Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Deleuze & Guattari's Thousand Plateaus ft. Prof Ian Buchanan (2/2)

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Deleuze & Guattari's Thousand Plateaus ft. Prof Ian Buchanan (2/2) · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

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Welcome back. This is part two if you are not listening to these back
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to back. We were just in the middle of a discussion with Ian Buchanan.
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He was bringing up the notion of territory, literal territory, and how
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we might rethink notions of hospitality, and that could be a measure of deterritorializing
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desire, particularly in colonial settler states, where as a settler, if you're
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a settler, your desire is still complicit in that arrangement or that state of
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affairs. But deterritorializing also has to do with mental territories, and that's what
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we're going to move into now. So here's your quick recap. This picks
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up right off the end of that, and we're going to continue our discussion
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on the pill pod with Ian Buchanan. Ah. All right, so at
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this point we're talking doubly about literal territories, and in this case, these
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literal territories are also conceptual categories, having been written into laws and things like
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that. Then do you think this would be a good time to try to
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define deterritorialization and territorialization, because these are both central concepts to the chapter that
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I read today. The refrain how you would use those contexts to actually,
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I guess, rearticulate kind of what you just said. But what is the
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importance of these concepts in being a thinker as well as being a political actor.
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So I think the first thing is that for Delaguittorry, the notion of
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territory is not necessarily co extensive with a particular space, So they take it
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from I mean, there's various points of origin. But if we look at
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the sort of ethological points of origin which they take out of animal behavioral studies,
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what is crucial about the idea of territory within animal behavioral studies is the
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sense of a kind of subjective position with respect to space, like this is
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my space, and as to do Asia say, my territory is the space
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in which I feel at home, Okay, And if somebody comes into my
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space, I recognize and I experience them as an intruder. But not everybody
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is experienced that way. So if somebody that I like comes into my space,
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I don't regard them as an intruder. I see them as kind of
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helping me to produce the space in which I live. They become part of
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my territory. So the idea then, of deterritorization is effectively to be expelled
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from or to expel oneself from the space in which you feel at home.
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Now, why might you do that on a sort of personal level. One
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of the things that Guataria always talks about through his kind of idea of therapy.
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He says that we should be able to move but between territories, you
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know, the territory of the home and the territory of work and that sort
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of thing, and that there should be a kind of seamless movement between these
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different territories. But sometimes, for you know, various complicated reasons, we
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can get stuck in a particular territory and we find ourselves unable to leave that
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territory. And so that would be like, you know, I feel at
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home in my home space, and whenever I leave my home, I feel
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like I'm a kind of away from home. But also like when I go
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into work, I treat everybody as though somehow they're invading my home. And
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so I haven't actually, you know, changed territories at all. I've just
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taken my territory with me, and obviously that creates all kinds of problems.
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So deterritorization in that sense is how does one leave one's territory? How does
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one find a way of moving on to other kinds of territories. So it's
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not intrinsically negative. In fact, for those in mytorry, it's necessary in
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lots of ways. If I become stuck on my racist values, how do
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I extricate myself from those values? What would it take to leave that territory?
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So the other way we can think about territory is territory is the set
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of values, a set of believes, a set of ideas in which I
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feel at home. And these can be absolutely incoherent, right, And you
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know, when we're doing a sort of analysis of racism, I think what's
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really interesting is to try to understand racism as a form of territory in which
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people feel at home and to ask the question, well, why do you
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feel at home in those sets of values? And what's really interesting is that
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when you push people on those values, they are, you know, both
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rock solid that they won't leave them because they feel comfortable, but they're also
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and they seem to know that they are incoherent. Like I hate all black
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people, but my black neighbor is okay, So there is you know,
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there's just no coherence in there, and it lacks all kinds of conviction.
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So how would you actually analyze that except to say, well, there is
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something about this set of values that enables this person to function in the world
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that they do. And so how would we de territorialism, How would we
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give them a new set of values that would enable them to feel at home,
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but feel at home in a way that did not necessitates kind of proliferation
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and production of kind of statements of hate and so on. And you know,
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do uscritariays saying, well, you know that that process is slow.
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You can't de territorialize too rapidly because then people, you know, feel like
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they don't have a home anywhere at all, and often that makes them even
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more violent. So it's it's a slow process. And that process they refer
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to as re territorization give them the new home to feel on. And I
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think what you see, you know, with Trump and so forth, and
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like I think, I always think that the American elections are so important,
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you know, the rest of us should be able to vote too, because
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clearly, because clearly the Americans don't want to vote like, fuck this man,
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let us vote too. We will show you the right way to go.
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I mean, obviously that's just the crazy at side. But I do
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think that the power of America is such that we can't just leave it up
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to the Americans to make these decisions. But you know, if you think
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about you know, Trump as this kind of how on earth did he actually
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get elected? And you know, you drill down into it and you think,
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well, why on earth would blue collar workers or even more kind of
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amazingly out of work blue collar workers, why would they vote for someone like
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Trump who clearly has expressed zero interest in their future at all and will literally
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do nothing to help them. How can we possibly explain that? And so
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this this comes back to, you know, getting back to your early questions
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about Marxism and so forth, that we can't really understand these these kinds of
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questions if we think about them solely in terms of interest, because clearly it
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is not in their interest to vote for Trump. If you think, I'm
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voting for the guy who will get me a job and so on. If
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we think about it that way, it doesn't make any sense. But if
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we think about it in terms of what kinds of values is Trump espousing that
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might matter to somebody who's feeling disenfranchised and you know, kind of disengaged from
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the world. Well, he's saying things about making America great. He's saying
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things about the priority of America over everybody else, and those values suddenly become
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quite attractive. So you can't understand it in terms of straightforward, you know,
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financial interest. You have to start to understand it in terms of cultural
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values. And for me, that's where desire comes into it. So I
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think that if we wanted to understand the present situation, you have to bring
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desire into that equation. Chris, do you want to respond to that?
