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This is the sixth session of the 2021 seminar on The Freudian Spaceship project. In this session, I look at the idea of dreamspace. Notes from the session are below the video. The first part of the video discusses Goffman’s idea of ‘total institutions’ and the staff/inmate role functions. Most of this was not in the notes below, which mainly cover the second half of the video.

TFS Session 6

The inmate and the staff

The threefold

Seeing without Seeing, Hearing without Hearing

Practical necessity / necessary matter

Philosophy contains within its methodology a particularly potent desire, located more often than not around the idea of necessity.  Necessity, for Marx, is in relationship to freedom, in a kind of inverse relation.  For Marx the realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity ends, which is in many ways in sharp contrast to philosophy, which often appears to present necessity as a kind of achievement of the intellect. 

For example, it is common to find a distinction within philosophy between something contingent and something necessary, let’s say between two types of linguistic proposition.  On the one hand a contingent proposition – it’s raining outside, I’m 5 foot 10 inches tall, I have a beard – all propositions about which it may or may not be the case.  Facts, we might say, although that’s a rather grand name for these trivialities.  I have a beard, but it’s just a contingent feature, accidental, it could easily be otherwise – I could have a shave, for example, and would no longer have a beard.  So on the one hand, something like a contingent fact, something that could have been otherwise, could be otherwise.  That a contingency expresses this sense of ‘could be otherwise’ easily lends itself to being associated with something like a feeling of freedom.  Freedom, as the sense that something is not necessary, as the sense that it – our response to the situation – could be otherwise. 

On the other hand, we find that philosophy associates necessity most often with something that seems peculiarly human, or peculiarly constitutive of the human, with reason itself.  Reason as the realm of necessities, discovered in those things that get called ‘a priori’ statements, things known before experience, from within the logic of logic, immanent to and arising from reason itself, necessities that impose themselves on us, like an overwhelming sensation that possesses us, occupies us.  This realm of reason, this space of thought, with its laws and logics and necessities, somehow becomes the space of freedom – perhaps nowhere more insidiously than in Spinoza.  Yet freedom is always a kind of acceptance, or to use a concept that is central to this project, a logic of compliance.  Freedom is in this situation a little like the good bourgeois, it is demonstrated in the capacity to comply, in the capacity to be mature enough to know the limits of reason, but also being mature enough to know the limits of the human in the face of reason.  For philosophy, freedom is too often bound into this curious compulsion to comply with reasons necessities.

So these two subterranean senses of freedom exist in philosophy – on the one hand, as a kind of accident or contingency, on the other as a kind of compliance or submission to necessity.  These senses aren’t opposed, rather they operate as two sides of the same abstract machine, two modes of expression of the same machinery of thought, one in which the connections are to be, as it were, causal, where commitments and entailments run like lines of compulsion from one moment of a syllogism to the next, from one moment of an argument to the next.  One of the strange reproaches to philosophy that arises from poetry is with regard to this sense of necessity.

Poetics operates without the sense of causal connection that is deeply embedded within philosophical concepts of reason.   It can do so because it can deploy the necessities of association, necessities that do not pre-exist the associations.  If the necessities pre-existed the association, somehow making the particular association the result of a prior causal necessity, as though somehow the association between a ship and travel pre-existed the experience of travel on ships, then the association would be little more than the expression of necessary conjunction.  We would associate one thing with another because all we are doing is recognising that they are associated by some more fundamental process in the world.   By contrast, poetics produces necessities as the result of association, rather than producing associations as a result of necessities.  If the poetics is powerful enough the necessity it produces in its association is necessary enough, sometimes so necessary as to be absolutely necessary enough.

Here we can glimpse another sense of freedom, one produced through association, one that is discovered as it is created, one that is in some sense an inversion of Marx in that the realm of necessity begins where the realm of freedom ends.   Marx and poetics offer two ways of encountering necessity and freedom quite distinct from philosophy and its rationality.  They offer a different abstract machine, one that is not searching for the causal connections, whether they be natural or rational, but one that is producing necessities from freedom, producing associations from creative conjunctions.  This particular abstract machine is operating when the artist is struggling to find the right tone or the right conjunction of tones.  It is also operating when the worker is struggling to find the right tool or machine, the right assemblage.  In both cases a kind of creative play of conjunctions isn’t absent-minded, isn’t idle, rather things are tried out in order to reach the point at which ‘it works’.  When ‘it’ works – and it’s useful to remember that the Id is just a posh jargon name for ‘the it’ – then that ‘it’ that we refer to when we say something like ‘it works’ is the moment of necessity.  The worker and the artist – and here I’m talking about these personae in their non-alienated state, in what might be an idealised image – the worker and the artist aim to make it work.  They conjoin, disjoin and rejoin themselves with objects, marks, others and networks, sometimes reaching momentary metastability where the machine just works, where it hits the sweet spot.  Maintaining that balance, that flow, is to encounter the necessity of the machinic, the moment of necessity that flows from the active, creative forces of life.

