Inspired by the Stories from Paolino’s Tapes: Private Recordings 1985-1993, Terence Blake at his AGENT SWARM has blogged a set of interesting posts that draw an affective portrait of Paul Feyerabend [*, *, *, *, *, *, *, *]. From the start, Terence shares an excerpt from Bertold Bretch’s Three Penny Opera sung and recited by Feyerabend himself. For Terence, the image that synthesizes such excerpt contains a good part of Feyerabend’s whole philosophy:

“‘And the ones stand in darkness and the others stand in the light. We only see those who stand in the light, those who stand in the darkness you don’t see’. Feyerabend describes the scene, where you see a few people in the light, jumping around and there is a huge number of people in darkness, being born, dying, laughing and crying. This, according to Feyerabend, is humanity. Not just the elect in the light, but all the others who go unsung and unnoticed. When intellectuals talk about “humanity” they just mean other intellectuals, in the First World.”

Terence’s aim is to consider Feyerabend as a thinker who refers to the arrogance of the intellectuals that speak in the name of humanity, the ‘insatiable lumivores’ ―as Terence calls them―: ‘who pose as spokesman for an abstraction, and who cultivate their intellect (and their power) at the expense of their humanity’. Regard to this, Terence also suggests in which sense this view can be paired with Deleuze’s foucaultian remarks on the indignity of speaking for the others, and underlines how ‘sometimes the context is completely silly’:

“Sometimes it is advisable to avoid an exchange as the context forbids any real thinking and we are faced with just sad old ego talk: no real communication, no openness, caricatural binary oppositions, hectoring and bullying, oversimplification, aggressive declarations and emotions that replace the subtle and nuanced intensities of thought. One should just walk away, or at the worst smile and say ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Sometimes it can be necessary to stay put and speak up, because even if a dialogue is impossible the monologue of the self-elected is inacceptable, one must show, to others and even to one self, that alternatives exist, that other voices are possible.”

While I could not but associate all his remarks with the discussion I recently had with John Mullarkey, Terence exemplifies this regard describing how, in one occasion, Feyerabend’s admiration and respect for his friend Erwin Schroedinger leaded him to decline an invitation to participate in a TV show dedicated to the life of his friend, ‘as he did not know into what context he would be put’. With this respect, Terence also detects how Feyerabend’s affective tone considered Schroedinger as ‘someone who played the role of intercessor, as Deleuze would call it, helping him to live and to think’:

“He thus managed to select out the joyful affect of having known and being inspired by Schroedinger, without having to suffer through the sad affects of sterile intellectual discussion. However, sometimes it can be more appropriate and rewarding to accept the convocation and to turn it to one’s advantage in some way.”

Terence also exemplifies this further point, describing the occasion when Feyerbend ‘decided to break with the asymmetry’ of his first job interview ―as it could not but be ‘reinforced and recoded by the asymmetry of power’―, by speaking to his interviewers ‘on an equal footing’:

“‘At the end he said “Stop! You ask me a lot of questions, now I want to ask you some questions”…Even here in this little anecdote we can see Feyerabend’s lifelong engagement in favour of immanence, and refusal of the asymmetries of transcendence. He remarks that this act of enunciation, plus Schroedinger’s recommendation, got him the job… Feyerabend is concerned with the microphysics of power and resistance as expressed in the ordinary contexts of everyday life… We have seen declining (Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’) and restoring symmetry (Feyerabend’s ‘Now I want to ask you some questions’). Another response is exemplified by Schroedinger’s action when he saw a Nazi SS harassing a Jew: ‘he went up to him and spit him in his face’. For Feyerabend, while courageous, is not to be understood solely in terms of refusing to give in to fear. More deeply he remarks that ‘Few people give such expression to their disgust’. When such disgust is felt before the intolerable, many people do not take action, but suppress their feelings or turn away. Schroedinger would ‘go forward and act on it’. Feyerabend piles up anecdotes and character traits to create an ethical and intellectual portrait of Schroedinger as more than just object of memory and of historical narrative, a field of singularities capable of moving and inspiring decades after his death. ‘What a person!’, Feyerabend exclaims.”

To this point, we can see already how the affective portrait that Terence draws of Feyerabend is showing also the ethical and intellectual (affective) portrait that Feyerabend draws of his friend Schroedinger. Terence also includes the review of other very interesting examples concerned to Feyerabend’s ideas: the meditations on metapoiesis that can be found in Dreyfus and Kelly’s All Things Shining (for Terence, ‘the problem posed by their book is an ethical one: what to do when faced with a surge of physis in us or around us?’); the opposition between the ‘confusionists and superficial intellectuals’ and the ‘deep thinkers’ (which is ‘well illustrated by the contrast that Andrew Pickering sketches between Mondrianesque and De Kooning-like approaches’) and also, the importance that Feyerabend gives to rhythm and style in Xenophanes (where ‘the style of a scientific paper today is not that of ordinary language, but a a special sort of elevated language that has been formalised so as to eradicate the imaginal dimension, what Xenophanes calls the plasmata’). But perhaps most importantly, we can see also how all these lines that Terence draws to give us an affectively portrait of Feyerabend, are also echoing with his very affective portrait of Deleuze:

“Deleuze detested schools of thought and tried to teach his students to ‘love their solitude’, to reconcile them with the necessity of being an outsider and of treating their teachers as intercessors and not models. His aim was not communication and consensus, but to impart a conceptual matter that could be worked over in many different ways. He did not want ‘immediate reactions’, where the ego asks questions and poses objections that would disappear if it had been patient enough to wait, but something deeper that came from his students’ solitude and goodness. He did not want merely intellectual reactions, but an alliance of intellect and emotion. He wanted to protect them from the impulse to imitate and to join, preferring a pedagogy of the outside. Feyerabend declares his admiration for Schroedinger: ‘he was a good guy’, that is to say that he was an outsider who would not shut up. He would not stay and keep silent in a situation where he was not in agreement, but either leave or speak out and give his opinion. He could not be prevented from acting on his opinions either.”

We have to admit that it is not but through Terence’s intensive reading of Feyerabend and Deleuze, that he can draw the lines of their affective portraits (without mentioning that he also was a Deleuze’s student for a period of time, which might be something invaluable). Within this intensive reading, Terence finds that these lines can be traced ‘by a constant pulsation between image and concept, and affect and concept’ and how this indeed means ‘knowing singularities by heart‘. Thus, with the portrayed presence of Feyerabend and Deleuze, Terence confirms us in which sense it is not but through love and admiration that this intensive reading is possible, and that with it is possible to trace the conceptual lines ―ie, to grasp the philosophical problems― posed by these authors, so to give voice and make speak the singularities that compose their untimely thought. As Deleuze says elsewhere:

“You have to be able to love the insignificant, to love what goes beyond persons and individuals, you have to open yourself to encounters and find a language in the singularities that exceeds individuals, a language in the individuation that exceeds persons”.

[Addedum: Terence have just posted another entry for the series: Sympathy For The Beast: Feyerabend’s Animal Becoming]