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Before I ask my next question, do you have a thought or no?
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I'm not putting it on the spot. No, no, no, I
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just I see this from the opposite side, because when I was reading on
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Duluz, I got criticized by a lot of thinkers that ce Deluze is a
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political So I mean the Peter Hallward's, the Gijaks, the bad you,
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and you always see you always hear that fantastic story about bad You smashing through
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with his moused friends in Deluz's class, and Delos just kind of dismissing him.
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You know, I'm teaching please lead my cot right. That was in
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sixty eight, yes, and and bad actually wrote a paper called the Fascism
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the Potato in seventy three. Now I'm not even joking about about all of
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this stuff with Deluz and and so like my my one question, because I
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struggled with this. I have to admit I struggled with this because you know,
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we have a lot of friends that are very Hegelian Marxists, and and
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I never saw the clear link with Marx and and Deluz. Actually, I
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mean Dereda famously stated at his funeral, you know Deluz was a Marxist or
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he was one of the good Marxists or something like that. But then you
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have bad You writing a book The Adventures in French Philosophy and putting Deluz in
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the map where fascism is with with Alta sur and stuff like that. So
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I mean, how do you approach people or how do you approach these other
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thinkers like Hallward and Jijacq and Badu and and even Roncier Roancier, who was
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I think was a friend of Deluze but wrote, you know, kind of
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not exactly the nicest remarks about his work. So how do you deal with
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this a political accusation against Deluze and delusions? I look, I mean,
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I I think I always thought that I never asked Peter about this, but
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I always thought Peter only wrote that book as a kind of a deal with
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with Verso, so that there was you heard it here firm. I think
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Peter, Peter may think that that's completely off base, and and maybe it
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is, but it's it's a very wake tique of delures, you know,
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it's it's such a weak critique of delures that most people haven't bothered to even
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repudiate. It's critiques of delures show evidence that he never actually read Alas so
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again they're not even worth repudiating. They're just absolute crap. And you know,
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if you read enough, which you know, for my sins, I
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have done after a while, not only is it clear that he never read
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delus in Batari and it has no intention of reading Delostari, he he quotes
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them at least as often approvingly as disapprovingly. So there's literally, you know,
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as my kids always say, no consistency. And you know, as
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for as for Baduo, I mean, there's so much bad faith there,
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it's just ridiculous. Like his book on Buco, Sorry Delus comes across as
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somebody who's just kind of pissed off that Delays wouldn't talk to them anymore,
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Like it's this sort of spoiled child, just just just for just for us,
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side for the readers. They were writing letters from eighty three to eighty
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six, and Deliz said he didn't want them published, and then instead,
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bad You went and took the letters and wrote the book the clamor of being
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sorry. I didn't doubt this is heart, so go offy and go off
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well. I mean, you know, Delos said to Bude apparently that he
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didn't want to continue the correspondence anymore. He felt that he said everything he
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wanted to say. If you can sort of imagine what that what that conversation
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went like, you know, something along the lines of, oh, look,
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bad you. You obviously are not listening to me. You know,
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I don't see any point in this conversation continuing because it's just pointless. And
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you know, Budge's response to that was to sort of come up with all
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this sort of focus discussion of ontology that somehow Delos's ontology because he believed in
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a university of being somehow meant that he believed in totalitarianism and something like that.
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I mean as a as a leap of thought, Like you would tell
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off a grad student for coming out with that bullshit. You'd be like,
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what on earth is this? You know, how would you expect your advisors
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to respond to a claim like that? So I've never felt that much need
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to respond to Budge's responses to Deler's they just seem idiotic. And so I
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think that the whole critique of and the other one that they everyone trots out
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of Delure's wasn't political until he met Guatari and this is hujet fine, then
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he became too political. I mean, what kind of idiotic idea is that?
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I mean, it's completely false to begin with, if you read Deloze's
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earlier works, they're clearly political in the sense of trying to develop an ontology
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that helps you to understand the current state of affairs. And also, you
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know, the idea that he becomes only becomes political in relationship to quataris is
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completely false because if Qatari was as political as everybody makes him out to be,
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why on Earth would he have wanted to talk to Delures if Delures was
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as a political as everybody makes him out to be. It's like, I
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know, the one person I really wanted to talk to is the most a
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political person in France and that foreign whatever it was. So it just it
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just doesn't make it any kind of things, Like it's clearly bogus. It's
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a story that people have conjured up. This sounds kind of good, so
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I think, really what is much more likely to be true is that they
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both had political leanings and ideas and sympathies, and they saw a convergence of
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those ideas, but more importantly, they saw an intensification of them as they
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came together. All right, so we've done our dunking, which I'm very
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happy about. That gives us, that gives us sound baits. All right,
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well, you know it is my forte of treasure. We've done our
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dunking, and I want to move right before we go to the refrain.
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If that's the direction we're headed. I like how this conversation is developing rhizomatically
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or organically in any case. But when we move into the last book that
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Deluz and Katari wrote together, what is philosophy, then this what you're talking
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about in terms of re territorialization and not state smashing, but thinking within a
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state of affairs that you're not going to be able to change, like with
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your humanist individual agency as a locust. And I think this applies to not
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just people who want to be philosophers, but artists, political subjects who want
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to be effective as political subjects. And as the notion of creativity, you
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talk about shooting off lines of flight, and really when you get to what
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is philosophy, there's almost an unction almost like if you hear us say one
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thing, it's do this be creative, don't box yourself in, don't stick
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to one territory, become nomadic, and all these sort of functions to remake
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yourself. And how would you reflect on that as sort of they're certainly not
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anti political, as we were just discussing, but how do you see this
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as their goal for just thinking philosophers in academics, but for people to become
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creative or make themselves creative? Right? So I think that in the introduction
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to the book, delzen Watari basically say that you know things have gotten bad
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when we start talking about people working in marketing as being creative, that this
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is not true creativity, this is barbarians at the gate. So there is
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a kind of defensiveness about this book which is quite different from their previous collaborations.
