Dorothea Olkowski

After Alice: Alice and the Dry Tail

According to Gilles Deleuze, the underground world of Alice in Wonderland has been strongly associated with animality and embodiment. Thus the need for Alices eventual climb to the surface and her discovery that everything linguistic happens at that border. Yet, strangely, in spite of the claim that Alice disavows false depth and returns to the surface, it seems that it is precisely in the depths that she finally wakes from her sleepy, stupified surface state and investigates the deep structures, the rules of logic. In this investigation, Alice questions many formal structures, such as causality, identity, reference and the rules of replacement. She discovers that Wonderland does not generate consequential conduct; in fact, it generates no conduct whatsoever! In other words, when it comes to consequences, Wonderland may not be all that wonderful. Yet, we do not live in Wonderland and therefore, our actions have consequences. The question this poses is, why organise language so as to escape causal relatio...

ELUDING DERRIDA - artaud and the imperceptibility of life for thought

of feeling pain, torment, torture, and suffering; of being born rotten in body and soul to the point of needing opium as the means for reentering life. Artaud experiences nothing less than contradiction between his inner and affective faculty, the actions and passions of the flesh, and his exterior, where the socius demands that he abandon his affective life in order to conform to the heterogeneous codes of writing and judgement, which find their mutual basis in vulgar, interested perception. This contradiction is, for Artaud, so severe, so painful that it is killing him. It is killing him because nothing “touches” Artaud except immediately, that is, “nothing interests me except what addresses itself directly to my flesh.”1 Artaud means this literally. Only insofar as things, including language, affect the flesh, the sensibility, and only at that specific point where they affect his sensibility do they have any impact on him at all. So that the usual “interests” that feed perception find him indifferent to their supposed charms. Are these the rantings of a madman or is there something real in Artaud’s sensibility? Why, we should ask, does Artaud claim to reject writing and writers? What makes linguistic constants the enemy? What is the point of view of a human being who vociferously denies that words have reference or signification and who is only interested in a system of language driven by emotions and images? Equally, we might ask, is this worthwhile pursuing? That is, should we relegate Artaud’s demands for a certain kind of thought to the margins inhabited by pathology? He himself admits that his own thought abandons him at every level, from words and shapes of sentences to the internal directions of his thought and the simple reactions of his mind.2 His thought contracts intensively and refuses to expand into the ordinary and common grammar and vocabulary of social communication. This forces him to place an undue emphasis on whatever forms he can grasp, whatever strong images or figures of speech (no matter how crude) emerge from the feeling that generates his language, his “poems.” But if it is true, as Jacques Rivière senses, that when Artaud says thought, he says what we habitually mean by creation, then what choice do we have other than to begin to heed him in the “excessive freedom” he gives to the mind? Otherwise, we destroy creative thought and creative language because we fear its effects and its apparent indecency. In spite of our alleged interest in creative thought, I have come to suspect that for most people an act of thought such as Artaud’s amounts to pathology and worse, immorality (whether they celebrate or reject it on this basis), because given the construction of our thought in the context of our social worlds, we have no

‘She’s a Killer,’ ‘The Image of the Women of Zero Dark Thirty’

The film Zero Dark Thirty has been reviewed and judged to be about the American government’s response to the events of 9/11. In the film, its protagonist, a female CIA officer, is characterised by her superiors as a killer. This essay examines the film from inside, meaning, from the point of view of the sensibilities evoked by it in order to raise questions about the nature of our temporal engagements with one another and our motives for acting.

Is Capitalism Inevitable? Is Revolution Possible? Deleuze and Guattari between Capitalism and Calculus

In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari maintain that nature is a process in which there is neither nature nor human being, except as a single reality produced in the processes of production, distribution and consumption, where distributions are immediately consumed and the consumptions immediately reproduced. In its historical realization, this is the process of capitalism, which must be an effect of such processes, processes of nature and human nature. This gives rise to this question: given the rules governing nature, including human nature, how much contingency is there and how much determinism? And ultimately, is capitalism inevitable?

Beyond Narcissism: Women and Civilization

New York Times article recounts a tale of two film makers. Fernando Meirelles (may-RELL-es) forty-seven years old, director of a ‘verite-style’ drama about crime among the street-children of Rio de Janeiro, nominated for an Oscar award for best foreign-film director. Katia Lund, thirty-seven years old, a Brazilian who began filming in the Rio slums in 1996 for a Michael Jackson video and has since filmed a documentary about the favelas as well as other music videos in Brazil, was named co-director but is not included in the Oscar nomination. Meirelles is referred to as a prominent director and producer. His oeuvre consists of hundreds of commercials but he has served as co-director on his only two films. He is dismayed at the implication that Lund deserves more credit: ‘She didn’t do all the jobs that a director has to do; she did only part of the jobs.’ ‘You can’t direct a film without talking to the director of photography, choosing the music, editing. This is co-directing, not directing.’ ‘She asked me for co-director, and I agreed because she was helping me a lot.’ Lund demurs. Not surprisingly, Lund provides a different account. She and Meirelles collaborated on opening an acting school in the Rio slums and they shared directing credits on a previous short film, a dry run for the Oscar-nominated film.