For Marx, of course, there is a more basic sense to his formula that the realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity ends, and it’s something like, you cannot be free until you’re needs are met.  Needs, those things which must be met before something else – free activity – can begin, are notoriously plastic however.  Even the basics such as food are subject to transformation, converted into technics of the body.  Without touching on the complex role that food takes within our contemporary Western world, we only have to note the roles of feasting and fasting to see how food is not a simple system of meeting needs but operates as a complex system of transformative technics.  A transformative technics is perhaps the name of the abstract machine at work in Marx and within poetics, a particular mode of relationship with the world in which repetition and reproduction take second fiddle to difference and production.  In both cases, the question is more like ‘what can the world be’ rather than ‘what is the world’. 

What can the world be?  If we talk of a ‘new Earth’, one that is not dominated and over-coded by the logic of capital and commodity, then this new Earth arises from a dream.  Deleuze once offered insight in an aphorism that is relevant here – do not get trapped in the dream of the other.  The first trap might be to feel the dream as insubstantial, as having no power, because it cannot be situated within some kind of chain of causal relation that matters.  This is a dream of the other, one in which the dream is an accident, a free contingency of surreal associations.  Yet this is too crude a concept of the dream.  It rends waking and dream states, offering the waking state as one of light, the dream state as one of darkness, operating with a distinction between the two that immediately devalues the dream in the hierarchy of waking and dreaming.  We can see this logic at work in the calls to wake up, in the dismissive language of sheeple and zombies and stupidity, a language that speaks from a self-declared position of being awake, of seeing clearly, a language that explains the failure to make a new Earth as rooted in people having been nullified in their desires.  The awakened speak of the rest of the Earth as though it were little more than dumb flesh.   They prescribe thinking like them as the answer, although they couch it in terms such as ‘education’, as though self-destructive behaviours were a matter of bad choices and if we only knew more then we’d minimise such failures of reason.  This is the dream of the other that has captured us, one in which we think that what we think is right.  This is the dream of philosophy in too many of its forms, its major forms, a dream that is undermined by a thought from within no doubt but that still overwhelms thinking too easily.

Rather than being called to awaken, we need rather learn how to dream a necessary freedom and the freedom of necessity.  These are the strange dreams of the sorcerer and the psychoanalyst and the revolutionary, the ones that they know are no longer dreams but that speak to them, that let them see that which they cannot see.  Intuitions of the imperceptible.  Such intuitions arise in the intervals, in the gaps, in the in-betweens and the transports between one space and another, between the face and the mask.  Which is not to say between the authentic and the inauthentic, but rather between one mode of relation and another.

Let me just call to memory that refrain, the one-to-one, the group and the community.  These three modes of relation, this legend for a map-making process, as a tool of disruption of the dreaming.    There is a one-to-one relation to the dream, a relation of intimacy, a relation of the body with the personality, in which the dream is felt, lingering in the morning.  Or where the dream returns, time and again, to the same point.  Or where the dream is a screen through which the world retains enough to be livable.  I have my dreams and my dreams have me and the intimacy of this is never adequately expressed in any account I give.  Yet the group dream also takes me, grips me, perhaps as a kind of shared family, perhaps as a shared game.  Then there are the dreams that constitute a community, the imagined communities of nationhood or the communities of strategic identity.  

To whom does the dream happen?  Where is the dream?   If the dreamer is thought as existing in some specific individual – you, me – then do we not have collective dreams?  We dream.  Whilst it might be a kind of intellectual game to talk about the dreamer being dreamed, and to wonder whether I’m a king dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a king, the volatility of borders within the dreamspace, the slips and slides, the morphing and mutating, all speak to the power of the associative dimension of production, to an acausal realm of necessities.  Nothing is more necessary than the nightmare.  Its imposition is precisely this awareness of being trapped in the dream of the other, but whilst that imposition might be most acutely encountered in the nightmare, its smell lingers across the dreamspace.  It lingers in the materials of association, the elements and ingredients and already existing associations that make up the dreamspace.  Adrift in the ocean of plastic waste, a dreamspace surrounds and sweeps below each island of waking.

