Disturbance and clarity

Disturbance and clarity set each other up. I read a chapter form Deleuze’s book, The Fold. The chapter is called “Perception in the folds”. I guess I picked it up after my walk in the city yesterday. I read it after writing the piece, “Disparity” and before the piece, “Afterthought”.

Deleuze talks of differentials in the way that Whitehead talks of limitation, as that which sets up a clear marker as a point of contrast in molecular fluctuations and vibrations that are on-going and everywhere and that are a constant unsettlement to perceptual certainty and yet make up the very conditions out of which clarities are worked up. Deleuze discusses Leibniz and his idea of the Monad. The monads are instances of these conjunctions that subsume and envelop the resonant flickerings of dual states into perceptual ideas that are stable in those particular circumstances. For instance the color green that is a certain stabilization of the undecidedness of yellow and blue.

Clarity is not a replacement of disturbance, it is the working through of disturbance- which is an active and continual process of interchange- there to articulate certain states that are only the momentary balanced points of tension and release within that process so that those balanced points are never ideals or goals set apart. They are perceptual states. For Whitehead they are Feeling states. For Deleuze, thought states.

“A collection will have as much (more) unity as there are relations amongst the ingredients, relations carried out necessarily through thought.” P108 The Fold

These feeling-thought states are the working through of particular vibratory complexes to the point of a threshold- the brink of transformation where a flicker becomes a drone, a swaying, a figure arrived at precisely through this perceptual aggravation. Where shapes and bodies are the complex of feelings they give rise to until there is a point of satiation and some kind of alternation sensitizes a different appetite of holding or letting go.

These differentials are not only the mechanics of response sensation. They organize what a body is at any moment- where it has a capacity for absorption or projection. There is this continuing clenching and letting go in the swirls of dust and filiated light circuits before the body has the functionary idea of doing that too in the way that organs have storage and circulation functions and in the way that senses sustain or move on a certain regard or bearing.

Form is an idea- the thought of collection and dispersal, contraction and expansion, stopping and starting when these differentials are associated into a working bond. This is similar to ideas in Traditional Chinese medicine where organs are the idea of a certain vibratory energy co-opted within a wider potential of other vibratory tendencies. The demarcation of an organ such as the liver, kidney, lung is only the limitation of the otherwise continuous score of frequency possibilities. It is the differentials playing out in a certain way in order to hold to a certain shaping- a certain functioning within the body, within the environment, within the cycles of change and recurrence in the seasons. Liver then is the capacity to grow connected to spring. It is also the welling up of anger and impatience, when that capacity is inhibited. The emotions are connected to that- and the taste- sourness which is biting in to initiate movement but also the sourness of stuckness when that is disallowed. Yet there is never just one or the other. The edge of constraint is also the edge at which anything gains traction. Of course then body and environment can not be separated because the conditions in form, function, emotion are arrived at in the interchange through which circulation processes- the movement of the blood, the movement of sap in a tree flow or are inhibited from flowing to a greater or lesser extent. Difficulty in the liver create patterns of spasm, knottiness, joint and tendon restrictions, rheumatism, oedema, just as a trunk of a tree swells when the sap is inhibited from a too rigid protective bark. Yet so too do these constraints allow for directional changes; curves, bends, folds that are an on-going shape-making in the run of things. Here then growth and creativity and stuckness and emotional bitterness are two sets of tendencies that emanate from the same vibratory quality, playing out in different ways within a wider relational complex. (look at the series of books by Claude Larre and Elizabeth Rochat dela Vallee covering all the organs of the body as commentaries following closely texts from the Chinese Classics).

“Leibniz is not stating that perception resembles an object but that it evokes a vibration gathered by a receptive organ” Deleuze, The Fold.



Projective geometry

Pain-Treatments- bodily resonance.