i left something out of the tiqqun quote above this D&G quote. let's produce the quote in full now:
"But for the time being the petty-bourgeois terror of language still reigns uniformly. On the one hand, in the "everyday" sphere, PEOPLE tend to think things are just words, that is, that they are, supposedly, what they are - "a cat is a cat," "a coin is a coin," "I am I." On the other, as soon as the impersonal (PEOPLE) has been subverted and language suddenly becomes a potential agent of disorder within the clinical reality of the already-known, PEOPLE project that regularity out into all the cloudy regions of "ideology," "metaphysics," "literature," or, more commonly, "small talk."
However, there have been and will be insurrectionary moments where, under the effects of a flagrant derangement of the everyday, common sense will overcome that terror. PEOPLE will then perceive that what is real about words isn't what they designate - a cat is not "a cat," a coin is - less than ever - "a coin," and I am not "myself." What is real about language is the operation it carries out. Describing some being as an apparatus, or as being produced by an apparatus, is a practice of denaturing the given world, an operation of taking a step back from what is familiar to us, or wants to be considered so. And you know it."
Notice the use of Common Sense here; in D&G, there is no "faculty for the centralization of information" - there is no "common sense" - in Tiqqun, Common Sense is supposed to close the distance between us and what's around us. It's supposed to penetrate through the "petty bourgeois" veil.
But is it not that the petty bourgeois veil is, in truth, the closest we have to common sense? hasn't the world already been ordered for us? aren't we going to have to develop an incredibly un-common sense? a sense specific to our assemblages?
or, more on the specifically deleuzian side of things:
"When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing herself when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as "insign," give orders or commands. A teacher's commands are not external or additional to what he or she teaches us.
[...]
The elementary unit of language
the statement — is the order-word. Rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words.
Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.
[...]
Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. 4 Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it."
-D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, Postulates of Linguistics
"People tend to think things are just words, that is, that they are, supposedly, what they are - "a cat is a cat," "a coin is a coin," "I am I.
[...]
However, there have been and will be insurrectionary moments where... people will perceive that what is real about words isn't what they designate - a cat is not "a cat," a coin is - less than ever - "a coin," and I am not "myself."
What is real about language is the operation it carries out."
-Tiqqun, A critical metaphysics could emerge as A science of Apparatuses
the other day i posted about thinking about how i want to dedicate my time moving forward - but i didn't really have an answer, and i still don't.
what i know is that i want to draw connections. i want to learn how things have been connected, both the "proper" connections and the connections others call "tainting". i want to see the connections between even disparate localities. i want to explore the gaps between translations. there are so many gifts out there, waiting to be found, waiting for a new connection to be drawn.
i do really love that the first scenes of Haunted are set in the rain, with every character but slade having the rain bounce off their body - the first indications that he's not real.
hey i dont know who needs to hear this but you don't actually need to post about the annoying people all the time. it attracts more of them.
of course it's exciting to be in the thick of it but it really solves nothing. if someone cares they'll come to you privately to discuss things 9 times out of 10.
and yeahyeah, metaphor, i get it. but this was not setup like a metaphor.
the next episode i watched (s3e6) is about Raven wanting nothing more than to read a book alone in her room, only to discover The One Guy Who Understands Her is literally magically trapped in the book and if she just listens to him they'll get to be together forever..... but it turns out The One Guy Who Understands Her is actually an evil dragon a la Sleeping Beauty; and that she got used and thrown away.
that's clearly Not Actually About Magic Guys In Books, the metaphor is lived out through the episode, not tacked on at the end.
today i watched season 3 episode 5 of Teen Titans - "Haunted"
the episode is clearly about Robin having PTSD from being in an abusive relationship with Slade. He's hallucinating, he's certain he has to do it on his own, he gets angrier and angrier at his friends for being incompetent because they're telling him that they're not finding evidence of what he's claiming. they even give him a health-scan mid-episode and are like "nothing is wrong with him from what we can see" and starfire is like "no there must be something wrong! he wouldn't yell at me like that! that's not the robin i know!" and we literally get a scene where Raven goes into Robin's mind and is like "oh shit, slade might not be real, but he's real to robin, and slade is winning"
overall it was a good episode - though, the last moments in the episode are a reveal that it wasn't actually PTSD at all, it was actually a secret dust that puffed out of Robin's "Slade Box" which was a chemical that hijacked Robin's nervous system.
strange way to end an episode that dedicated so much time to building out the fact that this was PTSD only to not have it be PTSD lmao
i hate when people use my positivity to ignore what i'm saying and make assumptions about why i'm saying it!!! stop it!!! i'm trying to give good, well rounded advice!!!!!!!!!
i got into streaming, political discourse, and philosophy because i wanted to learn my world, but instead i have mostly gotten myself further and further away from the world, and only recently have i been learning how to conceptualize the reality of world creation which i was so blind to for so long. i've been making my own world this whole time, attaching myself to things which could not fulfill me, and i don't want to do it anymore. i'm ready for something else.
been thinking a lot about how i want to dedicate my time moving forward. i've been going through a lot of memories - thinking about what child-me thought about the world and their place in it.
at a certain point in my youth i wanted to be a "scientist" - which, as my memory serves, was conceived of as a sort of "innovative problem solver". But of course, the more i grew up, the more i learned that a great deal of science was often not about innovative problem solving, or at least not in the naive view i had initially. the bureaucratic/academic side of things continued to feel further and further from the reality of the situation on the ground. solutions proposed from capitalist funding, and thus, a capitalist framework, felt more and more constricting before i even got started anywhere.
at a certain point i was heavily inspired by certain characters like Gandalf; wizards, knowledgeable and wise, with a heart towards good living together. i still, also, enjoyed the more naive side of magic users and finding ones place with certain witches like ghibli's Kiki. these sort of influences certainly had a part in encouraging my own initial work of witchcraft. but still, even then, i had failed to live up to any standard. i had fallen into some of the exact problems of disconnection. i started my witchcraft journey while i was a software developer. it was part of a naive attempt to imagine something better than the endless days of software development, instead of being part of an attempt to learn any of the land i was living on (because i didn't believe the apartment complex to be any sort of complex living), and the different overlapping lives infinitely smaller and larger than mine which make any of it possible. my witchcraft was mostly just me doing some practices of self-reflection and attempts to access knowledges of emotional association between objects.
for a long time in my youth i thought i would make music. it was a life rhythm i could connect to, it had it's own flow i felt like i could follow - but when i learned no one close to me wanted to follow that flow with me, i felt forsaken and disconnected from the only part of the world i had any strong connections to... then i got into software development as a way out. and ever since then i've been looking for something to make the world feel real again.
only in the last few years have i felt like i've gotten close. and i'm ready to chart the next course.
A wandering deer, building shrines along the way.