William James says somewhere that each of us might be an island, but that what this implies is that our separation at the surface hides a deeper connection beneath the waves.  The Earth.  This Earth dreams, has a dreamspace, one in which I might dream as easily from the encounter with a viral companion that has taken up residence, as from the compressions and intensities of the singular libidinal economy that organises my body.  The dreamspace is not an ideological or symbolic structure because it is primarily a flow of bodies and connections. 

Take the example of the women who took up a protest for life at Greenham Common.  They camped at the gates of the airforce base, offering up bodies of resistance to the machinery of warfare.  This singularity arose in part because of nightmares, shared nightmares of nuclear destruction, shared across letters in newspapers, words in conversation and poems of resistance.  This shared nightmare took place across a moment and place, taking hold of the dreamers and, in doing so, shifting the tone of the waking world, transforming it, opening it, listening and responding with a call to life.  Maybe it needed a particular moment in order for the nightmare not to be dismissed as ‘mine’, as ‘my reaction’.  Maybe it needed a moment of collective consciousness-raising to prepare the ground, a Womens Liberation Movement to provide a network, and the political conjunction of two governments, the US and the UK, having to find a particular place within the geographic distance of targets.  Maybe it needed all these other factors, but it also needed this sense that the dreamspace spoke, that it was capable to hear, underneath the clamour for peace through strength, a kind of runaway machine and an Earth that spoke against it, that called for another World.

There is perhaps nothing more futile than asking someone who wants something done, something to change, to dream.  Let’s make a broad and overly sweeping claim here: most of the time the answer to the question ‘what has to be done’ is obvious.  Only rarely is there actually a need to consider seriously various options.  Usually, such considerations reveal competing forces at work, with each having its own ‘obvious’ responses.  The difficulty is that this ‘obviousness’ is like an acquired taste.  We have acquired it whether we like it or not. Its impact is felt across our bodies and within our social lives.  Yet the obvious – that which is taken to be obvious – is not the result of conscious processes, in fact, it cannot be the result of conscious processes as it’s one of the grounds of them.  In the face of the obvious, we cannot help it. In the face of the obvious, we can resist and, via training – repetition and practice – shift some of the responses away from a kind of automatism.  Yet the obvious itself is like an atmosphere.  It is, to adapt Guattari’s concept, the grounded content of an ethico-aesthetic domain.  Within a particular domain – such as that of this Earth, this Earth in which capital has become the dominant logic – a field of obviousness arises as a kind of dreamspace, an ocean in which islands appear distinct but which still rest on the same Earth.  So the strategy of resisting the obvious that is part of a series of oppressive, divisive habits is a valuable tool.  However, the need for a new field of obviousness still remains and it’s through the dream that the new obvious is to be created. This new field of the obvious is constituted via the associative power of the dream as a series of new necessities.  What was once unimaginable now becomes the everyday.

Again, this sounds like a prescription for the future, for the new Earth, that rests on too flimsy a foundation. Where is power, where are the forces of production, the confrontations and coalitions that must occur if this World is to be transformed?  Yet it’s not a prescription of some wishful thinking, rather it’s a description of the capitalist revolution, that revolution we live in the aftermath of.  Or rather it’s a description of the flows which capital was able to parasitise in order to become the ubiquitous natural fact that it appears as.

(end part one)

Points for second half

The processes which brought capitalism to dominance as a logic of the World – constituting a new dreamspace of capital – are not specific to capital.  

The capitalist, the power relations, property relations, an underlying logic of enclosure

For the Marxist, class struggle (all history etc) – historical materialism.

For schizoanalysis, social desiring-production (de/re territory – enclosure)

Physical enclosure / Psychological enclosure (indeed, a psyche as a result, an enclosed space) (DOUBLE ENCLOSURE – DOUBLE ALIENATION – PSYCHIC ENCLOSURE IN DREAMSPACE ).

