In his book on Foucault first published in 1986, Deleuze drew a diagram in the last chapter, Foldings, that depicts in overview the Outside as abstract machine, defined by the line of the outside (1), which separates the unformed interplay of forces and resistance from the strategies and strata that filter the affects of power relations to become “the world of knowledge”.
The central Fold of subjectification, of ‘Life’ is “hollowed out” and ignored by the forces of the outside as they are realized in the strata fulfilling the obligation of the diagram to “come to fruition in the archive.” This is dual process of integration and differentiation. The residual dust of the affective relations produced by force upon force, integrate into the strata even as they differentiate to forms of realization – visible or articulable. The ‘empty’ fissure/fold attracts and repels these moving curvilinear strategies as they differentiate and ”hop over” it. Ostensibly, the Fold of subjectification effectuates change as both continuously topological, and as discontinuously catastrophic (as in leaping over). So, the process of crystallization from informal to formal paradoxically integrates as it differentiates. Deleuze’s somewhat paradoxical description follows:
The informal relations between forces differentiate from one another by creating heterogeneous curves which pass through the neighborhood of particular features (statements) and that of the scenes which distribute them into figures of light (visibilities). And at the same time the relations between forces became integrated, precisely in the formal relations between the two, from one side to the other of differentiation. This is because the relations between forces ignored the fissure within the strata, which begins only below them. They are apt to hollow out the fissure by being actualized in the strata, but also to hop over it in both senses of the term by becoming differentiated even as they become integrated. Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault
So this “pineal gland” figure of the Fold is the “center of the cyclone”, where life is lived “par excellence” as a “slow Being”.
As clarifying as Deleuze’s diagram is in summarizing the layered dimensionality of the Foucauldian/Deleuzian hybrid, some modifications will be drawn off to alternatively express the realizations of the play of informal forces as this diagram takes on the particular features of a Research Creation praxis. True to the originating wax tablet diagramma, the relations are drawn and redrawn, in recognition, after Bergson’s notion of recognition as the intensive point where memory meets action of the contemporary social field that situates it. The shifts from the 19C to 20C disciplinary diagram of Foucault’s focus modulates with the late 20C society of control diagram formulated by Deleuze. The shorthand for the force field relevant to the research creation diagram of practice-led arts research today is a transdisciplinary diagram, the gamespace of just-in-time capitalism, which necessarily elicits mutations in the Foucault/Deleuze model. Generating the power-resistance relations in this outside qua gamespace are, among others, the revitalized forces of the military-academic-entertainment complex that fuel economic models such as the Creative Industries that pervade the conditions of play in artistic research. McKenzie Wark concludes his book GAMER THEORY, with prescient comments on the black hole quality of a topology of the outside qua contemporary “gamespace” from Deleuze and Guattari (ATP) and Guy Debord. “Only by going further and further into gamespace might one come out the other side of it, to realize a topology beyond the limiting forms of the game. Deleuze and Guattari: “… one can never go far enough in the direction of [topology]: you haven’t seen anything yet — an irreversible process. And when we consider what there is of a profoundly artificial nature […] we cry out, ‘More perversion! More artifice!’ — to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of [topology] creates of necessity and by itself a new earth.”
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