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And so it does a number of things. But one of the things
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that wants to try to do is to identify what we might think of as
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being like, this is what authentic, genuine, scholarly creative work looks like,
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as opposed to marketing and something else. And so it's almost as if
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and maybe this was in fact the impetus that Dellaerzenotari were trying to defend the
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university and the idea of the university against the encroachments of neoliberalism, which,
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luckily for them they never had to experience in terms of what universities look like
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now compared to what they look like when Deluze was still working in the university,
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which he retired in like eighty seven or something, because I was a
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grade student starting about the time that he retired, and already then people were
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saying, oh, the good old days, the good old days, which
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no longer insisted in eighty seven, And I find myself telling my graduate students
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now all the good old days of the nineteen eighties, which people at the
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time thought were horrendous. They thought this was the end of everything that's holy.
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So there is a sense in which what Dellus Buttari which were kind of
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recognizing was the profound interference into the university by the state in the form of
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trying to turn it into something that was about marketing, that was about business,
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that was creative on demand. There was a kind of instrumentalized form of
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scholarship and all of those things. And he's clearly delos in Qatario, clearly
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trying to carve out a space and says, well, this is what authentic
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scholarship and creativity looks like. There is a set of values associated with that
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which are really worth defending, and we should defend them against the intrusions of
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the market, of the state and so on. And I think that aspect
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of the book has never really been recognized and talked about enough, perhaps because
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at the time it was only the early days of these kinds of intrusions.
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But you know, as I look at what's happening in the university sector globally
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now, you really can appreciate just how much they wanted to defend things that
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seem under real threat of extinction right now. So even though they are talking
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about creativity, they are also trying to say, and this is the other
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thing that's really interesting in this book. There is a really kind of concerted
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attempt to say, this is what is different about the sciences from the arts
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and from philosophy, that they are doing quite distinct things, and that we
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should try to recognize those differences and see that the job of creativity is not
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to extinguish those differences, but to get a kind of creative interference. And
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so that's where they talk about in the conclusion of the book that actually what's
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really interesting, but what we also have to defend against is the interference that
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the gaps between science, philosophy, and art, where one bleeds into the
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other and loses all distinctiveness. And that might sound like a kind of hypothetical
18:44
problem, but I can tell you that at my own university and many universities
18:48
around the world, they have all these kind of multi disciplinary, interdisciplinary research
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funds which give money to groups that can say, well, you know,
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we've got someone from the someone from engineering, someone from biology, someone from
19:03
somewhere else and now we're going to do all this kind of work together.
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But the principle of that work is that there is no intrinsic difference between what
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they all do, and so therefore there is a kind of profound de skilling
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of the individuals involved and also a sort of a despecialization. So you do
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creative arts, well, that's kind of like engineering, so you know,
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you can work together or you're an engineer that's creative. So therefore we you
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know, and eventually what you find happens is engineers are doing creative work.
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So therefore we don't actually need creative artists anymore because you know, they're just
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superfluous engineers already creative. You know, marketing is already doing philosophy, So
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we don't really need philosophers anymore because they're superfluous and they don't bring any money
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in. So let's get it. Sounds like the MIT research lab where they
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I don't know, grow leaves out of skin in a and then put it
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up on the wall and call it art, right, right, And that's
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what's happening. But I think what Deles we recognized before any of us,
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was that this would lead to the extinction of whole branches and fields of scholarly
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enterprise, and that we would all be the poorer for it, because what
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we don't need is the synthesis of all these things. What we need is
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the interferences between the differences. So this is not really an unction for just
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everybody to go, you know, write a book of poetry and self publish
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it. But it's more like defending probably philosophy specifically, and the arts because
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they're the most under threat from the middle term of those, which is the
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sciences that he was writing about. That is that more accurate to say,
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I don't think he regards the sciences as being sorry, that's pretty clearly that
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it's marketing and it's capitalism, Like the sciences are under just as much threat
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as well. I mean, look at you know, America's spectacular failure to
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deal with COVID, and it's not because they don't have smart scientists. They've
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got loads of them. You know, some of the smartest science in the
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world work in the US. But they're kind of separated from government and separated
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from being able to apply any intelligence to the issues in front of them by
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a whole bunch of structures that have arisen out of capitalism. So it's pretty
21:14
clear that capitalism, marketing, et cetera, et cetera, that's the enemy,
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and that all the scholarly fields are under threat. Oh yeah, we
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could mention that what's at East England, The East England School of Philosophy is
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being shut down. Ye yeah, just you know, one among many that
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have been you know, sacrificed to the greater God. But do you think
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that science are a stamp budget programs at any risk of being shut down?
