Understanding Deleuze Flashcards
How does politicos privilege the actual over the potential?
By stressing human life as already expressed and constituted stressing politics on man or the state rather than the powers which produce the state.
What is Foucaults criticism of the ‘repressive hypotheses?’
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.
Intensive difference
Unmappable difference with no clear distinct points in time through expresses itself different throughout time. Dynamic and temporally fluid.
Nomadology
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.
How do we transform the present into a new future?
By considering those virtual or unfulfilled potentials
What deterritorializes the social territorialization?
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.
Extensive difference-
Beginning from extension of spatially distinct and bounded points. (Family tree) an extensive multiplicity of some distinct generalized yet bound body.
What does Nietzsche say our ideology of morality and immorality grew from?
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.
What is Lacans ‘transcendental signifier?’
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.
How do we reterritoriaze despotism?
By returning the power of the leader to the collective. Using the leaders strength to empower the individuals.
How is life a Transcendental?
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)
Hegels “indifferent difference.”
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.
Why does Deleuze refer to Hegels philosophy as one ‘infinite representation’?
It places the representation of the world as the very being of the world.
How are concepts behind our ideology political?
Because it ties us into our relationships with others
Why is the virtual not subordinate to reality?
Because of its univocality
It is an open totality or a whole
Becoming woman
Western though places it’s though in being. But all life is on a plane or becoming.
How do we get past thinking of desire as a fundamental lack?
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.
Why is Evolution a virtual power?
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.
How is speech structured by desire?
Because the symbolism of language stands in for an imaginary presence.
Pre-linguistic
The identity of things is its difference. Lying outside the concepts we hold of them.
Representational thinking
Simply accepts already differentiated terms. “Men are men and women are women.”
Absolute detteritorialzation
A liberation from all connections
Lines of Flight
Organism made up connections. White male leads to cellular life form, humanity etc.
How did Marx transform the relation between theory and practice?
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
Assemblage
Life is process of connection and interaction. A Body is the outcome of a process of connections.
Intense germinal flux
Flow of genetic material , the great biocosmic memory
Practical Philosophy
Philosophy as a practice to form concepts and ideas which result in new possibilities for action and practice.
Desire
Life as machination with connections and functions without ends.
Minoritatian vs Majoritarian
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.
Why is Deleuzes Method transcendental empiricism?
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.
What is the dialectical tradition?
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.
Why is capitalism a deciding?
Because it reduces all flows down to their exchange value. I.E. anything and everything can be evaluated into the market.
How does Capitalism reduce becoming into being?
By grounding all the flows of desire, all the intensities of life, into a single quantifiable medium: money.
Immanence
The difference or flow that has no single center, foundation or outside point from which it might be judged or defined
How is philosophy different from art?
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)
What is totality?
A virtual space produced through and alongside the events of connection and spatialization (hence the idea of a ‘plane’)
Three historical stages of regimes of Synthesis.
Primitive (cruelty)
Despotic (terror)
Capitalist (cynical)
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
Primitive (cruel)
Which Synthesis of political desire is associated with a desire to be forced as a subject to some transcendental power?
Despotic (terror) stage
We have a wish to have punishment inflicted on us by the enjoying eye of the despot.
Summarize Foucaults book “Discipline and Punish” 1979
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.
Panopticon
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.
What is the first connection?
Mouth and breast (becomes socially recorded in this disjunction)
How do we form a social machine?
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.
How does an organism evolve?
By selecting and actualizing a multiplicity of its virtual powers to become.
What is desire?
Desire is the set of passive Syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies that function as units of production.
Surplus value?
Productive element that exceeds direct human needs and allows disequilibrium of power
How do the three Synthesis correspond with the three historical/political formations?
Connective-primitive/tribal
Disjunctive-barbaric/despotic
Conjunctive-capitalism
Connective Synthesis
A system of becoming connects to another (seperate) system of becoming. A wasp>an orchid
What allows the surplus value of capitalism to overcome?
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)
What allows territorializations?
Quantifiable things
Why is capitalism subject to deterritorialization and decoding?
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)
Decoding
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.
What is the first thing to be distributed on the BWO?
Race, culture, Gods etc
Social production
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
Perceptual semiotics
Explains how subjects and objects are formed from perception
Haecceity
‘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)
Line of flight
Power of local groups to produce unforeseen freedoms
What is ‘time-image’?
Presents the flux of difference: no longer a spatula or ordered image of time but time as the power of imaging.
In his book on Bergson how does Deleuze propose we step outside univocal constraints on perception? (In regards to Ethics, etc.?)
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)
Use Bergson to explain evolution. ‘Creative evolution’
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.
How does Bergson creative evolution affect the domain of the virtual-actual?
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.
