Passavant da bfhlr top

B/ the Obama administration to redefine “imminent threat” for the purpose of unrestrained drone strikes

C/ NSA shifts in legal statutes to allow for illegal warrantless surveillance – that’s Passavant

Leftist politics seep into legal memoranda allowing for the law to become deposed of its meaning and therefore taken out of context – John Yoo’s legal writings have become synonymous with reading Alice in wonderland.

The link outweighs - The right “taps into contemporary society’s self-conscious understanding of the openness of texts to interpretive pluralism exploiting this knowledge to advance specific political ends” meaning any aff offense is sequentially lost to neocons.

link – afro orientalism

Allowing the commodity to speak is an effort to disrupt phonetical conceptions of language and verbal meaning

link – BwO

The affirmative’s affirmation of the body without organs is an affirmation of multiplicity of meaning laying the leftist train tracks for the right wing’s train

Wang 2013 (Min’an, Professor at the Research Institute of Foreign Literature, Beijing Foreign Studies University, “The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Deleuze, and Desiring Machines,” in Deleuze in China, Theory and Event vol 16. No. 3)

Mao’s death put an end to the Cultural Revolution and ushered in Deng Xiaoping’s rule which inaugurated the age of economic reform and opening-up. What kind of reform did Deng initiate? If the Cultural Revolution targeted and coded desire, then the reform and opening-up policy formulated by Deng, one can argue, started decoding and deterritorializing desire. In a sense, the Dengist reform can be taken as an anti-Oedipal reform, which lodged an outright objection to the Maoist repression of desire as well as to the Maoist Cultural Revolution itself. By way of repressing desire, Mao became the Law of Father in almost every sense of the term. Therefore to engineer a reform in the economic and social domains of Chinese life was to subvert the Law of Father and, to borrow terms from Deleuze, to reactivate desiring-machines so as to change people back into productive desiring-machines. There were numerous symbolic moments during the economic reform, but for many people, the most visually impressive and perceptually significant event was the appearance of the nude fresco at the Beijing airport in 1979. This was a real event signaling the freedom of the body, as declared by some of the overseas media: “The appearance of a women’s body on the wall in public places in China foreshadows real reform and opening,” a famous Hong Kong businessman investing in the mainland noted. “Each time I came to Beijing, I would first go to see if this fresco was still there. Its presence always made me feel at ease.”19 The image of the naked body no doubt constituted an important visible symbol of reform and opening. This was the situation in China at the beginning of the 1980s. Once reactivated, the desiring-machines in their millions were never to be stopped again in spite of recurrent temporary frustrations (for instance, the above-mentioned fresco was covered up later on before it was uncovered again). Generally, the desiring machines in China tend to be running fervently at an increasing speed and with an increasing intensity, their lines of connection becoming increasingly complicated with ever-growing ramifications. Up to now, everyone has, in a sense, become a concrete abstract desiring-machine, everyone flowing fast and anguished; each and every desiring-machine is opening up its own holes and fissures, seeking new assemblages and new connections. They keep on assembling and conjugating, perpetually committed to securing multiple assemblages and creating multiple realities. Everyone is revving his engine, vying against everyone else running on the chains of desire and speeding up production with impatience. In China today, desire is flowering into ever-increasing vitality, every human body turning out to be a BwO (body without organs), with desiring-machines as much as their objects all becoming BwO’s. It is no wonder this “central kingdom” of desire-desiring is metamorphosing into one single body without organs, for the BwO reveals itself in the following manner: “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 161).²⁰ What is a BwO? Can a body have no organs? No, but these organs lose their usual organic functions. In this body, “No organ is constant as regards either function or position …” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 153). Feet are not for walking, eyes not for seeing, lungs not for breathing, and tongues not for talking. On the contrary, tongues are used for seeing, lungs for talking, ears for thinking, and eyes for eating. These organs give up their normal function so as to break away from the organization of the body and break down the organic constitution of the body. In this sense, the opposite of the BwO’s is not organs, because the BwO is not without organs; rather, it is without the organism that organizes its organs. Its organs are characterized by heterogeneity and diversity. “[T]he BwO[CsO] and its ‘true organs’ which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the organic organization of the organs.” “Organisms are the enemies of the body” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 158). Therefore, the BwO is the disintegration of the body. The organism attempts to integrate the BwO and make each organ stick to its position and obey the given organization. The organism tries to govern, to bind, to organize, and to dominate organs in order to make them submit to the whole, to ensure that they acquire a stable form and a proper semiotic meaning. That is exactly what the BwO rejects. The BwO violates all accumulation, sedimentation, coagulation, and condensation, destroying all stratification and fixation, and thereby denying totality, transcendence, interpretation as well as meaning. With a dynamic tendency to energy exchange, the BwO keeps moving on the plane of consistency, a pure migrating movement always ready for becoming the other. “[T]he organs appear and function here only as pure intensities.” “A BwO [CsO] is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities … The BwO [CsO] causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension.” “It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices.”21 In a sense, this is how desire exercises itself, and how it keeps flowing with intensity. Today’s China is perhaps such a BwO par excellence. The whole country is saturated with desiring-machines, ever flowing with intensity, and ever destroying the organism of the body; everyone is actively dismantling organs, seeking other functions and connections on their own. Just like rhizomes, desiring-machines are always at pains to go out in search of alliance, intertwinement, and propagation everywhere. In this republic of BwO’s, police are not merely organs maintaining social order; rather, they might be organs of gangs, connecting with criminal gangs, or probably with bureaucrats, or even with foreign embassies. Bureaucrats are no longer governing organs; instead, they might be functioning as an oppressive apparatus, or they might be organs of business connecting with business people. They might also be emotional organs or sex organs, connecting with different kinds of women. Soldiers might not be war organs. They keep on flowing and opening themselves up in all directions. They might flow towards singers, doctors, athletes, businesspeople and so on. Organs are actively disintegrating themselves, deviating from their central functions with a vengeance. They are becoming and flowing by way of practicing creatively. They struggle continuously against centralization and totalization. Desiring-machines penetrate through the BwO, their products being BwO’s as well: milk is the object that not only strengthens the body but also poisons it; leather shoes are functioning organs not merely of feet but also of medicine; schools are at once organs of education and organs of business. Here comes the problem: they are not unreal or fake; they are real objects, the products of desiring-machines. Various desiring-machines are assembling easily and wonderfully, weaving a chain of efficient production. They are surely the body of objects, although without organs; they are the body of multiplicity, the body that is decentralized. They are so effective and unique. Aren’t people across the world talking about the unique China model? This is the China model, not the model described by Adam Smith, but the rhizome model defined by Deleuze the philosopher: the productive model of desiring-production machine and the model of body without organs. This model brims with excessive force, desire, prosperity, multiplicity, flow, connection, propagation but with no meaning, transcendence, certainty, and eventually no order and law. This is the prosperity of multiplicity, the chaotic invigorating prosperity, the ever swelling prosperity of disorder, uncentralizable, undefinable, and uncontrollable.