Time Lost, Instantaneity and The Image

After all the scrutiny philosophy has given to the study of the intersection of embodiment and the world in the last century, one might think that every aspect of this subject would already have been addressed and that only interpretive differences representing colliding world views obstruct consensus. Phenomenological theories postulate a pre-cognitive, anonymous, lived body while existentialism insists on the fundamental subject-object structure of intentional consciousness. Cognitivists contend that the mysterious realm existing between the brain and/or nervous system and consciousness is primary. Post-structuralism reads the body through linguistic codes, along with psychoanalysis, which also articulates the patriarchal construction of those codes. Presumably anything one wants to say about embodiment could or should be able to be articulated through these theories, each of which attempts to illuminate a different aspect of the relation between embodiment and the world. Even if we wish to explore matters outside the purview of the issues addressed by each of these theories, they define the field of study and serve as the standard and measure of all other approaches. They share certain characteristics, in service to a more general world view, in spite of their apparent differences. Thus we should not be too surprised to discover that each of these positions privileges space and spatial concepts over time, for perhaps this is no more than a reflection of their investment in that more general philosophical world view, one that almost always conceives of time in spatial terms, as homogenous units measured by spatial divisions as we constituted them in perception and conception. This tendency is augmented and amplified by our ongoing fascination with acting in the world and with any contrivances that might allow us to do so with greater efficiency. Given this, the suggestion that we think about embodiment in terms of reflection on our temporal existence might seem to be unimaginable if not unintelligible. What, after all, is duration? What can we make of something so intangible as the heterogeneous flow of qualitative differences, since even our perception does not seem to give us access to the realm of anything outside of the figure on a ground, the object of our interests and action?

Materiality and language : Butler's interrogation of the history of philosophy

In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler reflects upon the relationship between women and materiality in the context of the history of philosophy. She points to the presumption of the material irreducibility of sex as the ground of feminist epistemology and ethics and analyses of gender. She also finds a similarity between Aristotles principles of formativity and intelligibility and Foucaults discussion of how discourse materializes bodies. While Butlers analysis reveals much about the history of philosophy with regard to the discourse on matter and women, nonetheless, she appears to begin with the notion of bodies as largely passive, even negative entities. Addition ally, her analysis also implies that principles of formativity and intel ligibility are historically contingent. This essay seeks to undermine those two positions in preparation for inaugurating a positive theory of fluid structures.

Beside us, in memory

In their final book together, What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari1 take up the question of what philosophy is and do it in a manner so direct and concrete that it poses a question and a challenge to the reader. That challenge is: Is this book a refutation or capitulation of Deleuze’s position that the philosopher stutters?2 Stuttering happens in language when the words themselves become characters. This is never a matter of starting with a homogeneous language system whose terms and relations are constant, then disrupting that system. Such an approach does no more than alter specific utterances. The point here is to make language itself stutter by beginning with a language system in “perpetual disequilibrium” (S, 24), a system which then “overstrains itself [and so] begins to stutter, to murmur, or to mumble” (S, 28) so that language reaches its limits. It bifurcates; it heads in two directions at once, and the elements of its syntax respond dynamically rather than standing in determinate and constant relations with other elements. So, for example, “the indefinite article ‘a’ [rather than responding to a rule in a rigid and consistent manner] covers the entire zone of variation generated by the movement of particularization” (S, 24), while any movement of the language toward generalization is covered by the definite article “the”. The effect of these movements is to make language vibrate, and in using language the writer becomes a foreigner, struggling to put words together even, or especially, in her/his own language. Such a language is evident even in pure science, for discovery, innovation, and creation are never a matter of simply making use of the constant terms supplied by a homogeneous system of reference. It is, rather, the “boom” of disequilibrium that lets language flee so as to vary constantly in every one of its terms (S, 25). But perhaps Deleuze has changed his mind and the stutterer is only found in literature or poetry, perhaps among composers. How can philosophy stutter? Is stuttering not contrary to all the traditions of philosophy? What is philosophy? The question, “What is philosophy?” was, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, always being asked by them, but too indirectly, too obliquely, and they compare their attempt here (though not necessarily their results) to Kant’s Critique of