During conversation last Friday the group briefly discussed what Jim described as the limits of production. During the weekend I came across a few paragraphs in Dialogues 2 that among other things, spoke of the path of production. Becoming as a matter of involuting; neither regression or progression.
To produce is to become more and more restrained, more and more simple, more and more deserted and for that reason very populated. This is what’s difficult to explain: to what extent one should involute. It is obviously the opposite of evolution, but it is also the opposite of regression. To involute is to take an increasingly simple, economical, restrained step. It is also true for cooking: against involutive cooking, which always adds something more, against regressive cooking which returns to primary elements, there is involutive cooking, which is perhaps that of the anorexic.
It is also true of life, even of the most animal kind: if the animals invented their forms and their functions, this was not always by evolving, by developing themselves, nor by regressing as in the case of prematureation, but by losing and abandoning, by reducing, by simplifying, even if this means creating new elements and new relations of this simplification. Experimentation is involutive, the opposite of the overdose. It is also true of writing; to reach this sobriety, this simplicity which is neither the end nor the beginning of something new. To involute is to be ‘between’, in the middle, adjacent, en route (Deleuze 28-31).
Deleuze, Gilles,Dialogues 2, Columbia University Press, 1977.
Beth
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