D + G

Not Dolce and Gabbana but Deleuze and Guattari.

The masters of the non-dendro-centric rhizome. Can the inseperable internality of the authorial polypersona not impact on our essentially biunivocal responses? Meccanosphere.

Did that make any sense? If so then you don't need to read the rest of this entry. In fact you're probably not going to be reading this blog. And well done on that decision.

Below is the ultimate D+G I have found so far. If you can tell me what it means please let me know.


'A field of anuses, just like a pack of wolves. Does not the child, on the periphery, hold onto the wolves by his anus? The jaw descends to the anus. Hold on to those wolves by your jaw and your anus. The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it's not that simple; jaw and wolf form a multiplicity that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf, as a function of other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities, between threshholds.'

Oh yes. Read it again. Do you get a strange feeling that this does make sense, but that you can't quite get it? I think D+G have hit on a brilliant formula. They have some excellent ideas - using Dumezil's bipolar political structure (priest/king) and then adding a third structure (the Nomad War Machine) is brilliant. The problem is that they push these ideas to the limits of sense, which is admirable. It's just that most radical thinkers like them have the courtesy to compress and edit these ideas again before publishing.

Anyway I highly recommend A Thousand Plateaus. Go for it and let me know if you ever did hold onto the wolf, via jaw or anus or even both...

Troy in Cambridge

http://www.troy-in-england.co.uk/p0.htm

I especially enjoyed the masses of comparative place-name evidence which is (hog)Wash. Also amusing is the superb level of inconsistency - strict reliance on Homer's numbers followed by total denial about similar issues as they raise inconvenient arguments.

This is the peril of ambitions such as this - trying to back up something inherently implausible by reference to irrelevancies. Why on earth would the names stay the same if the whole myth has been reterritorialized?

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization )

The underlying arguments about migration, folk-memory and the implications thereof are very interesting, though. I can imagine a despot harnessing a folk-tale and changing some of the place-names to suit political purposes.