“Tosquelles liked to repeat that in the course of his life he had been exposed to multiple physical and ideological “occupations”: as a Catalan citizen fighting Spanish imperialism; as an activist in the POUM struggling against Stalinist domination; as an opponent to fascism first in Spain and later in the Resistance in Vichy France; as a refugee incarcerated in the deplorable conditions of French internment camps. These various forms of segregation, colonization, or incarceration had rendered him particularly sensitive to the dangers of “concentrationism”—which he also called le-tout-pouvoir (the-all-power). “Concentrationism” was the potential of any institution or any group to become authoritarian, oppressive, discriminatory,and exclusionary. As the war had made clear, “concentrationism threatened more than our modes of social and political organization: it was also a behavior, a psychic disposition. Alienation was indeed always both social and psychic. It is in this sense that Tosquelles referred to Marx and Freud as the “two legs” of institutional psychotherapy: when one leg walked, the other needed to follow. Both were complementary and inseparable in understanding and fighting against the “voluntary servitude” in which humans lived.

It is at this crossroads of Marxism and psychoanalysis that institutional psychotherapy was born as a tool to diagnose and also to fight against ‘double alienation.’”

Tosquelles and Institutional Psychiatry – Camille Robcis, Frantz Fanon, Institutional Psychotherapy, and the Decolonization of Psychiatry, Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 81, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 303-32

In this post we move from discussing our teachers to some of the ideas we’re developing, the threefold being a central frame for our Fanonian Schizoanalysis. Notes from the session are below the video.

TFS Session 5

I want to recap a little the talk of the abstract machine.  Don’t panic.  The philosopher has a way of making us panic when they mention abstraction, the abstract often feels like some kind of strange test.  A weirdness.  Something out of the everyday.  There is something strange in the very act of philosophy that is closely connected to abstraction, to the capacity to abstract.

Anyway, let’s just recap a little.  The abstract machine is the name given to the nuclei of an enunciate assemblage.  An enunciative assemblage is a name given to a particular space of expression, the enunciative assemblage is the production of a context.  We encounter an enunciative assemblage each time we encounter a context.  What these concepts are doing, therefore, is giving us the machinery of production.  They can enable us to take something that we understand and use in everyday practice – a concept like ‘context’ – and enable us to begin to think about exactly what’s involved in a context, how it develops, how it is constituted.  They enable us to give dynamism to our thinking of context so that we are not trapped in the end result and can instead begin to think about how a particular situation comes about.

Marx talked about the importance of such a process, it’s a key part of his methodology.  One of the ways he put it was to say that, we cannot tell from the taste of the wheat how it was produced.  In other words, we cannot tell from the experience of something how that experience came about.  If we stop with the experience, stick with it, then the tendency is to become passive in the face of ‘the given’.  The experience is taken to be something like a fact – a given – and how we are given a particular fact is lost, forgotten.  This is one of the differences between something like schizoanalysis and phenomenology for example.  In phenomenology, we take the experience, the given, as it is and explore it, examine it, trying to track the forms of that experience.  What we don’t usually do – I say usually, because there are some key tensions in phenomenology around this point – what we don’t usually do is focus on the genesis of the experience, on how it came about. 

The other element of the concept of the enunciative assemblage is that it’s not derived from meaning processes, it’s not about what we mean.  Often our encounter with the concept of context is one in which meanings are framed by their context.  Remember the idea mentioned in an earlier session, about the strategy of escaping language.  This is another key feature, this strategy of not getting trapped in language.  So this is a big part of why we might want to talk of enunciation rather than meaning.  Still, it has strange connotations in English, this word enunciation.  It reminds me of being told to speak properly, of issues with accents and speech differences.  There’s a normativity, in other words, a kind of moral order, attached to the idea of enunciation that I don’t think is totally appropriate, nor is it a big feature of the way in which Guattari uses the concept, so this seems like it might be a connotation that derives from translation.   What’s more important is that enunciation refers to the way in which an expression connects what we might call a sender and a recipient.  It’s an act, not a meaning, in that sense.  So the enunciative assemblage is more than just context, it’s also the dynamics of relation, the way in which the expression is operating. 

