Monday, September 8, 2008
Reading Deleuze
We should not be surprised to find that different academic disciplines dealing with the concept of time (or any other concept, for that matter) in a variety of contexts would color or nuance the words they use as a part of their specialist vocabularies: the shift in the use of language is a demonstration of the adaptation of words to the variety of environments in which they function and this is akin to the process of adaptation in biological speciation—a sign of movement and change i.e. animation—in language.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
In reading the first couple of chapters of Deleuze’s Cinema Movement, I felt as if I were running into pools of conceptual quicksand, unable to concretize what I was reading, to make things gel, so to speak. I would encounter a variety of concepts with which I would have difficulties to come to terms with and grasp their meaning in a way that would make sense with the text I was reading—concepts such as time, movement, duration, feeling, set, etc. which as St. Augustine would say I know what they are and what they mean until I am asked to define them. For instance, take the concept of Time: depending on who we are, what we do, what we intend to do with Time, and what Time as a concept intends to do with us, the way we will conceive of Time will change. And when we start to think about Time and find ourselves being compelled by the circumstances to pin it down; it turns out it’s a target moving in a fog. To hell with Zeno’s arrow! As a target, Time is too undefined, too undifferentiated in its raw state as pure potential: it dissolves as it blends into the background because of the lack of differentiating contrast. In the case of the concept Time, for the average, non-specialist reader, the nebulousness of the conception is simply the overwhelming feeling or sensing of its variegated potential. It is the concept Time calling out to us from the vastness of potential to limit, define and condition its concomitant relations. Concepts are like lovers over-willing to transform themselves or present themselves in such a way that they will be more attractive and endearing: "You can call me Monica if you like that name better! What would you like me to do?" In some way, Time would like us to let it know how we would like it to be, and it is by letting the concept’s potential know what or how we want it to be and don't want it to be that we positively and negatively define the way that concept will couple with the other predefined concepts we are working with.
We all use words such as time, movement, duration, feeling, set, etc. in everyday speech without any problem whatsoever, but when we encounter them in a text such as Deleuze's we find it difficult and sometimes impossible to have them come together into something cogent—they all clamour for specificity at the very same time! They are inviting us and calling out to us to give them the particular attention they need in order to join the event: they are like noisy kids at a birthday party, all asking at the same time for a piece of cake, a glass of milk, to be shown where the bathroom is, and that they want to be the one to hit the piñata next: with all this shouting for attention, I can hear myself saying, I'm going to close the book and take a nap.
What Deleuze writes is often quite easy to understand, particularly, once you understand it! It's a bit like a magic trick: it's impossible to comprehend how the ace always comes out on top until the magician shows you how it's done, and then, with a little bit of practice, carrying out the trick becomes second nature to you and you can mesmerize others the way you were mesmerized before. The way that Deleuze uses these words, these concepts, is the way a philosopher would use them, and not necessarily the way a filmmaker, dancer, scientist, psychologist or person walking down the street would use them. He uses these words as a philosopher, as an individual whose professional role in the world is to manufacture concepts and to work with them within the particular discipline and tradition which is philosophy, and specifically in his case speculative philosophy. Unfortunately, this often results in a huge gap between the professional’s use of these concepts and how they are interpreted in the everyday world outside of the specialized philosophical context. It's a problem of communication where the sender is completely confident as to the clarity of the message while being completely oblivious to the incapacity of the recipient to adapt or enlarge the scope of the definition of the concept-base. The philosopher’s second-nature use of a specialist language creates a hermetic environment of understanding that is obvious and transparent to the philosopher yet impenetrable to anyone that is not imbued in that specific discipline or tradition: it ought to be a two-way street in that philosophers needs to make sure that the lexicons they are using are somehow actually anchored in the real world of everyday life experience while the non-specialist reader has to make that extra-effort to come to terms with the specialist’s language. I have to admit that I am being unfair to Deleuze with what I have written. Yes, his books are a difficult read: he uses what we consider to be familiar concepts in unusual, unexpected and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. His books are written for philosophers or specialists imbued in the tradition of thought, but one can find on the net numerous transcripts of his lectures at Vincennes that demonstrate how he would go out of the way to bridge the communication gap between specialist and neophyte. Yet, even with these aids, in reading his books, I find myself half the time (if not more) consulting one dictionary or another, reading other texts that will shine light on the concepts at hand, typing define: xxx in Google, or wiki followed by the word I'm looking for. I know that these web searches are frowned upon within academic circles because of their lack of rigor but, for me, the quick opening up of possibilities of meaning that vastly extend the potential of my understanding of these concepts totally outweighs the stigma of quickly and easily gained benefits derived from using the net. It’s like the pc solitaire game “Mine” where playing consists of taking chances and using intuition and logic to get the minefield to open up. Sometimes you click and the game blows up in your face, but when you click and the vastness of the field opens up, it’s a great feeling of satisfaction. Just like when you have that aha! moment when you figure out in a particular passage what Deleuze means by the word movement that makes everything so worthwhile.
Post a Comment