“Forget the Dialectic”

Heres a _rough_ version of the paper I gave at the Marxist Literary Group – Institute on Culture and Society 2010 in Antigonish at St. Francis Xavier University:

Forget The Dialectic

Too many

Movement philosophers,

not enough

moving philosophy.

The curse of

Movements

without

movement.

Politicos

make a motion,

fake e-motion.

We need more

Loco-motion.

Ideas

dancing

furiously

in the heat

of resistance.

–Ron Sakolsky, Swift Winds

********

MLG Paper: Sloppy Notes on a Deleuzian Metaphysics

I have begun fleshing out the abstract I wrote for the upcoming MLG.

Here are my notes:

Time: Bergson

Following Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblage” theory, all matter is connected through a set of singularities into ensembles without becoming a totality or whole. Bergson’s notion of duration helps distinguish between the intensive and extensive properties of multiplicities (ATP 484). The first sense of multiplicity are extensive numerical multiplicities (Space — see Riemann), the second continuous intensive multiplicities (Time). Maybe the most self-evidently Bergsonian aspect of multiplicities is found within intensive multiplicities, the idea of the virtual — the real immanent openness to change in in every particular situation. Following Proust on memory, Deleuze argues that the virtual is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”.

Here’s a wonderful graph I took from the wiki page for multiplicity:

Continuous multiplicities		Discrete multiplicities
differences in kind		differences in degree
divides only by changing in kind		divides without changing in kind
non-numerical – qualitative		numerical – quantitative
differences are virtual		differences are actual
continuous		discontinuous
qualitative discrimination		quantitative differentiation
simultaneity		succession
fusion		juxtaposition
organization		order
subjective – subject		objective – object
duration		space