An example, central to our project – the phrase ‘I can’t breath’.  Let’s call this a particle or element of expression.  It’s expressed in a variety of contexts, but the form of any context in which it is expressed is one of suffocation.  It becomes, in that sense, something like a refrain of suffocation, or perhaps more precisely, a refrain of the form of suffocation.  It becomes a refrain as it spreads, as it becomes echoed, as it develops something like a life of its own.  As it becomes a refrain, as it becomes something in the air, it begins to produce a form of consistency and at that point it begins to operate as an abstract machine, bringing disparate moments of life together in a consistency that suggests a wider process.  Trying to encounter that process is pretty much what we began with when we started with that phrase, ‘I can’t breath’.  In trying to encounter and think this form of suffocation expressed in the elementary expressive particle encountered in the refrain ‘I can’t breath’, the specific form is crucial but more importantly that which isn’t quite so specifiable but which surrounds it is what’s difficult to think. 

The attempt is to think about the production of consistency.  It involves some kind of gamble, a speculative moment. Maybe the best way of understanding this is to ask about which context matters when we encounter a situation of the world.  It’s clear, for example, that Eric Garner’s death takes place within the context of white supremacy, in particular how this has developed in the institutions of authority and control within the United States.  The history of policing in the US, tied up as it was with the control of slaves and then with the maintenance of racial segregation, is plainly the central immediate political context of Eric Garner’s death.  It remains the context of further ongoing deaths, including that of George Floyd more recently.  So to begin from that incident and then go somewhere else, other than policing, is perhaps odd.  In doing so we don’t want to deny that context at all.  However what we wanted to do was feel a connection that was offered in that phrase, that refrain, of ‘I can’t breath’.  That connection was with a form of suffocation, a form expressed in Eric Garner’s killing but that doesn’t stop there, nor begin there. 

This was the gamble in many ways, to connect the form of suffocation found at this moment with the ongoing climate crisis that we faced.  And behind that with the sense of suffocation that might be sensed as part of a more general dynamic.  In particular, the form of suffocation is not natural, it rather involves the imposition of force, what we refer to in the text as the choke-hold, and imposition of force that has been naturalised, which has come to seem normal. 

Fanon is famously quoted as saying that when we revolt it is because we cannot breathe.  “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we cannot breath”.  As the refrain of ‘I can’t breath’ spread it was clear in so many ways that there was a resonance with air pollution, with the climate crisis, but also with being overwhelmed, a sense of drowning or rather, and this is a crucial difference, with being drowned. Deliberately.  This is what we call the ‘deliberate disaster’.  Here we begin to shift the tone in which the refrain might be heard.

If I fall off a boat, I cannot swim and then I drown it is, of course, clear that I cannot breathe.   Yet this is quite distinct from if I am pushed off the boat, and different again from a situation in which someone, or something, is holding my head underwater.  It’s this last sense that we feel is vital.  This is not an accident, a natural disaster, rather it’s a deliberate disaster – but one in which there is no simple subject doing the deliberation.  Rather, and confusingly, there is something like a natural process taking place which is forcing our heads underwater, but this natural process isn’t natural.  Just as we are often called upon by Marxists to recognise the way in which capitalism presents as a natural process, and as such called upon to resist it in some small measure by trying to denaturalise it as a form of political economy, so too the civilizational process in which we are currently being drowned is not a natural process.  There has been an attempt to recognise that process by ascribing it to enlightenment thought, or to instrumental reason, or to some other kind of thinking process, but such attempts rest on the idea that it’s a way of thinking that’s at fault.  This seems to be only a very small part of the story.  It’s undoubtedly true that a way of thinking develops from the enlightenment that codifies a particular image of the human, of reason and of that which is to be expelled or denied.  This way of thinking is also part of the background to Fanon’s attempt to think a different human, thinking that is radically developed by Sylvia Wynter in quite wonderful ways.  Yet the emphasis on ways of thinking can too easily let ways of life slip away.  Trying to retain multiple different dynamics as they weave together, reinforce or resist each other and together constitute the braided reality of the Earth, this is what we want to do through the strategy of wretching, bringing together in our thinking both the wretched of the earth (to use Fanon’s phrase) and the wretched earth.

So this refrain – I cannot breathe – is taken as an abstract machine, the nuclei of an enunciative assemblage that we call ‘the Earth’.  In it, we strategically connect incidents of institutional racist violence with a process of deliberate disaster encountered in the climate crisis.  In doing so we try to learn lessons from the struggle against an anthropomorphic mode of thinking, to feel our way into some sense of the contemporary processes, the flows of desire to use a schizoanalytic phrase.  Here we find Fanon and schizoanalysis combine to offer a series of vital lessons. 

