[D-G] Getting Started with Deleuze

[Glen Fuller]

>   yes as regards to sequence i would like to say struggle instead of 
sequence

indeed!

I like the idea of interest guiding your reading. 'Interest' is part of 
the affect continuum interest-excitement in Sylvan Tompkins affect 
schema. Interest enables connections and assembles the machines of 
these connections that accelerate across the body into excitement (or 
with other situations/happenings to join with other affects in various 
complexes). Think of when you are reading something and you 
finally 'get it'. BAM! Speed of thought! Exciting!   

"Mediators" in _Negotiations_ is very good... It is not a summary 
exactly, but something like a 'position paper', except it has movement 
or joins up with movements. So a vector paper or something. It is 
certainly the most lucid connection that I have found between D&G's 
respective projects, by D, and various non-D&G things including 
everyday life.

Foucault's review of D&R and LoS is a very important text to read, too. 
It can be found online.

Coming from a Cultural Studies perspective I would suggest _Kafka_ is 
also an important book to read. So I agree with Minnie, but I don't 
think it is necessarily *easier* than AO and ATP. Perhaps, Minnie, you 
are reading it through well read eyes. You need to take out those eyes 
and put in the ones that do not recognise little phrases and concepts 
so easily. That is what is easier with Kafka, once an preliminary 
understanding has been wrought of their concepts, is the recognition of 
other D&G concepts. Also, _Kafka_ is much more precise in than AO or 
ATP in the sense that there are 90-odd pages devoted to explicating a 
singular series of thoughts, while ATP is frankly disturbing to new 
readers because of its non-linearity. Always the map with the tracing, 
put the tracing back on to the map! Otherwise you end with some shit 
where the only becoming is one of confusion and intellectual husks. 
Anyway, Cultural Studies is often interested in questions of 
containment or capture vs movement (LoF), or various ratios as a 
question of inertia, etc. D&G isolate the forces constructed by Kafka 
in his assemblage of minor literature across his letters, short stories 
and novels in the context of broader political assemblages. Such forces 
constitute a line of flight 'the fearful vampire who flees the new dawn 
sun'. This has been very useful for me because I am thinking about an 
opposite scenario where a popular language is distributed across 
multiple texts and it works to continually *capture* the forces that 
circulate and move across the assemblage of which it is part. This 
allows me to think the cultural industry in a non text-ideology sort of 
way, ie post-representational machinic conception of media. (Also this 
would eventually need to be read with AO, ATP, and some of Guattari's 
work in English as _Molecular Revolutions_ and _Chaosmosis_, so as to 
get a better understanding of the 'machinic' and of 'assemblages'.)

The sections on the 'crack-up' in _ The Logic of Sense_ also were very 
useful for me to understanding what Deleuze was on about. Mainly cause 
I could relate to the example. The Proust book reads a bit weird, 
perhaps unsophisticated, especially after AO and ATP, as there isn't 
much happening compared to the explosion of concepts in ATP especially.

As I am not a trained philosopher and more an autodidact the more 
traditional philosophical texts made little sense to me. With D&R I can 
intuitively understand the basic concepts better than what I read on 
the page. WiP? also seems somewhat distant. _Foucault_ is much better 
to understand, and maybe it should come earlier rather than later in 
your reading list? Also perhaps it depends on how much you can 
recognise Foucault in all the Deleuzisms.

Some of the discussion on 'stupidity' in various places is v. funny, 
too!

Ciao,
Glen.



-- 
PhD Candidate 
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney

Read my rants: http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/