Live no more in fragments.
Only connect....
E.M. Forster

Sometimes a book becomes less a tree and more a map. That is the way John Rajchman wants us to understand his effort to make Gilles Deleuze understandable: _The Deleuze Connections_(2000) Anyone who has struggled with the problem of roots, tubers, and leaves knows what I'm writing about: it is much better to be capable of lines of flight. "Lines of flight" will now be my way of referring to what rhetoric knows as Invention. (Some composition teachers might think of it as brainstorming.) Lines of flight means we start going and we just keep going, and where we'll end up can't be predicted.

1. Disjunctive syntheses are prior to predication and identification. Be guided that is by the maxim: retain what augments the number of connections. "And" before "Is."

2. To think is first of all to experiment, not to judge. Rhetoric has always recognized the priority of Invention to Judgment.

3. In a culture as uncertain as ours is--since we lack any coherent account of the commonplaces--we must then willingly accept 'empiricist' and 'pragmatic' labels. This helps us distinguish our aims from those of semantics, philosophers who have made the linguistic turn.

4. Connections are not found; they are forged. I can't think of a better way to describe Invention. Take this as your motto: Remain attentive to the unknown knocking at the door.

5. The logic advanced in this position is that prior to all identity and all determination there is a layer of sense. Deleuze conceived this layer in terms of series, converging and diverging series.

6. Looking to modern art, we witness a struggle to free sensation from the probable; this helps us discover the singular.

7. The greatest problem in this energy is that it poses violence to the common. By requiring to shake up the common for the sake of an alienation effect that would suspend all our prior stupidities, we forsake the places where we normally go for our arguments. On the other hand, what better way to begin a search for new places to begin arguments?

8. Deleuze seems to have joined the romantic imperative to make it radically new: "There arises a new enemy of thought, more insolent and self-assured than those of the last century--a communicational stupidity, to which corresponds a new form of power which Deleuze proposed the name 'control.' Now, if you see 'communication' as the shadow of rhetoric you get the perspective you require: communication is never inventional, while rhetoric must always be.

9. Society is always leaking. The impersonal 'they' wants you to write this way; so you find another way, your own line of flight.

10. The position requires two principles: affirmation and selection. With these two an endless series of Inventions may be possible?

MGGreer