Fanon brings to the fore the experience of territory under colonisation, both physically and psychologically, or more accurately, both materially and existentially.  Schizoanalysis brings to the fore the processes of production and, perhaps most importantly, of anti-production.  Resistances, frictions, dynamics that reverse and repress.  Both share a relationship to capitalism as, in some sense, the basic name of the process that dominates the flows of desire across the Earth.  At the heart of this, as a kind of bad uncle, lies Freud and the dynamics of repression, dynamics that are immanent to the flows of desire rather than imposed from outside.  The fascist within.

Colonisation and decolonisation, flows of desiring-production and anti-production and an immanent dynamic of repression.  We bring these moments of conceptual production together around the refrain, I cannot breathe, in order to try and re-organise the consistency that surrounds this expression.  This is, in many ways, what the Breath text is trying to do, an attempt to encounter the consistency of the Earth as we live it in this time, at this moment, in this place.  This place we call home, where we find ourselves so often homeless, this place of the play of the familiar and the strange.

The first responses to this thinking were mixed and perhaps rightly so.  The mode of expression of that first text brings with it its own limitations.  It is playfully building on the use of dates from A Thousand Plateaus, avoiding academic interpretation in favour of declaration, and trying to take sides in what seems clearly to be a conflict, avoiding any sense of a neutral ‘universal thought’.  Crucially, however, it is angry, upset and expressive of that and as such it’s one moment in a longer dialogue.  After the deluge…

The threefold

So another moment appears.  After attempting to articulate a consistency, what Guattari would perhaps have called an ‘ethico-aesthetic’ sense, the next moment is to move, to think through that consistency, not to simply stop with it facing us down, like a tidal wave about to crash.  From within this initial Breath text, we found our conversations of how to move kept coming around to this figure of the threefold set of relations that we call the one-to-one, the group and the community.   There are only a few moments in the text that indicate this development, so it might appear at first like a jump, a leap, but it’s consistent with the ethico-aesthetic consistency that developed, in particular the rejection of interpretation and the aim to mobilise desires, affects, senses and sensations.  This aim to mobilise desire is an attempt to respond to the ways in which our desires are already mobilised, constantly, and yet in a way that often only adds to our sense of suffocation.  The World offers us a constant stream of inductions to anger, a dynamic that has increased as social media spreads, no doubt because anger offers engagement and activates the desires, engages the click that the machine tracks.  The data tracking machines need an index of desire, an index or marker that can be registered or tracked, so the ‘like’ button develops, the ‘share’ button and a whole variety of ways to register clicks, those momentary engagements of desire with the representation that is offered to us in the form of the World.  There’s nothing more anathema to the data tracking machine than indifference.  Yet indifference can only offer a momentary respite, precisely because there is in the flows of capitalism an incapacity to leave us alone.  It cannot allow escape, it cannot allow another world to develop that it lets alone, not because of any moral dislike but because capital is driven by the flow to transform everything into a commodity, to make everything subject to exchange value.  To paraphrase the old proverb, capitalism puts a price on everything and knows the value of nothing – and that ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ are not metaphorical.  It’s an overwhelming process, which is in large measure why the dominant affect it engenders increasingly becomes one of suffocation.

This framework offers us a way to begin to diagram the braided flows of desire that we try to bring into consistency around that refrain of ‘I cannot breathe’ – the flows of desire of colonisation and decolonisation, production and anti-production, and immanent self-generated repression.  Again, as an abstract machine, there is a kind of refrain – in this case, the one-to-one, the group and the community.  A triplicity,  A threefold.  These threes keep re-appearing.  Perhaps this is the sorcerer’s effect, or the psychoanalysts, or maybe even some curious effect of adding Fanon into the set of names so that it’s no longer Deleuze and Guattari but now Fanon and Deleuze and Guattari …and and and.  The connections come through the writing, the thinking comes through the conversations and the writing – not before.  So whilst we write, it also writes, whilst we talk, it also talks – this it, this Earth, this life we are, we are not the privileged source of expression and in fact the more the Earth speaks the closer perhaps to the sense of being able to hear something.  In every conversation, every attempt to think, every attempt to write or express there must be these momentary phrases, these particles of expression that are emitted not by a mind or a person but by an enunciative assemblage itself. 

