“A replying which is always already a reply, etc. etc.”
1. A quote from Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
“[…] Will the Venerable One lend me his ear for one moment more?”
Silently the Buddha nodded his consent.
Siddhartha said: “There is one thing in your Teaching, O Most Venerable One, that I admire more than anything else. Everything in your Teaching is perfectly clear, is proven. You show the world as a perfect chain, nowhere and never interrupted, as an eternal chain, linking causes and effects. Never has this been seen so clearly, never presented so irrefutably. Truly, the heart of every Brahmin must leap with joy in his body when he, through your Teaching, sees the world as a perfect and coherent whole, unbroken, clear as crystal, independent of gods. Whether the world is good or evil, whether life in it is sorrow or joy, no matter — it may even be unessential. But the unity of the world, the coherent togetherness of all events, the enfolding of everything, big or little, in the same river, in the same law of cause and effect, of becoming and dying: all this shines brightly from your sublime Teaching, O Perfect One.
Yet now, according to that selfsame law, this unity and consistency of all things is nevertheless interrupted in one place: something alien, something new is pouring through a small gap into this world of unity, something that was not here before, something that cannot be shown or proved. That gap is your Teaching about the overcoming of the world, about deliverance. And that small gap, that small break shatters and abolishes the whole eternal and unified law of the world. Please forgive me for expressing my objection.”
2. A question: in your scheme, relayed from D&G, that enshrined pair, that wily tangle — where does your piece fit? Where does your act of articulating, applying, thinking, writing, publishing — fit? How does thinking of and employing the terms of territorialization and de-territorialization themselves reflect instances, too, of re-and-de-territorialization? How about when D&G first published Anti-Oedipus, and conceived of it? How when you first ingested and digested it? How do we wrap our desiring machine minds around its desiring machine explication of desiring machines?
Every attempt to smooth out the world into a perfect chain of cause and effects, yields up Siddhartha’s objection. The one who does the smoothing goes unsmoothed. He who explains the transcendental signifier escapes its umbrella, is left out, is the defiant remainder.
Any attempt to derive a scheme that folds in human beings and delivers us a concrete unity to compensate for the inexplicable gravity which holds together the universe; any attempt to fashion a set of laws which can relive human beings of their existential incompleteness, which attempts to shorn them of their responsibility, shelter them from their own cracked being — does violence. To the world which we are stretching and maiming to accommodate us, and to us, as we bloody our hands with the world’s despoiling to try and erase our ego’s solitude from the rest.
Or, as Heidegger would say, every case of metaphysics is anti-metaphysics.
3. And yet, there is something persuasive, seductive about D&G’s scheme! If we undertake reading it from a polyvalent distance, if we interpret it as a work of art, as a poetry — did not Deleuze himself claim that philosophy itself was essentially and primarily a creative act, an art, in his “What is Philosophy?” — then we see better the origination of his metaphysics, its work as a portraiture of the times, its relevance to we readers, as a site for a collective cry for help. Metaphysics is a world picture, a panoramic explication no less impressive and haunting as those of David Siqueiros. How dismal, to think of us human beings, flesh and blood rinds encasing hearts and souls — reduced to “desiring machines,” as cells shifting circuits of magnetic alignment within territories of larger social bodies, squirming either within arboreal hierarchies of domination or smothering over each other as rhizomatic roots of unfurling. It’s the displacement and horrific melting of the biological metaphor into that of the industrial and machine. We late moderns are experiencing the culmination of our absorption into a greater entity, that of the nation state. Individually, we feel ourselves as reduced to nodes on an organic circuit, as chips in the face of the Terminator, a machine wrapped in skin (rather than that of a soul wrapped in skin, as the Medieval would prefer it). That the bodily autonomy of conscious creatures is giving way to the emergence of a giant military industrial complex of consumption, where individuals are seemingly enlisted or enslaved or disposed of or dispatched by an ever polymorphous network of diverse, anonymous human relations spanning millions of members — yes, one feels that their essential subjectivity across all domains of human experience is that of a desiring machine, a nexus of territorialization, de- or re- or otherwise. A brain today struggles to resist the overwhelming perception of itself as a rotating juncture of pipes, either threading or unthreading, clogging or facilitating some kind of abstract transfer, or consumption, passage of food down the throat, content into the eyes, babble into the ears. That’s what it feels like to be a “citizen,” or a “unit” within today’s political reality. In the end, this metaphysics is a stab at, a critique of — politics. Of hyper-industrial planetary hegemony. Of “ __ “.
