Throwing Dice
Like many who I have spoken with since the presidential election of November of 2016, I remain puzzled and dismayed that this ignorant bombastic individual received enough votes to win The White House for four years. The media rationale as well as “reasons” given by acquaintances for supporting Trump seem surreal, like ideas transmitted from another planet, from a parallel universe. These words published in 1991 suggest that my sense of the matter is essentially correct.
Philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes
that are not aligned with one another
so that they fit together,
because their edges
do not match up.
They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
but rather the outcome of the throws of the dice.
They resonate nonetheless,
and the philosophy that creates them
always introduces the powerful Whole that,
while remaining open,
is not fragmented:
an unlimited One-All,
an “Omnitudo”
that includes all concepts on one and the same plane.
It is a table, a plateau, or a slice:
It is a plane of consistency or,
more accurately,
the plane of immanence of concepts,
the planomenon.
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
excerpt from What Is Philosophy, page 35
2 thoughts on “Throwing Dice”
The pieces of this jigsaw puzzle have many perplexing and incongruous edges, but the image of the puzzle, once completed, was not what was on the cover of the box. Make America Great Again was the Kool-aid swallowed by so many. People who believed that by we had been diminished by having an Africa-American president and somehow we needed to “Get Back” to something that lived, fully formed, in faulty memories. The election was, as has been stated over and over, a perfect storm of frustration over detached politicians mixed with a misogynistic culture, a wave of nationalistic fervor sweeping across the planet, an ability of billions of people around the world to justify any action, and an anti-intellectual movement by an ignorant and paranoid electorate. Remove any one of these reasons and the world would be a different place. So even if all of the pieces of the puzzle do not and cannot fit together, we have pounded them into place to create a single image of a nightmare that will not end.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
–W. B. Yeats