[D-G] Deleuze-Guattari Digest, Vol 74, Issue 5

[Dan Fineman]

I find this most excellent and central, and I wish I had more time now to
join this discussion fully. One can understand Deleuze by the question of
mathesis as central from his introduction to Montereggio in 1946 to WiP 45
years later and even his last, "A Life."  The mathesis of immersion is for
him life. In its activity of appreciation what is immanent acts while that
of science is the structure of regulation which has as its limit the
deductive and its construal of reference as assignment according to the
protocols of its currently dominant paradigm of registration and
experimentation. Badiou's misreading of D is the battle between these two
version of mathesis, B wishes for the Platonism of Knowledge while D offers
the ecology of the chaos we have.

dan


On 4/29/11 9:29 AM, "deleuze-guattari-request at lists.driftline.org"
<deleuze-guattari-request at lists.driftline.org> wrote:


> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:41:45 -0400
> From: malgosia askanas <ma at panix.com>
> To: deleuze-guattari at lists.driftline.org
> Subject: Re: [D-G] Concepts seen as functions
> Message-ID: <p06240803c9df9d7827cd@[192.168.111.3]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed"
> 
> Dear Jeff,
> 
> I wouldn't dream of discouraging you from a study of calculus, but to
> me it seems that the passage you quote from WiP doesn't call upon any
> special knowledge of calculus, or mathematics in general.  I think
> that "limit" here does not have any specialized mathematical sense,
> but just refers to restricting something, setting limits upon it -
> and that "something", in this case, is the virtual.  As for
> "abscissa", I think that the important point here is that in the
> virtual there is no external "clock", or standard, which "clocks" the
> variation of the differential elements (i.e. those elements whose
> differences are responsible for the continuous variation within the
> given virtual domain).  The differential elements thus form what D&G
> call "intensive ordinates" - their variations don't depend on
> anything extraneous, and neither are there any internal dependencies
> between the differential elements (that's why they all form
> "ordinates" and there is no "abscissa", i.e. no variable on which
> they are all considered to be dependent).  They vary freely,
> continuously and unrestrictedly.  For example, the gradations of the
> phonemes in the Idea (or virtuality) of Language would not be
> restricted by considerations of discernability by ear,
> pronounciability, etc.
> 
> Science, on the other hand, imposes limits on the virtual in more
> ways than one, if only through its stringent methodological
> requirements: that it be based on experiment, that the experimental
> results be reproducible, that the theoretical results have a close
> connection to the experimental and be formulated according to certain
> standards of shared intelligibility, and so on.  And since the
> language in which it expresses its results is the language of
> functions, the first step of any scientific project is to choose the
> variables under study - the variables whose changes express the
> natural phenomena under study, and whose functional dependencies the
> study will pertain to.  And every scientific project has to limit
> itself to studying the given phenomena under a certain set of
> conditions - which, in turn, sets limits on the possible values which
> the variables can range over.  So: the first two components of every
> scientific function - i.e. the first two functives, to use D&G's
> language - are the limit (or limits) and the variable (i.e. the
> choice of variables).  It is these two components that constitute the
> scientific plane as a plane of reference.  And why is "the variable"
> an "abscissa of speeds"?  I think it is because the introduction of
> these two components (or perhaps even just the choice of variables,
> qua potential functives and with their limits) sets a "clock" (like a
> sampling rate, but in a more profound sense) to the free variations
> within the virtual - the "sampling" will only take place according to
> certain methods, and only on certain terms, at certain "speeds" of
> thought, according to a certain experimental protocol, etc.  So if
> the variation of the virtual is described as taking place intensively
> and "at infinite speeds", then the scientific actualization is
> achieved by slowing down the virtual to speeds dictated extensively,
> by the methods of science, which thus effectuate an "abscissa".
> 
> These are just the general lines along which I would tease that
> passage, and perhaps completely off.
> 
> 
> -m
> 
> 
> At 6:42 PM +0000 4/28/11, Cain, Prof. Jeffrey P. wrote:

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