It’s an eloquent cry for help, a testimony on behalf of those souls enmeshed in the matrix of the consumerist masses. But is it true? Is this metaphysics as totalizing as it proclaims itself to be? No, as no one single artwork can encapsulate the infinite possibilities of human expression. As Nietzsche once noted, all art is a selecting and amplifying — and thereby, a reduction, a concealing of what it hides and leaves out. Metaphysics in every case is but a grand perspective.
And, of course, no artwork can contain its creator. It gives reference to him or her, but is itself but a storm of traces, and but one site of it. It stands for, but cannot replace. See, every grand narrative that attempts to explain everything has its unspoken gaps.
4. Deleuze asserted an affinity between himself as Nietzsche, and a crude reading will see a conceptual affinity between Nietzsche’s metaphysics of will to power and Deleuze’s desire. But it’s to Nietzsche’s credit that Deleuze is but one of an entire panoply of descendants — his philosophy was an explosion of philosophical radial speciation, to borrow a metaphor from evolutionary biology. A metaphor particularly apropos to my point, because one of the significant differences between Nietzsche and Deleuze’s reception of him in his philosophy is Deleuze’s dismal minimizing of biology. Nietzsche was above all a philosopher of life, a devoted student of Darwin, and as much a speculator of organic nature as he was a polemicist of culture. Among his key contributions to 20th century thought is the application of Genealogy to morality as a historical method, to break apart the present ideas of our culture into its lines of hereditary descent. A melding of genetics with historiography, leading to Foucault’s entire oeuvre.
In any case, what D&G’s metaphysics lacks is an appreciation for the mind boggling mutability, adaptability, and flexibility of living things, and indeed, their strength is their weakness. Where Anti-Oedipus is an entrancing, hypnotic testimony to the story of our nature as human beings getting engulfed by the emergent machinations of our species at large, that we all feel as though the mammalian scale and order of individual humans is giving way and getting pierced, hooked up, swallowed up, absorbed, and reconstituted within a colossus of plastic factories, car dealerships, for profit hospitals and Botox injection clinics, social media apps and data centers and all of it guzzling down crude oil and belching toxic gas into the atmosphere — that we feel we are losing our autonomy to a system made out of us like an eldritch horror, raping one of the universe’s rare green breathing jewels — that we feel ourselves to be the cells of a parasitic demiurge of extinction, made to be the billion instruments of a rape we do not condone but are condemned to be complicit in — yes, all that; nonetheless, it is incomplete. It is philosophically unsatisfying, and suffers like any metaphysics before it has. It’s another inbred nephew of Hegel, another mad dash attempt to resolve the wound Kant has left in us (or, rather, the old scar he reopened in us, left by Plato).
Deleuze would reduce us in his plea to wake us to our machines dehumanization by trapping us in that vision. Two hundred years prior, Thoreau tried to do the same, tried to be the “Chanticleer’s call,” rousing his fellow American’s to the humble glories of nature and towards a life of the sages. But unlike Deleuze, Thoreau* was a man of the woods, much more well versed in the glitters of Nature. His — and, say, Cavell’s reading of him in his “Senses of Walden,” one of my favorite books, a Jasmine fortune of a book — lead a leafy way out of the dismal world picture Deleuze depicts for us.
*To side step for a moment, and to bring about an association I positively adore: Thoreau, famously, was a student of Emerson. Who else should have been a disciple of Emerson… but Nietzsche! As Walter Kaufman relates in his preface to his translation of The Gay Science, Nietzsche had doted upon his copy of Emerson’s essays, and had many glowing words nominating Emerson as his mentor. This, then, in the genealogical tree of philosophers — would make Nietzsche and Thoreau brothers, if not cousins. How this association illuminates the one in the other, I think! A bristling of colors wave from each to each, German and American, the cold white air of the Swiss Alps and the greens and browns of New England Connecticut.
