"[un]identifiable origin, distinctive patterns"
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It has been suggested that Rhizome (philosophy) be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) Proposed since May 2011. |
Part be
side heart
beat beside
part: body
breath floats
electric
in the sea,
upward eddies
waterwall
into cloud
color, sky
lines.
[edit] Explanatory Note
The ocean dissolving into the sky and the sky dissipating into the ocean does not signal an ability by the subject to gain access to the object, nor vice versa. What it does signal is a dissolution of rigidly partitioned binaries, not just within the natural world, but in the realm of artifice as well.
In an essay on Deleuzian aesthetics, the poets once wrote:
"To conceive of a Deleuzian aesthetic solely as a de jure smooth, nomadic, or rhizomatic state would be to misunderstand both Deleuzian aesthetics and thought altogether. For at the end of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari clearly state: 'smooth spaces are not in themselves libratory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us'; moreover, such smooth spaces can in fact be quite dangerous: places in which one may be 'killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe ... into demented or suicidal collapse.' Therefore, Deleuze does not privilege the smooth-nomad-rhizome over their respective counterparts, but he claims that sometimes it is wise to remain striated-sedentary-arborescent to preserve oneself physically and mentally. This is not to say that a Deleuzian aesthetic is not of a de jure nature smooth, nomadic, or rhizomatic, but it most certainly manifests itself within (and is best understood as) a de facto mix that is a confluence of smooth-striated, nomadic-sedentary, and rhizomatic-arborescent tendencies. To this extent, what matters is not so much the nominal distinction attributed to an aesthetic-object (i.e. 'Is it nomadic or sedentary, rhizomatic or arborescent?'), but how these mixtures are 'translated, transversed ... reversed, [or] returned to' while in 'coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction.' In other words, within a Deleuzian aesthetic, the multiplicity of conflicting processes, relations, and transformations which an aesthetic-object continually enters into takes precedence over 1) particular, nominalistic designations and 2) aesthetic-objects that avoid, or attempt to avoid, passing through and between such mixtures."
Aquarelle maelstrom.
The binary relations Deleuze and Guattari employ, then, are not as important as the movement that takes place between them. The same can be said of the movement between the subject-object binary. Moreover, what is subject and what is object within a particular admixture is, to a great extent, unknowable, and that unknown designation marks itself through silence, which is, as Lyotard claims, a phrase "in absolute abeyance of [its] becoming" that produces a "feeling of suffering." It would seem, then, that the poets are under an obligation to lend an "ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge," or that which is silent.
[edit] References
- Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476945.
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