There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, we will ask what it functions with.
Another slow day at work. I've been reading a lot again lately but I can't say for certain that it's all starting to come together. I've been adopting a new dialect, an idiolect of Deleuzo-Guattarism, trying to understand all the couplings and flows of their great Abstract Machine. The Deleuze-Guattari Machine, next to the Bach Machine or Gonzalo Machine. Unfortunately, my sleep seems to be consistently getting worse so most of the time that I'm awake I feel half asleep and I have an abysmal headache. Ghost energy drinks have been helping to a small degree but what I really need is adderall or something to help me sleep better. Melatonin only helps me get to bed, nothing else. I live in the States and I'm too poor to go to the doctor. I've recently been disappointed, for all of my excitement for the philosophical openings of metamodernism, in all of its political expressions from Nordic Ideology of Hanzi Freinacht to The World We Create by Thomas Bjorkman, each seems to presuppose a virulent anti-communism and a qualified return to social democracy and liberalism. A return I find impossible.
To take stock of my progress on A Thousand Plateaus, I'm currently 11.09% finished with my entirely non-linear reading, which consists of reading 10 randomized pages at a time with the help of a Ruby program that tracks my progress. As far as my linear reading, I'm currently about to start On Several Regimes of Signs which I expect to start within the next day or two. Today I'm trying to focus more on Anti-Oedipus with a very similar Ruby program. Both of these I intend to also read in French in a decidedly linear fashion. Sometimes when I read this book and I find myself encountering the underlinings and ghosts of previous readings, it feels less like I have 1 non-linear reading, or 1 linear reading, or a French reading, and more like I have an intensely complicated assemblage of an infinite number of readings, all spreading out in lines in every direction wherever I direct my eyes. All to develop a perceptual semiotics that permits me to see strata and stratification, inclusive and exclusive disjunctions, connective syntheses, couplings, flows, the Abstract Machines separately from the concrete machinic assemblages. My only fear is that my writing style on this website will take on a subsequent becoming-insufferable. Taking Brian Massumi as a guide, I'm reading A Thousand Plateaus as a challenge, against myself and against the world.
The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterimages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest number, of connecting routes would exist. The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?
It's sad to me, but both Dr. E and Dr. O, who are the only professors I know who've read Capitalism and Schizophrenia before, tend to be intensely busy and have very little time to help me with this book, so I have to carve out this landscape alone. Dr. E was at least kind enough to tell me that her favorite of the plateaus is Of the Refrain. Dr. O strangely enough told me that I might want to consider reading Tears of Eros by Georges Bataille instead, and to pay extra close attention to Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of language, especially where they demarcate that grammar is just as much related to political formations, disciplining, and social repression as it is to its purely linguistic and morphological elements. She said something along the lines of you have to remember that these sorts of French thinkers at the time tended to place special emphasis on the text, and that eventually through study the rigid distinction separating the text from the reader is slowly dissolved.
I could be betraying her words so forgive me. I feel intensely alone in this labyrinth they've constructed for me. As a small aside, on the first page of my physical copy of A Thousand Plateaus right underneath the title I rubbed a spot with the ashes from my forehead from an Ash Wednesday service I went to. It was the same day a couple of my friends were confirmed into the church. Next to the smudge of ash I wrote solvet saeclum in favilla.
As far as my creative projects, I have 2 at the moment. The first is Liber 909 which I've been more or less working on since my second reread of Liber 333 in late November of last year.[1.] I don't think I've ever taken the time anywhere on this website to try to outline or communicate what exactly this project even is. In short, it's an intensely unstable blend of my favorite writing techniques that I've seen on display in the works of the CCRU, my bizarre and likely misguided interest in the Tempel ov Blood, the Order of Nine Angles and Western Esotericism more broadly, my persistently strained relations with various social formations attempting to enact leftist/progressive politics in the United States that tend to stabilize around Maoism, Marxism-Leninism, or democratic socialism as their guiding ideologies, and reflections on how all of these are mediated by the internet and the necessity of an online presence for any of these movements or milieus to get themselves out there and off the ground for viral propagation. All in the genre of theory-fiction. A very ambiguous genre. Perhaps one day I might be able to write philosophy in the old style
but until that day, I'm stuck with an unhealthy blend of philosophy and fiction. If I ever tell a friend about the book I'm writing I never know how to describe it, is it philosophy, horror, science fiction, a collection of short stories? I can only find out through writing it.