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Because I find that in the budgets I look at, including the budgets of
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the school that Chris and I have taught at, that's not at all the
21:44
case. Like it doesn't look like it's the case, because they get money
21:49
thrown at them because you know, everybody wants the cure for cancer, and
21:53
everybody wants you know, some fabulous new material or some fabulous new computer part
21:59
and so forth. So it doesn't look like that they're under any kind of
22:02
a threat. But if you look at how that funding is channeled towards them,
22:08
a great deal of it, particularly in the science is comes from corporations,
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which then means that their research is compromised from the outset that they've been
22:18
basically doing instrumental research for a corporation. They're not just doing pure research for
22:23
the hell of it. You know, we want to find out what this
22:26
particle does because that would be interesting. They're doing, oh, we need
22:30
to figure out how to do this in or to make a better supercomputer because
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you know, Microsoft wanted or whatever. So they're compromised in different ways that
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they look like they have pots of money, which often they do, but
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those moneys are kind of golden manacles. Can I can I ask you just
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a quick question because this is one of my concerns with what is philosophy just
22:49
about? You know, it seems like a manifesto for creators to create,
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But at some times it seems like Deluz is just talking about arbitrarriy, just
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creating for the sake of creating. So how do you differentiate between arbitrarily creating
23:06
something and creating something that's necessary to I don't know, to to kind of
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as he says, you know, make the stutter or stutter or shake the
23:15
status quo. I guess what he's saying is something like this creativity is important,
23:23
but genuine creativity is difficult, to the point of almost impossible, and
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genuinely new things happen extremely rarely, so we produce lots of things through a
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creative process that are in some way a replication of what already exists, which
23:41
is not to dismiss it. I mean, it doesn't mean that it's unimportant
23:45
or uninteresting, but it hasn't risen to the level of genuinely creative. And
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so I think that there is a kind of very very high bar put in
23:55
place in what Delos and Quataria is saying about what does creativity look like?
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Like it's really hard to achieve this level of creativity, and so they're saying,
24:03
you know, it's only by bringing something new into the world that were
24:06
actually creative. But I think this has a kind of political resonance because you
24:11
know, if you go back to what I was saying before about the impossibility
24:12
of revolution and insurrection and so forth, to bring about a genuinely new way
24:18
of thinking about the world is obviously really difficult. That there are so many
24:22
kind of forces and powers arrayed against novelty within political ideas, and more importantly,
24:30
novelty within the kind of application of political ideas they're actually to bring about
24:36
that transformation is an extremely powerful kind of an event and something that you know,
24:41
we would all, you know, I guess want to try to figure
24:45
out how to do and this is the you know. The one thing that
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Budu does say which is kind of interesting around politics is the idea of conviction,
24:52
and he says that a political idea should be as kind of impossible to
24:59
argue with as a mathematical formula, which, on the one hand sounds kind
25:02
of stupid, But on the other hand, if you think about what a
25:06
mathematical formula is, it's like you can't argue with it, right, Like
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two plus two equals four, and you can debate that all you want,
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but at the end of the day, it's still an equal four. So
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if you were able to produce the political idea that was as lucid it as
25:18
an impossible to argue with that, Like you know that people ought to have
25:22
a living wage, for example, If that could be as lucid as a
25:25
mathematical formula, how powerful would that be from a political point of view.
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And that's what we're struggling against, Like we can't seem to produce those ideas
25:33
easily that just simply had that level of traction and I think that's where our
25:38
creativity is called upon, and speaking of creation and the creation of concepts,
25:44
which is the job of the philosopher. I don't know if you know where
25:48
this is said, or if it was said at all, or if I
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made it up and pretend that I had read it somewhere. But did Dillah's
25:53
say that his only real original concept, despite all the ones that are associated
25:59
with him, body without organs, the territories, the plateaus, all of
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these are sort of transposed from other thinkers. But did he say that his
26:07
one concept that he had created was the refrain? Not just him, he
26:14
a guatari. But yes, But did they say that specifically? Yes,
26:21
Yes, I do say that this this is the thing we created, and
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we think that's most Do you know where, because I've been looking for this
26:29
quote all day. It's in either the Desert Islands or the other collection of
26:38
it. Okay, I'll try it. If you send me an email,
26:41
I will be able to find it for you. I can't, off the
26:44
top of my head tell you where it is. It's either in that one
26:47
or the two regimes in madness. It's in one of those two, for
26:49
sure. For sure, I would be able to find. Okay, so
26:52
the refrain. I know your book deals with the refrain, so I'd like
26:56
to take a little bit to first of all, discuss what refrain is,
27:00
just in case you look this up in the dictionary. The refrain is like
27:04
a chorus in music, or a repeated line in poetry, or even a
27:10
motif reproduced across a painting. So a refrain something that is repeated. And
27:15
do you want to talk about this with respect to your work or what you're
27:22
currently been thinking about and presumably spending a lot of time on Ian Sure,
27:27
So the best way to think about the refrain is to see that the refrain
27:33
is something that is produced through the repetition of material things, so whether its
27:38
sounds or images or whatever. But in fact, the refrain is that kind
27:44
of synthesis of those things like the impossible to reproduce or to think otherwise,
27:48
like if you think about a chord, you're playing like three notes at the
27:51
same time. You can't achieve that thing except by doing all those things all
27:56
at once. So the refrain is the is what happens when you produce certain
28:03
kinds of repetitions. And what I think the Lasabretari particularly interested in is the
28:11
kind of internal necessity that comes about through the production of the refrain. So
28:18
you know, if you're thinking about this in musical terms, and you're thinking,
28:22
like you're whistling a tune or whatever, and you think, well,
28:26
you know what should the next note be, and what would be possible and
28:32
what would be impossible. And then if you ask yourself, well, how
28:34
on earth do I know what is possible and what is impossible? Because surely,
28:37
in the grand scheme of things, I can drop in any note that
28:40
I want. But you would know that that was not true. Like if
28:45
you put in some notes, it's just going to be completely wrong. The
28:48
whole thing's going to fall apart. It's not going to work. It would
28:49
just sound discordant, right, It would sound wrong even if you don't know
28:55
anything about music. That's literally discordant, right, So discordant means yeah.
