Deleuze for the Desperate #8: becoming-animal
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ม.ค. 2017
- Discusses the main examples in A Thousand Plateaus and generalizes from them to discuss how we can become-animal. Appropriately, a Siamese cat was recorded on the sound track by accident (or was it) at about 18:30.
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Thank you for this Deleuze series. I thoroughly enjoy it. I use Deleuze to help inspire my dance theater research and creation.
Thanks for the feedback shadowbody. Your project sounds fascinating. Good luck with it
The style of dance I practice is a Japanese post-modern dance called butoh which began with Tatsumi Hijikata who was inspired by Artaud among others, hence a connection with Deleuze. My teacher's name is even Rhizome Lee, the name based off Deleuze's rhizome. He tries to embody the philosophy of Deleuze in his method of dance. :)
Watching this video was such a beautiful experience
Really glad you liked it. It's a really nice location in these parts
Beautiful. I especially like the moment the train pauses with a dog in a yard on a hill in the center frame
I was lucky with a few of the scenes -- or was it the Unconscious? In the one on the BWO I'm motorcycling past Dartmoor Prison just as I am bleating on on the commentary about Foucault!
This is hands down the best video series on ATP available. Cheers to opening up lines of flight for those who find it.
Thanks very much Patrick Duffey. Very encouraging remarks.
I have no background in phisophy whatsoever and I have been researching the concept of humanistic-animalistic oppositions in various cultures just to take a break from my bachelor in Japanese, and your website and youtube channel are hidden treasures for people like me. thank you for taking your time to educate us all.
Hi Mina Huston. What a very kind set of remarks! Thank you very much for making them. I am much encouraged. All the very best of luck for your own studies and future projects
Bumped into your channel incidentally while researching the movement-image, thank you so much for taking your time doing this. All the resources on your website are also well organized. I hope you are doing well :)
Many thanks. Sorry for the late reply
your series, with the footage you add, reminds me of 'sans soleil'. lovely combination of ideas and localities.
Thanks for this Josh Mastel
Very interesting topic, thanks for sharing Dave!
You are very welcome Jesse Vulnik. All the best
yes thank u !!!!!! this is so helpful
Glad to have been of some use Scarlett Hirst
Grateful.
You're welcome
I'm coming at this without any grasp of Deluze or becoming in the technical sense it's being used in here. But based on this discussion I get the sense that "becoming animal" means something like a mode of expansion towards some aspect of the lived environment, or some sociologically rich, networked assemblage of material reality (a heccaeity), such that that "particle" is animal. What this becoming seems to mean is not a full isomorphic transformation which reproduces animal identity, but a form of involvement which merges networks of sense and behavior, producing new forms and relationships; whether these come to a sympathetic relationship with the animal unit of this network that's driving this expansion or some other more antagonistic or violent relationship or mode of understanding. This seems to me to be an approach towards animal existence which drives change; becoming as such rather than becoming something, even if this becoming as such is informed by the relationship to specific life forms in specific relationship networks or clusters of sense and activity.
Thabnks for this ZebraStandards. I think it is about expansion, or rather a change of level 'down', off a specifiic plateau, to something at which humans share something with animals. Implications for change toward our relationships to animaals are better explored in Guattari's work on ecology, perhaps?
revisiting this and relating it to Herzog's Grizzly Man and the becoming-bear of Kleist.
thank you so much for this! I'm currently revising for my English BA, and the moby dick example really helped me get the concept of becoming. Also helped that Looe is one of my favourite places!
Excellent, VL, and sorry for the delayed reply. I hope the English BA went well. I can't wait to get back to Looe after the lockdown
Hi folks, I've just noticed I got the transcript link wrong on thhis video. It should be www.arasite.org/deltranscript8.html. I can't find my own website!!
Becoming child is in someways about uncoupling the child (as the child is subject , we are all child)from the Oedipal dynamic . About how an individual may create a BWO , as children are most subject to social rules of control.
Thanks for the comment Peter Madden
Actually you pronounced Castaneda right the first time. Thanks a lot for these videos
Thanks Delfos -- my pronunciation of names of Spanish origin is a bit uncertain
ooo i loved this one
Good stuff. Glad you enjoyed it
Hiya, the transcript link no longer seems to be working :(
Hi ChristinaAintNoCritic. Which link did you mean? The ones on the website all seem to work. Thanks for the comment
Hi. I just looked at the video again and the transcript on the screen is wrong. It should be www.arasite.org/deltranscript8.html. --org not com. I must have been drunk when I typed that or something Apologies and thanks.
Thank you, as always. Maybe you have something on the war machine in the works?
Good idea Sereptie.That is a very ambiguous and controversial term, and I am tempted to have a bash. There is a very good book on war machines by DeLanda you can look at if you want to press on?
Hi Sereptie. You might want to dive more deeply into the actualpolitial invovlements then? Guattari and Rolnik Molecular Revolutionin Brazil is good, with Hardt Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticehip in Philosophy goodon the turn to politics. I have notes on all those on the website if you need a quick run-through: www.arasite.org/deleuzep.html
thx for the nice video.just one thing if u dont mind.i think deleuze was reaching for smthg actually different by talking about the becoming whale whale not moby dick and just believed that art could in moments of inspiration materialize and bring to the surface those "TWILIGHT ZONES" where very different entities come out in parallel and just shine in some kind of musical composition. achab wanting to become moby dick is in my opinion falling again in the same symbolic dilemna deleuze tried very hard to escape by trying to deal with "meeting" of the reigns of the species .