5. As it turns out, to speak of deterritorialization — territorializes. It traps us in that line of thought. It distracts us from considering, for instance, that Nature itself is an essentially alternative kind of “territorialization,” of “territoriality,” “of territory” in itself. Namely — it’s always the excess of territories, it defies its own territory. It’s always ever opening up new territories, which conflict and cooperate at random, depending on the negotiations and contrivances of disparate living things. But this line of thinking leads the way to Bataille…
But let me not turn to Bataille. Rather, the last reference I’ll make is to another metaphysician, perhaps the first modern metaphysician: Spinoza. It’s to him that Deleuze claims his deepest allegiance, and it’s to Spinoza that he also aligns himself, threads himself through Nietzsche, who too had much admiration for the Jewish exile. What we find in Spinoza is a glass grinder’s notion of Reality, of Nature rendered as a kaleidoscopic jewel, where Substance radiates into its refracted Aspects. This flash summary indicates that right from the beginning, modern metaphysics is bound up with metaphors of technology, and its encroachment upon human subjectivity, in how human beings conceive of themselves. Before Marshall McLuhan defined media as extensions of our sensory organs, almost four hundred years prior, Spinoza was conceiving of Existence by submitting it to the confines of a crystal ball. There’s an inverse relation here — the greater our development and employment of technologies, the deeper we sink into a view of the world (and ourselves in it) as a more and more complex machine. Until, finally, we arrive at Deleuze’s uncanny circuit board of flesh; from Spinoza’s glass egg,* emerges a Lovecraftian titan of social computation, “__”.
*In the embryonic middle, Nietzsche’s will to power.
And after? What is the adolescence, or the puberty of this line of thought, for this thinking of the industrial consumerist desiring machine-tissued eldritch God? This undead corpse rising in the shadow of the Christian God we killed? Well, that way leads to the 90’s philosophy of Nick Land…
Shuddering stuff.
6. Aye, but need it be so? What about Deleuze’s concept of the Schizoid? That Hinterland at the rim of territorialization? That band of insanity which resists all co-opting, to which phenomena like raves and homeless camps and Napoleon’s Corsica ostensibly belong?
To quote myself from another time, what Deleuze means by Schizoid, he means less like my schizophrenic grandmother and more like the German poet Holderlin. But really what Schizoid signifies is the hole to escape his own schematic. Deleuze is at least kind enough or self aware enough to have built a door in his mad-hatter metaphysics.
How to interpret the Schizoid is left at our feet to pick up and make our own. For your curiosity, if I’ve piqued it, I’ll tell you how I’m to grasp it. I liken it to that of the viral, the microbial, the fungal, the germ. If out of the mass of human beings, there has arisen a Behemoth — then let us pivot towards the small pox and bubonic plague! Let us be the jubilant terror of the malarial, of the yellow fever, of wriggling parasites bursting blood cells, of eggs hatching inside brain tissue, let us indulge in our discovery and knowledge of all those invisible things which have scourged humankind for a hundred thousand years. Of our species at large is like an algae choking planet, putting its surface at a stranglehold — well, what does Nature, what does Life do? It invents new organisms, novel living things who exist to feed upon this overabundant monopolizer. Parasites for the tyrant parasite! Penicillin for the Earth’s germ! Let us be a fungus upon the face of our species’s colossus. Let us be like Earth in the Palaeozoic, three hundred million years ago! Let us intake a page out of Nature’s book, let us innovate as decomposers in the aftermath of our own collective Permian. After the Sixth Extinction, comes the Sixth Explosion.
You need to realize that the vast majority of Brooklyn doesn't exist in Park Slope, Williamsburg, Bed Stuy etc., where those from other parts of the country decide to live because they think it's cool. BTW I'm a native Brooklynite.
Your comment affirms a central thought of the piece: it is precisely the areas that non-Brooklynites (I.e., the enshittifiers) believe are 'cool' that are subject to the highest form of enshittification. Of course, these areas aren't the only areas of cultural production in Brooklyn. But because of the enshittification, these areas are the ones that where one could visibly see the phenomena discussed above (e.g., the stultified gym bro on the dance floor). But even notwithstanding this, there are certainly many venues in other areas of Brooklyn that do still experience gentrification to some degree. To that extent, I still hope that the discourse opened with this piece can still help in grounding a deeper understanding of the situation, agnostic of area.