29:00
And so if you're whistling something and you can to yourself, you know what
29:03
sounds right, and that's the refrain, right. The refrain is this kind
29:07
of creation of something that then has its own internal necessity. And if you
29:14
like, that's the way thinking about imminence too, because when you're in the
29:15
middle of that refrain, that is the structure that's imminence, that is pure
29:21
eminence, and that structure itself determines what comes next, what should be next,
29:25
And that's the creative mentality. Like when you're in the zone of people
29:27
that being in the zone, then you kind of know what the next thing
29:30
should be. And that's the refrain at work, is that the imminence of
29:36
that space that you have created through the repetition of certain kinds of notes and
29:40
then and the creation of a structure that enables you to decide what should be
29:44
next and what can't be next. But I mean that's I agree absolutely,
29:49
But a lot of a lot of the musicians that Della's loves, Berg Bulez,
29:56
there's not a lot of repetition. There's a kind of a lot of
29:59
free play, a lot of like the any space whatever, the especially with
30:03
Bullez, who he had a he had a he wrote a lot about Bulez,
30:10
But when he's talking about bulls, I mean, repetition of music is
30:14
not just simply the repetition of notes. It can also be the repetition of
30:18
beats, right, So it can be the repetition of a particular structure a
30:22
sequencing of beats, and so musical composition has and I'm by no means an
30:26
expert, of course, but I know enough to know that musical composition has
30:30
a number of different levels. But what's more important is this is the creation
30:34
of the kind of internal necessity whereby you know what must come next and what
30:40
cannot come next, and that is important. Like Bullez, you listen to
30:45
his music, I'm not a huge fan, but nonetheless, when you're listening
30:49
to it, you don't sort of expect that the next thing will be the
30:52
sound of an asteroid hitting the earth. You can kind of know what the
30:56
next thing might be. So it has its internals, and he creates this
31:00
own space of imminence that progresses and develops. That makes a lot of sense
31:06
because the one aspect where he starts talking about bird song about the I forget
31:12
the musician that does this, that writes whole songs as if you know,
31:19
copying the sound of birds. I can really see the internal necessity in regards
31:23
to that. So and this concept of the refrain he actually uses in a
31:29
chapter an example of bird song as territorializing, which is another concept we've already
31:34
mentioned today in terms of what we talked about the other week Chris about vitalism
31:40
and how action is not specifically human. He's also making a posthumanist philosophical move
31:47
in a sense of saying, this is not just a music's a music item
31:51
that humans invent, but birds use the refrain to mark territories. And it
31:56
has this whole concept of not being associated with the eye and the ocular centrism
32:01
of Western philosophy since Plato. It's saying, let's thinking audio terms or musical
32:07
terms rather than thinking of forums and identities. So it seems like a really
32:13
centralized concept that kind of unifies everything around it in a few ways. Yeah,
32:19
and that's certainly how they think of it. And it becomes so that
32:22
the refrain then is the foundation of the concept of the territory. The territory,
32:27
they say, is the first form of the concept of the assemblage,
32:30
and the assemblages, you know, the sort of the first form of later
32:34
concepts that developed out of that that kind of grow in scale and complexity.
32:39
So you know, if you want to to find the kind of the grounding
32:43
point for them, then it becomes this idea of the refrain. But they
32:45
also connect that refrain to notions of desire, because the refrain is a way
32:52
of organizing desire. So within the kind of ethological context and birds and so
32:59
forth, it's about mating rituals. But those mating rituals are also about saying,
33:06
you know, it's an invitation to somebody to join that particular territory,
33:08
to be part of that same kind of way of thinking. It's also a
33:12
kind of warning to all the other would be competitors and contenders to stay away.
33:17
So their desire is intrinsic in those kinds of sounds. Yeah, and
33:22
I can hear the birds outside declaring their territories at the moment. But if
33:28
we move instead from I guess this ecological context in terms of you know,
33:34
bird song what most people hear in terms of the refrain, and this will
33:39
probably connect to your discussion of desire that you just made. But how does
33:44
this connect to something like pop music, which uses the refrain in hooks and
33:50
and you know melody, and yeah, this becomes very much integrated in your
33:58
mind, right, It's like, so we're interesting to ask yourself, well,
34:00
why is this song a hit? And why is that song not a
34:02
hit? Like what is the you know what is the difference in the quality
34:06
of the way that song is produced versus that song that's produced. It's almost
34:10
impossible to understand. And if you don't think about it just in terms of
34:14
whether it's sold millions of copies or whatever, but think about it in terms
34:17
of did it have a form of affect of resonence such that you know,
34:22
fifty years later, people are still singing that song and still you know,
34:25
kind of developing memories and associations with that song. It's quite extraordinary, Like
34:30
it's really an extraordinary thing that our culture has produced. There's like three minute
34:35
pop songs which we think of as being just you know, kind of throw
34:37
away commercial things, but they're not like they they are an important part of
34:43
the way by which we structure our memories and our desires in contemporary society.
34:47
And you know that's for me, those other kinds of refrains and questions that
34:52
become really interesting, well, how do those songs function to structure memory,
34:57
to structure desire, to structure the waves which we communicate to each other and
35:00
so on. And it's been like really interesting to see all the bands that
35:05
have come out recently and wanted to prevent trump from using their music, you
35:12
know, so like Tom Petty's estate said, you can't use our work back
35:15
down, and various other bands have done as well. And I was reading
35:19
recently apparently Buick offered the Doors a whole bunch of money in nineteen sixty seven
35:23
to use one of their songs to advertise their cars, and Jim Morrison said,
35:29
if you do that, I'm going to buy a Buick and I'm going
35:31
to publicly smash it and set it on fire and tell everybody what a ship
35:37
card is. And they so they never used the Door song, and basically
35:43
Door songs that have been used for commercial purposes since then. But you know,
35:47
it's not we kind of think of that as been about the band's authenticity,
35:52
and sure that's part of it, but is it not also about a
35:54
sort of strongest sense that these songs do have an incredible capacit city to harness
36:01
and to galvanize desire. And you know, those which are explicitly say,
36:06
you know, we march to our deaths on the tune of a song.
