Understanding Deleuze

Question 1

How does politicos privilege the actual over the potential?

Answer 1

By stressing human life as already expressed and constituted stressing politics on man or the state rather than the powers which produce the state.

Question 2

What is Foucaults criticism of the ‘repressive hypotheses?’

Answer 2

It is not that our sexual desires are covered by cultural expectations but that once these relations are established, their implicit underlying meaning is formulated after the effect has already been produced.

Question 3

Intensive difference

Answer 3

Unmappable difference with no clear distinct points in time through expresses itself different throughout time. Dynamic and temporally fluid.

Question 4

Nomadology

Answer 4

Western thought moves from a fixed point. The aim of nomadology is to free thought from a fixed point of view of position of judgment.

Question 5

How do we transform the present into a new future?

Answer 5

By considering those virtual or unfulfilled potentials

Question 6

What deterritorializes the social territorialization?

Answer 6

The connectivity of the tribe fascens us together and empowers us under the strength of our numbers but then hurts us and detteritorializes us through the despot.

Question 7

Extensive difference-

Answer 7

Beginning from extension of spatially distinct and bounded points. (Family tree) an extensive multiplicity of some distinct generalized yet bound body.

Question 8

What does Nietzsche say our ideology of morality and immorality grew from?

Answer 8

Arbitrary and inhuman causes: example-‘punishment’ first as ‘festive cruelty’ the joy of inflicting suffering to affirm power over the individual. We’ve come to organize law and morality that justifies the pleasure of asserting force.

Question 10

What is Lacans ‘transcendental signifier?’

Answer 10

In order to use a system of language (relating through a system of things which signify other things) we must first have a signification which signifies this significationS. What you speak is not just noise there is a concept of meaning in order to posit a sense behind what is being spoken.

Question 11

How do we reterritoriaze despotism?

Answer 11

By returning the power of the leader to the collective. Using the leaders strength to empower the individuals.

Question 12

How is life a Transcendental?

Answer 12

It has no ground to stand on outside of itself by which to ascribe the ultimate being of these differentiations. All being therefore expresses itself on the same plane of imminent differences differently Pluralism=monism (disjunctive Synthesis)

Question 13

Hegels “indifferent difference.”

Answer 13

The common sense view of difference is that it opposes another’s being without having an effect on it. It is only an external relation. But yet our identity itself gains it’s being from its opposition (difference.) what something is is defined through its other, its negation.

Question 15

Why does Deleuze refer to Hegels philosophy as one ‘infinite representation’?

Answer 15

It places the representation of the world as the very being of the world.

Question 16

How are concepts behind our ideology political?

Answer 16

Because it ties us into our relationships with others

Question 17

Why is the virtual not subordinate to reality?

Answer 17

Because of its univocality

It is an open totality or a whole

Question 18

Becoming woman

Answer 18

Western though places it’s though in being. But all life is on a plane or becoming.

Question 19

How do we get past thinking of desire as a fundamental lack?

Answer 19

Desire as connection. Desiring machines as life as literally a process of functions without ends or wholes. Desire is therefore the outcome of a series of connections.

Question 21

Why is Evolution a virtual power?

Answer 21

Because it is a capacity of potential change and becoming that passes through organisms. It is ungebetene by actual goals and stresses the striving of creativity and difference.

Question 24

How is speech structured by desire?

Answer 24

Because the symbolism of language stands in for an imaginary presence.

Question 25

Pre-linguistic

Answer 25

The identity of things is its difference. Lying outside the concepts we hold of them.

Question 26

Representational thinking

Answer 26

Simply accepts already differentiated terms. “Men are men and women are women.”

Question 27

Absolute detteritorialzation

Answer 27

A liberation from all connections

Question 27

Lines of Flight

Answer 27

Organism made up connections. White male leads to cellular life form, humanity etc.

Question 28

How did Marx transform the relation between theory and practice?

Answer 28

By arguing that our ideas or theories (the concepts we use to make sense of the world) are not innocent and that the way we think and represent the world is inextricably tied up with how we act and what we desire

Question 29

Assemblage

Answer 29

Life is process of connection and interaction. A Body is the outcome of a process of connections.

Question 30

Intense germinal flux

Answer 30

Flow of genetic material , the great biocosmic memory

Question 31

Practical Philosophy

Answer 31

Philosophy as a practice to form concepts and ideas which result in new possibilities for action and practice.

Question 31

Desire

Answer 31

Life as machination with connections and functions without ends.

Question 31

Minoritatian vs Majoritarian

Answer 31

Description of groups in terms of their formations. Refer to Deleuzian Cinematic Critique: a film that seeks to appeal to majority of audiences is (Major) and not great. But a piece of literature that seeks to change the status quo and challenge the standard is (minor) and great.

Question 31

Why is Deleuzes Method transcendental empiricism?

Answer 31

It refuses to start with any given thing; matter, reality, humanity etc.
But yet it is empirical because it insists on beginning with ‘the experienced’ or ‘given’ as such a commitment to experience.

Question 31

What is the dialectical tradition?

Answer 31

It does not accept what a thing is but instead questions how any thing we experience comes into being or becomes through what it is not.

Question 32

Why is capitalism a deciding?

Answer 32

Because it reduces all flows down to their exchange value. I.E. anything and everything can be evaluated into the market.

Question 33

How does Capitalism reduce becoming into being?

Answer 33

By grounding all the flows of desire, all the intensities of life, into a single quantifiable medium: money.

Question 34

Immanence

Answer 34

The difference or flow that has no single center, foundation or outside point from which it might be judged or defined

Question 35

How is philosophy different from art?

