Navigating Space with Deleuze

Intro:
Before we begin, this is a third year university course outline-based essay. Studies show that less than half of college enrolment make it this far; that said, don’t stress yourself. I didn’t get the greatest mark, only a measly 73% and to paraphrase my instructor “It’s just Deleuzian fluff about time and space”, which to me suggests it’s genius because Deleuze wrote theories to avoid structures his whole life, to a very bizarre sense of being and articulating in writing, (why they teach us this 'away with all that’s been’ type anarchy yet insist we adhere to a structure is becoming increasingly asinine… in that way both Deleuze and myself are victims of ‘be the change you want see’.)
If you want a refresher on cultural theory terminology, forget about your normal dictionary, and get prepared to spend more time reading wikipedia than contemplating the article, so just relax and enjoy the fluff.

“THE PYSCHO-TEMPORAL DERIVE:
NAVIGATING SPACE WITH RHIZOMATIC STANCE OF DELEUZE”

Imagine a collection of threads, crossing and holding each other, in a freeform without gravity and the constraints of earthly being, but in motion. Each intersections of material, a fractal of the entirety, and with every movement a friction within that space. A push and pull is created for motion of the whole. The collisions of every thread creating energy, one that spread beyond the intersection, as if creating energy, one that spreads beyond the intersection, as if creating heat, in which the surrounding space is forever changed by the kinetic reaction.

“Time is no longer related to the movement it measures, but rather movement to the time that conditions it.” (~ Deleuze 27).

To visualize such a statement could provide and number of creations. Through comparative analysis, my response aims to show how one may move through a spatial reality in Gilles Deleuze’s essay entitled “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize Kantian Philosophy” (1997). His discourse on the recipe for time provides the relationship between change (as an idea) and a critique of the necessity to measure that movement (in order to contextualize the difference, or place it within a tangible framework), show Deleuzian theory to be portrayed in the actions of those who chose to challenge urban environments with a similar sense of deconstruction. The Situationist International “Theory of the Derive” written by Guy Debord is a written plot of creating circumstances of movement through a metropolis setting in order to experiment with how “everything moves and changes in time [people and/or perceptions], but in [in this case dominating urban structure] itself does not…” (Deleuze 29). It is movement through these forms that alters the experience of recognizing structures; be it the structure of time, or ‘psychogeographical contours’ that may be manipulated, to change the experience of them. If one were to of Deleuze’s criticism of the definition of time as succession, space by simultaneity, and permanence by eternity (28) as more relative to the space which surrounds the threads in the blanket of time, it has more true existence in perception and affect (like the derive) rather than the tangible “derived from meteorological movements. It has become the time of the city and nothing, the pure order of time” (28). As such, if one were to accept Paul Virgilio’s theory from his book “Landscape of Events” (2000), “that time has finally overcome space as our main mode of perception” (Tschumi X) how then would an expanded practice of the Situations move through time?

The Situationists in their ideology, functioned in a quite specific structure, like Virgilio’s notion “[thier] event is any one of all possible occurrences, one of which must happen under stated circumstances” (Tschumi ix). The correlation between Deleuze’s idea that (time) needs to be from being simply a denotation, and the Situationists aberrant nature of ‘break through’ for chance and change to create progress, is this: finding a new experience for a structure that is preexisting will lead to a progression in how consecutive structures are created and perhaps more importantly; how they are defined. The reinterpretation of the spacial qualities would function like the Kantian/Rimbaud concept-object relation, where the “itinerary of the [individual]” is the ‘active form’ and the (temporal) landscape is “merely potential matter” (Deleuze 30). Yet it is evident that time and space are preexisting structures because no matter how delightful contemplating how “a landscape has no fixed meaning, no privileged vantage point, it is only by the itinerary of the passerby” (Tschumi xi) seems to be; they are objective states of being, and cannot be reduced to a subjective notion of permanence/eternity. To understand the true plot of Deleuzian theory that time and space pertain to something as erratic as ‘potential data’, I ask myself: what barriers of time would the Situationists desire to liberate themselves from if they moved through the “constant currents, fixed points and vortexes” (Debord) of time like a derive? The answer lays ahead!

