Deleuze for the Desperate #2 Rhizome
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.พ. 2016
- This one encourages thinking about the philosophical implications of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus in a 'key concepts' approach. Some problems in using the term as a simple metaphor are raised.
Transcript available on: www.arasite.org/deltranscript2.html
beautiful use of your time in retirement. Congratulations. Very democratising.
Thanks Graham Warren. Sorry for the late reply
Really something to look up to, spending one's retirement in knowledge and education rather than drown in misery and nostalgia.
I once wrote a 30-page paper on D & G's "Anti-Oedipus" as a philosophy undergraduate student. I entitled it, "A Factory is erected upon the ruins of the ancient theatre: An Exegesis and Critique of Selected Aspects of the Deleuzo-Guattarian Unconscious".....I felt like a charlatan and an imposter all the way through the process, as you have delineated this particular type of Deleuze "scholar"....however, at the same time, I felt incredibly superior in an elitist way to the rest of my undergraduate collegues.
Yes -- I know this feeling. It is one of the reasons academic discourse is so enticing. It can get amusing if you use it competitively too -- deleuzian stuff can be quite an effective trump (no offence) card if you find yourself in a terminology clustergroup
You should make a video and read it
Your footage is the perfect thing to watch while contemplating these ideas. It’s just enough distraction to keep from “focusing too hard” on one of the ideas and keeps the awareness fresh and relaxed.
Thanks -- that was exactly the intention. Lots of real philosophers have needed to walk round in the countryside, of course, perhaps for the same reason, to get enough stimulus to take their minds off trivial matters while not raising anxiety too high. A state of 'flow' it has been called.
Thank you for all the work, Dave. I never thought I was going to get Deleuze but you're helping me quite a lot
Thanks forthe encouragement, lucasmiguel4734.Best of luck with your efforts
Decalcomania is an art technique where you use foil and paint. You paint something on the foil and then you use that foil to kind of stamp it onto the paper. And then you re-do that a few times. That's why it's related to the Rhizome, I think. You get a series of roschach-test like images. It was a technique popular among surrealists because they wanted to "bring their subconscience to the surface".
Very useful -- thanks
I also got “a technique used by some surrealist artists which involves pressing paint between sheets of paper.”
Incredibly insightful. As someone outside the realms of academia this is by far the most accessible and in depth way of working through the hard bits. Love it!
Thanks a lot twan jon.Very encouraging
thank you for creating this series, and many years later, I hope this message finds you well. I have been listening to your series off and on while working my way through deleuze.
Thanks for the encouragement Peter Wear. I hope to have been of some help. Best wishes for your own projects
I really really appreciate the effort you have put in here! Thank you.
You are very welcome. All the best
thank you so much dave! i love the series so much.
Thanks for the kind words SH J -- very encouraging
This is lovely and extremely helpful, really appreciate the work you did to make this series
Thanks for this series, Dave. Very helpful.
Sorry for the long delay. You are welcome Susan Sharron
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. - Ph.D. candidate in the U.S.A.
You are very welcome, Tyler. Best of luck with the PhD
Brilliant. Clear and concise. You've made this concept very understandable for me. Thanks!
You're very welcome. Best of luck with it
Thank you for these wonderful videos. I had been reading Anti Oedipus a few months back but ultimately dropped it because I felt like I was totally lost, now I stumbled upon your videos and got motivated to go back into it. Hope you're doing well.
Great idea, great series - many thanks for posting.
Thanks Malcolm Hanson
Wonderful! Thanks very much for sharing your knowledge! The videos are very soothing.
Glad you liked them. I've always thought soothing video ( or music) helps academic work --probably not for everybody though.
To provide you an example of American literature that makes use of the rhizome, William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury has a somewhat rhizomatic narrative progression, especially in the relationship between the perspectives of the three Compson sons which comprise entirely separate sections of the book. It's not only nonlinear but each section connects at multiple points (in ways that require the reader to take a more active role in interpreting and making these connections due to ambiguity, etc).
Sorry if that's vague. Writing this while on my way to work. Will try to provide more detail as soon as I can.
Thank you for this series Dave. This video explained the rhizome in a way that finally made something click for me. I am reading deleuze, because I am thinking about how to form connections between subjects that seem to have to connections at first sight. Once I find an overlap between such subjects they almost always become way more fascinating to me. And I would love to be able to understand that proces better.
