chaosmosis comments on A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts? - Less Wrong

24 Post author: sixes_and_sevens 25 April 2012 12:12PM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 25 April 2012 10:50:37PM 10 points [-]

If we took fifty literature postgrads from across the English speaking world, and asked them to explain the sentence, would they give consistent answers?

Comment author: chaosmosis 26 April 2012 02:15:00AM *  6 points [-]

If they were familiar with the way Deleuzians phrase things then about 80% would, is my guess. Mostly the quality of postgrads is pretty poor because lots of philosophy professors suck, which influences this.

I got the same interpretation as Tim S though. I've read some D(&G) stuff before.

"Infinite" is just Deleuzians being overdramatic and imprecise with language. Or, perhaps they're not trying to convey the logic of the argument so much as the idea or feel of the argument. Deleuzians often have a hard time seeing the division between things like logic and persuasion and bias. They're right insofar as there is no hard concrete division between those things, but it sometimes makes them lazy.

RE: Below comments: "flows" mean something specific within Deleuzian terminology. It implies interconnectedness and chains of causality with uncountable numbers of variables interacting with whatever it is that they're talking about. It also has implications related to perceiving objects as dynamic rather than as static.

Once you understand the jargon and have read his arguments a bit it's actually sort of pleasant to read Deleuze's stuff. His frequent use of metaphors allows him to make subtle references to other comments and arguments that he's made in the past. It's like how jargon is useful, except the benefit is not precision but is rather the breadth of meaning which each phrase can convey. Also, it's almost never that the associations of arguments invalidate the misinterpretation, but that the misinterpretation overlooks specific shades of meaning. It's difficult to interpret on some rare occasions but once it's interpreted there's a lot of meaning in it.

Most of the Deleuzian secondary authors suck though. They give me headaches.