The threefold, thus, comes into play, offering a way to move.  It develops from a thought about Fanon, about the different elements of his expression, the different modes or moments in his texts.  The angry revolutionary, the furious man encountering the racist colonialist, but also the lover, the sensual partner, the one whose skin is alive to the touch.  And also the thinker, the philosopher.  And also the doctor, the scientist, the psychiatrist aware of their complicity, encountering their complicity as part of an institutional failure of care that they have to resign from.  So the threefold begins with thinking about these moments, moments that are first encountered in this doubling of experience expressed in the book Black Skins, White Masks.  The doubled mode of existence that had already been noted by W.E.B.DuBois in his work on the ‘doubled consciousness’ of the black experience in the United States, the experience of an internal conflict within the colonised.   

The first moment, of the one-to-one, is found in Fanon’s discussions of love, in the move from mask to skin, in those relations of expanded capacity in which this one enables that one.  This is the experience of love.  The mode of relation here is encountered in psychotherapy, mobilised and reorganised, but it’s also encountered in sorcery, in devotional or dedicative work in particular.  In the revolutionary, this moment of the one-to-one is perhaps most encountered in the counter-revolutionary, in the moments in which the enemy is no longer human.  This we called the movement from mask to skin – from role, image, representation, to intimacy, connection, affection.

Then comes the group, the movement we called the movement from skin to mask, that role in the group, the way we’re seen, but more crucially perhaps the collective body, well beyond the human – the pack, the swarm, the gang, the moment of what’s been called ‘strategic identity’.

Then the third, the community, the place where these two dynamics weave together to produce demographics, ecologies, molarities.

Each of these moments is something like a form of relation.  Together they are a generalised diagram of such forms of relation, constituting something like a ‘model of the world’ – cartography, to use Guattari’s phrase – that is not aimed at accurately representing anything, but which is rather aimed at preventing forgetfulness.  It’s not that this threefold model is, as it were, the way the world is – rather if in each moment of analysis we remember these three modes of relation, then our senses of the world are multiplied by thinking in each of these modes, then perhaps we can learn to remember the Earth.

The rewired World, and the specific problem of capitalism.

At one point in the Breath text (in section 8) we declare that “revolution is as simple and complex as this, new ways of organising one to one, group and community relationships and the ways of connecting overlap, producing unforeseen assemblages” (Breath, p.64).  This is not a prescription for a future, or rather, it is a prescription but one that arises from a description.  In other words, this is a way of understanding what has happened to the World so as to understand how another World can develop.  To use an awful phrase that abounds in some social or political theory, this is a ‘theory of change’, of how change takes place, change that we might describe as revolutionary.  For it must be remembered that capitalism was a revolutionary change, the revolution took place and we live in its aftermath now.  It was, of course, not the revolution of the wretched of the earth or the wretched earth, it was the revolution of the modes of relation that occurred as a particular process took hold.  That process mobilised and colonised flows of desire, gradually producing transformations in the modes of relation of the Earth.  It rewired the Freudian Spaceship, which is comprised of these modes of relation, these various flows of desire.  Think of the advent of capitalism as a kind of recombination, a rewriting, a re-organisation.  A viral epidemic, and one that has now spread throughout the body, slowly creeping up the limbs until it begins to fill the airways and the mouth and the lungs and we begin to choke, producing the expressions of resistance we hear each time we encounter the refrain ‘I cannot breath’.

For Guattari, this rewiring occurs through a process of identity that is distinct from and which subordinates a process he calls ‘singularization.  He suggests that “identity is what causes singularity to pass from different ways of existing to a single identifiable frame of reference” (Molecular Revolution in Brazil, p.94).  He goes on to offer a description of what he means by singularization:

What I call processes of singularization—simply being able to live or to survive in a particular place, at a particular time, and to be ourselves—has nothing to do with identity (things such as: my name is Félix Guattari, and I am here). It has to do with the way in which, in principle, all the elements that constitute the ego function and are articulated; in other words, with how we feel, how we breathe, how we want to speak or don’t want to, being here or going away. (emphasis added, ibid p.94-95)

