More here

(Thanks Abe)

I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’5 When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem. [...] Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.’6

Full Story: The Art of War

(via Blustr)

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

My friend Richard Phantastica has a blog, with posts about EsoTech, Grant Morrison, Gilles Deleuze, and William S. Burroughs. Check it out.

As DeLanda explains it, an entity is never fully defined by its relations; it is always possible to detach an entity from one particular set of relations, and insert it instead in a different set of relations, with different other entities. For every entity has certain ‘properties’ that are not defined by the set of relations it finds itself in at a given moment; rather than being merely an empty signifier, the entity can take these properties with it, as it were, when it moves from one context (or one set of relations) to another. At the same time, an entity is never devoid of (some sort of) relations: the world is a plenum, indeed it is over-full, and solipsism or atomistic isolation is impossible.

Put differently, no entity can be absolutely isolated, because it is always involved in multiple relations of one sort or another, and these relations affect the entity, cause it to change. But this is not to say that the entity is entirely determined by these relations.

Full Story: The Pinocchio Theory.

“If it is a question of showing that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierarchy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes and rhizomatic offhoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overtuns the model and outlines a map, even if it constiutes its own heirarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable… We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic formula we all seek-PLURALISM=MONISM-via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.” (A THOUSAND PLATEAUS (20-1)

Fenris 23 has undertaken the daunting task, at the request of Doloras LaPicho at Chaos Marxism of explaining Deleuze and Guattari “in terms a factory worker would not only understand but would be interested in.” Daunting in part because I’m not sure how one can approximate what “a factory worker” is interested in or what they are capable of understanding. I’m not sure if being a college educated tech worker puts me in a better or worse position in terms of understanding D&G, but I think Fenris does a good job at introducing these concepts I’ve been spending the past few months trying to wrap my brain around. Here is the rough draft for the first part:

Their project for Capitalism and Schizophrenia was psychological emancipation of the individual and cooperative social organization so they are very compatable with both Marxism and Occult practice.

Deleuze and Guattari, however, are not a totalized whole that can be understood and explained. Rather their work is many things subject to many understandings. One purpose of studying Deleuze and Guattari is to change how you think. It is an initiation. Their concepts are not a system to be understood but rather tools we can apply or put to work.

Full Story: Isle of Lyngvi.

The Situationist Drift is an example of a program that creates a Body without Organs and circulates charge across it.

By disengaging with the striated purpose of the city and the streets the drifter creates or allows a null to exist. This smooth space forms the body without organs. The organs of the city cut themselves loose from the organized system that makes a city an organism.

Full Story: Isle of Lyngvi.

See also: NLP Parts as Desiring-Machines or Metaprograms.

I’ll just stick to my own work, since I really haven’t tracked the Deleuzian scene in a while. “Back in the day” I was a total maniac for the stuff, and moderated a fascinating listserv devoted to D&G. I think I was attracted to their work because, of all the French poststructuralist thinkers I felt compelled to “master” during college, D&G were by far the trippiest-and the funniest. But I think my own take is rather different from the perspective of many, uh, “orthodox” Deleuzians. I believe Mille Plateaux is a psychedelic text. I think they were trying to write and think a sort of perception, where every aspect of mind and culture are seen as expressions of a mutant probing Tao that is constantly congealing and liquefying as it moves along. Delanda, one of D&G’s most interesting interpreters, is occasionally explicit about their psychedelic dimension, though I interpret this dimension in a more explicitly spiritual/Dionysian/Taoist manner that Delanda or most Deleuzian thinkers. The spiritual key to their work is in the chapter “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs”? It is all about Tantra, although they do not use the term.

Full Story: markdery.com.

How incredibly useful:

My aim here is to introduce the philosophers Deleuze-Guattari[i] to readers perhaps unfamiliar with their work and indicate something curious about their work, which is that it appears to have some sort of relation in a practical sense to the concept of the sorcerer. Whilst not a central figure in Deleuze and Guattari?s work, the sorcerer and the witch are themes that do crop up in their texts more often than might be expected and play more than a simply ?metaphorical? role. I think that Deleuze and Guattari can provide a resource for those interested in sorcery, magic and witchcraft in two ways: firstly they can provide theoretical tools which can challenge or at least complement structuralist, constructivist and historicist accounts and so can be of use to researchers attempting to understand these phenomena; secondly, they can provide a theoretical resource for those within the magical community who at times attempt to theorise their practise with what are essentially philosophical concepts.

Link [PDF].

Thanks Bill!