Once upon a time

There is nothing wrong with telling stories, of course. And it is often hard to know how to start them. In my German lesson this week, I thought I had to tell a story using the words we had been discussing during the lesson, so I now know that "es war einmal.." is the equivalent German beginning to "once upon a time." It turned out I had misunderstood (frequent occurrence!) and that I was actually supposed to be using the word Geschichte (story/history) in a sentence, but telling the story instead used even more words so it was a productive misunderstanding.

Anyway. I have been mostly reading about subjectivity.

That's not true! Or is it.. I have been reading many things (the InterLibrary Loan Affair has reminded me of the loveliness of physical-copy books), and I think most of them could be said to be a bit about subjectivity in some way (except maybe the series about the Tudor lawyer who solves crimes.)

The references from Chaosmosis that I have been reading are mostly to do with subjectivity, and its formation. I'm currently on The Machinic Unconscious - Guattari can refer to his own works too, that's only fair - and we've reached the chapter on the refrain. I'm deliberately taking a not too careful/in-depth approach to reading them, letting a lot of it float past a bit on the basis that repetition and general absorption will get me somewhere (further than if I go slowly and don't manage to finish reading any of them, anyway), but I am finding The Machinic Unconscious easier going than Schizoanalytic Cartographies, which - the clue should really have been in the title, I suppose - was very diagrammy.

The final section of the final chapter of my PhD was on the refrain, and is the part I most wish I'd spent more time on. It is (from what I remember) the bit where I said that this is what Nietzsche was getting at, but said better by Deleuze & Guattari - or extended to conclusions that you might be able to do something with, at any rate. But because it was the last part, and because I spent most of my PhD rewriting the first chapter, it was written over the course of an intense three-month period in which I was simultaneously trying to edit all the rest of the thesis and staying in a series of locations that weren't my house in order to avoid the fleas (this is why you must deflea your cats, people!).

And (so) I am still not sure I understand what a refrain is. And I would like to. Hence the reading.

A refrain is - I think - a territorialisation of time (with faciality a territorialisation of space? Or is that a little too neat?). I am not sure that is right, or not entirely and uncomplicatedly right anyway. But that's okay, revisions are possible/encouraged. If we take that - what is it to territorialise time, what does/would that mean? The sense I'm getting is that it is a shoring-up - a protection (and simultaneous production?) of (a) subjectivity. Via repetition, I think. So - when the scared child sings a song in the dark, when the bird calls, they are using repetition - of notes, of a phrase - to take and create an order upon the unknown terrifying world, or to interpose this between them and the world? I am reminded that I want to go back and re-read Deleuze's Francis Bacon book on the rhythms between figures and territories. And the interposition of this order creates a .. rhythmic structure? .. which allows them to survive. So - it is the production of their own subjectivity, but not by cutting it off from the rest (the world, the universe). More by diverting/steering/channelling a portion of it into the repeated phrase - as one might isolate a track, a portion of a track, and loop it?

That's a first attempt anyway. I think that "once upon a time" is a refrain. Maybe?