link – Baudrillard – “push through”

Buadrillard’s call to embrace the catastrophic model is the vehicle for non-meaning –justifies necon reconstruction of reality

Baudrillard 96. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, pg. 96

What are we to do, then? What becomes of the heterogeneity of thought in a world won over to the craziest hypotheses? When everything conforms, beyond even our wildest hopes, to the ironic, critical, alternative, catastrophic model? ¶ Well, that is paradise: we are beyond the Last Judgement, in immortality. The only problem is to survive there. For there the irony, the challenging, the anticipation, the maleficence come to an end, as inexorably as hope dies at the gates of hell. And it is indeed there that hell begins, the hell of the unconditional realization of all ideas, the hell of the real. You can see why, as Adorno says, concepts prefer to scupper themselves rather than reach that point. ¶ Something else has been stolen from us: indifference. The power of indifference, which is the quality of the mind, as opposed to the play of differences, which is the characteristic of the world. Now, this has been stolen from us by a world grown indifferent, as the extravagance of thought has been stolen from us by an extravagant world. When things, events, refer one to another and to their undifferentiated concept, then the equivalence of the world meets and cancels out the indifference of thought -- and we have boredom. No more altercations; nothing at stake. It is the parting of the dead sea. ¶ How fine indifference was in a world that was not indifferent -- in a different, convulsive, contradictory world, a world with issues and passions! That being the case, indifference immediately became an issue and a passion itself. It could preempt the indifference of the world, and turn that pre-emption into an event. Today, it is difficult to be more indifferent to their reality than the facts themselves, more indifferent to their meaning than images. Our operational world is an apathetic world. Now, what good is it being passionless in a world without passion, or detached in a world without desire? ¶ It is not a question of defending radical thought. Every idea one defends is presumed guilty, and every idea that cannot defend itself deserves to disappear. On the other hand, one must fight all charges of irresponsibility, nihilism or despair. Radical thought is never depressive. On this point, there is total misunderstanding. Ideological and moralistic critique, obsessed with meaning and content, obsessed with the political finality of discourse, never takes into account writing, the act of writing, the poetic, ironic, allusive force of language, of the juggling with meaning. It does not see that the resolution of meaning is to be found there -- in the form itself, the formal materiality of expression. ¶ Meaning, for its part, is always unhappy. Analysis is, by definition, unhappy, since it is born of critical disillusionment. But language, for its part, is happy, even when referring to a world without illusion and without hope. That might even be the definition of a radical thinking: a happy form and an intelligence without hope. ¶ Critics, being unhappy by nature, always choose ideas as their battleground. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce meaning, language and writing, for their part, always create illusion -- they are the living illusion of meaning, the resolution of the infelicity of meaning by the felicity of language. And this is surely the only political -- or transpolitical -- act that can be accomplished by the person who writes. ¶ As for ideas, everyone has them. More than they need. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis. That alone can justify writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas. There never will be any resolving the contradictoriness of ideas, except in the energy and felicity of language. `I do not paint sadness and loneliness,' says Hopper. `What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.' ¶ At any rate, better a despairing analysis in felicitous language than an optimistic analysis in an infelicitous language that is maddeningly tedious and demoralizingly platitudinous, as is most often the case. The absolute tediousness secreted by that idealistic, voluntaristic thought is the secret sign of its despair -- as regards both the world and its own discourse. That is where true depressive thought is to be found, among those who speak only of the transcending and transforming of the world, when they are incapable of transfiguring their own language. ¶ Radical thought is a stranger to all resolving of the world in the direction of an objective reality and its deciphering. It does not decipher. It anagrammatizes, it disperses concepts and ideas and, by its reversible sequencing, takes account both of meaning and of the fundamental illusoriness of meaning. Language takes account of the very illusion of language as definitive stratagem and, through it, of the illusion of the world as infinite trap, as seduction of the mind, as spiriting away of all our mental faculties. While it is a vehicle of meaning, it is at the same time a superconductor of illusion and non-meaning. Language is merely the involuntary accomplice of communication -- by its very form it appeals to the spiritual and material imagination of sounds and rhythm, to the dispersal of meaning in the event of language. This passion for artifice, for illusion, is the passion for undoing that too- beauteous constellation of meaning. And for letting the imposture of the world show through, which is its enigmatic function, and the mystification of the world, which is its secret. While at the same time letting its own imposture show through -- the impostor, not the composteur [composing stick] of meaning. This passion has the upper hand in the free and witty use of language, in the witty play of writing. Where that artifice is not taken into account, not only is its charm lost, but the meaning itself cannot be resolved. ¶ Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion -- in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real. Viral, pernicious thought, corrosive of meaning, generative of an erotic perception of reality's turmoil.