36:07
It's something very powerful with that. He loved Edith pf Right. I think
36:13
I'm pronouncing her name right. He loved the just her. He loved her
36:16
pop songs, but he loved just the way that her voice would go off
36:22
tune sometimes like you see him kind of his eyes kind of like light up
36:27
when you when you when he when you bring up her. Yeah, that's
36:30
what Rolind Bart referred to as the grain of the world. So we've talked
36:32
about this term in terms of music, which is what it's closest to,
36:37
but it's also a concept for how to think philosophically and presumably how to write
36:43
philosophically, because that's how you think. So it would be other applications that
36:46
don't have to do with music or to do with writing or anything. Right,
36:52
So I can give you a different, completely different kind of example.
36:55
I'm working with a colleague at my university, Gordon Waye to in human geography,
37:01
and we've been working on a project relating to cycling and so over the
37:07
last month or so, we've been working on this article using the idea of
37:10
the refrain and of territory to think about cycling. And so within that chapter
37:15
on the refrain, they talk about this notion of critical distance, and so
37:20
critical distance is the space between creatures of the same species and creatures of a
37:27
different species and what is the right distance between them? So like, you
37:31
know, I guess that the global pandemic has made us super conscious of what
37:37
critical distance looks like. And we all get told to say, one point
37:39
five meters or two meters away from people of our own species and so forth,
37:45
whereas previously we never used to think about that too much, but if
37:46
we came up against a lion, we'd be like, well, you know,
37:51
two meters is probably not enough distance to be a lot further away.
37:54
So if you think about this in terms of cycling by which the regulation of
38:01
traffic is organized in Australia. And also I wrote around in Toronto a lot,
38:07
and people told me that writing in Toronto was scary, but I was
38:09
like, this is a paradise compared to Australia. We got lanes now,
38:15
we got lanes on every street in downtown. So well, I was constantly
38:19
shocked. I would be walking along and I get to an intersection and cars
38:22
would stop to let me cross, Like in Australia that doesn't happen. Like
38:27
cars do not stop to let you cross. If you want to cross,
38:29
you wait for the lights to change, or you just take your chances.
38:32
But they certainly ain't going to stop. And so this idea of traffic then
38:37
either treats all vehicles on the road as the same species, in which case
38:42
then it's just a question of distance between them, or they're treated as a
38:45
different species, which then produces a different set of problems, which is for
38:51
those I think about in terms of function, but for us are in terms
38:53
of whether or not you should be there or you shouldn't be there. So
38:57
if they are of the same species, then to me, and this is
39:00
the analogy I use in the paper, it's like saying it's perfectly fine to
39:06
have the fox and the chickens in the same coop, because all you need
39:08
to do is paint a white line down in the middle of the coop,
39:10
and you know the chickens are going to be safe. We know that's completely
39:15
false, but that's what they do with bikes, right, They've got trucks
39:20
and busses and cars zooming along and fifty sixty kilometers an hour, and you've
39:23
got a white line that's supposed to magically defend you from that, which you
39:29
know it doesn't. You go across your line, you die, So that's
39:32
a problem. Or alternatively, and this is more how it is in Australia.
39:37
The position is rather something like, well, the chickens should never have
39:40
been in the in the coop with the fox to begin with, because it
39:45
was clearly the fox's coop, and the chickens ought to have known that,
39:47
and they should never have been there. And if they get eaten by the
39:51
fox, that was their own fault because they shouldn't have been there. And
39:53
so in Australia they kind of there's a real trajectory to try to push bikes
39:59
off the road letely, not just onto separate lanes, but onto separate bike
40:01
paths and ideally onto trails in the bush or something, but just you know,
40:06
get out of our way. And so for me, it's quite interesting
40:09
to begin to think about the space of the road as a territory because the
40:14
founding question is I think false. If we assume that they're all just traffic,
40:19
that's a false assumption. So therefore, if we don't assume that they're
40:22
all traffic, we ask ourselves, well, what is the actual state of
40:25
relations between bikes and cars and trucks and buses. When we realize that actually
40:31
it's a predatory relation, it's a relation in which we acknowledge tacitly that the
40:37
truck has right away because it could kill us, okay, And all our
40:40
traffic laws are premised on this idea that the thing that can kill you should
40:45
be given right away, and that if you want to cross the road then
40:47
you're an idiot. You should keep out of the way the truck who should
40:51
have priority because it's doing important work and whatever. So for me, this
40:55
idea of the territory then becomes a way of questioning the foundations of some thing
41:00
is basic as traffic. All right. So we have two examples of refrains
41:06
in process, and it seems to be something about the generation of patterns,
41:09
or the generation in your in your mind, or the generation of complex human
41:15
organizations. And you mentioned to me in our pre discussion chat that you were
41:22
focusing on this chapter a little bit in your book. So with the last
41:24
little bit of time we have left, could you give us a preview of
41:30
what your thesis is, what people can look forward to, and maybe how
41:34
this concept of the refrain fits into the thesis that you're developing in that.
41:39
Yeah, So the book itself is about the idea or the possibility of using
41:45
the concept of the Assemblage to do forms of cultural analysis and critical work.