Answer 35

Philosophy conceptualizes, or tries to grasp in itself what art will present in singular fashion while art gives us essence or (thing) by presenting this particular (thingness)

Question 36

What is totality?

Answer 36

A virtual space produced through and alongside the events of connection and spatialization (hence the idea of a ‘plane’)

Question 37

Three historical stages of regimes of Synthesis.

Answer 37

Primitive (cruelty)
Despotic (terror)
Capitalist (cynical)

Question 38

Which historical stage of synthesis is associated with desire as a circulating force throughout a tribe? Where force is an investment and wards off transcendental force from above? Invests in; sacrifices, totems, animal intensities

Answer 38

Primitive (cruel)

Question 39

Which Synthesis of political desire is associated with a desire to be forced as a subject to some transcendental power?

Answer 39

Despotic (terror) stage

We have a wish to have punishment inflicted on us by the enjoying eye of the despot.

Question 40

Summarize Foucaults book “Discipline and Punish” 1979

Answer 40

He describes a regime of terror (despotic) and how the enjoyment we get out of public execution (spectacle of punishment) produces a transcendence of power.
The emergence of separated transcendental power is achieved through spectacle.

Question 41

Panopticon

Answer 41

Elevating the body of the despot as enjoying our punishment becomes virtual power of our subjection. A body in prison being viewed by a central tower whether with a guard in the tower or bit is an immaterial force whereby the prisoner is disciplined by the virtual gaze.

Question 42

What is the first connection?

Answer 42

Mouth and breast (becomes socially recorded in this disjunction)

Question 43

How do we form a social machine?

Answer 43

D&G do not statt desire with lack(scarcity) but surplus. Society is formed when the parts that are not consumed are taken away by a locus of anti production (the capitalist who does nothing but watch his laborers labor, enjoys his money). Thus this transcendent use of this surplus is decoded.

Question 44

How does an organism evolve?

Answer 44

By selecting and actualizing a multiplicity of its virtual powers to become.

Question 45

What is desire?

Answer 45

Desire is the set of passive Syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies that function as units of production.

Question 46

Surplus value?

Answer 46

Productive element that exceeds direct human needs and allows disequilibrium of power

Question 47

How do the three Synthesis correspond with the three historical/political formations?

Answer 47

Connective-primitive/tribal

Disjunctive-barbaric/despotic

Conjunctive-capitalism

Question 48

Connective Synthesis

Answer 48

A system of becoming connects to another (seperate) system of becoming. A wasp>an orchid

Question 49

What allows the surplus value of capitalism to overcome?

Answer 49

The need to have no hinderance affecting the subjects of these exchanges. Anything is permissible as long as it carries with it the possibility of capital exchange. (Monetary flow)

Question 50

What allows territorializations?

Answer 50

Quantifiable things

Question 51

Why is capitalism subject to deterritorialization and decoding?

Answer 51

Because there is no longer an external authority impressing its power through the pleasure it derives from this of flows but instead the need for profit constantl deterritorializes and decodes these flows through the need to use capital to increase capital. Power is produced directly by these flows instead of by a surplus value of code. It is this imperative of capital flow which governs our lives. It is not important what is exchanged as long as there is an exchange. (The unit of measure of exchange has become the authority)

Question 52

Decoding

Answer 52

Decoding at the most general level might be read as something like: the way by which something loses structure and enters a higher level of abstraction. To code something is to make it enter certain definite relations - the more something is coded, the more rigidly it is entered into those relations, and the less able it is to pursue alternate relations. Deleuze has this notion of an amorphous desire flowing through everything in the world, akin to a Spinozist conatus. In a sense, the desire as a force pre-exists the way in which it is concretely directed toward a certain end. Desire is coded when it is concretely directed (and hence restricted) to certain activities and ends, and decoded when it is let loose to pursue lines of flight toward others.

Question 53

What is the first thing to be distributed on the BWO?

Answer 53

Race, culture, Gods etc

Question 54

Social production

Answer 54

Interest, classes, social unit, one cannot use the united of class or persons to transgress social oppression for it is the very coding of life into such territories that engineer oppression

Question 55

Perceptual semiotics

Answer 55

Explains how subjects and objects are formed from perception

Question 56

Haecceity

Answer 56

‘Whatness’ a unique thing that is not yet grounded in a subject or thing such that perception creates subjects and objects from the interactions of haecceities (vibration of light and a pulsation in the Reyna open the perception between eye and image)

Question 57

Line of flight

Answer 57

Power of local groups to produce unforeseen freedoms

Question 58

What is ‘time-image’?

Answer 58

Presents the flux of difference: no longer a spatula or ordered image of time but time as the power of imaging.

Question 59

In his book on Bergson how does Deleuze propose we step outside univocal constraints on perception? (In regards to Ethics, etc.?)

Answer 59

By beginning with a hypothesis of ‘pure perception’ there is not a brain that perceives or a subject that is affected. Like cinema, it is the effect of one event becoming another. (Flows of images)

Question 60

Use Bergson to explain evolution. ‘Creative evolution’

Answer 60

Most argue actual world is the outcome of all these possible potential polymorphism and as such possibility is limited by the natural (actual) world.
Rather:
Let us say a being has x amount of possible developments. These developments are decided by demands of the natural world.
The possible is what we trace back from the actual.
Example:we see humans in their present form and assess the possible and probable of their evolutionary development.
Essentially past and future are explainable from the actual present.

Question 61

How does Bergson creative evolution affect the domain of the virtual-actual?

Answer 61

By the virtual being open to revision and transformation that virtual possibility passing into actuality would affect the whole domain of the possible and re-figure it.