2003-06-28

D&G- Movements and Go


p281 [a wonderful way of putting things]
"""
Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature
imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement of a
moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings, in other words,
pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below and above the
threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perceptions are relative;
there is always a threshold capable of grasping what eludes another: the
eagle's eye... But the adequate threshold can in turn operate only as a
function of a perceptible form and a perceived, discerned subject. So that
movement in itself <i>continues</i> to occur elsewhere: if we serialize
perception, the movement always take place above the maximum threshold and
below the minimum threshold, in expanding or contracting intervals
(microintervals). Like huge Japanese wrestlers whose advance is too slow and
whose holds are too fast to see, so that what embraces are less the wrestlers
than the infinite slowness of the wait (what is going to happen?) and the
infinite speed of the result (what happened?).
[...]
there is no movement that is not infinite; that the movement of the infinite
can occur only by means of affect, passion, love, in a becoming that is the
girl, but without reference to any kind of "mediation"
"""


p352 [a long quote that pulls together a lot of ideas under 'games']
"""
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State
apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from
the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the
space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China
played it. Chess pieces are codes; they have an internal nature and intrinsic
properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive.
They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a
bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power,
and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the
chess player of the game's form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are
pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous,
collective, or third-person function: "It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a
woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of nonsubjectified machine
assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the
relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of
interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal* relations with one another, and
with the adversary's pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other
hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with
nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfils functions of insertion
or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go
piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot
(or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an
institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear battles. But what
is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor
retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology.
Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of
arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another,
of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces.
In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space,
of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is
not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or
destination, without departure or arrival. The "smooth" space of Go, as against
the "striated" space of chess. The <i>nomos</i> of Go against the State of
chess, <i>nomos</i> against <i>polis</i>. The difference is that chess codes
and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing
or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate
that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory;
deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within;
deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elewhere...). Another justice,
another movement, another space-time.
"""

*[nb: biunivocal is repeatedly used for the physical model in science: gravity
is a biunivocal force, two particles equally attracted, and everything is
forced into this model, except where is doesn't work and then we get
forces/flows/differentials.]


p356 [and the two]
"""
the Japanese fighter, interminably still, who then makes a move too quick to
see. The Go player.
""""