Friday, July 13, 2007
Keyword: We
Key words
Assemblage
Shared concern
Love and care
Amateurism
Power
Nomad Citizenship
Community
Improvisation
Assemblage (G. Deleuze, On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature)
Assemblage is the minimum real unit. Collective and multiple. The proper name does not designate a subject, but agents, elements. Proper names are not names of persons, but of peoples and tribes, collectives, companies etc.
To assemble is to become something else we are sympathetic with. It is madness without lunatics, drunkenness without alcohol.
Henry Miller, Sexus: the only benefit, I reflected, which the act of writing could offer me was to remove the difference which separated me from my fellow man.
Lawrence: we only have sympathy to struggle and to write. Sympathy is something to be reckoned with, it is a bodily struggle, hating what threatens and infects life, loving where it proliferates.
Amateurism (E. Said, Representations of the Intellectual)
The desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.
Four pressure which challenge the intellectual’s ingenuity and will:
1) Specialization which limits one to a relatively narrow area of knowledge.
2) Expertise and the cult of certified expert; to be an expert you have to be certified by the proper authorities. Problems: conformity and political correctness.
3) Inevitable drift towards power and authority in its adherents, towards the requirements and prerogatives of power, and towards being directly employed by it.
4) Being absorbed by political parties, industry or commerce to further commercial or political agendas. Systems which rewards intellectual conformity, as well as willing participation in goals that have been set not by science but by the government or market.
Amateurism is an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization. The intellectual today ought to be an amateur, someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies. In addition, the intellectual’s spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnects with a personal project and original thought.
Every intellectual has an audience and a constituency. The issue is whether that audience is there to be satisfied, and hence a client to be kept happy, or whether it is there to be challenged, and hence stirred into outright opposition or mobilized into greater democratic participation in the society. But in either case, there is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual’s relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?
Deleuze’s concept of Power (Claire Colebrook)
Deleuze’s concept of power is the positive idea of power to.
Deleuze’s antecedents in this tradition are Spinoza and Nietzsche.
For Spinoza a being is defined by its power, its striving or its potential to maintain itself (SW: survival).
Rather than seeing human life as having a proper form which it then ought to realize, so that potential would be properly oriented towards actualization, Spinoza regards potentiality as creative and expressive; if all life is the striving to express substance in all its different potentials then the fulfillment or joy of human life is the expansion of power.
Joy, as the realization of power, is therefore different from the moral opposition of good and evil, and opposition that impedes power by constraining it within some already given norm.
Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power’ , for Deleuze, is an affirmation of life. Powers or forces from which beings are effected.
A master does not have power because he is a master; rather, it is the exercise of a certain power which produces masters and slaves.
Powers, in their encounters or connections with other powers, produce relations. But nothing in the power itself determines how it will be actualized, and any power has the potential to be actualized differently.
Relations are external to terms:
1) powers to be, powers actualized only in their relations to other powers.
2) If powers are actualized in a certain way, through the particular relations, it is also possible for different relations to produce different worlds; powers might be actualized through other relations.
Power is positive; a being is its power or what it can do.
Active power: maximizes it potential, pushes itself to its limit and affirms the life of which it is but one expression.
Reactive power: by contrast, turns back upon itself. Political power is reactive.
We imagine- from the image of individuals who exist together in a possible community- that we then need to form some form of political relation or system. But there can only be a polity or individual beings if there has already been an active power that has created such a community or assemblage of persons; once we realize this then we might think of politics as the recreation or reactivation of power, not as the redistribution or management of power.
Deleuze’s concept of Nomad Citizenship (Eugene Holland)
Groups organization is immanent to the relations composing them.
The organization is not imposed from above by a transcendent command.
An improvised jazz band forms a nomadic group, in contrast with a symphony orchestra; in the jazz band, group coherence arises immanently from the activity of improvising itself. Horizontal allegiance.
Nomad citizenship is a utopian concept created to re-articulate and suggest solutions to the problem posed by the lethal nature of modern nation-state citizenship.
Nomad citizenship is created to break the monopoly exercised by the State over conceptions and practices of citizenship, and to add or substitute alternative forms of belonging and allegiance.