The distinction between identity and singularity rests on this way of organising our relation to the world within either a single frame of reference or multiple elements of constitution.  The single frame of reference, the uniform, control, has its roots far deeper than in capitalism.  The State, the monotheistic God, the Platonic ‘Good’ – all these express this singular frame of reference – and the attempt to impose it is the rewiring of the singularities of life into one great big consistency.  On the one hand, this process can be seen as material control.  When William the Conqueror colonises this land he imposes control through those huge Norman castles and his militarized nobility, but also – fundamentally – through marking a single frame of reference for productivity, the Doomsday Book, in which each productive singularity across the land is literally listed in a ‘single identifiable frame of reference’.  On the other hand, this process is existential, marking us as members of a single nation-state, with a single head, the one that wears the Crown, again a ‘single identifiable frame of reference’.  So the process of identity rewriting singularity is not a process confined to capitalism, if anything it’s a description of a more general dynamic of the human socius, or more specifically of what Guattari called the “productions of subjectivity”.  Yet what must be remembered is that these processes only take place as territories overlap and press on each other.  There is no singular space of the World – or rather, there is no necessarily singular space of the World. There have been and will be many Worlds, even if there is still only one Planet. 

As the Normans impose their World on the Anglo-Saxons, they do so through spatial domination, through the occupation and dominance of territory.  The territories overlap, and conflict – and one response, one solution to the territorial conflict is to impose a single identifiable frame of reference.  The difficulty is that in this image we can see the territory.  We can mark the space.  We can understand this movement of imposition, control, change.  This is a difficulty because it is too easy, too visual, too representational. It is too easy to think of this as the way in which rewiring takes places, as the way in which change from one mode of relation to another occurs.  It’s archaic and speaks to a previous Earth, one in which that Earth was a limit to the human, in which it dominated us but as a background, in the way the weather dominates us but as a background, as a rhythm of production and existence.  That Earth still contained many Worlds.  One territory might be a site of conflict and domination between different Worlds, but the Earth itself sat and breathed in and out as the rhythms of the planetary movement ran through the year.

What occurs with the advent of capitalism is something more generalised.  Rather than territorial conflict, rather than conflictual territorialisation, we begin to see radical deterritorialisation.  This is the claim of schizoanalysis.  The rewiring begins not as territories overlap but as new territories are integrated into a new logic, a new value system, one that is not tied to any specific territory but which rips up all ways of doing things – those “singularisations” – and begins to mark them all under a new “single identifiable frame of reference”.  Capitalist value production refers to no head of government, no Crown or dictator, no community or place, it refers only to itself, in a self-reinforcing dynamic that produces a new kind of territory, an abstract territory, one that lays over all of the Earth, no longer limited by the seasons as it has no temporal rhythms.  Every day is just another day.  Yet the Earth is still underneath this, still the great source of productive forces and desires, still the great rhythm.  Guattari’s conflictual dynamic between identity and singularity is focused on the way in which subjectivities are produced, human subjectivities, and yet the singularization/identity tension is also an interesting way to think about the tension between the Earth and Capitalism.  The Earth is the great singularization process, Capital the great identity process, and as the monoculture of capital reached global densities the Earth began to be slowly choked.  And we live now in the time of the last breath.

It’s the abstract nature of this process that is vital to grasp if we are to be able to break the choke-hold.  It’s for this reason that something like a concept of abstract machines is useful, it forces us to try to grasp the particular, peculiar process that is capitalism.  If we can begin to encounter the Earth as a singularization, we might begin to be able to hear it.  More importantly, perhaps we might be able to begin the process of cultivating singularization beyond the human.  It is, moreover, as part of a process of cultivating singularization that we think about the threefold modes of relation.  Remember that description Guattari gives of singularization – being able to live or survive in a particular place, at a particular time, and be ourselves.  He’s focused very much on the human here, but the need for the Earth to live, to survive, in a particular place, at a particular time – even to “be itself”, as it were, is a condition of the production of subjectivities.

The way in which the threefold could operate here is to take the Earth – in all its elements, all the flora, fauna and ecosystemic structure – as comprised just as much of the various modes of relation as the human socius, indeed to reconfigure the socius as necessarily including all those non-human elements. 

It might seem that we’ve come a long way from Eric Garner’s killing to talk about rethinking our relation to the Earth.  It may be too far, the connection may be tenuous – or, just perhaps, it might be a way to develop the “ethico-aesthetic” frame we need – the ‘way of feeling’ that the rewiring that will need to have in order take place, in order to develop the cultivation of singularization.  This ‘way of feeling’ is like rewiring our intuitions, reorganising our instincts if you like, so that those basic intuitive, unthinking habits of living can escape Capitals capture of our drives.