link – deleuzian education

D&Gs model of education feeds the war machine – it is an experimental knowledge affirming the “multiplicity of nomads, “experimental knowledge” and “explication of experimental signs” – a knowledge used to justify the multiplicity of words and experimental definitions

Semetsky and Delpech-Ramey 11(Inna and Joshua A., “Educating Gnosis/Making a Difference”)

The emerging field of Educational Futures in educational research explores the questions of globalization and knowledge economy, employing such methods of futures studies as scenario planning, strategic foresight, imaginative narratives as well as new utopian thinking comprising present edutopias (Peters & Freeman-Moir, 2006; cf. Slaughter, 2004; Milojevic, 2005, 2006; Inayatullah et al, 2005). For Milojevic, a predominately neoliberal discourse in education needs to be enriched with new utopian visions that exceed solely critical thought but include alternative epistemologies. One such unorthodox approach to knowledge belongs to Gilles Deleuze whose philosophy is fundamentally utopian. His future-oriented, somewhat untimely, experimental and creative ‘epistemology’ makes an object, in effect, a consequence or a limit-case of the inquiry: it is multiple becomings that, for Deleuze, serve as the precursors (NB: quite often, dark precursors) of being. Becomings are affects, which are not just subjective feelings or emotions but do reflect the objective structure of experiential events that, in their intensity, can ‘spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else)’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 127). Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘affects ... traverse [one’s universe of being] ... like the beam of light that draws a hidden universe out of the shadow’ (1994, p. 66), this hidden, invisible, universe becoming known – visible – to us in the form of experiential knowledge. This deep inner self-knowledge – ultimately, the knowledge of human nature, of life itself – is what the ancients referred to as Gnosis, from the Greek for knowing. Nel Noddings (2006) is adamant about the importance of self-knowledge as the very core of education via an examined life, as Socrates would say; that is, a life lived in accord with the ancient ‘Know Thyself’ principle that was inscribed on the temple of Apollo in Delphi. She insists that ‘when we claim to educate, we must take Socrates seriously. Unexamined lives may well be valuable and worth living, but an education that does not invite such examination may not be worthy of the label education’ (Noddings, 2006, p. 10; italics in original). The ultimate knowledge of life is a prerogative of a unified science that differs from the current positivist paradigm. Deleuze’s 1946 publication, titled ‘Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy’, reflects his profound fascination with esoteric themes related to Neoplatonic tradition of revolutionary Gnosis that was to be rediscovered and redeployed in nineteenth-century Europe. The essay was his Preface to a reissue of the French translation of Johann Malfatti de Montereggio’s work titled Mathesis, or Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge. Malfatti was a nineteenthcentury Italian doctor who practised the science of medicine in the tradition of natural philosophy grounded not in a technical proficiency but in experimental practice embodied in lived experience of deep knowledge leading to healing through the sympathetic patterns of vibration that produced what Deleuze would later call maps or diagrams. The idea of mathesis universalis – a science of all sciences that, if and when realized, would have established a long-sought-after unity of knowledge – has been historically viewed as both occult and politically subversive, defying the then scientific beliefs and religious dogmas alike. As Yates (1964) has argued, part of what led to Giordano Bruno’s burning at the stake was his advocacy of a new religion that would be centred on love and art together with magic and mathesis. Mathesis as a universal science was then not posited in opposition (as per would-be Cartesian dream of reason) to art and magic; they would have been reconciled (cf. Semetsky, 2008a). In mainstream Western philosophy, mathesis universalis is associated with Leibniz, who had envisaged an arithmetica universalis or scientia generalis that would allow a kind of formal or internal elaboration of all possible relations between all concepts in all branches of knowledge taken together. As such, mathesis would be a kind of universal grammar, a sort of formal ‘language’ of symbols. Leibniz conceived of a lingua characteristica as a universal pictographic or ideographic alphabet of human thought comprising arcana, diagrams, pictures as complemented by calculus ratiocinator and reflecting ratio embedded in Nature. It is a poetic language of interpretable symbols – contrary to the language of propositions that directly refers to empirical objects of logical positivism – that would have indeed expressed ‘the truths of gnosis’ (Martin, 2006, p. 37) rooted in Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophies. In his later magnum opus, Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) refers to mathesis in connection with an ‘esoteric’ usage of the calculus, claiming that there is a mathesis universalis that corresponds to his theory of ideas as the differentials of thought. The ideas are often so enveloped or enfolded deep ‘in the soul that we can’t always unfold or develop them’ (Deleuze, 1993, p. 49) by means of our cognitive tools alone. The ideas are to be different/ciated in the double movement between the multiple – actual and virtual – levels of reality. Virtual tendencies have the potential of becoming actual through different/ciations of the ‘initially undifferentiated [transcendental] field’ (Deleuze, 1993, p. 10) so that the actual, unlike the Platonic model and copy, is not exactly a copy of the virtual (Deleuze’s Platonism is reversed). They are different, and it cannot be otherwise because the virtual is posited just as a tendency, therefore no-thing. Virtual tendencies as potentialities or no-things become actualized as though created ex