On Becomings

Deleuze, following Nietzsche, talks of becomings. I wish to continue in that flow.

I wish to talk of becomings rather than change. I wish to talk of becomings rather than established truths or determined states.

No beginnings, no endings -- just flows, perpetual movements.

No beginnings, no endings -- always in the middle of things.

In the middle -- between times more than at a point in time; never concerned with providing firm resolution to difference; never in a central and fixed location.

We do not have any surety of where becomings will lead us, but we can, from within our rhizome connections, create imaginations regarding how these becomings might be transforming us and others. Such imaginations are powerful creative forces (though not concerned with accuracy or predictability) and must never be trivialized.

Becomings – Nature and People

Becomings are not about a person/organism manipulating life and surroundings for the purpose of ensuring a determined outcome.

No, instead it is more likely we find ourselves carried by, even living out the desires of... becomings.

Particular becomings.

Becomings are best understood not as abstract generalities (i.e. becoming generous, becoming strong, becoming responsible) but as becoming a specificity, an image, a name (becoming animal, becoming woman, becoming river, becoming sea, becoming child, becoming eagle, becoming Buddha, becoming Christ, becoming godless, becoming... ).

I wish to talk of the becomings we are connected to as intimately associated with the becomings of nature. I wish to see our human worlds as indistinct from nature. I wish to see our becomings as sharing much in common with the constant becomings emerging within the grass, the rivers, the trees, amidst the lives of birds, fish, insects...

We know, of course, that the language we give to nature often invites separations – nature/culture; natural/artificial; natural/human -- dualisms that can set the stage for numerous violations and violences.

Yet, we still wish to talk of nature. We wish to see ourselves connected to those vast becomings wherein all life moves.

Rhizome Becomings

Becomings are always rhizome events, can be nothing but communal.

Individuals never determine and construct their own becomings. While we can easily delude ourselves with language, we can never truly be separate from the diversities of life.

As individual organisms we can give creative energy to our becomings, but that which is created is never simply the product of our own actions, it is never something over which we can individually claim ownership.

The initiation of becomings is also never an act of individual powers. Life initiates incessant becomings; they can go unnoticed, they can be purposely ignored, but they also can grasp us, even sweep us off our feet.

Becomings connect us to new worlds. They create repeated innovations, including new and renewed rhizome community.

Becomings and Negation

These becomings which we experience do not emerge from negation processes.

Now, clearly, negations surround us. Out of force of habit, we repeatedly participate in them. Negations are all too often engrained in our thought. They appear integral to the very structure of our lives.

We are led to believe that change only emerge by means of bravely coming face-to-face with negations. We are told that if we discover what is wrong with us, if we acknowledge what is wrong with us and if we then make changes based on such learnings we will accomplish our required redemption.

However, in life I see very little of this. Negations are far more likely to create reactive negations in response -- negations triggering further rounds of negations. Or they are likely to create a depressive paralysis, an immobility that breeds further depressive negations, that leads toward a sense of falling-backwards.

There seems to be a significant tie between those experiences we see as depression and worlds dominated by varied and incessant negations. Reactive and negative forces tend to glorify depression. These forces inform us that it is necessary to bear the burdens of one's errors, to repeatedly be reminded of the pain of one's sins – this is often thought of as a requisite for the journey towards a healed life.

Negation is part of the age–old tradition of sin/redemption. In this tradition our connections to the natural world swarming around us are condemned. Such connections were historically considered "pagan" and undesirable. In the dominions of fall/redemption we are informed of our sinfulness, of our transgressions against, not imminent forces around us in our lived world, but forces transcendent to life, forces far beyond everything that is nature. We are also informed of the requisite transcendent mechanisms which are able to redeem us. People are thereby pulled away from nature, from the forces of life, and become dependent upon the transcendent worlds of redemption. Such ideas of transcendent redemption become firmly established and ordained within modern religious and secular institutions.

A further note on the idea of redemption: as Deleuze aptly suggested, we must learn to live life and not save it.

Entering the Becomings

While we as individuals are not the architects of our own becomings there are actions that we can engage in.

However, as tempting as it might be, I refrain from detailing here such responses. Detailed suggestions coming from outside the specificity of the flows of a rhizome life are likely to fall somewhere between useless and damaging.

We all bring to life creative powers in abundance. Responses will appear to all of us who:

· affirm the creativity that life has bestowed upon us;

· resist the influences of negation which repeatedly attempt to keep us from creativity and action;

· appreciate and affirm the rhizome relations in which our lives are embedded.

The challenge for us is to learn how to determine which response to give, not to determine if there is a response.

What can we do, beyond providing detailed instruction?

· We can dare to put aside the influences of negation.

· We can affirm and respond to life, immanent life; affirm and respond to life as it moves amongst bodies (human and otherwise); respond to the endless complexities that life produces.

· We can create things, with others, with nature as a partner and leader.