You are welcome Jeroen Schmitz. I am glad something clicked.Best of luck with your own projects
Thank you so much! You really made this so much simpler to understand!
Sorry for the late reply, Peter Raengel. Thanks for your encouragement
I'm very curious if you've read about Terrence Deacon's "Incomplete Nature" and his theory that organization/structure (as opposed to a chaotic maximization of entropy) is only possible due to "constraints".
Any cultural system would just dissipate in transmission if it wouldn't have within it some cultural rules/memes that maintain and perpetuate its necessary constraints (sometimes the constraints are explicit, other times are implicit part of that culture). Also a biological organism, by Deacon’s standards, is in a way "less then the sum of it's parts", because every component existing at every level of magnification in that organism (atoms, simple molecules, macro molecules, conduits such as blood/lymph vessels, the structure of the heart, the neural correlates of specific perceptions, etc) is constraining the "action" of other components-the degrees of freedom in a living organism are considerably less than in a dead organism in which chemicals start to more freely react. Similarly, a car engine is able to function only because of constraining relations between the hot high-pressure gasses, the pistons, the cylinders, crankshaft and so on-all these constraints are creating, figuratively speaking, a channel through which the potential energy from the gasoline’s atomic bonds is transformed and funneled until it ends up as spinning rubber. And if one should "loosen the bolts" as it were, slacking the constraints and increasing the freedom, the energy is rendered aimless. If we free the piston from the constraining cylinder, increasing the space of the latter then the piston will jiggle about randomly and purposelessly.
So, both structure and function are intimately related with the concept of constraint-the Eiffel tower sustains itself thanks to hundreds of thousands of pieces of metal that constrain one-another from moving; the car moves up the hill thanks to thousands of pieces of metal that constrain each-other and the flow of energy.
But how did these precise systems of constraints came about in an universe that's in a fundamental disposition of maximizing its entropy? In such an universe things go exactly the other way round, breaking up any constraints as soon as they form. Here, Deacon invents some concepts as "orthograde" - going with the grain of entropy maximization"; and "contragrade" - going against the grain of entropy maximization. Any contragrade process would necessitate energy, doing work to go against and beat the spontaneous orthograde processes. But he identifies in the natural world many orthograde processes which interact in just such a way that they produce countragrade effects at their mutual boundary (the most simple example he gives is that a sugar-water solution is high in entropy, but once the room temperature evaporates the water the cup is left with a lower entropy state of sugar crystals; reducing the cup's entropy was a contragrade process which emerged at the confluence of orthograde processes). Thus paradoxically, the purely spontaneous entropic nature is the same nature generating all these wonderful structures we see in life; and entropic flow is also the one powering those structures.
In my opinion Deacon elaborates the only theory of abiogenesis approachable by individuals who don't have scientific training, such as myself-you can at least pick up the gist of a story in it. I won't go into that but once formed, the nugget of primitive life, which he calls "automaton", is a *bundle of constraints* that self-sustains as long as it has the necessary boundary constraints offered by the environment (for my personal structure and operation the environmental temperature would be such a constraint; and if the environment ever goes to 100 degrees C, my atoms would start interacting madly and obliterating my human structure; this is not permitted by the current temperature constraint i'm in). In these ancient unicellular organisms "possibility, in a sense, became increasingly improbable" due to the compounding of new constraints, as the metabolic apparatus got more complex. Life is in a perpetual blind search to develop and deploy within it the constraints necessary to sustain itself, able to compensate for any absence of outside constraints that are currently necessary (as an example, organisms have evolved the ability to synthesize various necessary molecular parts in order to survive environments where those molecules weren’t present; another example is that organisms developed the ability to maintain temperature by sweating if the outside temperature increases above a certain level where the body’s chemical reactions start running amok). The pattern of a whirlpool is generated by constraints consisting in perturbations/collisions between the water molecules, but if you remove the stone that generated the perturbation it dies. The pattern of a human being is a highly evolved pattern that internalized many of it's necessary constraints and has a memory of those constraints (DNA) which is itself specified as constraints. The bewildering complexity and highly specific architecture of self-sustaining constraints is the thing which makes a human able go in search of "stones" and "better flows of water" to keep itself going.
