Notes for Eric #4

This week I began teaching ‘Schizoanalysis for Beginners‘ again. I haven’t taught it for 4 years and haven’t spent time reading Anti-Oedipus all the way through for maybe two or three years. I return to it quite regularly but in chunks and so it’s interesting to begin reading through it again, in a new space and time, in a new setting. I’m finding it shouts at me, it’s speed and all the connections it sparks once again being mobilised but this time the machine is one I’ve had around for a while and that hasn’t been oiled properly, so in getting it going again I’m noticing the creak of my old bones.

Machines and assemblages have this curious entropy that we all probably are familiar with. Paint peels, rooms get dusty. I’ve gathered a shelf full of tools and potions to accompany my motorbike and recently we got a new set of shelves for the kitchen to put these things on. We got them cheap, of course, and this week we had to remove them, a failed experiment, they were bowing under the weight of the tools. So the shelves came down and everything on them was piled back into the ‘study cum temple space cum living room cum bedroom basement space’ next to our kitchen. Inside my house, where I work, the study and the altar – the two space that I relate to mostly in the sitting position – form little zones of ‘stillness’ or ‘sitting’ amidst a myriad of mixed elements. In the other corner is my partners work zone. Across the walls are elements of mnemonic tech for when I’m working in a standing position, doing some kind of standing meditation or ritual, or shelves of books and notes that attach themselves like invisible threads to my desk and words via my body, hands, brain and eyes. Constantly these things fill up, break down, need cleaning and re-arranging.

The sun shone yesterday and I rode out. Bikes have to be ridden regularly or be put into hibernation properly. If not ridden regularly they can get cranky, rust up, deposit crud in the fuel lines. Engines generally need to work regularly. They need to flow, heating up and cooling down, lubricating their elements, breathing.

As always, the wind is met at about 60 to 70mph. I crouch forward across the tank, let my hands relax on the bars, grip in with my knees and lean the bike as the road curves, feeling a joy that only speed, machine, body and noise can bring. The wind is noisy, rushing and howling across my helmet, buffeting my chest, filling the space, underneath the engine runs hard, never able to drown out the wind. On the outside, across the way, the walker can only hear the engine, the roar of that machine, but inside only the wind. As I slow down I sit back up, my body catching the wind and the resistance braking the bike as I slowly grip the lever harder. Everything works together, actively, a group of flows distinct from the passive cages of the cars that surround me, where the individual is anaesthetised behind a mediation of technology. Soon the driver will be redundant in the car, sleeping or watching a screen inside the beautiful robots that will carry them, like gestating foetuses, to their promised land.

You refer to Foucault and his thoughts about community in the draft chapter. Foucault is apparently ‘the most cited researcher across all fields’ ( https://foucault.info/articles/#citation_ref_1 ). On Google Scholar, which is this curious machine to ‘measure’ the value of academic work on the basis of the criteria of citations, that is, on the basis of how many times someone has referred to them. Foucault citations seem to peak in 2016. Of course this data is no doubt deeply flawed, not least because it probably depends on how it is sourced, when such measuring started and other factors that are quite contingent on curious accidents of knowledge production. Yet I had a small smile to myself. We’ve passed peak-Foucault. I’m not unhappy about that.

There are, as you note, three types of community that are spoken about by Foucault – the given community I identify with, the tacit community that sets the conditions of membership and the critical community of freedom, where the individual is able to reach themselves in so far as they find the community ‘intolerable’. Freedom comes with critical distance it would appear. Yet again, as with Benjamin, this relationship can easily seem to be set up as being between two nodes – the community and the individual – and this seems to start from somewhere that prevents positive movement. I can’t help but feel that the ‘critical distance = freedom’ position is just another form of saying ‘we academics, with our critical skills, are the ones who are truly free’. Nothing is more self-indulgent bullshit than the idea that academic knowledge produces freedom, and individuals who hold to this seem to be self-deluded, making excuses for their own choice of survival. We all have to survive. I hold no-one to account for the necessity of their survival strategy. When in prison the books people sent were exactly that, survival strategies. As I read, I slipped the bars, and explored new lands of thought and sensation. As I began to learn I felt the exhilaration of the ‘critical distance’. The capacity to produce my own values, to become autonomous, or to feel autonomous to be more precise, grew and eventually this was the background for my own entry into academia. Yet my story is incomplete if it reads too quickly as ‘books let me escape’. This was only a background condition and one that wasn’t completely neutral.

In prison I learned more than just how to read a lot, something I had always done. I learned to read intensely, often going over and over things, almost learning them by heart. Comrades would send me all sorts of history and political books. Amongst the various books that arrived, however, there was a set of ten Bond novels by Fleming, originals I think, in their pulp fiction covers and cream, slightly brittle paper. Those novels were odd things. I hadn’t really devoured pulp fiction before and found I could sit and read a Bond novel in an evening. Once the cell doors had shut – there was no TV in our cells in those days – I would settle down with a small blim and some of the godawful tea we picked up in our flasks before lockup and just read through a Bond novel from start to finish. It was like watching a film. When bored, or antsy and irritable and unable to concentrate on something more ‘serious’, I would return to these Bond novels and over the course of the months they formed a very strange affect, unlike anything I had encountered in reading before – they produced a kind of dream-like state of images, odd phrases and tranced breathing. They relaxed me. Gradually this affect, once built, began to transfer to other texts, sometimes poetry or biography or even – much later – ‘theory’. What it absolutely was not was a ‘critical distance’.

It’s a simplification, perhaps, to reduce the idea of a ‘critical community’ to ‘critical distance’. If becoming part of a critical community involves moving beyond a sense of ‘being an individual’, perhaps in a movement that breaks out of the dominance of this way of being, that transcends it in some sense, then it contains potentials to embrace. Yet these potentials have too easily been re-incorporated into an academic mode of being that is itself, fundamentally, rooted in proper names, individuals, careers – flows of knowledge production, recording and distribution that have been easily integrated into capitalism and which academics seem incapable, in large part, from resisting. It’s almost impossible, for example, to get an academic not to participate in the ‘paywall’, a seemingly obvious and easy step (‘free the knowledge’) but one that is constantly met with excuses of one sort or another. In this situation it is not theory that offers a route to a critical community, nor the experience of theory, but something radically outside theory that is not simply ‘practice’.

What that other thing is, outside and beyond theory or the experience of theory in ‘critical distance’, is the group. In the organisation of the three modes of being, one to one, group and community, it is the group that is often peculiarly left out, only occasionally being the focus, such as in the work of the psychoanalyst Bion. As with most psychoanalysts, of course, the ‘group’ in Bion is in fact nearly always referring to a ‘group of humans’ or a ‘group of subjects’. My own sense is that ‘group’ operates always and intimately as a form closer to ‘pack’ and animal than either of the other two modes and that this might explain the repulsion that theory and theorists have for such assemblages. The group is the first moment in which a new power is found, one which can liberate or dominate. This new power, before community and beyond the one to one, may contain capacities yet to be explored or acknowledged, threatening and intimidating capacities that are capable of making thinking something other.