41:52
I you talk about the idea of the territory as one of the ways for
41:58
which the Assemblage presents to us, and I use the example of the kids
42:04
film Cars, which maybe you have seen or maybe not, but I must
42:07
have seen it. We we both have nieces and nephews, so I think
42:12
we've both seen it too. Yes, when that film came out, my
42:19
son was about three or four, and he absolutely loved that movie, so
42:22
I got to watch it many many times. But I remember at the time,
42:28
I mean, I quite like the movies. That's lots it's good about
42:30
it. But what was really striking to me was then walking around supermarkets and
42:34
seeing like cans of baked beans with images from cars on it, and wondering,
42:38
you know what, what is the correlation between those two things. How
42:43
do the kids look at that? And does it make them think that the
42:46
baked beans are going to taste better because it's got an image of the cars
42:50
on it. I don't know, And I tried asking my three year old,
42:52
but he was, of course useless, as three year olds are.
42:57
Why do you want this thing? Right? And the terrible co investigators.
43:02
But on the other hand, they are super interesting too because they kind of
43:07
point you towards things you might not otherwise have paid any kind of attention to.
43:12
And so it became really fascinated about how do these things function in a
43:15
marketing sense, and I started to think that really what they do is create
43:20
territories. And the reason I think this is because like if you try to,
43:25
like if you watch kids playing with toy versions of cars and so forth,
43:30
they don't really kind of try to replicate the movie in any kind of
43:35
way, but they take ideas and almost concepts from the movie, which they
43:42
then use and recombine in their own kinds of ways. So it seems to
43:45
me that what's important is that the film somehow creates a kind of territory that
43:51
their desire can occupy. It. It's a kind of an imminent space in
43:53
which cars can talk and cars can do crazy things that they know that they
43:59
don't do in reality, and this enables them to occupy that space, so
44:04
that the toys then become kind of props that enable them to create and occupy
44:08
this space. And that seems to me that's how the advertising works. And
44:13
I think also what's really interesting is that we tend to, in my view,
44:16
not pay enough attention to the notion of character. Like it seems to
44:20
me character is the formation of a territory. We always think of character in
44:24
plot terms, but if you talk to people about films, particularly film franchises
44:30
that that they like, Like in my family, we're mad fans for the
44:35
whole Fast and Furious franchise because they're just so super hilarious. And whenever we're
44:42
driving, we always have this kind of refrain family that if we're going to
44:46
write family, yeah, exactly part of family, but also what would Dom
44:52
do in this situation? You know, I'm stuck in a traffic jam?
44:55
What would Dom do? And I always I'll just go over the curve and
44:59
I'll go up on the footpath and I'll get around these cars. And everybody're
45:01
like, yep, don would do it. But that's that's extracting notions of
45:06
character, and it becomes then a kind of a territory that we can occupy,
45:09
and it becomes a sort of imminent space for the imagination. And I
45:13
think, to me, that's what's really fascinating, And I think that's why
45:16
films work, Like that's why we're interested in them. If you talk to
45:20
kids and watch them playing out their various versions of you know, Frozen or
45:24
whatever, that's what they take. They don't really give a shit about the
45:29
storyline. The storyline is fairly immaterial to them. The storyline just creates the
45:32
occasion for these interesting characters. And what they do is take the characters off
45:37
on new journeys and new kinds of adventures for them, for themselves. And
45:42
to me, those are territories. And that's how I try to think about
45:45
them in the book, because as these are territories, and we should be
45:49
interested in the production of territories, and then ask well, what kinds of
45:53
investments of desire do we make into these territories? And you know, that's
45:59
to me how contemporary popular culture works. Yeah, I was as you were
46:02
talking, I was thinking about the cinema books and when when do this starts
46:07
talking about the Western And I was thinking, and when I think of westerns
46:12
has nothing to do with westerns. Actually, I think of the eighties fighting
46:15
movies. You know that you first you have Dolph Lundron, and then you
46:19
have Steven Zagala, then you have Sean Claude van Dam and it's always one
46:23
person against the World's it's all of these and you know, even Sylvester Slone.
46:29
And then finally we get this new movie the is it called The Expendables,
46:32
the Expendables, and they give us a whole montage of just like every
46:37
single one you grew up with in the eighties, with all of these and
46:40
they're all doing the same thing. And because they're the territory of the one
46:45
person against the world is completely drawn away, so you have all no,
46:51
it's just eight different people acting like individuals against the world. But it is
46:55
also that, you know, that's the kind of thing we did as kids.
47:00
Like as kids, we would say, oh, I imagine if you
47:02
know, the Superman and Batman had a fight, and how would that go?
47:05
And now we have those movies like it's people who grew up as kids
47:08
going what if we did this with that character and did that with that character?
47:12
And now we're getting the film versions of it, which are always you
47:15
know, basically disappointing because they can never be as good as what we imagined
47:20
as kids would happen if you were to have Batman versus Superman or whatever.
47:22
They kind of overlayer with too much adult crap. And not just the pure
47:29
fun of what those characters themselves might do. So is this is most of
47:34
the book, this kind of developing through a contemporary examples film. Do you
47:38
have any other examples you want to throw at us while we close out?
47:43
Right? So no, not really Disappointingly, it's not really a book about
47:46
popular culture. These are some of the examples that I use. The other
47:50
example that I use from film is the Denzel Washington character in The Professional and
47:57
talk about the way by which his character is created through a set of like
48:05
there's a refrain there of the of the kinds of character ticks. So I
48:08
say, like, if you want to distinguish between all the various military training
48:13
characters that are revenge ouring to so Liam missing, Liam Nisson in the Taken
48:17
series and so on, John Wicks, right, right, it's real good.