nihilo and embodied in the actual things, in the guise of new objects of knowledge, new meanings. The nuance is significant: it is ‘[f]rom virtuals [that] we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without being able to isolate one from the other’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 160). It is the affective conditions in real experience when the desire for Gnosis becomes intensified to the very limit that can unfold them because this deep inner, Gnostic ‘knowledge is known only where it is folded’ (Deleuze, 1993, p. 49). As encompassing an affective dimension, Gnostic knowledge is experimental and experiential: for Deleuze: once one steps outside what’s been thought before, once one ventures outside what’s familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and thinking becomes ... a ‘perilous act’, a violence, whose first victim is oneself. (Deleuze 1995, p. 103) Such a perilous act of thinking is embodied in the maximum intensity of experience as ‘a power to affect itself, an affect of self on self’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 101; original italics) that leads to our learning from experience and becoming-other. Deleuze’s model of learning is based on the explication of experiential signs (such as, for example, involuntary memories similar to those awakened by Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine; cf. Bogue & Semetsky, 2010), images, or aesthetic and artistic signs as potential sources of meanings in accord with the logic of sense (Deleuze, 1990). This logic exceeds a narrow instrumental reason: it is ‘an intensive and affective logic of the included middle’ (Bosteels, 1998, p. 151). As Deleuze says, we need all three – percepts, affects and concepts – at the level of real life, of practical action. The path to Gnosis involves paradoxical non-philosophical understanding; for Deleuze and Guattari (1994), ‘Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts’ (p. 66). The affects are immanent, and the plane of immanence ‘knows only events and other people and is therefore a great creator of concepts’ (1994, p. 48). The radical concept of constructing the plane of immanent consistency presupposes a developed intuition (Semetsky, 2004; cf. Noddings & Shore, 1984) because the path to Gnosis involves both ‘intuition and the certainty of possessing a method permitting access to such [deep, inner] knowledge’ (Faivre, 1994, p. 19): the knowledge of ourselves and human life as a whole. Deleuze agrees with Bergson that human mind is primarily intuition and only secondarily calculation or rationalization. For Bergson – contrary to authority figures in society who reinforce a particular ‘contraction’ that this society is – it is mystics who have the potential to creatively ‘expand’ (versus ‘contract’) the aperture of human awareness and consciousness in order to enter into communication with other levels of duration as states in which the energies of the virtual whole can be differentiated and given new forms. In Deleuze-Bergson’s terms, our current educational system would be qualified as a kind of hyper-contraction, and even frozen; it habitually ignores intuitive or integrative approaches such as the would-be way to Gnosis by means of Deleuzian practical construction of the plane of immanence. Education is reduced to formal schooling (for children) or perpetual training (for adults), thus a priori marginalizing the realm of lifelong human development and learning devoted to the knowledge of this very life as mathesis. Yet, Gnosis would be invaluable with regard to diverse educational contexts. Inayatulla (2002), in the context of futures studies in education, refers to multiple deeper interpretations that would have exceeded the ‘views of reality for which only empirical data exists’ (p. 3) and encourages a reflective approach problematizing the nature of the current episteme as the very foundation for knowledge (Inayatulla, 2006). Contrary to detached observation performed by an independent subject forever separated from the world of objects, and which became equated with the ‘objective’ method of natural sciences as a current episteme, indeed, Gnosis would be achieved by participation, by a ‘mutual solidarity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 45) in terms of affective relations between subjects and objects because ‘neither of them can be identified otherwise’ (p. 45). Gnosis is produced along the transversal line of flight connecting two ‘inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 109) when the ‘subjective’ world of mind comes in contact with the ‘objective’ world of matter in their mutual integration at the deeper, soul, level, thus ‘establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 165). Ultimately, such Gnostic knowledge created first as just a singular experiment becomes a constituent part of what one author (Semetsky, 2008b) has called nomadic education. Deleuze’s nomad metaphor affirms the multiplicity of paths that nomadic tribes wander along in their movement in the ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 371) of the steppe when ‘“every now and then” crossing [traversing] closed deserts’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 111). The alternative law that guides nomads in their travels is nomos, the ‘law’ of the Outside and the outsiders. Nomadic place is always intense because the nomads’ existence is inseparable from the region or space they occupy. The nomad’s relation to the earth is deterritorialized to such an intensity, ‘to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 381). The adjective smooth is contrasted with striated, both terms defining different musical forms: striated – as ordered by rigid schemata and point-to-point connections ensuring a linear and fixed structure (as an episteme of positive science) – and smooth – as an irregular, open and heterogeneous, dynamic structure of fluid forces – as the would-be mathesis. A classical episteme of metric systems, technical objectives and precise measurements and classifications gives way to an experimental and experiential ‘field ... wedded to nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 381) and filled with the polyvocality