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The delirium of the X-treme
call for projects
"Every extreme attitude is a flight from the
self."
Eric Hoffer
"There is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races,
and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is
world historical, a 'displacement of races and continents."
"Delirium is a disease, the disease par excellance, whenever it erects
a race it claims is pure and dominant."
Gilles Deleuze
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I was in the hardware store yesterday and saw colored duct tape that was
called 'X-treme Duct tape.' I later had to get gas at my local convenience
store and noticed a sticker on the door for an x-treme sport drink. I
suppose the sport for which it was intended was X-treme also as were the
shoes you could be wearing or the x-treme car you will later get in to
go to your x-treme job.
The 'extreme' indeed seems to be at its rhetorical extreme these days,
flourished no doubt by the substitution of 'ex-' by 'x-', the x having
it's own charismatic/chiasmatic signature effect these days.
The affect found most often at the intensities which define the extreme
is delirium, the defining feature of which is, according to some sources,
"the disturbance of consciousness, accompanied by a change in cognition
that cannot be accounted for by pre-existing or evolving dementia."
That is, it's an irruption or intervention into consciousness of states
marked by confusion, agitation, altered levels of consciousness, and perceptual
disturbances.
Webster's New International claims that delirium is to "make the
furrow awry in plowing, to deviate from the straight line" —-
literally: de- as in from, and lira, a line or furrow. More clinically,
it is defined as "a temporary state of extreme mental excitement,
marked by restlessness, confused speech, and hallucinations," a symptom
rather than a cause.
'Extreme' is listed as "at the outermost, farthest; at the utmost
point, edge, or border" and as the "utmost in degree; of the
very best or worst that can exist in reality or in imagination; excessive;
immoderate" and "last; beyond which there is none."
Poor old longshoreman/philosopher of the common man Eric Hoffer no doubt
thought that extremity in the service of the self was oxymoronic since
it led to the dissolution of subject formations. Deleuze would no doubt
agree that was precisely the point, coming from a different 'becoming.'
What is at stake in the passage to (wished for at the very least) extremes
and delirium is stated succintly in this passage from Roberto Calasso
concerning Nietzsche's last work and descent into madness: "What
he seems to have wanted to demonstrate visibly is the passage [....] from
a theory that is radical but still respectful of formal conventions to
a PRACTISE of an unprecedented nature …" (The Forty Nine
Steps) We now know that that is also the place of monsters ('monstration'
being precisely that making visible of sui generis passage.)
Walter Benjamin’s extolling of the extreme no doubt compensates for
the lack of accessiblity to any stopped time, any chips off the old messianic
block; if you can’t stop it, roll it back or roll it under. As all
good Gnostics know, that’s always a ready possibility, always everywhere,
a subter-alter-rainean vehicle that’s always stoked and ready to
drive off into totally unknown regions (deliria by any reckoning).
At any rate, 'extremes' and 'deliriums' perhaps (or not) exist now in
the same proportions they always have. One difference seems to be the
place they occupy in our collective imaginations through the continual
monstrations of technology and the subsequent (?) wish of many to be on
the very edge of … whatever. Maybe Judge Schreber was right: we are
all on our way to becoming his children.
Send us your borderline thoughts, your holey digressions, your spit-stuck,
star-struck (or dis-astered) web sol/vent/utions, and unprecedented practices,
your more considered academic approaches, your speedtraps and potholes
at the front and the back of the bell curve, yearning to be free, fried,
or filled.
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"These visions, these auditions are not a private matter but form
the figures of history and a geography that are ceaselessly reinvented.
It is a delirium that invents them, as a process driving words, from one
end of the universe to the other. They are events at the edge of language.
But when delirium falls back into the clinical state, words no longer
open out onto anything, we no longer hear or see anything through them
except a night whose history, colors, and songs have been lost."
Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical
RC
atlanta 2001
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