Lorraine, Tamsin E.

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Swarthmore College Works Philosophy Faculty Works Philosophy 2010 Smooth Space Tamsin E. Lorraine Swarthmore College, tlorrai1@swarthmore.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-philosophy  Part of the Philosophy Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Tamsin E. Lorraine. (2010). Revised. "Smooth Space". The Deleuze Dictionary. 256-258. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-philosophy/505 This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. 256 S M O O T H  S P A C Eeven in sensing music that accompanies a ‘dance of dust’ (D 1993a: 86). These formulations about singularity infl ect Deleuze’s work on style and the creative imagination. With the same vocabulary he notes that great writers possess ‘singular conditions of perception’ (D 1997b: 116). Indeed singularities allow great writers to turn aesthetic percepts into veritable visions; in other words, to move from a unique site of consciousness to an oceanic one. Such is what makes the writer change the world at large through microperceptions that become translated into a style, a series of singularities and differences that estrange common usages of language and make the world of both the writer and those in which the reader lives vibrate in unforeseen and compelling ways.Were singularity associated with the ‘Causes and Reasons of the Desert Island’, (one of Deleuze’s fi rst pieces of philosophical writing) it would be connected with difference and repetition, one of the bases of his work on duration, identity and ideation in Difference and Repetition. A singularity is a unique point but it is also a point of perpetual recommencement and of variation. Like other keywords in his personal dictionary, singularity shifts and bears different infl ections in different contexts but is always related to perception, subjectivity, affectivity and creation.ConnectivesEventLeibnizLines of fl ightSMOOTH SPACETamsin LorraineIn A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari characterise living organ-isms in terms of ‘interior milieus’ (cellular formation, organic functions) and ‘exterior milieus’ (food to eat, water to drink, ground to walk on). Milieus are vibratory blocks of space- time constituted by the periodic repetition of the confi gurations of forces that makes them what they are (D&G 1987: 313). All the milieus of the organism have their own patterns and these patterns interact with the patterns of other milieus with which they communicate. The rhythm of the interactions between these dif-ferent milieus operates in terms of heterogeneous blocks rather than one homogeneous space- time. Thus, an organism emerges from chaos (‘the milieu of all milieus’) as vibratory milieus or blocks of space- time that M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd   256 10/08/2010   16:17This content downloaded from 130.58.106.203 on Tue, 21 Jan 2020 16:46:02 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsS M O O T H  S P A C E 257create rhythms within the organism as well as with the milieus exterior to the organism. Territorial animals (including human beings) are natural artists who establish relations to imperceptible as well as perceptible forces through the refrains of song (birds) or movements and markings (wolves, rabbits) that create the rhythms of life- sustaining regularities from cosmic chaos. The various rhythms of the human subject’s components and their relations to interior and exterior blocks of space- time become territori-alised into the sentient awareness of one organism living in the ‘striated’ space of social life, cancelling out anomalous interactions among milieus in the process. The conventional notion of space as a homogeneous whole within which movement unfolds is thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, a totalised construct of space that emerges from heterogeneous blocks of space- time. They contrast their concept of ‘smooth space’ to the more conventional notion of space; ‘smooth space’ haunts and can disrupt the striations of conventional space, and it unfolds through ‘an infi nite suc-cession of linkages and changes in direction’ that creates shifting mosaics of space- times out of the heterogeneous blocks of different milieus (D&G 1987: 494). Deleuze and Guattari are interested not in substituting one conception of space with another, but rather in how forces striate space and how at the same time it develops other forces that emit smooth spaces (D&G 1987: 500).In a discussion of the concept of the ‘movement- image’ inspired by Henri Bergson, Deleuze distinguishes movement from space: ‘space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering’ (D 1986: 1). Spaces covered by movement are divisible and belong to a single, homo-geneous space while movement changes qualitatively when it is divided. Movements, of what Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus call ‘deterritorialization’, are acts of covering that are not referred to space conceived as a uniform area of measurable units within which changes occur. A subject who orients himself with respect to movements, rather than a retrospectively created construct of space, experiences space not in terms of a totality to which it is connected (I walk across the snow fi ve miles from the centre of town), but rather in terms of pure relations of speed and slowness (snow under moving feet as wind lifts hair) that evoke powers to affect and be affected, both actual and potential (pushing feet against ground, could also jump or run). A person on a trip to another city might orient himself by following the road mapped out through social convention from one point to another. A nomad of the desert in search of food might orient himself differently, travelling not from one point to a predesignated destination, but rather travelling from one indication of food to the next as the need arises. In the former case, local movements are charted with respect to already specifi ed points (thus imposing a plane M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd   257 10/08/2010   16:17This content downloaded from 130.58.106.203 on Tue, 21 Jan 2020 16:46:02 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms258 S O C I U Sof organisation upon the movements that unfold). In the latter case, space shifts with each movement in keeping with shifts in meeting the need for food. These shifts do not occur in space; rather they establish different confi gurations of nomad and vegetation and landscape that unfold as the smooth space of the search for food. The smooth space shared with others emerges not with reference to an ‘immobile outside observer’, but rather through the tactile relations of any number of observers (D&G 1987: 493). It is thus a space – like that of the steppes, the desert or polar landscapes – occupied by intensities, forces and tactile qualities, with no fi xed reference point (D&G 1987: 479).ConnectivesDeterritorialisation/ReterritorialisationNomadicismSpaceSubjectivitySOCIUSKenneth SurinTraditional philosophy relied overwhelmingly on the operation of tran-scendental principles which were required to make claims possible, as well as moral aesthetic judgements. There are also transcendental prin-ciples, perhaps less widely acknowledged than the ones that underlie traditional philosophy, which subtend the constitution of the social order. These principles are embodied in what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘socius’. The well- known philosophical counter- tradition inaugurated by Friedrich Nietzsche, and continued by Martin Heidegger, undertook a dismantling of the transcendental basis of traditional philosophy, and the work of Deleuze is to be located in this tradition. For Deleuze, as for Nietzsche, an entire tradition extends from Plato to Kant, in which it is declared that the yardstick of knowledge is verisimilitude. In Plato’s case verisimilitude derives from an ideal ‘world of Forms’ (the transcendent), whereas for Immanuel Kant this world of the transcendent was banished to the realm of the ‘noumenal absolute’. Kant, though, insisted that the counterpart to the noumenal world, for example the world of phenomena, was constituted by the activity of the transcendental (or non- empirically given) subject of possible experience. In their refl ection on the socius, conducted throughout the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, M2328 - PARR TEXT.indd   258 10/08/2010   16:17This content downloaded from 130.58.106.203 on Tue, 21 Jan 2020 16:46:02 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Smooth Space

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Smooth Space

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