28.10.09

On Deleuze, Form, and Generosity

2 comments:

Enchanted Thinker said...

Great stuff,
For once, the message doesn't take a back seat to the medium.
It seems that Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage is a great example of this Deleuzean belief. That is, McLuhan's one text is actually a network of texts, so in a way, the text doesn't trace back to even him as author, as the trascendental signified, as (for Barthes) the Author. The text is one text while at the same time being all the texts that are in his text. Hence, the one and the multiple are not opposed. This connects to Deleuze's notion of the rhizome. I believe the beginning words of Deleuze's A Thousand Plateaus is "Since each of us are multiple, there was already quite a crowd." What are your reactions to this Dr. Coffeen?

Daniel Coffeen said...

Yes yes yes! A thing — a text — is always and already a multiplicity. If for Derrida, this network is a text's undoing, for Deleuze and Guattari, this is the very condition of a text's formation. And _The Medium is the Massage_ performs this elegantly.