“Spinoza suggested a new direction for the sciences and philosophy. He said that we do not even know what a body can do, we talk about consciousness and spirit and chatter on about it all, but we do not know what a body is capable of, what forces belong to it or what they are preparing for.”
-from Deleuze’s “Nietzsche and Philosophy”
MJ
More info: [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13401894 ]
I’ve got a geologist friend and we’ve been briefly discussing this… Apparently the Mississippi might change direction completely which would make it bypass both Baton Rouge and New Orleans…
“The water will take days to pour out into the Atchafalaya River basin, filling up marshes, engorging bayous, submerging hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and seeping into thousands of homes. It will also test the network of federally and locally built levees that wall off towns and small Cajun communities throughout the basin. The water levels in the area will remain high for weeks.”
-Megan
This week there have been monks at the BCC. They were there all week creating an extremely beautiful, and almost painfully intricate, sand madala as part of the New Jersey Folk Festival. Then, during the closing ceremony at 5:30 pm, after blessing the artwork, they destroyed it and distributed the multicolored sand among the audience. Before the ceremony, I had the fortune of sitting down to an hour long conversation with one of the monks. As he was explaining Buddhism to me in his somewhat broken English, I couldn’t stop thinking about D+G. It reached a climax when he compared himself to a military officer. He explained that in the army, officers shoot at animals. However, what I think he was trying to say was that war represents an uncontrolled release of the worst human emotions; greed, prejudice, ect. By shooting at an enemy, they person is attempting to fight back, to curb these emotions from running amuck. The monk went on to explain that he is like an officer because, by practicing patience and tolerance, he curbs and controls “the animal in himself”, he checks himself. This monk willingly comparing himself to violence, aggression, and war reminded of D+G because it is such a jarring comparison, he slightly deteritorialized not only himself but also my notion of war. Earlier this year I made a post of D+G and Buddhism, now after my experience I am more convinced that the two would be modern day Buddhists.
[Madiha Aziz]
In class today, the question was raised as to whether Bartleby’s speech is related to Buddhism. While of course there is no definite or fundamental relation between the two concepts, I believe Bartleby’s projection of a zone of indetermination resonates powerfully with certain elements introduced into Buddhism via Mahāyāna writings, specifically in the Vimalakīrti sutra.
“Then, the Licchavi Vimalakīrti asked those bodhisattvas, ‘Good sirs, please explain how the bodhisattvas enter the Dharma-door of nonduality!’” (Thurman 1976:73). Posed to the collection of bodhisattvas gathered to pay respects to the ailing Vimalakīrti, this brief but profound chapter creates concepts quite similar to Deleuze’s unpacking of Bartleby’s “being as being, and nothing more.” Keeping with the rest of the sutra, the chapter “The Dharma-Door of Nonduality” is constructed as a humorous yet dense conversation between legions of dutiful but bumbling bodhisattvas and the wise trickster figure Vimalakīrti.
The bodhisattva Śrīgandha declared, “‘I’ and ‘mine’ are two. If there is no presumption for a self, there will be no possessiveness. Thus, the absence of presumption is the entrance to nonduality…’
The bodhisattva Priyadarśana declared, ‘Matter itself is void. Voidness does not result from the destruction of matter, but the nature of matter is itself voidness. Therefore, to speak of voidness on the one hand, and of matter, or of sensation, or of intellect, or of motivation, or of consciousness on the other - is entirely dualistic. Consciousness itself is voidness…’
The bodhisattva Satyarata declared, “It is dualistic to speak of ‘true’ and ‘false.’ When one sees truly, one does not ever see any truth, so how could one see falsehood? Why? One does not see with the physical eye, one sees with the eye of wisdom… There, where there is neither sight nor nonsight, is the entrance into nonduality.” (73-76).
In parsing the meaning of these responses we must keep in mind that the sutra is essentially didactic; with each succeeding answer, more light is shed on the difficulty of separating oneself from the false binaries of language. While Śrīgandha’s answer is an extreme simplification of Buddhist teaching that obviously reifies positionality, as the responses go on the answers become more in line with the subtle variations that distinguish Mahāyāna Buddhism. No answer is recognized by Vimalakīrti as correct, however.
Then, the crown prince Mañjuśrī said to the Licchavi Vimalakīrti, “We have all given our own teachings, noble sir. Now, may you elucidate the teaching of the entrance into the principle of nonduality!”
Thereupon, the Licchavi Vimalakīrti kept his silence, saying nothing at all.
The crown prince Mañjuśrī applauded the Licchavi Vimalakīrti: “Excellent! Excellent, noble sir! This is indeed the entrance to the nonduality of the bodhisattvas. Here there is no use for syllables, sounds, and ideas” (77).
Again, while there are great philosophical divides between Deleuzian and Buddhist concepts, in this instance I believe the fundamental lesson is the same: language is a force of stratification. While Bartleby utilizes language of indeterminacy, in the context of the narrative of the chapter Vimalakīrti’s silence serves to replicate the same “growth of the nothingness of the will.” In both Vimalakīrti’s silence as well as Bartleby’s agrammaticality, there is the same act of non-action, the same response with no referent.
