.

can`t sleep

so I've opened up some old notes
on Deleuze-Guattari in the middle
of the night, their professed
philosophy of immanence, and as
I revisit their ideas, I discover
something decidedly eastern, a
thread of Tao running through their
writings. and afterall, it is that
time of night when disparate views
converge.

they write,

"Tao, a field of immanence in which desire
lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked
to any external or transcendent criterion."

philosophies of immanence affirm
the empirical world to be the only
actual source for beliefs, ideals,
meanings and values, that these are
made and transmitted by experience,
thereby denying transcendent causes,
essences and unchanging principles.

with this in mind, they add,

"The field of immanence or plane of consistency must
be constructed. This can take place in very different
social formations through very different assemblages
(perverse, artistic, scientific, mystical, political)
with different types of bodies without organs. It is
constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions,
and techniques are irreducible to one another. The
question, rather, is whether the pieces can fit
together, and at what price. Inevitably, there will
be monstrous crossbreeds. The plane of consistency
would be the totality of all BwO's, a pure multiplicity
of immanence, one piece of which may be Chinese,
another American, another medieval, another petty
perverse, but all in a movement of generalized
deterritorialization in which each person takes
and makes what she or he can, according to tastes
she or he will have succeeded in abstracting from a
Self [Moi], according to a politics or strategy
successfully abstracted from a given formation,
according to a given procedure abstracted from
its origen."

after reading this, I think, 'how dry
the language of philosophy is!'. no wonder
Deleuze and Guattari loved to play with
words, tossing letters about like dice,
their portmanteau words packed tight
like a suitcase, many meanings for
many contingencies. I read on...

philosophers of immanence emphasize the
ways we are part of the world we experience,
the ways we construct, interpret and change
it in order to make new or different things,
interpretations, experiences, possible because
change inheres in the immanent world.

I like the word 'inhere' and repeat it
at least ten times to myself, faster and
faster until it loses meaning. this is a
childhood game my sister and I used to
play when we were small. shouldn't
philosophy also be playful?
it continues...

materialism and empiricism are
varieties of immanent philosophies,
which include the voices of the Stoics,
and those that Deleuze extrapolates from
(namely, Bergson, Spinoza and Nietzsche)
in order to assemble his radical empiricism.
his is a pluralistic one that assigns
multiplicity to a central role in the
immanent world.

this makes sense, and sense is their point.
I reread the previous 2 sections, stumbling
over the word we. I can hear the
incessant echo of an old professor`s voice
in my head, chastising me for using the word
we in academic papers. "who is we?"
he shouts in an exasperated tone.
"what we? which we? are you referring to?",
he implores. I shrug my shoulders. there are
so many commonly used words that get taken
for granted, that get consumed thoughtlessly
like fast food, somuchso that expression
becomes a veritable minefield.

meanwhile, Deleuze accounts for the world he
lives in, for the diverse ways in which human
existence and experience are related to his
notions of flux and change, to temporality
and plurality. he suggests a unity to this
multiplicity, a unity to the effect of
multiplicity which affirms a dynamic
fluidity that isn't a metaphysical principle
of totalization at all: this means that his
immanent ideas intend to undermine the
preexistance of transcendent foundations,
to reveal them as an illusion of universals.
the infinite movements and transformations
of thought, of difference itself, is
unstoppable.

in my current sleepless state, I
particularily like this notion of
unstoppability.

therefore, for Deleuze, the goal of
empiricist philosophy is practical.
it means to invent, create, and experiment
for the sake of making a positive difference.
he posits a philosophy of actual experience
(not a universal theory of experience), one
that problem-solves lived events as they
unfold. in this way, experience is continually
problematized and then transformed into new
experiences (becomings) with the aid of
conceptual tools. Deleuze states that whenever
there is immanence, there is philosophy.

I find philosophy inherent in the smell of
freshly ground ink, in the cold steel-weighted
pull of the printing press. the rhythm of the
pull and the consequential lift, first the
press blankets and then the dampened paper
peeled back to unveil the image. to seek
difference in its repetition, in the
delightful anticipation of (examining)
the print itself. did it work? does it
differ from the others? ... to ask this
is to understand immanence.