The second is a project which necessitated the creation of this stylesheet itself, as a throwback to what my website looked like before its redesign as well as a very particular reference. The light brown background color was taken from the color of every book ever printed by Fourth Sword Publications, books I still have on my shelves. This project is a compilation that I call Struggle Sessions: Selected Essays 2018-2021, which I intend to be far from merely a compilation. My hope is that I'll actually take the time to learn typesetting software so I can turn this compilation into a typographical monstrosity reminiscient of something like House of Leaves turned pitch black. I find it somewhat funny that as of now, the book I'm intending to compile that explores and redeploys Maoist theoretical documents intended for political activism is the book where I'm allowing myself all kinds of liberties with the forms and aesthetics of individual pages, and the book that I'm writing explicitly composed of magical theory is the book where I'm going to try to keep the pages looking as clean and neat as possible. Maybe a diagram here and there. But, another thing to add is that I'd hate to give the impression that this compilation is intended be uncritical or unwilling to interrogate, and in some cases annihilate, the theoretical stances and postures of its contents. Truthfully, I want to rip every essay apart, sinking my fingers into its words and twisting its guts and splitting its veins—I like the smell of its blood.
Other than Brent Adkins' lovely book on A Thousand Plateaus, I only read one other theoretical text this month. It was Dark Deleuze by Andrew Culp and truthfully I didn't care much for it. Chapters were often far too short and the general idea behind the titles were often more interesting than their actual expression. I might have to read it again since it only takes about a day or two to get through all of the material. I particularly enjoyed its discussions of the destruction of words against the creation of concepts, un-becoming as opposed to assemblages, asymmetry instead of complexity, cruelty in the place of intensity and unfolding as the dominant image of thought instead of the rhizome, but more than likely I'll treat the book as a small prolegomena to my own theoretical explorations. There's not much to say about it, the guiding thread of the book was that for far too long academia has been inundated with the ceaseless reproduction of the Joyous Deleuze who creates concepts and intensities and speaks for the molecular and the multiplicities and that to counter this impotent and defanged rendering of Deleuze we have to return to the catacombs to re-encounter Dark Deleuze, a cruel monster who cultivates hatred for the world. My only other problem is that it's another treatment of Deleuze that completely removes Guattari from the picture despite the fact that the material primarily focuses on concepts from their co-authored texts. I was frustrated because every time I thought the author was onto something interesting, I'd feel it was incredibly underdeveloped or they'd switch rather quickly to something else, but I find a lot of the basic moves and reversals quite interesting in their own right, especially due to my recent disappointment with metamodernism.
Lastly, and really quickly, I want to try to take the time to read both volumes of Tiqqun in service of both of my creative projects. I'd also like to read their Introduction to Civil War and Theory of Bloom in English. My capacity to read French is slowly improving and I'm hoping after a few other novels I'll be able to transition from novels to theoretical documents a bit more easily. Right now reading anything that I haven't already read in English I find intensely difficult, so more than likely I'll have to read things in English alongside the French for a while before I feel comfortable enough to read things independently. As you can tell from the Archive, I've been watching quite a lot of French YouTube in my free time. I pretty much don't even really watch YouTube in English anymore because my algorithm on my original account is such an unfocused mess. One thing I've been needing to make time for is using my Page Randomizer tool to stop to read random pages from my tiny French dictionary so that I can slowly but surely acquire more vocabulary alongside the stuff I normally do. I don't think I have anything else to yap about.
[1.] A possible confusion I find it necessary to clear up is that my website only says Liber 808 because I'm too lazy to go back and change everything in the HTML code, the final intended name for this book is, in fact, Liber 909 and nothing else.