of directions taken by nomadic tribes that could be found ‘in the Greek milieu’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 88) and which would have included a path to Gnosis. Nomadic education ‘takes place’ along the lines of becoming when the path to Gnosis produces ‘a shared deterritorialization’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 293) that Deleuze and Guattari illustrate by their famous example of wasp and orchid: ‘the wasp ... becomes a liberated piece of the orchid’s reproductive system ... the orchid ... becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction’ (p. 293). Two series, two planes – of the wasp and the orchid – are transversally (non-locally) connected in between via the line of flight that runs perpendicular to both planes and – by virtue of being orthogonal to both – represents ‘the absolute speed of movement’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 293). Such a limit-experience in real life appears to be achieved only by mystics, shamans, magicians, or sorcerers (Semetsky, 2009a; DelpechRamey, 2010). It is mystics and poets (even if they were forbidden to enter the Academy) who traditionally played a participatory, embodied role in the relational (as Deleuze would say, rhizomatic) network that forms an interdependent holistic fabric with the world, thus overcoming the dualistic split between subject and object that has been haunting us since the time of Descartes. Such apparently mystical inflection can be traced through Deleuze’s corpus of works; still Deleuze’s mysticism is practical. It is not solely reduced to what dualistic thinking equates with the occult and which is traditionally posited as a binary opposite to science or analytic philosophy alike and, as such, incapable of being explained (Semetsky, 2009b; Lovat & Semestky, 2009; Delpech-Ramey, 2010) in rational terms as a sole prerogative of either. Rhizome is a biological metaphor used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe a model for knowledge-structure irreducible to a single, stable foundation as a scientific episteme. Growth and movement are embedded in a network of traversing lines leading to the creation of concepts. This network, in contrast to a map that a priori represents a given territory, would engender the very territory to which it is supposed to refer; would create it in practice! As a symbol for unlimited growth through the multitude of its own transformations, rhizome is contrasted with a tree, the latter symbolizing the linear and sequential reasoning rooted in finite knowledge. The tree metaphor accords with the infamous tree of Porphyry, which is an example of the classificatory system, or a hierarchical structure based on precise definitions that serve as the foundation for the rationally justifiable theoretical knowledge. The tree of Porphyry incorporates an arborescent reasoning; that is, a type of syllogistic logic based on the method of division – of the excluded middle – to form a precise catalogue. The hierarchical structure precludes the existence of the interdependent, sympathetic relations between the separate branches of the sacramental tree. But a rhizomatic structure consists of a network of imperceptible relations in the form of zigzagging and crisscrossing lines of flight comprising critical, clinical and creative dimensions as three Cs of holistic education (Semetsky, 2007, 2010a) in contrast to the habitual three Rs of formal schooling confined to standardized testing and measurable objectives. Thus the model of education pursued by Western liberal, democratic society is not liberating itself. It is Gnosis as intuitive knowledge of the individuating forces of life which is truly democratic. It is democratic – but not because it will subject itself to free debates and discussions. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) ironically point out, ‘Rival opinions at the dinner table – is this not the eternal Athens ... ? ... This is the Western democratic popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s’ (pp. 144-145). Rather, Gnosis is democratic in that it symbolizes reciprocity expressed in the capacity ‘to affect and be affected’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. xvi) as part and parcel of self-knowledge and animating principles effectuating these debates and discussions. The liberating capacity of mathesis lies in the embodiment of the fundamental elements in nature as symbols so that they immediately impart a power to act for the sake of life itself. To step into nomadic spaces – even if such a space is a paradoxical ‘empty square’ (Deleuze, 1990, p. 47) – is liberating: the ‘Politics of Sorcery’ (Delpech-Ramey, 2010) brings new creative ‘magic’ into a presently disenchanted world which has long been disengaged from ‘a critical attitude or ethos’ (Simons et al, 2009, p. vii; italics in original). Such politics would be devoted to the invention of new concepts (indeed, in a Deleuzian spirit) and new communication systems (cf. Peters, 2009). The overall aim would be the creation of ‘the open society’ (Peters, 2009, p. 303) as the transformation of the knowledge economy. Nomad’s way is an immanent trajectory and not a transcendental end; a deviant footpath and not the royal road. As a symbol for becoming, nomads always ‘transmute and reappear in the lines of flight of some social field’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 153). Contrary to the method of direct instruction that continues to stifle and striate contemporary pedagogy, Gnosis ‘leaps from one soul to another ... And from soul to soul it traces the design of an open society, a society of creators’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 111). A society of creators is an integrative society: because the path to Gnosis crosses – traverses – the supposedly dual opposites, Gnosis is an integrative way of knowing; at once the intellectual (mind), spiritual (soul) and practical (body), activity, that – in the process of repeated de/reterritorializations – marks ‘the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 9) which is ‘laid down’ in real experience and enables an intuitive access to the multiple ‘truths of gnosis’ (Martin, 2006, p. 37).

