MPCAD November 28, 1947: How do you make yourself a body without organs?

[Michael Bailey]

(I really wanta know)

(a-and who's this Artaud guy?)

reflections not necessarily from this plateau:

smooth, striated - smooth landscapes like the sea, like steppes (plateaus)
where nothing impedes motion
Striated places like forests and cities and mountains where
one's passage is constrained
("every valley shall be exalted and the rough shall be made smooth)

but also, striated vs smooth muscle tissue? in which case the
smooth connotes involuntary (and internal)
while the striated connotes voluntary (and pertaining to external motion)?

footnote 22. from the translator's foreword, "The terms 'smooth space' and
'striated space' were in fact coined by Pierre Boulez"
who apparently did some burly theorizing [memo to self: check that out sometime]

footnote 20 from rhizome Rhizome: "it will be noted
that the word "plaeau" is used in classical studies of bulbs [such as Byron],
tubers, and rhizomes; see the entry for "Bulb" in M. H. Baillon, Dictionaire
de botanique (Paris: Hachette, 1876-1892)"


as to the chapter proper (remembering one's promise to be brief)
a- how is this different from the Hindu or Buddhist or Theosophical
"desire body" or "astral body"?

b- memo to self: revisit this after looking at _Anti-Oedipus_

c - some fairly stern warnings: examples of failed, cancerous, hypochondriac,
paranoid, schizo, drugged, masochist B's w O.  "Why such a dreary parade
of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the BwO
is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance?  So why these examples,
why must we start there? ... What happened?  Were you cautious enough?
Not wisdom, caution.  In doses.  As a rule immanent to experimentation:
injections of caution.  Many have been defeated in this battle."

"Artaud wrote a 'letter to Hitler' - 'Dear Sir, In 1932 in the
Idercafe in Berlin, on one of the evenings when I made your
acquaintance and shortly before you took power, I showed you
roadblocks on *a map that was not just a map of geography*, roadblocks
against me, an act of force aimed in a certain number of directions you
indicated to me.  Today Hitler I lift the roadblocks I set down!  The
Parisians need gas.  Yours, A.A. - P.S. Be it understood, dear sir,
that this is hardly an invitation, it is above all a warning.'
That map that is not only a map of geography
is something like a BwO intensity map, where the roadbloacks designate
thresholds and the gas, waves or flows."





"He ain't crazy, he's a-makin' pottery" - Finley Pater Dunne