· We can create rhizome words that engender relations with many and diverse bodies and, therein, many powerful becomings.

· We can enter with the grass and the trees, the grasshopper and the crow, those unmanaged and joyful realms of becoming.

Re-Imagining Life and Time -- Gilles Deleuze and Brian Eno

The Experimentations of Brian Eno

Brian Eno -- musician, collaborator, producer, musical experimenter -- has recently found his interest focussed on the artistic image. Using his long experience with sound experimentation, Eno now experiments with images that move and shift, constantly recreating, never repeatable. A new show where he highlights these experiments is generating intense interest, it is called 77 Million Paintings.

In this art-form Eno introduces a new idea about time into the concept of image or painting. Not simply the implication of movement in a still image, but images that actually constantly morph, constantly generate new forms. It also introduces an art which is not dependent upon the artist for a distinct and specific form, but rather the artist is involved in a process which in turn creates art-forms in movement, in constant becomings. This is a radicalization of art, where art is no longer the gift of a single person, but more like a process of nature, a generator of beauty that is not dependent upon the artist, but not removed from the artist either.

Eno also introduces another twist on art-in-process. Eno creates music which is set to the images of life-in-process. Images move in ways parallel to real-time, in rhythms connected to the flows of time nature creates. Not dependent upon narrative inventions, just the flows of time and life. A forest which simply morphs through seasons. A tree by a river, moving through days and months.

Gilles Deleuze and Brian Eno

I find much resonance between Eno's visual and auditory experiments and the various conceptions of time and life created by Deleuze.

Outside of Narrative

Deleuze presents concepts which invite a view of life and time not structured so much by narrative or other traditional inventions for seeing and organizing time. These concepts invite appreciation for and engagements with the many possibilities for the movements of life in the process-of-life.

Complex Relations

A quick note on Deleuze's thinking on life. He creates ways of seeing that evade all simplistic description.

For Deleuze life:

• evades categorization,
• is always connected to diversities,
• is engaging in constant movements,
• generates unpredictable futures,
• and is always tied together through numerous lines of relationship.

A Generative Process

Deleuze does not invite a copying of nature, not a forming of structures that simply replicate what we have come to believe about how nature operates, but he calls for the creation of ideas, concepts and ways of life that connect us to the endless possible movements of life. To re-emphasize -- this is a generative, creative process that creates much more than ideas and words, it creates new possibilities of relationship with the diversities of life itself.

Next Posting -- Becomings and Rhizome

Two ideas Deleuze presents that illustrate such connections to life are "Becomings," and "Rhizome."

I will explore these two concepts in upcoming postings.

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A final video. Brian Eno with Bono and The Edge.

The Opposite of a Morality of Salvation

Immersed with thoughts from Lawrence, Whitman and Spinoza, among others, Deleuze talks about the soul and the body.

The soul and the body, the soul is neither above nor inside, it is "with", it is on the road, exposed to all contacts, encounters, in the company of those who follow in the same way," feel with them, seize the vibration of their soul and their body as they pass", the opposite of a morality of salvation, teaching the soul to live its life, not to save it.

Deleuze, Dialogues, pge 62.

Let me repeat...

"Feel with them, seize the vibration of their soul and their body as they pass", the opposite of a morality of salvation, teaching the soul to live its life, not to save it,

The soul as described here is not a divine creation, a product of higher powers inserted inside a body. It is not aligned with either the interiorities or the individualisms of Western life. It is not about an inner life. The soul is outside us -- it is with us, with all we walk through life with.

As Lynn Hoffman would say, the idea of the soul creates a "withness" not an "aboutness." It does not reside above or within, it resides amongst.

The soul accompanies us, connects us to complex worlds of relations. And it connects us to the pragmatics of our movements in real geographies and ecologies.

Experiments with Gilles Deleuze

I have clearly been absent from regular posting on this blog for sometime now. This is not because certain ideas and ways of living are not moving me, or that the words are absent, but because the forms of creation that I have been driven to have altered from when I was regularly posting on this site.

However, I now want to return, but to do so with a particular and different focus. Recently I have been taken by an old passion -- that is the ideas created by French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. I want to experiment in this blog, at this point in time, with the thoughts of Deleuze, see where they might lead. I am not doing this out of a sense of discipleship, and certainly not from some sense of obligation.

It is more like a kind of exorcism, a desire to give my own form to these ideas, to address them, remove them from the vague, less-than-formed mass they feel to be right now. Remove them, create with them, and move on to some other ground...

I do not feel I am mining his thoughts, nor searching for an authentic author's voice for Deleuze. No, I want to let his ideas springboard to new places, let them create new ideas, actions, communal-relations, timely-constructions that assist in nudging and moving to productive places in life.