What thrilled me about his way of explanation is that he wants to trace the emergence of "value" from the basic mechanics of the universe, stating that "values are born in the natural world as constraints by which non-equilibrium states (life) are furthered". Off course he cannot approach/explain the nature of qualia but he brilliantly explains the character of some conscious phenomena in accordance with the character of the neural physical processes (a dumb oversimplification of one of his examples would be that a certain micro pattern of constraints (maintained by way of "memory") could get coupled to incoming energies from the environment (perceptual stimuli), which would give rise to physical strain which would translate into psychological strain-this is why you feel psychological strain when you perceive some pattern that hurt you in the past). "Mind" is constrained/channeled activity that performs work for its own sake, maintaining the system of constraints, and our sophisticated mind today is in the continuation of the work done by the molecular activities of those primitive unicellular organisms. Otherwise, molecules for instance don't do work to keep their existence going, they don't "spend" energy to go against entropy.
Deacon maintains that we see "work" done all around us but we ignore what's making all this work possible. Namely constraints! They have the ability to channel energy into directions that are against spontaneous change, and in a living organism that energy is channeled into maintaining.. its constraints. Life is an emergent type of physical constraints, ones that work together as "systems of constraints that prevent each-others ending".
Also very interesting is the way in which he explains the telos manifested by human beings. This ability to be moved by future possibility is *not* "out of this world" according to Deacon, but very much a thing that emerges inside a completely natural universe following deterministic laws. A universe working in a "thermodynamic regime" (producing entropy) gives birth to a "morphodynamic regime" (where certain processes give rise to "shapes" that naturally fall and interlock in even more ordered shapes), which then in certain conditions lead to the "teleodynamical regime" (term invented by him; where processes give rise to "ends", goals, ideas, values). Ultimately he wants to obliterate any supernatural "outside intervention", explaining the existence of teleodynamics/mind from a natural perspective. Besides scientific implications, the political, cultural and economical significance is immense. Anyway, i couldn't refrain making analogies between the rhizome's structure, flow and transformation, and the complex interaction of constraints.
This looks really gripping. Thanks. I don't know the work but I'll put him on my to-do list
Thanks for this comment. Looks like something worth checking.
Interesting
I'm reading Thousand Plateaus and these series are very helpful. Thank you!
Sorry for the very late reply. Glad to have been of help.
This is very fascinating and love the video that goes with it
Thanks Dee Bee -- very encouraging
thank you for explaining these rather complex philosophies
You are very welcome Lars Larsen. I offer only my own take of course -- there are lots of more scholarly commentaries
Here are a few of the works by American and British writers that Deleuze and Guattari cite as examples of rhizomatic literature: Henry Miller - The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy, DH Lawrence - Aaron’s Rod, Jack Kerouac - On the Road, Virginia Woolf - The Waves, Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Yes -- I only know some of those and have gone right off H Miller. I also think he might have liked the French OuLiPo writers, especially G Perec, who also explored artifical devices to inspire creativity, or the brilliant Irish writer Flann O'Brien, who seems to have used only quantities of Irish stout and porter (and a degree in languages and Irish history fromTrinity Dublin). They are fiunny as well, which might not have met with approval?
This is great! I've been saying that I'm going to read this for so long... but end up reading things I have to instead. I kind of feel like I have a once removed understanding of their idea of assemblage as a result. This is very helpful!
Good stuff --keep soldiering on
Thanks for this!
You are welcome Teo Tornberg
What a fantastic series. Works of art. My first inclination is to go on at the keyboard about them, but somehow that would run counter to their deliberate and very effective unpretentiousness
Very kind, pfflam. Glad to have been of some help. Best of luck with your own efforts
Thank you for making these videos! I was looking for a brief introduction to deleuze and guattari before reading anti-oedipus and i feel like i have a little bit better footing going in now after hearing your explanations
Thanks for the comment shnora shnevans. Anti-Oedipus was their earlier work,of course, and I think it is far more focused on Freud and linguistic structuralism than Thousand Plateaus.That makes it easier in some ways, but the style is also quite a bit wackier. Good luck!
Hi Dave. Thanks for posting these :).
Hi John Dee. Thanks for the encouragement, and sorry for the delay in replying
What ruddy great fantastic content! - Did not expect to visit Deleuze in Devon.
Many thanks.It is an incongruous setting but that helps I find
I've started researching Deleuze primarily for his Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 texts for my film & tv course, infamously esoteric and difficult to parse. These videos feel so grounding and comforting for me, as I love his concepts and thinking but I've felt so out of my depth! Huge thank you for the time and work you've put into these videos, taking these wild concepts and ideas and making them much more palatable for the mind.
You are very welcome POintZ3RO. It is tough going and morale is easily dented. Good luck with it all.
