canon

One of the funny lines from the new Transformers movie (which I have now seen three times) is when Ironhide whips out two large weapon-looking things from his wrists and ‘aims’ them at the human teenager helping the Autobots and says: I just wanted to show him my canons.

There is an element of mechano-homosocial desire that triangulates the elderly Ironhide with the young male human and Ironhide’s ‘canons’. What will mecha get excited about when anime worlds one day become reality? Probably their canons.

Here are some canons from the internets to enjoy while drinking your morning coffee. First, a dude on two guitars all laid back and relaxed.

Second, when it is time to get excited, what was once the most watched youtube video of all time:

Via Inmanencia, EGS have posted some more video lectures on youtube. Check out DeLanda on Deleuze. DeLanda’s work would be part of the current Deleuzian canon…
Watching and listening to DeLanda speak about the geology of morals makes me question the nature of Deleuzian discourse that does not take seriously the invocation to stutter in one’s own language. DeLanda: “And then I shot the bird.”

My anecdotal assessment of literal stuttering derived from my own experience as a stutterer bolstered with some brief reading about stuttering is that it is an affective short-circuit. Most researchers of so-called speech disorders seek to locate the problem of stuttering in the stuttering subject. There is something wrong with the way the stuttering speaker enunciates and expresses words. Stuttering is therefore a problem of expression. This is a juridico-medical discourse of stuttering. There is something wrong (a judgement) and it is located in the neuro-physiological composition of the subject (medical). The affective disposition of the subject (habitus) is broken as it betrays a manifest inability to properly modulate the contours of affective activation that course through everyday expression. What if instead of this assessment of stuttering organised around a transcendental speaking subject as an author producing sense through manipulation of the human physiology of verbal expression, stuttering was located within the event of sense.

Words have an affective timbre, but concepts inculcate affects as weapons. Weaponised affects are concepts arrayed by the operative outside of the multiplicities across which the concepts move. As the speaking subjects also moves within concepts expressed the verbal enunciation there is a relay or correspondence between at least two series of sense: one belonging to the sense extracted from language and the other extracted from the multiplicity of the concept. The affective short circuit of stuttering then would not be located within the subject, but within the event of sense distributed across the body of the speaking subject, but also the ‘body’ of language, the ‘body’ of words, and the bodies of the various other elements within the event of the copncept.

The non-human affects of the concept interact with the human affects mobilised (or immanently ‘in-acted’ to use a neologism from my diss) through expression. The interaction within groups is therefore across the signifying assemblages of language (human affects) and the asignifying assemblages of the concept (non-human affects). Stuttering in one’s own language is not simply reproducing a model of enunciation deprived of the assumed slick correlation between the sense of language and its realisation in a state of affairs, but of a painful attentiveness in the non-correlation between the multiplcities of the asignifying assemblages of the concept and the signifying assemblages of language. There is always a gap or fall into language between the two, but instead of jumping off the cliff, stuttering means the excruiating task of mountain climbing down the face of sense.

Academics are supposed to speak well. Sometimes they speak too well. I wonder if they properly comprehend the play of non-human and human affects in expression and the prduction of sense if these affects are weaponised…