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Steve,
Yes-'my' point exactly!-nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari also point out that, at the level of anthropomorphic strata or secondary utterances, one strata can often come to dominate another. Transversality is continous variation but between the utterances of Persons, there are also 'theatres' of the interstitual or what I would call the 'vague' utterance or murmurs of speech?
These haeecitties occupy a strange space between virtual and actual without which a distinction between transversality and the utterance would be meaningless. For Deleuze, haeccities are that which distinguish the composite from the phylum but I am not so sure that nomadic distribution does not occur between bodies as much as 'in' the containment specific composites. So the problem of 'community' needs to be addresssed here without mistaking an interstitual aggregate for THE COMMUNITY at large.
By ornamental, I mean a ritual or utternace belonging to you or me that, in a way not dissimilar to speculative space, accrues its time-values, or specific utternace by being surplus to individual need but in an interstitual relation to other strata which it may dominate or be dominated by, or, more likely both. In this peculiarly Nietzschean sense, there may be an ornamental component to all utterances but one might want to talk about degrees of ornamentality i.e speech becoming idols.
This then opens onto the problem of ritual at the level of collective enunctiation. Can writing or filmmaking for a people that is missing take place without some ritual or at least the creation of symbols ? Where does the institutual in film occur? True, tranversality is collective agencement but the specific cuts, joins and assemblages of partial time/images bear no contextual relation to virtual multiplicity. Although each time image is an indeterminate article, it must, nevertheless produce some illusion of pattern, however minimal, to make sense from non-sense. At what point does one want to say a continuum in variation has passed into ossified destructive habit, a point that itself varies. Stopping to wash ones hands while the house is burning ...braving all odds for a treasured souvenir, icons of health, hygiene and community
Anyhow, enough chat! Back to making a fuzzy felt semiotics...
Ruth.C
>>> "steve.devos" <[log in to unmask]> 12/22 12:51 am >>>
Ruth/SEan
Or transversality which Guattari defines as "...simply continual
movement from one 'front' to another...The unconscious is above all a
social agencement , the collective force of latent utterances. Only
secondarily can these utterances be diveded into what belongs to you or
to me..." Ritual as such being simply a specific form of utterance...
s
Ruth Chandler wrote:
>hi sean,
>my last post of this year-yes there are qualitative differences ( i already aplogised for lack of specificity) or we would have no differences in kind, only differences in degree betweeen two modalities. habits can become ritualized and then we are starting to talk about what i would like to think of as 'ornamentalized' habits and which will have a cultural idiom, a spatial distribution as theatre- and a politico/aesthetic economy. thats still hugely general but i'm really thinking of the distinction between, or rather the mixture of smooth and striated space in A Thousand Plateaux when i talk about ritual. rituals are always tightly striated habits or closed repetitions.
>
>Ruth.C
>
>>>>Sean Cubitt <[log in to unmask]> 12/20 9:54 pm >>>
>>>>
>I get nervous now, after moving to a place where ritual odf the
>traditional variety is an integral part of life, to hear the word
>'ritual' applied to activities which are merely habitual, or which
>are fetishised or obsessive -- it smacks of the concept of 'taboo' so
>roundly and throughly assassinated by Levi-Strauss.
>
>That is to say: there is a connection between ritual ablutions before
>eating a sacred meal and the obsessive washing of some types of
>paranoia, but they are not the same activity, neither is reducible to
>the other. From where I sit, each belongs to a different media
>formation -- the difference between sacral cleanliness and the
>marketing of technologised hygiene (see Giedion on the history of the
>bathroom, and jane Graves beautiful essay, inspired by Mead, on 'The
>Kitchen as the Upside-Down Bathroom').
>
>I'd go so far as to say there is a qualitative difference between the
>cleanliness protocols associated with maori feasting, the ablutions
>performed by a catholic priest before touching the Eucharist, and the
>habitual or paranoid washing of hands before cooking or dining in the
>modern west. Because each takes place (and time) in a different
>regime of sense-making, structuration and phasis, none is reducible
>to a single general and universal category.
>
>If on the other hand they were thus reducible, then there is no
>reason why the 'rituals' of reason would not be equally part of the
>same universal form: the passing of degrees, the ritual humiliation
>of students, the heightened language of pedagogic oratory, the
>formalities of turn-taking. Even 'rational' hygiene in catering
>legislation.
>
>Reductive, but in a way not much more so than the binarism of our
>heading. Bataille's 'acephalic' is no more revolutionary than kantian
>reason -- it isonly its obverse. The walls of capital do not shudder
>because of Pulp Fiction and Linkin Park - on the contrary, they are
>fortified by the assimilation of irrationalism.
>
>and a merry christmas to us all
>
>sean
>
>
>
>--
>Sean Cubitt
>Screen and Media Studies,
>Akoranga Whakaata Pnrongo
>University of Waikato,
>Private Bag 3105,
>Hamilton,
>New Zealand
>T: Dept: +64 (0)7 838 4543
>T: Direct: +64 (0)7 856 2289 ext 8604
>F: +64 (0)7 838 4767
>http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film
>http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita
>http://www.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/welcome.html
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