to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant”; the model is “vortical,” not laminar, operating “in an open space throughout which thing-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things”; that model models not a “striated” space that “is counted in order to be occupied,” but a “smooth” space that “is occupied without being counted”; and the subtlest & hardest for me to grasp among all these distinctions, it is “problematic,” not “theorematic.”
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@adamgreenfield is this all just a long-winded way of saying “it’s complicated”?
@luis_in_brief I used to think things like that, but now I’m of the opinion that it’s ungenerous. There is specific sense here, buried in (and retrievable with some effort from) what is admittedly frequently enough turgid or infelicitous language.
@adamgreenfield Lawyers don’t generally get to throw stones about turgid language, but I have a high tolerance for academic prose and yet… I find a lot of D&G and similar so impenetrable that it feels like the authors didn’t want it read. So I usually end up respecting that wish.
I would read a history of how continental crit acquired such a reader-hostile style. I suppose some roots in Kant, and the Marx of Kapital? (Not the Marx of Manifesto.)
@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield although now I'm curious about how LLMs would do summarizing D&G. Maybe it's all just an extremely foresightful defense against being hoovered up by AI
@shauna @luis_in_brief If only ‘twere that straightforward.
@shauna @luis_in_brief About D&G specifically, though, my contention is that if I can understand them, then anyone can.
@shauna @luis_in_brief At the cost of patient, painstaking, careful reading, of course, as it ever was! And I don’t doubt that many people, if not most, would regard what they get out of it as a not particularly worthwhile return on the investment of time and energy. But that’s not the same thing as being incomprehensible.
Nobody insists more on clarity and care in the craft of prose than I do, and I’m first to admit this text is hardly exemplary in that regard. It can be understood, though.
@luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield
I actively get mad when it seems like an author is being purposefully illegible, regardless of the topic or domain. I usually set it down immedtiately. Currently wading through a modestly illegible book purely so I can talk about it with a friend, looking forward to never reading something like this again.
@shauna @luis_in_brief If it’s a text originally written in English, that I’m reading in English? Yeah, I despise that. I have beef with Harney & Moten particularly for this, though people just seem to love them.
@luis_in_brief Kant is my go-to, yeah, as the locus classicus of the preposterous idea that prose should be impenetrable & you as the reader should have to fight to extract meaning from it. It’s not uncommon for me to struggle with other German writers in English translation — Marx and the old Nazi, both, e.g. — but Kant is the only one I balked at entirely & turned completely to secondary sources in order to get my head around.
So far as the French are concerned...bof. There I often enough think the text is only the traces scratched in cuneiform clay of some psychic transmission between two ENS-trained minds most of the bandwidth of which is in the far UV, with what we get on the page something like one-fifteenth of the actual signal.