Taking into consideration the Situationist structure, that “the derive must be defined in accordance both with it’s own logic and with its relations with social morphology” (Debord), assuming ‘social morphology’ means evolution, a temporal derive may only exist with how time affects the whole of existence and the investigation part, with ‘breaking down barriers and what not would only exist in the individual’s ability to adapt. (In short all this turns us into lunatics). Deleuze also argues that we are “interior to time” and that space as well remains interior to the mind (31), is my further investigation the is freed from predetermined destination, but only through memory. How it exists in the ‘inner sense’ is the permeability of time where time is freed and the only place a temporal-derive can happen (hence the title of this article); in this way may consider time to be something to be visited at any moment by the process of recollection past and contemplation of the future. However it cannot be an objective restructuring of the entirety because what is being articulated (with ponderings that are as structurally relevant a Situationist derive experience) is: 1. personality, 2. his individual endurance, and 3. a connection to the divine (which is likely the goal here!).

To open the door for the creation of time to be like a space in itself, open to an exploration like a physical existence, the possibilities remain with only the supernatural or else entirely contradictory. If the urban psychogeography of the traditional derive were paralleled to the ‘imposition of action on time,’ then an “action of chance” (debord) could only mean to move through it blindly as it if were a landscape but a landscape that is the result of actions. Proving thus that time and space equals fate; chance is a game of personality and connectivity with little to no defining moments for permanent objectivity, or for redefining something as vast as time has shown itself to be. The Situationist International admitted the contradiction inherent with these types of (dare I say, personal) deconstructionist ploys by acknowledging the need to know about the constructs they are choosing to move through (as if those constructs were not there). I stand firmly to say that I can imagine any point in time, a swirling, a piece of the picture, an expression that is reminiscent of something else, a pause, two people of different earths in the same room, a deep breath, a different season, and not change a damn thing. Yet my ability to articulate the insanity of what type of spatial comprehension that might pertain to seems to be the issue, what is most often left out is location; my concern is that intentionality is left out because they don’t want to tell the truth about where they imagine themselves and who/what they are talking to… If an amalgamation of individual internal phenomena is how they affect a social morphology; then it is of utmost importance to say what you are doing in your mind, making the other derive here a navigation out of the mental health crisis because the majority don’t want to hear it from low-lives, as much as no wants to put some rubber boots thinking it will help them walk around the city blindfolded; the experience of being ‘within something greater than you’ gets called insanity leaving thousands of hopefuls scrambling a way to articulate what is happening under the messy guidance that the individual’s truth as the ‘the passerby’ is called crazy, pushing us all further and further into mostly irrelevant discourse when 1 book could explain it all. The truth is that it damages the construct of my future structures, because we the people of culture can’t say it without being mutely objective to define a closeness to god without saying the word: g.o.d. So to this I profess that Deleuze is wrong all over the place, with wording that is sometimes tragic showing bouts of self-possession realizations like John in the Bible, all while citing the laws, states of being, and structures of description terms to be up for obliteration. My what conundrum the children of conceptualism must find themselves; as “I think there for I am” becomes a clustered quasi effort to give one last kick at the can to prevent the inevitable, that Time is here to stay; you don’t exist without it. So enjoy your psycho-temporal conundrums with spatial hindrances affecting all of humanity, just articulate it well, tell me what saves you from hell, and understand that nothing is going to tear down a city block because you walked into wall when you went out to find a new way of understanding the city, then how to build them.

c/o NorthEastSouthWest, Julianne Chladny,
Essay response for HUMN:311 Space Time Continuum

Bibliography went missing, will update at a later date.

So there it is. I changed the ending quite a bit, the whole thing was a bit more poetic, but that didn’t go over so well. So I said what I was saying but bolder, which is that I feel sort of abused by the High Art Deleuze phenonema, I understand what he is saying perfectly (I don’t understand the need to discuss it so much), and I think he feels abused by cognitive structure which makes me perceive him to have low standards for what should be done. (‘Boo Hoo, there is structure at the core of existence’ and whatnot; if you were better you’d see that it’s love at the core and be overjoyed as they say); The rhizomes are ‘Light’ and there is no going back. ;-)
So long and farewell, forever and day, until tomorrow, I bid you adieu, and condolences, forever and at once, most sincerely thanks and apologies, signing off with Deluzian stance, together and never further away from the heart,
~Julianne

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Chladny, Julianne Claire (2019) “Psycho-analysis of the Temporal Derive: A correlation of the Situationist International and Deleuzian Theory of Time.” Http://www.JCenterprises.international/blog/2019/1/23/the-psycho-temporal-derive-navigating-space-with-the-rizomatice-stance-of-deleuze