Fan-TASTIC! Thank you!
Thanks for this George Reid
Thank you. Very clear.
You are welcome. All the best with your work.
Thank you so much
You're very welcome moneyman jones
very helpful. Thanks!
You're welcome
Helped me understand Deleuze significantly better. Currently reading Anti-Oedipus.
Glad to have been of help Loic Brismeur. I haven't really addressed the themes of AO specifically but there is some overlap, of course. Best of luck with your own work.
Thank you so much for this series, I really wish you were my philosophy professor
It would mean I would have toget all serious and 'maintain standards' and all that with a view to assessing you later. I'm glad to have stopoped being a pedagogue!
black mirror or even love death robots seem to be possibly rhizomatic in the conjunctive sense - both on Netflix in my area
Lots of modern culture gets a bit rhizomatic, of course, once we break with classical narrative
Charming and marvelously subtle satire. The strolls about Devon do make it rather sedate. One has the impression that one is slipping into a not altogether unpleasant dementia. I'm reminded of Borges' definition of philosophy as "fantastic literature"--a view "serious" philosophers tend to take as deflating but which is really wonderfully expanding.
That is marvelous -- many thanks. A very flattering description of what I was trying to do.
Dave, you're very cool!
Aw shucks. Thanks
Hopscotch by the argentinian Julio Cortazar could be an example of american rhizomatic literature, I would say.
(Argentina is also America :* )
Don't know it I'm afraid -- I'll get round to it. Thanks.
I'll track it down -- thanks
Julio Cortázar es un grande!
Thank you very much for making this. I am much more at home with "analytic" philosophy (using scare-quotes here since I don't think that categorization is very helpful), but I think I now have a bit of a better picture of what a rhizome might be. It seems to be a kind of network, made up of many smaller individual parts, each of which responds to local pressures; it also seems like individual rhizomes may be composed into larger and more general or abstract structures.
Of course, I'm probably simplifying or misunderstanding something, but I still feel like I have some kind of picture whose inaccuracies I can now correct. Thank you!
Very useful summary here --thanks
brilliant stuff dave. can you do baudrillard someday?
Thanks lsvh vow. I like Baudrillrd too
I just started reading ATP and I recently finished Anti-Oedipus and your videos have been very helpful, thank you for making this series!
Well done Tall Gay Girl.Those are not easy reads,especially if you are under some pressure. Glad to have helped
these videos are brilliant! do you plan on ever making any more? thanks so much :))
Thanks Fred Fairley. Very encouraging of to hear that. I haven't got any videos planned just now but I am always adding stuff to the website: www.arasite.org/
I'm very upset, that there're no subtitles in video's 2-10. I'm not good enough at english to understand everything I want form listnenig, but enough to understand with the subtitles. I don't know how it works; does anybody know how can this problem be solved?
Matryna Pestka --I am sorry about this. I do have written transcripts for videos 2--11 which might be better?. You will find then listed on my website: www.arasite.org/deleuzep.html Good luck with it
Thank you very much! Some of my friends in Poland are interested in Deleuze too, we will be very glad to read it. Best wishes :)
You are very welcome.I hope you find it workable.Best wishes to you and your friends
I'm an undergrad double majoring in philosophy and psychology and I read this stuff for my own growth (also assuming i'll have to use it eventually). In Lincoln-Douglas (philosophy based basically) debate in high school superior debaters occasionally run cases based off of Deleuze. This has also been related to why I'm interested and how I know anything about it. I don't find it IMPOSSIBLE but the writing is dense and time consuming and I am quite thrust into other studies (Nietzsche, Paglia, Rawls, Scanlon, Hume, Kant). Thank you for this much more integrable piece of media.
Also, Swann's way is probably my favorite book. Do you have a favorite volume of In search of lost time/remembrance of things past?
Next to that, Joyce's Portrait made me cry multiple times with self enlightened and emphatic energy. Not a good description, but it was quite amazing.
Very courageous and committed of you Matthew Frazier. You are right to see the connections with other writers as endless and vertiginous. I think it best to just postpne tracing the links until you have time and have acquired some expertise -- unless a specific project requires you pursue particualr links.Best of luck with it
There is an extremely Deleuzian joke in Finnegans Wake: 'he . . . has an eatapus complex'
Any extensive catalogue of artistic work by any artist, composer, songwriter, painter etc. would be a rhizome.