link – faciality

Faciality seeks to explode signifiers and their respective meaning – the same logic used to justify reinterpretation of words to find new configurations for meaning

Bignall 12 (Simone Bignall – Senior Lecturer in the Office of Indigenous Strategy and Engagement @ Flinders University, Deleuze and Race pgs. 79-83)

In general, then, ‘the face brings the body of that which varies from the majoritarian into comprehension for dominant culture . . . they always exist in comparison with the majoritarian face’ (MacCormack 2004: 136). Or, as Bogue comments: ‘the face of despotic-passional power identifies, classifies, recognizes . . . the facialized object is recognized, pinned to the wall, or stuffed in a hole, imprinted with a look that it returns as a reverberation of the force that shapes it’ (2003: 104–5). In fact, as is evidenced by the example of the reportage of the events at Palm Island – which focused on disorderly, rioting Aborigines and deflected public attention away from the causal factor of police violence – a facial regime maintains its majoritarian form by attributing a negative value to any fragments of signifiance that threaten to elude capture: In a signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was ‘bad’ in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs . . . finally, and especially, it incarnates the line of flight the signifying regime cannot tolerate . . . the regime must block a line of this kind or define it in an entirely negative fashion . . . Anything that threatens to put the system to flight will be killed or put to flight itself. Anything that exceeds the excess of the signifier or passes beneath it will be marked with a negative value. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 116) The Palm Islanders protesting against the violent treatment of their people held in custody became scapegoats, negatively identified in dominant news discourse and social discussions that maintained emphasis on the riots and thereby refrained from scrutinising the inciting violent behaviour of the white police offi cer. This framing of the events and the actors implicitly upheld whiteness as an unremarked category of social ‘normality’ against which Australia’s internal ‘others’ are represented as ‘unruly’, measured as deviant and finally ‘managed’ within the space of the nation. Causal Power and the Ruin of Representation The ‘ruin of representation’ is a central aspect of Deleuze’s task in Difference and Repetition and indeed forms a consistent thread through his entire œuvre, including his work with Guattari (Olkowski 1999). The aim in Difference and Repetition is to shake off the ‘four iron collars of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy in judgement and resemblance in perception’ (Deleuze 1994: 262). In A Thousand Plateaus, the discussion of faciality likewise involves a critique of representation; in particular, how faces ‘form loci of resonance that select sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 168). For Deleuze, at the heart of representation and aligned forms of political practice is the misconception that the established regime of power / knowledge (the face) causally structures the productive force of desire and assemblage. Within this model of causation, an established signifier or set of significations predetermines the possibility of recognition and limits the potential for inventing new configurations of meaning and, hence, of social organisation. The imposition of an already-given order of meaning upon an actual variety of subject-forming events reduces them to a limited and predetermined interpretation of experience, as was the case in the narrow reportage of the events at Palm Island. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 177), all interpretation then becomes assimilated to an existing structure of meaning: ‘You don’t so much have a face as slide into one.’ Deleuze and Guattari encourage us in Anti-Oedipus (1983) to understand alternatively that the established forms of power described by the subject and the signifier are not the (already-given) causes of signifi ance, but are, in fact, themselves reactive effects of a process in which meaning is constructed through the association of elements into a coherent form (see, for example, 1983: 129). They therefore assert: ‘concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visagéité), which produces them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 168). This engendering involves the process of facialisation, in which the face ‘takes shape’ and ‘begins to appear’ as certain regular features are inscribed and emerge as fixed strata upon a mobile ‘surface’, thereby forming the landscape of the face with the repetition of their occurrence over a period of time. However, these features are not inevitable characteristics of the facial landscape; they occur according to a particular and contingent coding of elemental conjunctions to define a particular emergence of faciality. Thus, a ‘concrete face’ is always defined by the assembly rules that code the causal force of desiring-production within the ‘abstract machine of faciality’ that causes the face to emerge as such. When the established