Suspended indefinitely between Form and Chance

First order of business (I’m writing this first in google docs and it just suggested @agenda to me…) : refrains and faciality do operate in similar ways and/or have similar roles. Hurrah! Already, a 200% increase in understanding can be seen from my recent programme of free-play reading/actually reading texts rather than doing a smash and grab for quotes. It can only remain to be seen what this does for profits throughout the quarter!

(Guattari’s definitely to blame for the final exclamation mark)

Let’s leave aside for the moment any question of allocating faciality and the refrain their own little parcels of the transcendental aesthetic. Let’s also just look at refrains, because if  faciality and the refrain can be associated with space and time respectively that would be a pleasing reverse of the usual spatialisation of time, which I’m not going to dig into/offer anything to support right now but IT’S A THING, IT HAPPENS PEOPLE, guard your conception of temporalities against spatialisation! Or don’t, it’s probably fine, actually.

(Maybe it’s actually more about writing in the morning, when the caffeine/nicotine balance is still in play - is a balance in play when it’s moving backwards and forwards? Is play always movement/oscillation/strife? Maybe.)

Refrains (and faciality) both bring about “particular spaces and times” (p.138) and “abstract conceptions” of time and space (p.156) (all references are to The Machinic Unconscious) (fuck, I need footnotes in this thing.. and you could set the data structure up quite nicely, authors and texts get their own entries, and then.. references (each with page number) are attached to the text.. rather than the quote itself? But it would be quite cool to be able to assemble a collection of different quotes from different texts/authors.. but that would also make it difficult to split the quote up how I want..)

(you know what would be cool? “Cool”? Saying something about the quote. Hey, kids.. why don’t we do some writing, that’d be fun, huh?)

(But what if I want to use footnotes to ramble about other stuff? Rather than purely for a citation? *Gasp*)

(shut up)

How do they do this? (Working out what it is to bring about either a particular time or an abstract conception of time may be illuminated by this question).

A list, drawn from reading over the past week:

They emit quanta of deterritorialisation

• They enlarge the rhizome in two directions, towards both socius and individuation
• They also work simultaneously within standardisation and deterritorialisation (to what extent do these pairings map onto each other?) (stop trying to map stuff already!) (no, carry on, it’s fine)
• They are “components of passage” whose role is to hold together the contradiction between the singularity of the assemblage and between general flow (general flow == quanta of deterritorialisation?)
• They are particularly good at productively “misconstruing” other components - this can be transformative, but also reductive.

The other theme that emerged this week is how autopoesis (which is not - according to Guattari in Chaosmosis - the same as in Maturana & Varela) sorts out that whole self/world freedom/determinism split we got going on there. I think I wrote for a while about this? It feels vaguely familiar, anyway, it’s something that comes up a ton in literature on eternal return. The question on the freedom/determinism split being: does what makes us who we are come from outside, or within? Which relies on there being this hard boundary between “me” and “everything else,” and every action gets divvied up (“is this one of mine?”) between the two. There are a couple of different temporal plays to the outside-influences narrative:

• a pre-ordained plan (predeterminism) by God, the Norns, London Northwestern Railway
• the cumulative outcome of a random series of events (leaves on the line)

Both of these get opposed to our freedom to self-determine (I should be able to arrive in Marston Vale when I want!). Pre-ordained plans must have been ordained by something, and so we get led into final causes. The random series of events must also have been caused by other random events (the effect of leaves on the line trails back to weather conditions, but also to managerial decisions, indigestion, carbon composition etc etc) and there’s not really any way of excluding anything to stop this spreading to the entire history of everything everywhere ever. So in both cases, we end up with us vs the world (us as in me, the world as in everything else). And at the same time we are caught up in fate/chance and equally driven by it. Did I murder you because the devil made me, or because of the complex interplay between my genes, background, and a passing comment someone made on the bus? All I wanted was the third option: because I’m a dick 😢 One day, when I grow up, I wanna be a final cause…

But! If we accept a) that things can be their own causes in combination with other things, and stop being so fucking billiard ball about it, and b) that we are made up of many such things rather than one lonely fucking spoilt soul, then the distinctions (between self/world, and freedom/determinism) become either meaningless, or more interesting, or bestofall both.

Refrains (and faciality) are part of how these self-managed assemblages work (gain/maintain consistency). And therefore part of what keeps us “suspended indefinitely between Form and Chance.” That’s p.151, but the footnote should really be Title of Guattari’s second album, obviously.