Assemblage
Shared concern
Love and care
Amateurism
Power
Nomad Citizenship
Community
Improvisation
Assemblage (G. Deleuze, On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature)
Assemblage is the minimum real unit. Collective and multiple. The proper name does not designate a subject, but agents, elements. Proper names are not names of persons, but of peoples and tribes, collectives, companies etc.
To assemble is to become something else we are sympathetic with. It is madness without lunatics, drunkenness without alcohol.
Henry Miller, Sexus: the only benefit, I reflected, which the act of writing could offer me was to remove the difference which separated me from my fellow man.
Lawrence: we only have sympathy to struggle and to write. Sympathy is something to be reckoned with, it is a bodily struggle, hating what threatens and infects life, loving where it proliferates.
Amateurism (E. Said, Representations of the Intellectual)
The desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.
Four pressure which challenge the intellectual’s ingenuity and will:
1) Specialization which limits one to a relatively narrow area of knowledge.
2) Expertise and the cult of certified expert; to be an expert you have to be certified by the proper authorities. Problems: conformity and political correctness.
3) Inevitable drift towards power and authority in its adherents, towards the requirements and prerogatives of power, and towards being directly employed by it.
4) Being absorbed by political parties, industry or commerce to further commercial or political agendas. Systems which rewards intellectual conformity, as well as willing participation in goals that have been set not by science but by the government or market.
Amateurism is an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization. The intellectual today ought to be an amateur, someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies. In addition, the intellectual’s spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnects with a personal project and original thought.
Every intellectual has an audience and a constituency. The issue is whether that audience is there to be satisfied, and hence a client to be kept happy, or whether it is there to be challenged, and hence stirred into outright opposition or mobilized into greater democratic participation in the society. But in either case, there is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual’s relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?
Deleuze’s concept of Power (Claire Colebrook)
Deleuze’s concept of power is the positive idea of power to.
Deleuze’s antecedents in this tradition are Spinoza and Nietzsche.
For Spinoza a being is defined by its power, its striving or its potential to maintain itself (SW: survival).
Rather than seeing human life as having a proper form which it then ought to realize, so that potential would be properly oriented towards actualization, Spinoza regards potentiality as creative and expressive; if all life is the striving to express substance in all its different potentials then the fulfillment or joy of human life is the expansion of power.
Joy, as the realization of power, is therefore different from the moral opposition of good and evil, and opposition that impedes power by constraining it within some already given norm.
Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power’ , for Deleuze, is an affirmation of life. Powers or forces from which beings are effected.
A master does not have power because he is a master; rather, it is the exercise of a certain power which produces masters and slaves.
Powers, in their encounters or connections with other powers, produce relations. But nothing in the power itself determines how it will be actualized, and any power has the potential to be actualized differently.
Relations are external to terms:
1) powers to be, powers actualized only in their relations to other powers.
2) If powers are actualized in a certain way, through the particular relations, it is also possible for different relations to produce different worlds; powers might be actualized through other relations.
Power is positive; a being is its power or what it can do.
Active power: maximizes it potential, pushes itself to its limit and affirms the life of which it is but one expression.
Reactive power: by contrast, turns back upon itself. Political power is reactive.
We imagine- from the image of individuals who exist together in a possible community- that we then need to form some form of political relation or system. But there can only be a polity or individual beings if there has already been an active power that has created such a community or assemblage of persons; once we realize this then we might think of politics as the recreation or reactivation of power, not as the redistribution or management of power.
Deleuze’s concept of Nomad Citizenship (Eugene Holland)
Groups organization is immanent to the relations composing them.
The organization is not imposed from above by a transcendent command.
An improvised jazz band forms a nomadic group, in contrast with a symphony orchestra; in the jazz band, group coherence arises immanently from the activity of improvising itself. Horizontal allegiance.
Nomad citizenship is a utopian concept created to re-articulate and suggest solutions to the problem posed by the lethal nature of modern nation-state citizenship.
Nomad citizenship is created to break the monopoly exercised by the State over conceptions and practices of citizenship, and to add or substitute alternative forms of belonging and allegiance.
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