Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Deleuze on ~~Windsurfing~~

I  have at long last found the Deleuze chapter I am often thinking about-- it is called Mediators, and it comes from Negotiations. In this chapter, Deleuze basically advances the idea that the correspondences we find in the world, across diverse fields and strata of relationality, are not really accidental or coincidental. He argues, "philosophy, art, and science come into relations of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons," and that, " the way they impinge on one another depends on their own evolution. So in this sense we really have to see philosophy, art, and science as sorts of separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." (125) This is also related to Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and polyphony that I brought up in class.


  
Another great quote, "the kind of movement you find in sport and habits are changing. We got by for a long time with an energetic concept on of motion, where there 's a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, a lever. But nowadays we see movement depended less and less in relation to a point of leverage. All the new sports surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding-take the form of entering into an existing wave. There's no longer an origin starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to "get into something" instead of being the origin of an effort" (122).


Ultimately what I love about Deleuze (and Guattari) and process philosophy more genuinely is that they don't dismiss intuition, they don't get too bogged down in the typical stratifications of experience and allow for a much more holistic interpretation of experience, which I think really comes through in this piece beautifully.  


The  chapter starts on page 121 of the PDF download link I will attach.

https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwijx5rHw-jLAhXrmoMKHdAoCAAQFggbMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdesignstudiesdiscourses.files.wordpress.com%2F2013%2F09%2Fdeleuze-negotiations.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGLE7CHT56RAPm76vsngm92O1moXA&sig2=qShsYJC1Byhs0IvR-OARUg

4 comments:

  1. This is one of my favourite texts! It's best to fix the translation: it should be intercessor, not mediator (the intercessor does not perform a mediating function).

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  2. I love the idea of 'getting in to something'. As an artist, I often catch myself doubting the originality of a work, as 'originality' in this field, more often than not, suggests plucking an idea out of nothingness. I realize that the creative process, for me, has much more to do with co-composing with forces that are already at work, 'doing' something and, perhaps, in need of some articulation. Thanks for this!

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  4. Matthew, this speaks to what I was talking about in terms of the force of the political that can move through the work itself.

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