“A replying which is always already a reply, etc. etc.”
1. A quote from Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
“[…] Will the Venerable One lend me his ear for one moment more?”
Silently the Buddha nodded his consent.
Siddhartha said: “There is one thing in your Teaching, O Most Venerable One, that I admire more than anything else. Everything in your Teaching is perfectly clear, is proven. You show the world as a perfect chain, nowhere and never interrupted, as an eternal chain, linking causes and effects. Never has this been seen so clearly, never presented so irrefutably. Truly, the heart of every Brahmin must leap with joy in his body when he, through your Teaching, sees the world as a perfect and coherent whole, unbroken, clear as crystal, independent of gods. Whether the world is good or evil, whether life in it is sorrow or joy, no matter — it may even be unessential. But the unity of the world, the coherent togetherness of all events, the enfolding of everything, big or little, in the same river, in the same law of cause and effect, of becoming and dying: all this shines brightly from your sublime Teaching, O Perfect One.
Yet now, according to that selfsame law, this unity and consistency of all things is nevertheless interrupted in one place: something alien, something new is pouring through a small gap into this world of unity, something that was not here before, something that cannot be shown or proved. That gap is your Teaching about the overcoming of the world, about deliverance. And that small gap, that small break shatters and abolishes the whole eternal and unified law of the world. Please forgive me for expressing my objection.”
2. A question: in your scheme, relayed from D&G, that enshrined pair, that wily tangle — where does your piece fit? Where does your act of articulating, applying, thinking, writing, publishing — fit? How does thinking of and employing the terms of territorialization and de-territorialization themselves reflect instances, too, of re-and-de-territorialization? How about when D&G first published Anti-Oedipus, and conceived of it? How when you first ingested and digested it? How do we wrap our desiring machine minds around its desiring machine explication of desiring machines?
Every attempt to smooth out the world into a perfect chain of cause and effects, yields up Siddhartha’s objection. The one who does the smoothing goes unsmoothed. He who explains the transcendental signifier escapes its umbrella, is left out, is the defiant remainder.
Any attempt to derive a scheme that folds in human beings and delivers us a concrete unity to compensate for the inexplicable gravity which holds together the universe; any attempt to fashion a set of laws which can relive human beings of their existential incompleteness, which attempts to shorn them of their responsibility, shelter them from their own cracked being — does violence. To the world which we are stretching and maiming to accommodate us, and to us, as we bloody our hands with the world’s despoiling to try and erase our ego’s solitude from the rest.
Or, as Heidegger would say, every case of metaphysics is anti-metaphysics.
3. And yet, there is something persuasive, seductive about D&G’s scheme! If we undertake reading it from a polyvalent distance, if we interpret it as a work of art, as a poetry — did not Deleuze himself claim that philosophy itself was essentially and primarily a creative act, an art, in his “What is Philosophy?” — then we see better the origination of his metaphysics, its work as a portraiture of the times, its relevance to we readers, as a site for a collective cry for help. Metaphysics is a world picture, a panoramic explication no less impressive and haunting as those of David Siqueiros. How dismal, to think of us human beings, flesh and blood rinds encasing hearts and souls — reduced to “desiring machines,” as cells shifting circuits of magnetic alignment within territories of larger social bodies, squirming either within arboreal hierarchies of domination or smothering over each other as rhizomatic roots of unfurling. It’s the displacement and horrific melting of the biological metaphor into that of the industrial and machine. We late moderns are experiencing the culmination of our absorption into a greater entity, that of the nation state. Individually, we feel ourselves as reduced to nodes on an organic circuit, as chips in the face of the Terminator, a machine wrapped in skin (rather than that of a soul wrapped in skin, as the Medieval would prefer it). That the bodily autonomy of conscious creatures is giving way to the emergence of a giant military industrial complex of consumption, where individuals are seemingly enlisted or enslaved or disposed of or dispatched by an ever polymorphous network of diverse, anonymous human relations spanning millions of members — yes, one feels that their essential subjectivity across all domains of human experience is that of a desiring machine, a nexus of territorialization, de- or re- or otherwise. A brain today struggles to resist the overwhelming perception of itself as a rotating juncture of pipes, either threading or unthreading, clogging or facilitating some kind of abstract transfer, or consumption, passage of food down the throat, content into the eyes, babble into the ears. That’s what it feels like to be a “citizen,” or a “unit” within today’s political reality. In the end, this metaphysics is a stab at, a critique of — politics. Of hyper-industrial planetary hegemony. Of “ __ “.