-Tammer
References
Thurman, Robert A. F. 1976 The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
During class on Monday I kept thinking about something that Professor Dienst said earlier in the semester regarding building upon things. He said that when taking a theory class and learning about literary theory there is always a sense of not knowing enough. It demands a prior knowledge to a topic or in this instance, you need to have read in order to fully understand everything that we talk about in class because we talk about various examples of literary works. Therefore in order to comprehend everything we need to have done something prior to talking about theory in order to have text to apply the theories to.
This ties in nicely to a segment of the Bartleby reading. There are two quotes in particular that I’d like to point out:
1) ” A great book is always the inverse of another book that could only be written in the soul, with silence and blood.”
2) All language, has references or assumptions. These are not exactly what language designates, but what permit it to designate. A word always presupposes other words that can replace it, complete it, or form alternatives with it.”
Both of these quotes in one way or another mention how it is necessary to always have something BEFORE whatever currently happens in order to apply, create or complete something. I know this all seems very abstract, but I think that’s the point…
On an ending note, the notion of needing to have read prior to being able to apply a theory or ideal packages well with our end of the semester paper.
Good luck writing them!
-Emily Gabriele
Madiha, nice post, and catchy freakin title. I know we’ve moved on from music, but that’s it keeps coming up in my mind. Especially taking note of people on the buses, or walking to and fro. I’ll admit, I’m guilty now and then of being the guy with his earphones in, seemingly disconnected from the world. But we all have those moments. Sometimes we get so absorbed into such a powerful book that we wouldn’t notice a car crashing, or so captivated by a soundtrack that we feel like we’re swaying on the bus to the rhythm the bumpy road has predetermined for us. Or we feel like we’re drowning in a sea of unfamiliarity so that we cling to our phones, hanging by our thumbs, clawing and scratching to keep hold of a life outside of a class, a dining hall, or a bored night in a dorm room.
We’re surrounded by abrasiveness, so we do keep our immediate surroundings as smooth as possible. Comfort and convenience is key, because anything else would cause stress. Apparently.
Saying that it’s “more accurate to see our day as a single moment of smooth space occasionally interrupted than it is to see it as a chain of individual events” really perks my ears up. Bartleby comes to mind, and I wonder if his desire to remain in a smooth space (least resistance) is what would, ultimately, lead us all to complacent idiocy? Not saying that when you “prefer not to” do something you’re a mindless zombie, but, really, what did the dining hall guy experience for that hour? I doubt they serve brains at any dining hall, but with feet shuffling from seated idleness to the nearest food source, unaware and uninfluenced by his surroundings, maybe we’re all a bunch of Bartlebys now and then. Which begs: is this the “default” nature of man, or is the the nature being pounded into us by a corporate, capitalist system far larger than we? Could refusing to own an iPod, and engaging in conversation with seemingly interested people, be the resistance to wasting away in obscurity?
-Chris Adams
From the third floor of Old Queens, which roughly two dozen students have occupied since 10:17:32 a.m. today, Wednesday, April 27, 2011. Looking out from the windows of the third floor I see a congregation of students, faculty and staff, a amorphous gathering within a homogeneous perimeter of RUPD officers. The smooth growth of the mass, initially acknowledged by us, on the inside, in striated numerics of “75+ people” and “2:30 p.m.” The involuntariness classrooms attendance giving way to voluntary exoduses towards the main Administrative offices. The smooth spread of rain forcing the crowd into the striation of tents and overhanging branches.
Maybe we’re sometimes nomads, but our primary determination today is to occupy and hold, not the grassy sea-ish of Voorhees, but the singularity of Old Queens’ geometry. To strategize on which floor, in which office to establish our Pirate Caucus, strategizing around the obstacles of badge-and-gun. Smooth interactions to preempt and take advantage of striations. The anxiety of Administration and RUPD striating us, most likely, eventually, into handcuffs.
-Bhav
The English Department event at Rutgers Day on Saturday is a marathon reading of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although he doesn’t work Twain into his essay on Melville, Deleuze’s discussion of American pragmatism account for both of these great writers. He describes pragmatism as process of gathering elements of Truth, islands of scattered knowledge and experience, both autonomous from and interrelated with each other, an archipelago. This is the becoming of Huck in the novel, questioning his received wisdom by judging its possibilities in the world. To ‘light out’ for the territory, as Huck does, is to become an explorer, an “Original” as Deleuze says; to engage in ‘American travel’ (smooth and striated chapter) by floating down the American spine, the Mississippi, attaching and detaching himself along its jagged shores. -jon q.
I read a classmate’s story in a fiction writing class - and it was about an upper-class girl consumed in judgmental consumer culture - mean girls style- but that also cut herself on her inner thigh. teenagers cutting themselves isn’t all that rare to hear about, but I never gave it much thought as a phenomenon, just always thought it was sad and self-destructive beyond comprehension. Recently I thought of one’s urge to cut themselves as a way to reclaim their body - the character in the mean girls story felt as though her body had been taken over by forces outside of itself - but i feel like this over-powering sensation happens in different, alternate and abstract ways all over the place - and the phenomenon of teenagers cutting themselves is a becoming-physical of this abstract power battle over the body. Sadly the cutting is self-destructive and not self-progressive, or transcendental.
But look at the explosion of tattoo’s in our culture too. And peircings, all the different ways our culture, and others, reform and reshape the body in an effort to “make it theirs”.
just some thoughts…
-Michael Johnson