The Eagles are Satiated

The eagles are satiated
They only fly away when my
Proximity becomes
Absolutely intolerable

For they are
Drunk on the
Grease-crammed eyes of
Endless salmon

Stoned on fat
Omega three stained beaks
Blue oil soaks the sand
Pulled by gravity
To the river

Running from layers
Of scattered vertebrae
Jawbones
Hollowed eye sockets
Colourless skin
Cartilage

Fat fleeing everything

That the eagles and gulls
Would not stomach

And from all of this abundance
Of skin and bones and oil

Overwhelming life
Endless tomorrows

Thinking about Charity and Gift-Exchange

It’s the Christmas season again, a time of year when we are called to focus upon those people who we consider less fortunate than ourselves. We are called to give from our own wealth to those who are perceived as lacking or in-need. We are repetitively informed that it is the season for such an approach to giving..

However...

***

• Charity is no gift-exchange.

• In a gift-exchange we are giving in response to gifts already given, we enter into an emerging game of reciprocity.

• The gift is always in response to an encounter with abundance.

• The gift-exchange pays little interest in need or lack – that is the work of charity.

• We all-too-often talk as if the world needs more charity, more people giving to other people who are lacking and in need.

• I argue we do not require more charity.

• We must resist the belief that human lives are empty and lacking.

• Instead, we must see human lives as rich and full – understanding that this fullness is not always an easy thing, sometimes it can also be a source of pain.

• We take on the responsibility of bearing witness to our own experience of the fullness in human lives, and in life in general.

• And we take on the responsibility of creating meaningful, enlivening and specific response to our encounters with such abundance.

• Such responses are always unique... they never can be truly scripted or anticipated.

• We respond to a unique and irreplaceable presentation of a particular act of giving within a complex rhizome world.

• We respond to the abundance of others, not to lack and poverty.

***

• Such an emphasis on gift-exchange does not at all minimize the horrors of poverty.

• On the contrary, poverty is tragic and reprehensible precisely because it repeatedly minimizes the gifts circulating within human lives and worlds.

• Our response to poverty is actually not a response to poverty at all -- it is a response to the gifts circulating within the lives and worlds of those people we are engaged with.

• And, our response to such a circulation of gifts is not limited to emotions such as gratitude, but might call forth any number of responses, including actions of anger which emerge upon the understanding that the circulation of these gifts might be minimized and limited.

Creating a Relational Work - Part II

Life and Work through Image: Bill Reid and The Spirit of Haida Gwaii.

To access: Creating a Relational Work - Part I, click here.

We are all too often led to believe that in order to give understanding and direction to life and work we are in need of the appropriate words. We are taught that it is in language that we are supposed to discover truth, meaning, instruction, enlightenment – it is hard to envisage any other way. However, I am here inviting an exploration of life and work through an encounter with an image.

In the international departures area of the Vancouver International Airport there is a large bronze statue created by the late Haida sculptor, Bill Reid. It is called The Spirit of Haida Gwaii -- it is sometimes also called the Jade Canoe. This image is also found on the Canadian twenty-dollar bill.

I will let Lynn Hoffman introduce you to this work of art (she first encountered The Spirit of Haida Gwaii in another location, not the airport):

Another feature of this work was a strong communal presence. During a break in my workshop, which was being held in Vancouver, a person in the audience took me into a room filled with green light. There, in the midst of ficus trees and bamboo, was an astonishing object. It was a greenish bronze canoe, half the size of the room, and in it a variety of totemic animals were struggling with each other: the raven with the bear, the wolf with the eagle, the crow with the dog, while half-human creatures like the Dogfish Woman, or the Bear Mother, paddled, watched over by the sombre Village Chief with his temple-shaped hat. I learned that this was the achievement of a sculptor called Bill Reid, who was himself descended from First Nations people. In this work, titled “The Spirit of the Haida Gwai,” Reid represented himself as the Ancient Conscript, paddling along with the rest.

Click here to access Hoffman's entire document.

No words are necessary as we encounter this image. However, for many of us who see The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, who walk around it, who examine each detail and crevice, who touch the cool smoothness of those bronze creatures, we find that words cannot be escaped. For words are inevitably evoked, created in response to experiencing this creation. I will briefly share a few words that emerge through my own encounter with the The Spirit of Haida Gwaii:

• Life is almost always full, abundant, even crowded.

• The living of life can never escape a diversity of characters and relationships.

• Some of that diversity which elbows through our worlds includes relationships with animals -- animals are people too (and, of course, people are animals too)!

• We never move anywhere on our own through life, it is forever a communal event. The idea of individualism is simply a deceit – that emperor wears no clothes.

• Our movements through life are never direct and pure. There are always bumps and obstacles to be encountered.

• Our relationships in life are also never pure and free from conflict. There will always be a sense of clumsiness associated with our relationships, and, if we linger long enough in our looking, we will always find that somebody is biting somebody else.

• Yet, through it all, we somehow together manage to paddle that canoe, and (again -- if we linger long enough) we will repeatedly be confronted with a sense of fullness and even joy in our movements through life.