It’s an eloquent cry for help, a testimony on behalf of those souls enmeshed in the matrix of the consumerist masses. But is it true? Is this metaphysics as totalizing as it proclaims itself to be? No, as no one single artwork can encapsulate the infinite possibilities of human expression. As Nietzsche once noted, all art is a selecting and amplifying — and thereby, a reduction, a concealing of what it hides and leaves out. Metaphysics in every case is but a grand perspective.
And, of course, no artwork can contain its creator. It gives reference to him or her, but is itself but a storm of traces, and but one site of it. It stands for, but cannot replace. See, every grand narrative that attempts to explain everything has its unspoken gaps.
4. Deleuze asserted an affinity between himself as Nietzsche, and a crude reading will see a conceptual affinity between Nietzsche’s metaphysics of will to power and Deleuze’s desire. But it’s to Nietzsche’s credit that Deleuze is but one of an entire panoply of descendants — his philosophy was an explosion of philosophical radial speciation, to borrow a metaphor from evolutionary biology. A metaphor particularly apropos to my point, because one of the significant differences between Nietzsche and Deleuze’s reception of him in his philosophy is Deleuze’s dismal minimizing of biology. Nietzsche was above all a philosopher of life, a devoted student of Darwin, and as much a speculator of organic nature as he was a polemicist of culture. Among his key contributions to 20th century thought is the application of Genealogy to morality as a historical method, to break apart the present ideas of our culture into its lines of hereditary descent. A melding of genetics with historiography, leading to Foucault’s entire oeuvre.
In any case, what D&G’s metaphysics lacks is an appreciation for the mind boggling mutability, adaptability, and flexibility of living things, and indeed, their strength is their weakness. Where Anti-Oedipus is an entrancing, hypnotic testimony to the story of our nature as human beings getting engulfed by the emergent machinations of our species at large, that we all feel as though the mammalian scale and order of individual humans is giving way and getting pierced, hooked up, swallowed up, absorbed, and reconstituted within a colossus of plastic factories, car dealerships, for profit hospitals and Botox injection clinics, social media apps and data centers and all of it guzzling down crude oil and belching toxic gas into the atmosphere — that we feel we are losing our autonomy to a system made out of us like an eldritch horror, raping one of the universe’s rare green breathing jewels — that we feel ourselves to be the cells of a parasitic demiurge of extinction, made to be the billion instruments of a rape we do not condone but are condemned to be complicit in — yes, all that; nonetheless, it is incomplete. It is philosophically unsatisfying, and suffers like any metaphysics before it has. It’s another inbred nephew of Hegel, another mad dash attempt to resolve the wound Kant has left in us (or, rather, the old scar he reopened in us, left by Plato).
Deleuze would reduce us in his plea to wake us to our machines dehumanization by trapping us in that vision. Two hundred years prior, Thoreau tried to do the same, tried to be the “Chanticleer’s call,” rousing his fellow American’s to the humble glories of nature and towards a life of the sages. But unlike Deleuze, Thoreau* was a man of the woods, much more well versed in the glitters of Nature. His — and, say, Cavell’s reading of him in his “Senses of Walden,” one of my favorite books, a Jasmine fortune of a book — lead a leafy way out of the dismal world picture Deleuze depicts for us.
*To side step for a moment, and to bring about an association I positively adore: Thoreau, famously, was a student of Emerson. Who else should have been a disciple of Emerson… but Nietzsche! As Walter Kaufman relates in his preface to his translation of The Gay Science, Nietzsche had doted upon his copy of Emerson’s essays, and had many glowing words nominating Emerson as his mentor. This, then, in the genealogical tree of philosophers — would make Nietzsche and Thoreau brothers, if not cousins. How this association illuminates the one in the other, I think! A bristling of colors wave from each to each, German and American, the cold white air of the Swiss Alps and the greens and browns of New England Connecticut.