political regime of the face is erroneously taken as the cause of signifiance, it operates as a ‘site of transcendental illusion’ which suggests the apparent inevitability of that regime of signs (Deleuze 1994: 265). When everything must conform in advance to a regime of signification already given, then there is no room for creative divergence in the productive process. There is nothing new, no new desires or alternative associations that might construct different expressions in the established face, which grimly sets its features into a representative order. In this way, in the rigid structures of a formed face, ‘the whole of desiring-production is crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation, and to the dreary games of what is representative and represented in representation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 54). It is helpful to read ‘Plateau 7 – Year Zero: Faciality’ in conjunction with ‘Plateau 5 – 587bc–ad70: On Several Regimes of Signs’. There, Deleuze and Guattari analyse ‘a certain number of semiotics displaying very diverse characteristics’ (1987: 135). They explain that there is such diversity in the forms of expression, such a mixture of these forms, that it is impossible to attach any particular privilege to the regime of the ‘signifier’. If we call the signifying semiotic system semiology, then semiology is only one regime of signs among others, and not the most important one. (1987: 111) In fact, any particular regime of signs subsists in a milieu where competing regimes circulate. Accordingly, any given discourse of race is not a fixed or closed system of signification, but is flexible and relative to other modes of expression and possible interpretations. A racialised entity might occupy many classifications simultaneously and thus can transfer between meanings. For example, during the time when Australia had a formal policy sanctioning the forcible separation of ‘half-caste’ indigenous children from their families, communities, country and culture, a person may have been considered ‘white enough’ to be adopted and assimilated within a colonial household, but ‘not white enough’ to enjoy the same treatment or life opportunities received by the natural children within that household. A complex mixture of various semiotic regimes forms a milieu or landscape that furnishes material for the constitution of the sense of a particular body, identity or event. The milieu constitutes an exterior context in which a dominant organisation of meaning subsists. At its points of contact with this milieu, a representation is fundamentally unstable, as its elements combine, shift, transfer and pass between other regimes of sense. Thus, there are possible passages between regimes of signs, enabling movements of destratification or the mixing and translation of established regimes of signification. The face depicts a systemic collection of the dominant representations that comprise a majoritarian order of sense. Whereas the semiotic regime of the signifier and the subject works to capture and reduce diverse meanings to a limited version of ‘truth’ that masquerades as uniform and universal, excluded alternative and polyvocal regimes of sense and expression are always possible (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 136; see also Deleuze 2004). However, the potential for discovery of these alternative and contesting regimes of sense ‘requires a rethinking of the majoritarian face and a willingness to envisage more than one system of comprehension and function for the face’ (MacCormack 2004: 138). Deleuze and Guattari suggest: when the face is effaced, when the faciality traits disappear, we can be sure that we have entered into another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more imperceptible where subterranean becomings-animal occur, becomings molecular, nocturnal deterritorialisations overspilling the limits of the signifying system. (1987: 115) In his early refl ection on his experiences with racism and resistance, Frantz Fanon writes: I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it. (1967: 229) Repression occurs when calls for acknowledgement of a group’s just political concerns – such as those voiced by the Palm Island rioters – are confronted by a ‘white wall’ of signification, which responds only by bouncing back given structures of meaning and is not capable of recognising creative inventions of sense or differences that depart from the majoritarian perspective. Racism constructs an empire of uniformity and digs a ‘black hole’ of subjectivation in accordance with an established or normative model of identity, in which the minoritarian self is imprisoned or buried. Deleuze and Guattari accordingly ask a question relevant for antiracist strategising: ‘How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How do you dismantle the face?’ (1987: 186).

link – ling chi

“Reveling in the contradictory experience of anguish and ecstasy” is an irruptive force of meaning and “dictionary definition” – their affirmation gets coopted

Benjamin Noys, professor of critical philosophy, 2000, “Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction,” The Subversive Image. Pluto Press. HHurt.