Deleuze reacts against Platonism, against
its divisiveness (ie. Platonism gives
transcendence a plausible philosophical
meaning to the notion of the judgement
of the universal One, of God). to reverse
this is to restore immanence to its
fullness and purity.

drawn in by his idea of "reversing platonism",
I read further...

reversing Platonism: this means
to demystify Platonic thought by
erasing its dualisms (essences and
appearances, the pure and the impure,
authentic and inauthentic). Deleuze
does so by practicing a philosophy
that affirms a continuous becoming
through diversity. continuums rather
than either/or's and this/not this's.
nature thrives through interrelationship,
(re)producing itself through unendingly
new combinations of heterogeneous elements,
with no single combination found to
encompass all of it and offering no
totalizing sum to describe the many
diverse individuals, species and
environments. there is no way to
reduce the plurality of all its
causes.

instead one must view them in causal series.
Deleuze views the natural world in a
continuous state of flux, in a constant
movement of becoming, a simultaneous
coexistence of differences in an open
system of multiplicities (which does not
have a single fixed centre nor an absolute
Being). to say "we are all god" is probably
in keeping with his notion and this becomes
my intersecting point between D&G and Tao.
by refusing to priviledge the conditions of
experience with transcendent Platonic essences
and by refusing to measure real experiences
according to a prescribed model of resemblance,
he regards experience as movements of
experimentation that express the ever-changing
conditions of difference in the natural world.
reversing Platonism is a naturalistic strategy
that affirms difference (and repetition,
immanence, external relations and becomings)
by eliminating the dualism of essence and
appearance (afterall, how can god be way up
there and me down here, separated?).
therefore, unity ceases to be an Absolute
and instead, becomes the simultaneous
coexistance of differences within an open
system of multiplcities, one that insists
on real experiences to define its conditions.
actual lived experiences that are not
transcendent Platonic essences but real
events that can not measured according
to a model. they, we, are all movements
of experimentation.

when Deleuze states (in Logic of Sense)
that he attempts to reverse Platonism,
he also means to undermine idealism
and rationalism through the paradox
of language, to set the stage for his
philosophy of difference, one that
embraces the sensible world of becoming,
one attuned to the perpetual flux of
actions, thoughts and desires, to the
many singularities in us that configure
new possibilities for thinking and
feeling and that ground us in the lived
experience. in this way, our actions,
like our expressions, are guided by our
inter-connections and enriched by our
diversities rather than letting our
habits of mind become limited by the
conventions of language.

"who is us?!", he implores, the same old
professor scratching his head for emphasis.
he wheels a black desk chair closer to mine
while waving my paper in the air, but I am
distracted by his large merlot-coloured
livingroom lamp, out of place and hovering
on the edge of a black filing cabinet, the
same lamp he always turns on in the middle
of the afternoon, the one that casts a
buttery line down the left side of his
cheek. can memories be immanent?

a plane of immanence is the indefinite
movement of thought or thought without
proper limits, it is the absolute horizon
of events (concepts), the consistent and
unified horizon on which concepts are
created and held together in an unlimited
milieu, a 'planemonon', a non-fragmented
yet open Whole which harbors concepts, a
mobile environment through which the
internal components of concepts incessantly
inhabit. it is the necessary philosophical
condition, the pre-philosophical plane
that philosophy acknowledges to create
concepts on, the very image of thought
which is not itself a concept but the
presupposition of a concept, the power
of thought being continuous with the
tide of immanent experience. Deleuze's
radical empiricism presents only events
(possible worlds as concepts and people
as their expression) where the construction
of concepts-events is a process of inventing
new modes of existence, new possibilities on
a plane of immanence. it is only from this
limitless and continuous plane of immanence
and the infinite movement of thought that
new concepts and new modes of existence
can be created which won't be betrayed by
a transcendent plane.

it is impossible for any one plane of immanence
to encompass that which is constantly becoming.
each plane has its own way of constructing
immanence, for philosophers it is a field of
variation, filled with different concepts which
make up a specific power of thought and being
to indicate what it means to think differently.

I read all of this and remember how the language
of D&G philosophy once excited me. what I look for
now are their intersections between philosophy and
art. how their writings become an artful philosophy
of process.

the intersection between D&G and Tao remains.
I wonder why some people think that Tao can
only be known through stories of old men
secluded in mountains, by obscure poetry
that depicts gods riding dragons or from
elaborate rituals. if Tao is immanent,
why put another's experience before your
own to reach its understanding? if Tao is
in each of us, it must be lived immanently
and not studied transcendently. Tao,
like D&G, exists to wear it and to
practice its movement til it fits.
and yes, it is now a habituated reflex
to ask myself, which

us

?...

Of territorialization, D&G write,

"There is always a place, a tree or grove,
in the territory where all the forces come
togehter in a hand-to-hand combat of energies.
The earth is this close embrace. ... Inside
or out, the teritory is linked to this intense
centre, which is like the unknown homeland,
terrestrial source of all forces friendly
and hostil, where everything is decided."

all these words, however nonsensical,
become territorializations of the night,
as if to capture it til sleep grabs hold