5. As it turns out, to speak of deterritorialization — territorializes. It traps us in that line of thought. It distracts us from considering, for instance, that Nature itself is an essentially alternative kind of “territorialization,” of “territoriality,” “of territory” in itself. Namely — it’s always the excess of territories, it defies its own territory. It’s always ever opening up new territories, which conflict and cooperate at random, depending on the negotiations and contrivances of disparate living things. But this line of thinking leads the way to Bataille…
But let me not turn to Bataille. Rather, the last reference I’ll make is to another metaphysician, perhaps the first modern metaphysician: Spinoza. It’s to him that Deleuze claims his deepest allegiance, and it’s to Spinoza that he also aligns himself, threads himself through Nietzsche, who too had much admiration for the Jewish exile. What we find in Spinoza is a glass grinder’s notion of Reality, of Nature rendered as a kaleidoscopic jewel, where Substance radiates into its refracted Aspects. This flash summary indicates that right from the beginning, modern metaphysics is bound up with metaphors of technology, and its encroachment upon human subjectivity, in how human beings conceive of themselves. Before Marshall McLuhan defined media as extensions of our sensory organs, almost four hundred years prior, Spinoza was conceiving of Existence by submitting it to the confines of a crystal ball. There’s an inverse relation here — the greater our development and employment of technologies, the deeper we sink into a view of the world (and ourselves in it) as a more and more complex machine. Until, finally, we arrive at Deleuze’s uncanny circuit board of flesh; from Spinoza’s glass egg,* emerges a Lovecraftian titan of social computation, “__”.
*In the embryonic middle, Nietzsche’s will to power.
And after? What is the adolescence, or the puberty of this line of thought, for this thinking of the industrial consumerist desiring machine-tissued eldritch God? This undead corpse rising in the shadow of the Christian God we killed? Well, that way leads to the 90’s philosophy of Nick Land…
Shuddering stuff.
6. Aye, but need it be so? What about Deleuze’s concept of the Schizoid? That Hinterland at the rim of territorialization? That band of insanity which resists all co-opting, to which phenomena like raves and homeless camps and Napoleon’s Corsica ostensibly belong?
To quote myself from another time, what Deleuze means by Schizoid, he means less like my schizophrenic grandmother and more like the German poet Holderlin. But really what Schizoid signifies is the hole to escape his own schematic. Deleuze is at least kind enough or self aware enough to have built a door in his mad-hatter metaphysics.
How to interpret the Schizoid is left at our feet to pick up and make our own. For your curiosity, if I’ve piqued it, I’ll tell you how I’m to grasp it. I liken it to that of the viral, the microbial, the fungal, the germ. If out of the mass of human beings, there has arisen a Behemoth — then let us pivot towards the small pox and bubonic plague! Let us be the jubilant terror of the malarial, of the yellow fever, of wriggling parasites bursting blood cells, of eggs hatching inside brain tissue, let us indulge in our discovery and knowledge of all those invisible things which have scourged humankind for a hundred thousand years. Of our species at large is like an algae choking planet, putting its surface at a stranglehold — well, what does Nature, what does Life do? It invents new organisms, novel living things who exist to feed upon this overabundant monopolizer. Parasites for the tyrant parasite! Penicillin for the Earth’s germ! Let us be a fungus upon the face of our species’s colossus. Let us be like Earth in the Palaeozoic, three hundred million years ago! Let us intake a page out of Nature’s book, let us innovate as decomposers in the aftermath of our own collective Permian. After the Sixth Extinction, comes the Sixth Explosion.
You need to realize that the vast majority of Brooklyn doesn't exist in Park Slope, Williamsburg, Bed Stuy etc., where those from other parts of the country decide to live because they think it's cool. BTW I'm a native Brooklynite.
Your comment affirms a central thought of the piece: it is precisely the areas that non-Brooklynites (I.e., the enshittifiers) believe are 'cool' that are subject to the highest form of enshittification. Of course, these areas aren't the only areas of cultural production in Brooklyn. But because of the enshittification, these areas are the ones that where one could visibly see the phenomena discussed above (e.g., the stultified gym bro on the dance floor). But even notwithstanding this, there are certainly many venues in other areas of Brooklyn that do still experience gentrification to some degree. To that extent, I still hope that the discourse opened with this piece can still help in grounding a deeper understanding of the situation, agnostic of area.