I've had a quick spin through the whole now, Chris, and although I'm
perhaps better disposed towards it than I was towards its abstract, I do
share concerns about the use of virtuality of a kind already voiced by
Dominic. It struck me too that in its accounts of becoming contra being it
seemed liked existentialism minus the individual. I note too that in its
twist into precedence of system over reality it sounds (ironically given
Deleuze's supposed credentials) like contemporary bourgeois managerial
thinking: i.e. there is such a skill as 'management' which can be
transfered to any 'system' regardless of its actuality therefore a suitably
enabled individual can supervise the activities of either (say) a
manufactury of portaloos, cultural activities in a small town or a
motor-bike repair business or mental health outpatient therapy regardless
of any other qualification which is partly why we seem to be running
towards a society of pandemic incompetence comparable to Pope's 'universal
darkness buries all' at the close of The Dunciad :)
On 10 August 2012 13:02, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I find the whole Deleuze/DeLanda thing baffling. They use a wholly
> deterministic model (chaos theory) based on state spaces (that is,
> collections of distinct states of a system) to argue for the priority
> of "becoming" and "indetermination". It looks like a lot of
> hand-waving to me.
>
> The account given in this paper is actively obscurantist, making the
> case for "a dimension of existence which is intrinsically hidden and
> implicit". Well, how would you know - except by hand-waving - that
> such a dimension existed? I see no reason to submerge the actual in an
> imperceivable superdimension of virtuality. At most, DeLanda shows
> that one level of the actual can act as the virtual for another: that
> we can generate subsystems the generating conditions of which are
> hidden and implicit *from the point of view of the subsystem*. That
> is, relatively hidden and implicit - not "intrinsically".
>
> The underlying philosophical issue is whether it makes sense to
> prioritise either term of the couple identity/difference. Suppose we
> have a "system of differences, without any positive term". What is the
> material basis of such a system? There must be something that can act
> as a differential mark. That thing may have no positive identity
> within the system it supports, but it does have a prior identity of
> its own: it is what it is, and is not another thing. If it could not
> be discriminated from another thing, it could not act as a
> differential mark. Identity evacuated from the system at one level
> reappears at another.
>
> To take a concrete example: we believe that the system of gender is
> unstable, that "masculine" and "feminine" are reciprocally
> determining, that neither can function as an essence or the basis of a
> fixed identity. But the material basis of the system is bodies and
> performativities: what a body can or cannot do. And this is not
> cleanly divisible into two reciprocally determining classes of bodily
> reality; but every body is what it is, and is not another thing. The
> death of one body is not the death of all bodies, but the death of
> that body alone. The gender system is supported (and sometimes
> undermined) by particular men, women, transpeople and intersex people,
> each of whom is themselves - a sexual being - and not another. The
> system occludes and distorts the reality of which it is the system;
> but the system is not the reality.
>
> Dominic
>
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
**
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