Maybe, Aydn of Astro-Action -- but wouldn't it rdepend on the actual connections? Deleuze also says artists (like Bacon) can also develop on a 'plane of consistency', which might not be the same?
hello! How can we use it as a practice of thinking?
Hi Pygmalion. Preferred ways of learning and thinking are personal, of course, but I always like to get a basic idea of an argument first, in my own terms, before going back to test and refine. It takes confidence to persist sometimes, and I have been defeated (eg reading Joyce's Finegans Wake). But I nearly always get some insight. Good luck with your projects
Can you enable the cc for most of your videos?
Thank you so much for making this video however I am quite confused on how the application of the rhizome relates to identity. I've heard that deleuze rejects the idea of static conceptions of identity. So is deleuze in a sense color blind? I've heard many ideas of that we should instead create thousands of tiny sexes or genders etc. How does this make sense? Also should we reject the usage of pronouns. When I say "he said..." Doesn't the usage of the word he construct the static ideal that the person I am referring to is a masculine man. Also Does this also mean we should view the state rhizomatically, as in not every state official is a corrupt fascist? I know I am asking a lot of questions but I am very intrigued by deleuzian and guattarian thinking. I am a freshman in college and going into phil
Hi Spy Edits. You seem to be encountering the differences between how we normally see the social world and how philosophers like Deleuze see it. All academic specialists see the world differently, of course -- mathematicians, scientists, theologians. The differences are major ones even though it looks like philosophers are using the same terms as normal people. In the normal world, people don't really think that long about terms like gender or identity, usually because they have immediate practical and social goals to achieve -- they need to get on and interact with somebody and then move on Philosophers like Deleuze have different specialist goals -- to make new concepts (in D's case) and make them consistent with more general arguments. So there may indeed be a thousand tiny sexes when you really think about it ( the context, I recall, is how thousands of ordinary terms are sexed -- in French especially, of course), but how we 'apply' that insight to ordinary life is unclear -- we could not live normally if we hesitated every time to analyze which of a thousand sexes we were seeing when encountering a policeman in the street or whatever. There is a major critical use though -- people would be mistaken to think that the usual 2 sex model was somehow natural or eternal and so different sexes/genders are 'unnatural'. The same goes for any simplified view, of course, including simply labelling all state officials as fascists. Philosophical thought opens up new possibilities, sometimes far too many for ordinary life. For me, I think it opens up a sociological issue too, although Deleuze is not good at pursuing this question -- how did all the potential complexity of sexual identity actually get reduced to the nice simple forms we are used to? You'll need feminist or socilogical thinking to grasp that one? Best of luck with college.
Wow this was very helpful. Sorry just a couple follow ups and I'll be sure to get out of your hair. So when we talk about sex or race its not a matter of colorblindness but recognizing that race ans sexuality are fluid> You also say that terms are sexed. So would the breast be a sex, or many be a stereotypical thing a girl would do, is singing or shopping a sex. I probably sound like an idiot but can you give 1 example of a sex or race (not the known societal ones). Also does deleuze not believe in origins Like rap for example was conceived by the black community and then others started listening to it and became a part of their identity. Does deleuze reject giving credit to certain cultures for creating new things because that generalizes them?
Race and sex are fluid for Deleuze at a suitably 'deep' philosophical level, even though they might not be in actual societies. Almost anything can be seen as relating to sexual identities as we know -- clothes, music, the way you walk, what you do in your lesiure time, or how you dance are the obvious ones for us I suppose. There are even sexual metaphors like calling the parts an electrical circuit male and female components. 'Race' seems a bit less flexible maybe. Some social pressures, like a rigid family code, make sure these all line up so we can assure ourselves of our sexual identity on every occasion (walk like a man, hold your drink like a man, only laugh at manly things etc), but we could experiment a bit too and mix things up a bit if we wanted to, and some do. I think the discussion of origins is very philosophical again about things 'in nature', rather than origins in terms of people creating things. Deleuze liked the sort of art (music in this case) that gave us philosophical insights, usually by doing something experimental. I think I recall his mate Felix Guattari thinking some rap might qualify, but it must have been early versions he had in mind.
If you're looking for some criticisms of how they position identity I read Donna Haraway's When Species Meet a while ago and she's pretty good. They have been criticized for things like not valuing mundenaity or trying to over value this idea as being cosmically 'above' it all. Also in terms of the identity thing, they've been criticized of trying escape solidifying identity, while also focusing heavily on 'becoming', which is a kind of vague and incomplete circle to draw.. which I guess again is putting a focus on an other or outer worldly experience rather than acknowledging or giving a kind of agency or importance to the more seemingly banal aspects/ figures in existence, which is not really popular with some current ideas of how humans and non-humans interact, in social science circles at least.
