Well, for a little flashback to my chanced Deleuzean rendezvous!
When we met up with Dr. Kunhammad in
Kannur months back, we all had such a delightful rendezvous over a
cuppa in his (HoD’s) room.
There, we were discussing a
whole lot of literary delights, from Spivak to Deleuze, giving little heed to Time’s
wing’d chariot!
It was then, during this enlightening
chit chat, that I chanced to know that Dr. Kunhammad is a Deleuzean! And howww!
This proved the much-needed impetus for
me to revive my reading on Deleuze, and I was surprised to find some delightful, lovely streaks that links him with a host of philosophers, Heidegger in particular! This Heideggerian streak runs through Deleuze, on a host of concepts, much more so, with the concept of assemblage
and that of the rhizome in particular!
But I’m still quite confused on a lot of
his ideas. So me thought of reproducing some of them that I found a bit more easy on the eyes and mind!
Thanks a million to Dr. Kunhammad for
lighting the Deleuzean spark in us all!
This critique, given below, is from a
book on Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus
by Brent Adkins.
If I could give a tentative title for
this passage that’s featured below, I would say…
Which
do you prefer? Stability or Change?
Wanna have a stable schema for life, or changing
vistas for life?
So here goes…
Between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari collaborated on a book that’s on Kafka.
Kafka continues many of the themes found
in Anti-Oedipus, such as Oedipus and
desire, and anticipates many of the themes that will be taken up in A Thousand Plateaus, such as immanence
and assemblage.
I want to show that the concept of "assemblage"
(agencement) provides the book with its thematic unity.
Deleuze himself is quite explicit about
this.
When asked in an interview about the
unity of A Thousand Plateaus, he
replies, "I think it is the idea of an assemblage."
We can think of "assemblage" as
an answer to the venerable philosophical question, What is a thing?
The trouble with "things," as
philosophy soon discovered, is that they seem to combine two contradictory
properties: stability and change.
Identifying a thing as a table entails both the recognition
that the object possesses some kind of permanence but also that it is also
subject to modification.
The desk in my office, for example, has
numerous scars and stains on the top, and a couple of the drawers are missing
their pulls. It's still recognizable as a desk, but it's also easy to imagine
this sort of decay happening to the point where the desk is no longer
recognizable as a desk.
Furthermore, long before that happens, it
will be no longer usable as a desk. While Heraclitus and Parmenides sought to
minimize either Stability or change, Plato responded to the problem by strictly
separating these two properties into the discontinuity of the sensible and the
intelligible.
The establishment of the discontinuity
between the sensible and intelligible, as we have seen, is the
inaugural gesture of Western philosophy and has been the predominant way of
dealing with the paradox of the "thing."
The stability of a thing is attributed to
its intelligible nature, while the
thing's ability to undergo change is attributed to its sensible nature.
For the most part, the properties related
to the thing's intelligible nature are its
essence, while the properties related to its sensible nature are its accidents.
Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblages addresses the paradox of the
thing in a radically different way.
Deleuze and Guattari are thus faced with
two interrelated problems.
First, they must (re)articulate things in
terms of assemblages.
These assemblages, furthermore, are to be
thought as concrete collections of heterogeneous materials that display
tendencies toward both stability and change.
The second problem is that because
Deleuze and Guattari are uncovering the tendency toward change as crucial to
understanding assemblages, one might take them as arguing that the task of
philosophy is to pursue the tendency toward change to the exclusion of the
tendency toward stability.
The danger of an unrestricted tendency
toward change is just as great as
that of an unrestricted tendency toward stability.
To adapt a line from late in A Thousand
Plateaus, never believe that change alone will suffice to save us.
For Deleuze and Guattari any given thing
thus exists on a continuum that lies between the fully intensive and the fully
extensive.
Take a human body, for example. A fully
grown adult has converted most of its intensive processes into stable
extensities.
An adult won't grow anymore, change
eye-color, or develop gills. Some processes, though, remain at the intensive
level even in an adult. Chief among these are biological metabolism, which
takes flows of nutrients themselves converted from food, which is extensive-and
through the process of digestion absorbs the nutrients to maintain the
stability of the adult human body.
In the same way, we might also think
about thought itself as an intensive process. Thoughts seem to percolate in and
out of conscious awareness for the most part. However, thoughts can also
coalesce around a particular idea.
It's only when jealousy becomes fixed as
an idea (extensive) that it begins to orient one's other thoughts and behaviors.
Thus, every plateau will have three components: 1) The moment of stability
under consideration. 2) One pole on an intensive continuum that marks the
plateau's limit in terms of stability. 3) Another pole that marks the limit of
change.
Each chapter of this book will seek to
make explicit these three aspects in every plateau in A Thousand Plateaus.
As a brief example of what l have in
mind, let's look at Language.
Language is a concrete assemblage that
evinces tendencies toward stability.
This tendency toward stability in
language Deleuze and Guattari call, the being
major of a language. In order for a language to be major it must have the
support of numerous other assemblages, particularly a government powerful
enough to declare a language "official" and pass laws with regard to
what language a government's business is to be conducted in.
Government-sponsored education bolsters
the language's status by ensuring the teaching of the "proper" rules
of grammar.
At the same time, however, other forces
destabilize a language.
Everyday usage, borrowings from other
languages, literature, and slang continually disturb the stability of a major
language.
As a concrete assemblage, a language is
the dated, singular zone of stability that is the result of intensive processes
with tendencies toward both stasis and change.
A
Thousand Plateaus is the exploration of assemblages or
plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate how to create concepts in a
way that does not presuppose a metaphysics of discontinuity!!!
