have the D&G team discovering laws which, by their nature are subject -independent. Ostensibly, then, what was written in Ant’Oed  supplants Freud and late  Marx. Capitalism  causes familial issues, and what really happens to spark a potential re-molarization of class consciousness is a molecular disengagement from the machine. But first, you have to rage a bit at the system, yes? 
  
But where, then, would be the proof that this is a universal law affecting those bourgeois enough to benefit from the system itself? Would not the simple terms "despair” and “depression” be sufficiently Ockam-ish enough to adequately describe our dear bourgeois Julie’s… depression and despair? 
  
This, of course, leads to that Popperesque notion of “refutability”. How, in any case, would you describe a situation in which Julie did not manifest the stages of said molecularity? If Deleuze had intended upon writing a psychological tract that proposed an objective law, my bet is that he would have covered his tracks far better. As it stands, what D&G have written is a tract on how to justify and channel lots of schizo-energy that came about due to a particular de-valorization of social norms; ostensibly caused by the vicissitudes of late capitalism having commodified previously codified relations between individuals. In other words, what to do when all that is solid melts into air… 
  
In other words, for your version of Deleuze to work, molecular/molar would have to stand as provable, and demonstratively true. 
Julie goes molecular in a nomothetic sense to the extent that molecularization is a universal, behavioral truth. Otherwise, the term might be best understood as a call for action. don't mourn--molecularize! 
  
Finally, I’d like to say how pleased I am that Deleuzo-Guattarian has yet to become a dead language. That it can be applied to an astoundingly great film whose author he never met—although they were contemporaries, together, in Paris for five years!—is an altogether enchanting project; and, again, I offer my deep complements for your efforts. Yet I, for no better reason, perhaps, than personal taste, prefer the Copenhagen solution. 
  
Sincerely, Bill Harris