Thanks elie chemaly. Guattari is also very keen on transversal 'meetings' , of course in his own work. I think that can get a bit elusive, and prefer the modern term 'intertextuality',but both have problems
Thanks for producing these.
Q4U:
Is it not actually about intensively involving one's "self" in the traits of animals? After the manner of animositic warriors and their totem animals. I think becoming-animal is the only way to understand the natural/virtual reality that underlies all cultural/actual animal symbolism.
The idea of human beings becoming animal is all over ancient literature, for example, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Apulieus' Golden Ass-but I think at the deepest level, becoming animal is based on a real and actual equivalence of animals and personalities--for example, Aesop's fables were clearly produced through a kind of transcendental empiricism. Becoming animal involves an expansion of certain drives together with a contraction of others.
There is a praxis of becoming animal, and it is called either shamanism or astral magic. And it is dangerous.
Another example: think of the Viking berserkers, who involuted themselves with animality before a battle. Their ferocity led to the legend of the werewolf, which only later became a bourgeois symbol for "psychosis."
BTW, beautiful analysis of Moby Dick-ultimate allegory for the insanity and megalomania of the American Empire.
Have a great life.
Very interesting comments here, Luke Hall. D&G seem to mostly stress 'art' as the route to becoming-animal, perhaps including shamansim and/or drugs (they like Castenada on peyote rituals for example). Later materialists -- like K Barad or V Kirby -- have developed the case for 'real' equivalences based on some universal Natural script, but I am still a bit skeptical. The route for them is the biology of queer animals and extending work on linguistics. I found Guattari on animal communication ( including the long Plateau 11) close. I have just written a book on Barad which explores this a bit. Glad you like Moby Dick -- still my favourite American novel.
@@DaveHarrisreDeleuze Despite my Deleuzions (pun intended), I am more or less Aristotelian (though I don't think academics have had a clue about Aristotle since the Renaissance) I'm a big believer in the relative univocity of being. Bear with me, Mr. Harris. I really love your work and am getting a kick out of communicating with you.
Aristotle's metaphysics are actually much more rhizomatic than people realize. Aristotle's ultimate teaching about Being is like Deleuze's BwO. It is elusive and intangible, but also fully actual.
But for Aristotle, the key phrase is, being can be said in many ways. Its like Bill Clinton said when he was being pressed about getting a slob-job from Monica Lewinsky: "It depends on what the definition of is is." THAT is the basis for Aristotle's categories (already we can see he is more advanced than the half-baked Hiedegger, who used the word being like a poet and not like a philosopher), because he conceptualizes ten forms of being (I know you can already see the infinite rhizomatic potential in this picture of being):
1. Form 1: substance, that is, as a unitary thing-a human, a tree, a rock. "That IS a chair"
2. Form 2: quality. "That chair IS brown"
3. Form 3: quantity. "There ARE 3 people standing there"
Form 4: relative (cf Einstein). "I AM next to you"
Form 5: place. "I AM here"
Form 6: time. "It IS after dawn"
Form 7: position "I AM horizontal" (not the same as place)
Form 8: Having "I [AM] have[ING] this."
Form 9: Acting Upon "I AM telling you"
Form 10: Being Affected: "You ARE helping me."
For Aristotle, all of these manifestations are connected to Being in-itself, which (a) transcends all the categories but also (b) is immanent to them all and, ultimately, is (as Deleuze's BwO and Open Whole) something ineffable.
So although Deleuze have associated Aristotle with trees, this itself was an example of Deleuze succumbing to dogma and naivety (surprising, because Deleuze to my eyes is perhaps the only post-Nietzsche thinker to really get Nietzsche).
Consider the old ANALOGIA ENTIS of The Sun (the Catholic magisterium still uses this image on the highest level. Have no doubt, this is the sun that beamed up Schreber's asshole. The Sun represents being because, just as the sun produces all life on earth, so Being produces all existence in the universe.
If you trace the ANALOGIA ENTIS further, you see the really sublime aspect of it, which is that qualities and positions, substances and times, etc., are all, as it were, rays of this same sun.
Giordano Bruno, executed by the Church and called a mad priest of the sun, held that this was the basis of magic (I am bringing this comment home, I swear): that the imagination can convert anything to anything. Dante too says something similar. Now, the magician, in both primitive societies, where they are called shamans, and in so called civilized societies, where they are called magi or wizards, are simply the people who are able to bond disparate things together, and to loose things that have been bonded. The magician is the one who can go into the roots of being, where substance, quality, quantity, relativity, place, time, position, having, acting upon, and being effected are all united (that is, the virtual): this is also the realm of dreams, deliriums, visions, myths.
@@DaveHarrisreDeleuze In short, the concept of a universal natural script is not new: began with Aristotle and was perfected by Ibn Arabi with his concept of the univocity of being. It also seems to be the view of the Platonists, Neoplatonists, and maybe even Nietzsche. . . . Consider arabesque.
I suppose the theologians kicked it all off? Spinoza helped turn God into Nature?
In pre-modern Europe I mean -- of course the Greeks got there sooner
thanks for this. For those interested in the subject, I think some reading on Conrad Lorentz, NikoTimbergen (ethologists); Jakob von Uexküll (philosopher, biologist) ("A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans ") ; or the more "recent" ideas from Frans de Waal can be very useful to grasp the idea