48:23
But what distinguishes them is not their capacity to kill people, because that's
48:28
more or less, you know, kind of evenly distributed. Rather, what
48:30
distinguishes them is their kind of mental ticks. Right, So, the Denzel
48:35
Washington character is always polishing his apples, and he always starts his stop watch
48:38
before he starts punching people, and he stops his stop watching. So in
48:44
North America it's called the equalizer. I think, all right, I probably
48:46
got the name wrong, but the equalizer, Yeah, I think the same
48:51
character back in the day played both. Anyway, doesn't matter, I've probably
48:54
just got it wrong. But yes, those kinds of character traits. Like
49:00
what is the point of those character traits? But clearly they're necessary to distinguish
49:05
them. Otherwise you just have these kind of inhuman killing machines because they don't
49:09
have any particular moral position, et cetera, et cetera. It's all just
49:13
about revenge and so on. So these character traits are quite important. They
49:16
really play a very particular kind of role, which I think we need to
49:22
begin to think about. And for me, it comes back to this idea
49:24
of territory, of creating particular kinds of territorial spaces. So what we could
49:30
get out of that is these techs differentiate specifically the protagonists as they're a real
49:37
person. They're not just a killing machine, whereas everybody that's running up the
49:40
stairs and getting shot they don't have any of the they're they're not aolated or
49:45
individuated as a territory. So where we have sympathy for one, because of
49:50
the refrain except for the villain so as umberto echo showed with the Bond films
49:55
in very famous essay from the nineteen seventies. You know, it says,
49:59
all all the villains in Bond films are sexually aberrant. They all have,
50:02
you know, these various character traits in other words, which you know,
50:07
people have read to say, well that this demonizes these various forms of sexuality,
50:12
which is undoubtedly true. But in terms of how it was I think
50:15
trying to function, it was also trying to say, well, how do
50:19
we make the villains seem particularly villainous, how do we make them seem you
50:22
know, a worthy adversary for what the hero is trying to do, and
50:28
what kinds of investments of desire can we attract towards it. The other thing
50:32
that I do say about popular culture in my book, and I guess this
50:35
is a good one to finish with. I took my kids to disney Land
50:39
in Florida in twenty seventeen, just at the time when Trump was being inaugurated.
50:50
So it was a really interesting time to be a kind of you know,
50:52
cultural studies critic wandering around America thinking, you know, what the fuck's
50:55
going on in this country. But it was really interesting to me about Disneyland
51:01
was this was the new Star Wars park had not yet been built, but
51:05
it was in the process of being built, but already there were Disney things
51:08
happening in the park. But what's interesting to me was that the most dominant,
51:14
most kind of prevalent and pervasive image from the whole Star Wars franchise was
51:23
the Stormtroopers. Like I really thought Disney it would be all about the rebels,
51:29
that it would be Luke Skywalker and so on and so forth. But
51:31
no, it was Darth Vader, it was Captain Fasmo. It was Stormtroopers,
51:37
And like every half hour or something, you'd hear that and then have
51:42
all these Imperial Stormtroopers marching around the park. And to me, at first
51:46
this seemed utterly incongruous, And then I thought, but then, if you
51:50
think about it, Trump's about to be inaugurated, what is the most dominant
51:53
image that America has of itself right now? It's as an empire. Like
51:59
it seems to me that it's not actually that surprising that the imperial side of
52:02
Star Wars should be attracting all this investment of desire because in the country that
52:08
is the most powerful empire in known history. And so I think that there's
52:14
a really interesting thing to be thought about there, because when I was a
52:16
kid, when Star Wars first came out, there is no way as a
52:21
kid you would want to wear a Darth Vader mask or a Stormtrooper mask or
52:24
whatever. You know, those were just absolutely the bad guys. No one
52:29
you know, you'd had to take turns of being the bad guy. No
52:30
one wanted to be a Stormtrooper because you know, they were terrible. But
52:34
now like that seemed to shoot right and they can't shoot. Yeah, I
52:37
think in The Mandalorian that's scene done by Tycho is absolutely brilliant with his two
52:44
Stormtroopers are trying to shoot a can or something and they just both keep missing
52:47
it. Absolutely, you know, it's a brilliant sort of fan generated kind
52:51
of moment in film. But yeah, when I was a kid, like,
52:53
nobody wanted to be Darth Vader. Nobody wanted to be the bad guy.
52:57
Everyone wanted to be the Rebels. Luke impossibly with regarded as a hero
53:00
that you might want to be. I mean, when you watch Luke now
53:02
and he seems so whiny. You're kind of like, well, I guess
53:07
I can see why people would rather be dough. I wanted to go to
53:08
Tashi Station to get some to buy some power converters. He's like, ridiculously
53:15
whiny for this hero. I'll never get off this island or this planet or
53:19
whatever. And you see, whiny, how you're going to become a hero.
53:22
But yeah, this kind of prevalence of the of the of the imperial
53:27
aspects and the dark side and everything right in the heart of Disneyland, the
53:30
happiest place on Earth, it's meant to be all about American values. To
53:34
me, that that was the image that summed up my trip to the US
53:37
at that point in time. And I try to say a little bit about
53:40
that in the book, and probably not enough, but I think there's a
53:44
there's a whole other project to come back to around this that would be trying
53:47
to trace the investments of desire in American popular culture. Right. Well,
53:52
I think that's a perfect image to end it on because that can be refrained
53:58
to people's minds. So that's the book that's coming out this year September.
54:05
But if you like this thing to Ian, he's got many more books,
54:08
including the only one I can personally recommend, which is Dylla's on the internet.
54:14
Plus about what thirteen years of journal entries or so a longer if I'm
54:20
honest, I mean, I mean of yours of your journal that you've you're
54:23
editing. Oh right, yeah, yeah, I guess I think I saw
54:28
it was on thirteen. Anyway, So thank you very much to Ian,
54:34
Thank you Chris, and we are going to thanks for having me, Thanks
54:38
for having this. It's great. This was excellent Ian as our first celebrity
54:43
guest. I couldn't I couldn't be happier, totally thrilled. Yep, me
54:47
too, Thank you boys, and so from the pill Pod, we are
54:53
out goodbite to