9 Lacan fanboys disliked this.
Sorry about this -- do a video of your own explaining why?
I'm not sure what you mean? I meant it as a joke, because of how disappointed Lacan was when Deleuze and Guattari pursued the project that they did.
Sorry not to spot the joke. Do your own video anyway?
I apologize, I would make my own video but firstly, I have no audience and secondly, I don't have the time to record it.
Please don't apologise! I was not at all cross or annoyed at your first comment, but genuinely interested in what you might have had to say. I am too old and too retired to take offence. I couldn't find any offence ! I wanted to encourage you ( singly or collectively) to join in the great struggle to understand the arguments. I'm also a fan of very lo-tech videos as you can see, where you only need a camera and a walk round. All the best of luck with your projects.
Is rhizome same as maya? It doesn't have object or subject
Lovely work but as u said this particular vid had me asking "where are we going with this??!?"😅
I constantly ask myself this question! Just when I am about to give up -- it raises an interesting issue. I think we are clearing the ground here, opening things up as much as possible, going beyond as many constraints as we can, heading for the virtual.
2022
Kerouac's On The Road
D&G have a strange fondness for Kerouac -- thanks
2021
Sorry, this is a bit enigmatic
desperate for the rhizome
Look before you leap -- you might disappear. Always keep a lilttle piece of territory, the sages say
no all the martrys got killed
Too gnomic for me, I fear. Best wishes
I thought Kantian and Hegelian Philosophy was hard. Seems like they are easy reading compared to Deleuzian.
The prize surely goes to Lacan?
It’s just Buddhism but on steroids
Maybe -- I don't really know enough about Buddhism, I am afraid
Deleuze vs Krishnamurti or Marx
Deleuze seems to be a pseudo-nominalist like Krishnamurti or Marx; that is, there is just an outside, no inside. A voiceless thing . Objects without subjects. Objects without essences. As in Marx, he emphasizes the material aspect of the signifier word.
aspects of the objects.Krishnamurti just considers the objects to be words, nothing more.-Ever since the gratuitously skeptical Hume, science has imprisoned us in the dark cave of materialism and blind empiricism and needs to restore us to the rational, deductive sunlight of plato (plotinus) in which the universe must be mentally governed, and governed from a singularity top down. -- see my website independent.academia.edu/RogerClough or search in Google with a search term such as Clough plotinus Site: independent.academia.edu/RogerClough This paper can be referenced by opening it in academia.edu and copying the address in the address bar.
Roger.
You have read Krishnamurti insufficiently.
You put him in the same category as Marx, which is absurd since K would say and has said that Marx's way is wrong, because man must change from within, not without.
He always downplayed social and political action, in favor of personal discovery and transformation.
five and a half minutes in and nowhere near giving any tangible, let alone useful, definition of what the term "rhizome" even means
seriously what the fuck are you talking about. what is the concept. what is the value of the concept. why the fuck are you using a term repeatedly for now 12+ minutes before defining it?
My technique is to discuss some examples then think out how they might fit together. I don't think offering single definitions will do it justice. That does take more than 5.5 minutes though -- sorry.
@@gloverelaxis Sorry again, and I have experienced the same anger and frustration, so I sympathise. D&G are trying to break with ordinary notions of definition, and concept for that matter, and do what they think of as philosophy not ordinary forms of applied thinking. I have been rebuked by philosophers like D Finemann for not stressing that enough in these videos! It's like learning a foreign language really -- it is a real struggle to make sense of it at first. Try the transcript where you can skip through a bit more conveniently?
I respect your need to be seen as an intellectual and to think there is value in this...but post modern philosophy is mostly a pointless salon game of elitism by the pseudo-intellectual bourgeoisie in order to influence others through obfuscation to control the 'agenda' of any argument and obfuscate your thought. I have my own thought system, i don't follow someone else's INTERPRETATION... Think for yourselves, don't fall for the post-modern ruse. I hear so much waffle interspersed with obvious basic observations and then more complete waffle.... just listen to yourselves... its laughable.... THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES....
Just to add a point. I am a sociologist and I have doubts whether anyone 'thinks forthemselves'. We all get our ideas from somewhere. Where do you want to get yours from?