A bit about process of idea development

Deciding to pin down one instruction as "Make a modernist or machinic visual tableaux for the conceptual persona" started from an attempt to draw (I do not draw well, I am a performer and writer more than a visual artist) a machinic portrait of D&G's philosophy in What is Philosophy? The sketches are horrible but served to get my brain working in another mode. I am not saying this is a successful portrait of their philosophy; just a partial mapping of my thought trail.

I drew ladders and a very bad mobius strip and a slide and a crank. If I could draw in an Escher like fashion, I would have drawn a mobius strip of a a ladder. A ladder that is both snake and ladder in the game. A snake-ladder eating its own tail while stretching out in a seemingly linear fashion, a snake-ladder with cranks and gears in odd places, that spin endlessly yet are frozen. Upon closer inspection, the ladder would be built out of smaller snake-ladders with their own cranks and gears in odd places that spin endlessly yet are frozen.

The smaller snake-ladders are the components (which also often are concepts in their own right). The larger snake-ladder is the the concept. Plane of immanence is the space in which the ladder floats. Figuring out where the plane of immanence ends and the concept ladder begins is as tricky as figuring out, when we get down to the molecular level, where my ass begins and my sofa ends. There is an end; there is a beginning, but all we can see is the curve of a limit stretching out seemingly forever, seemingly never touching the X axis.  I don't think it is right, but my brain likes to imagine that the conceptual persona is an unseen figure that "climbs" this ladder (a sieve of sorts) not by stepping on the rungs, but falling through the spaces defined by the rungs.

All these words make it seem more orderly than it was- it was more associative, more visual, even less logical and sensical. I didn't recount getting up from the couch after re-reading the chapter on plane of immanence, getting up with the desire to not write about it and going to wash dishes. While washing the dishes, the the image of a ladder popped in my head- it suggested itself as a base for a machinic portrait but there was no good or logical reason for the image of a ladder going no where in particular.

I watched an episode of Battlestar Galatica, to take a break from too many thoughts chasing their tails. I thought about space, about sound in space. How sci fi movies and tv shows put sound where there would be no sound because otherwise the fight scenes would fall flat. I wondered if an impossible sound might somehow capture something related to D&G. (I now wonder if unthought is like the unsound in space).  Somehow, this led me back to my ladder and to the desire to pin- like a live butterfly, wings still fluttering- some words outlining a possible instruction- down for our inspection. I flipped back and forth through the book, re-reading various selections. I began to lay words down in a not quite haphazard, but definitely not straight line, path/wall/boundary. My portrait of D&G's philosophy was drawn as I put each word down. I didn't have a plan, just a series of fancies.