Someone might remark that because a text has multiple layers there can be no flat ontology of the text. In other words, it is here asserted that where there is a logic of depths and surfaces there is necessarily a vertical ontology. However, this is precisely what flat ontology rejects. If we take seriously that texts are composed of multiple layers, then only a flat ontology can properly preserve the layered nature of a text. The claim that the text is flat is the claim that each of these layers is absolutely autonomy and irreducible to the others or that all of these layers are on equal ontological footing. That is, flat ontology refuses a logic of expression that would reduce one thread, series, or layer of the text to another. Instead, flat ontology would defend the dignity of each of these layers as a distinct multiplicity. What is hereby refused is the reduction of anything to anything else. There are instead only interacting substances.
February 10, 2012
February 10, 2012 at 7:56 pm
What happens when we start to explore the differing intensities of allure? I’m trying to think this through. In a flat ontology of text layers are irreducible to each other. But each layer has its own level of intensity. My problem is not collapsing into relativism when mapping this intensity. Take Harry Calhan’s gun. There are multiple layers, but can the intensity it exudes be talked about without subjectivization, or have I answered my own question?
rwm
February 10, 2012 at 8:12 pm
I agree with this. The problem for the practicing critic is to examine interactions between the various layers or threads.
February 11, 2012 at 10:54 am
hi levi,
do you think that the first deleuze book on spinoza is still a philosophy of expression and that the immanence understood from a bergsonian point of view (as in IM and IT) was an essay to overcome it?
February 11, 2012 at 3:25 pm
Nuno,
I’ve been wondering about that too. I need to go back and reread Expressionism and Philosophy with that question in mind to answer it. By the time of Anti-Oedipus expression has become one of the things to be avoided at all costs.
December 28, 2012 at 12:49 am
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