It is not a matter of destroying the image, of creating a ‘pure’ subversive image, but of embracing what is hateful and ugly in that image. We are pulled back into the image, running into it out of control. The irruptive forces revealed by Bataille flow out of the image and then flow back into it, disrupting its propriety. However, once Bataille has drawn out these irruptive forces is it not possible that they could be assimilated and put to use by science or philosophy? Could they not be analysed conventionally? These irruptive forces do not settle within the conventional, and the classifications of science or philosophy would be variations on the dictionary classifications which work through imposing meaning. Like the dictionary, science divides up the world into discrete units, trying to impose ‘a mathematical frock coat’ (VE, 31) on the world. Philosophy, on the other hand, tries to contain these forces within metaphysical wholes. What remains is the leftover, the remainder, which cannot be assimilated. The event of eruption is like ‘a fly on an orator’s nose’ (EA, 102), whose comic effect of ‘acute perturbation’ mocks the discourses of knowledge.

link – ling chi poetry

Their use of poetry is a tactic of sacrificing words and an expression of multiplicity

Brennan 15

(Eugene Brennan, Literature and Intoxication: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess, 2015, SHR)

Poetry occupies a privileged place in the work of Georges Bataille. Along with a number of recurring signifiers throughout his work, it suggests a form unproductive expenditure.” For Bataille this referred to states or practices which were not subservient to a future goal or specific purpose. Bataille characterizes eroticism for example, along these lines as a loss of energy, a loss of self in a moment of intensity, as distinct from the future oriented goals of procreation or attaining pleasure. Productive expenditure is based on conservation for the future while unproductive expenditure is all about loss in the present moment, exceeding the servile confines of everyday life. In an early landmark essay Bataille characterized poetry in these terms a synonymous with expenditure it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore close to that of sacrifice (BAtaille, 2013, p. 120). The type of poetry envisioned here would have only a secondary relationship to representation and symbolism, and would primarily seek actually to enact a sacrifice of words, dramatizing moments of loss. In this chapter I consider the theoretical significance of poetry for bataille in relation to the more obscure and under-examined portion of his oeuvre occupied by the actual practice of poetry. I focus on the importance of intoxication, particularly as it manifests itself as a “loss of self” and as an excess that results, somewhat counter-intuitively, from states of lack, absence, and dissatisfaction. Intoxication as an experience of absence and loss is frequently precipated by a practice of mourning. Poetry and mourning often seem to be actually synonymous with intoxication in Bataille’s thought. Mourning is similarly characterized alongside a disparate group of other states such as war, games, cults and perverse sexual activity as activities which at least in primitive circimstances have no end beyong themselves. In at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves, In Bataille’s schema these states are privileged moments when servility towards either the future, the world of work, or any form of production is ruptured. Mourning and poetry are thus considered here as instigators of intoxication, a state of excess perhaps more usually considered from a vitalist or hedonist position of presence and plentitude, filling up the emptiness and sense of lack rather than accentuating and intensifying it. Where Bataille often linked alcohol-induced drunkenness wit the inebriation induced by religious experience, he was at the same time highly critical of hedomism and mysticism. For Batialle, the hedonist is enslaved to the future in the form of attaining pleasure just as the Christian is enslaved do the hope of salvation. Bataille, rather searches for states which intensify the present moment in all its anguish, obliterating concern for both past and present. If the mystic has a vision of God and the future, Bataille’s mysticism, an experience of the sacred he reffered to as inner experience, renounces the traditional objects and external authorities of mysticism. It begins from and intensifies, a state of dissatisfaction. If I describe the experience I had on that day, he clafiries, it is because it had a partly lacking character (BAtialle, 1972, p 133). As opposed to implications of plentitude of fullness normally inferred from experience, the type of experience he is attempting to communicate is one based on lack and absence. FOrthernore it’s only authority is not God, as traditional mysticism, but the continuous putting into question of all authority, including itself. The writing of such an experience would seem to be a betrayal of its object then, through it is presicely these sorts of contradictions and tensions which interest us. Mysticism without God and intoxication without alcohol are aligned for Bataille with a poetry that negates itself. He advocates a poetry which would profess a ‘hatred of poetry’ meaning a disdain for mere aesthetics and beauty, as well as representation and symbolism. Poetry is conceived here as a sacrifice of itself.

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