MPCAD - translator's intro

[braam van bruggen]

Thanks, Michael, i'll be looking forward to your posts
on Thousand Plateaus

Braam

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Bailey" <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 5:17 PM
Subject: MPCAD - translator's intro


>I like all the ideas for the next read, and it is somewhat cool
> that many of us are thinking in terms of immediately doing another group 
> read.
> I for one found that I did more than I would have (especially when 
> hosting)
> and learned more from the wealth of postings than a solo read.
>
>
> I got the English of _Mille Plateaux_
> (_Thousand Plateaus_) on interlibrary loan
> and if I post on a chapter each day that is probably the only way I
> will read it...
> Not trying to start a big thing, in fact I will be very brief.
>
>
>
>     Translator's Foreword: The Pleasures of Philosophy
>
> Brian Massumi, translator.  http://www.brianmassumi.com/
>
> Thick book, 15 chapters plus the foreword.  Mille Plateaux came out in 
> 1980,
> the translation in 1987.
> It's a follow-up to Anti-Oedipus and shares the subtitle "Capitalism and
> Schizophrenia"  The foreword talks about D&G as a reaction to the tendency
> of philosophy to build structures which buttress the
> imperialist/patriarchal/authoritarian
> state.  Instead of building a philosophical structure, D&G's project
> was to construct a toolbox for nomadic thought
> (something all the travelers in AtD could use?)
>
> D was a classically trained philosopher challenged by the events of 1968
> to rethink the role of intellectuals in society.  Prior to that he had
> written works
> on Kant, among others, trying to find different perspectives,
> and uttered the famous buggery quote...
> Also wrote _Difference and Repetition_ - (my personal reaction - 
> philosophy
> can make somebody write a whole book about something seemingly simple like 
> that)
> - and liked Bergson, Hume, Spinoza, Lucretius and (yuck) Nietzsche...
>
> G was a Lacanian psychiatrist who worked to "abolish the hierarchy
> between doctor
> and patient in favor of an interactive group dynamic" and had "an
> uneasy alliance"
> with the worldwide anti-psychiatric community including Laing in England 
> and
> Basaglia in Italy.  He worked at this really cool mental hospital in
> France called
> La Borde http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Borde
>
> Plateaus was how anthropologist Gregory Bateson described a Balinese
> sexuality that wasn't obsessively focused on the orgasm. "In D&G, a 
> plateau
> is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of
> intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax." They suggest 
> that
> such a plateau can characterize a style or dynamism which can exist and
> be thought and written about...
>
> Therefore the book's sections each deal with such a style or plateau
> that the authors have noticed and thought to be interesting.
> "Each section is dated, because each tries to reconstitute
> a dynamism that has existed in other mediums at other times"
>
> The other 2 dichotomies I brought away from the foreword - and
> will probably be reading more about - are
> the tree structure of traditional philosophy versus the rhizome
> and "striated" (hierarchical) space versus "smooth" space (where free
> movement is possible)
> (This sort of speaks to the "narrowing of possibilities" noted in AtD
> at the Chicago stockyards)
>
> Finally, Massumi and D&G give the readers permission not to like
> everything in the book: "The authors' hope, however, is that elements
> of it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into 
> the
> melody of their everyday lives."
>
> Final sound bite:  the authors "would probably be more inclined to
> call philosophy music with content that music a rarefied form of 
> philosophy."