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.
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 
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